Mr. Cornell’s unspoken suspicion that Mrs. Hitt would drop her school-friend as suddenly as she had picked her up was in a way to be falsified, if the events of the next few months were to be taken as testimony.

The two matrons were nearly inseparable—shopping, driving, walking, and visiting together. For Susie had a New York visiting list speedily, and almost every name stood for an introduction by her indefatigable “trainer.” The epithet was the taciturn husband’s, and, as may be surmised, was never uttered audibly. Susie’s wardrobe, furniture, table—her very modes of speech—sustained variations that amazed old friends and confounded him who knew her best. The cherished black velvet she had thought “handsome enough for any occasion” was pronounced “quaintly becoming, but too old for the wearer by twenty-five years.” Slashed and dashed and lashed with gold-color, it did duty as a house evening gown. For small luncheons, she had a tailor-made costume of fawn-colored cloth embroidered and combined with silk; for “swell” luncheons, a rich silk—black ground relieved by narrow crimson stripes, and made en demi-train.

For at-home afternoons were two tea gowns; before she received her second dinner invitation, she had made by Mrs. Hitt’s dressmaker—(“a Frenchwoman who doesn’t know enough yet to charge American prices, my dear, and I hold it to be a sin to throw money away!”) a robe of white brocade and sea-green velvet, in which garb she showed like a moss-rose bud, according to her dear friend and trumpeter.

These strides into the realm of fashion, if at first startling to the dÉbutante, were quickly acknowledged to be imperatively necessary if one would really live. Kitty’s taste in dress approximated genius. Even she was hardly prepared for the ready following of her neophyte.

Had she needed corroborative evidence of the cashier’s liberal income, his wife’s command of considerable sums supplied it. With all her frankness, Mrs. Cornell did not confide to her bosom-friend where she obtained the ready money that gained her credit with new tradespeople.

Now and then an uneasy qualm stirred the would-be comfortable soul of the wife as to how much or how little Arthur speculated within his sober soul upon the probable cost of her new outfit. There were two thousand dollars deposited in her name, and drawing interest in a Brooklyn Savings Bank. The rich aunt had given her namechild three-quarters of it from time to time. The young couple had saved the rest, and it was tacitly understood that it should not be touched except of necessity. No landmark in her new career was more pronounced than Susie’s resort to this fund for the equipment without which her dawning social success would, she felt, lapse into obscurity more ignominious than that from which she had emerged. She must have the things represented by the money, and intoxicated though she was, she had still too much sense and conscience to deplete her husband’s purse to the extent demanded by the exigency. He would have opened an artery to gratify her, had heart’s blood been coin, but she knew he would look grave and pained did he suspect her visits to the Bank and their result.

He was sober enough, nowadays, without additional cause of discomfort. When questioned, he averred that all was going right at the Bank, and that he was well. Nor would he confess to loneliness on the evenings when she was obliged to leave him in obedience to Kitty’s summons to rehearsal or consultation in some of the countless schemes of amusement the two were all the while concocting.

“Don’t trouble yourself to come for me or to sit up for me, dear,” the pleasure-monger would entreat in bidding him “good-by.” “I’ll have one of the maids call for me,” or “I have a carriage,” or—and after a time this was most frequent of all—“Jack Hitt is always very obliging about bringing me home.”

With a smile upon his lips and gravity she did not read in his eyes, he would hand her to the carriage, or commit her to the spruce maid, hoping that she would have a pleasant evening, and having stood upon the steps until she was no longer in sight, would go back—as she supposed—to sitting room or book. Whereas, it grew to be more and more a habit with him to turn into the nursery instead, and sit there in the dark until he heard the bustle of her return below-stairs. He invariably sat up for her—she never asked why or where. The fire burned cheerily to welcome her, and the offices of maid, assumed, in the beginning in loverly supererogation, half jest, half caress, were now duty and habit. Upon one point he was resolute. If she went to bed late, she must sleep late next morning. This was a matter of health, a concession she owed those to whom her health was all-important.

The two older children had breakfasted with their parents for a year, and he made much of their company when their mother was not the fourth of the party. Sometimes he sent for the baby as well, holding her on his knee with one hand, while the other managed coffee cup and toast.

Susie surprised him thus one morning, having awakened unsummoned, and dressed hastily that she might see him before he went out.

“Arthur Cornell!” The ejaculation was the first intimation he had of her presence. “You spoil the children and make a slave of yourself! Where is their nurse?”

“Don’t blame Ellen, dear!” checking her motion toward the bell. “I sent for the children. They are very good, and I enjoy their company.”

Mrs. Cornell flushed hotly; her lips were compressed.

“I understand! After this, I will make a point of giving you your breakfast. It was never my wish to lie in bed until this hour.”

“It was—and is mine!” rejoined her husband, steadily, unmoved by her unwonted petulance. “As it is, you are pale and heavy-eyed. You have had but five hours of sleep.”

“My head aches!” passing her hand over her forehead. “That will go off, by-and-by. Baby! come to mamma, and let dear papa get his breakfast in peace. Let me pour out a cup of hot coffee for you, first.”

Her softened tone and fond smile cleared the atmosphere for them all. Arthur sunned himself in her presence as a half-torpid bird on an early spring day. The children prattled merrily in answer to the pretty mother’s blandishments; the baby stood up in her lap to make her fat arms meet behind her neck. She looked pleadingly into the proud face bent over mother and child. He was startled to see that the sweet eyes were misty.

“Dear! can’t you go with me to-night?”

He fairly staggered at the unexpected appeal.

“If I had known——” he began.

“Yes, I know! I ought to have spoken before you made your engagement. I was careless—forgetful—silly! I do nothing but silly things nowadays. But I wish you could go, darling!”

“I’m afraid it’s impossible,” said Arthur regretfully. “The president made a point of my attending the meeting. I am sorrier than you can be, little wife.”

She shook her head and tried to laugh.

“That shows how little you know about it! Don’t make any more engagements without consulting me. ‘I’m ower young’—not ‘to leave my mammy yet’—but to be running about the world without my dear, old, steady-going husband—and I’m not willing to do it any longer.”

He carried the memory of words and glance with him all day. Coming home at evening, he found a note from her, stating that Kitty had sent for her.

“There is a dress rehearsal at seven,” she wrote. “I wish you could be there and see how ravishing I can be! If your business meeting is over by ten o’clock, won’t you slip into society toggery and come around in season to see ‘the old lady’ home?”

“The fever has run its course!” thought the husband, with kindling eyes. “I knew I should get her back some day.”

His dinner was less carefully served than in the olden supper days, but he dined as with the gods, and ran briskly upstairs to send Ellen down to her meal while he undressed the children and put them to bed. He had done this often during the winter, pretending to make a joke of the disrobing, but knowing it to be duty and vicarious. According to his ideas the mother should see to it in person. No hireling, whose own the bairns are not, can care for them as those in whose veins runs answering kindred blood. Usually, the task was done in heaviness of spirit. To-night, no effort was required to bring laughter to his lips, lightness to his heart. To-morrow mamma would breakfast with them, and resume her place in the home, so poorly filled by him or anybody else. She had come back to them. He tried to sing one of her lullabies as he rocked the baby to sleep, but failed by reason of a “catch in his throat.” Mamma would warble it like a nightingale to them to-morrow night.

The business meeting was unexpectedly brief—“Thanks,” as the president was pleased to say, “to the admirable epitome of the matter in hand prepared and presented by Mr. Cornell.”

At ten o’clock the husband was in his dressing room, hurrying the process of “slipping into society toggery.” He repeated the phrase aloud while tying his cravat with fingers uncertain from nervous haste. He was thankful beyond expression that he had never cast the shadow of his disapproval over Susie’s spirits, even when they threatened to carry her out of the bounds of reason. She was young and pretty; so affluent of vitality, so richly endowed with talents, that a humdrum fellow like himself could not comprehend the stress of the temptation to plunge into and riot in the mad vortex of social parade.

“If there were any one thing I could do as cleverly as she does everything, I should be doing it all the time,” he confessed in contrite candor.

Yesterday he had thanked Heaven that Lent was close upon the panting racers over the pleasure grounds. Now, he was indifferent to the advance and duration of the penitential season. His darling had returned of her own right-headed, right-hearted self to the sanctuary of home, having detected, unaided by his pessimistic strictures, the miserable vanity and carking vexation of the hollow system. He sewed two buttons upon his shirt before he could put it on, and when he pushed the needle through a hole and the linen beneath into the ball of his thumb, he began to whistle “Annie Laurie.”

Susie had practiced “Annie Laurie” for an hour before dinner yesterday. He wondered if she had sung it last night at the Hitts’. She had been overrun with business of late, getting ready for the chamber concert and private theatricals, and mercy knew what else of frolic and folly gotten up by Mrs. Hitt for the benefit of the “Industrial Home” which was the latest charitable fad in her set. He had paid ten dollars for a reserved seat last week at the behest of the volatile Lady Patroness. She had let him have it “at a bargain because he had the good luck to be Susie’s husband.”

“Mr. Vansittart and Mr. Peltry paid fifty apiece for theirs, and I made Jack give me thirty for his. My rooms will seat comfortably just one hundred and fifty people, and I won’t sell a ticket over that number at any price. None will be for sale at the door, and none are transferable. Of course, the rush for them is fearful!”

Before going Arthur peeped into the nursery, dropping the most cautious of kisses upon the cheek and forehead of each sleeper. Three-year old Sue made up her lips into a tempting knot as he touched her velvety face.

“Dee’ mamma!” she murmured in her sleep.

He kissed her again for that, the “catch in his throat” in full possession.

“I don’t wonder they love her!” he said brokenly. “Who could help it?”

The block on which the Hitt mansion stood was lined with waiting carriages, and Mr. Cornell supposed that the entertainment, which he called to himself “a show,” must be nearly over. For an instant, he meditated waiting without until the crowd began to pour out, then, making his way into the hall, to send word to his wife that he awaited her pleasure. Something in the immobility of the doors changed his plan. He did not care to lurk for an hour or more among the coachmen who stamped and swore upon the pavement, reminding him of some verses Susie had read to him in other days when she had time for books and the talk over them after they were read. He recalled the first and last verses, and smiled in going through the discontented ranks and up the flight of stone steps:

A surge of hot and scented air enveloped him with the opening of the door. The crowd in the hall contradicted the hostess’ declaration that no more people would be admitted than could be comfortably accommodated. Struggling up to the dressing room he got rid of hat and overcoat, and struggled down again and to the door of the rear drawing room. A curtain was rung up from a stage at the end of the apartment as he gained a view of it.

The scene was the interior of an old-fashioned barn. Wreaths of evergreen hung against the walls and depended from the rafters, and the floor was cleared for dancing. From a door at the side a figure tripped into the middle of the stage. Arthur looked twice before he recognized the wearer of the colonial gown of old-gold brocade, brief of waist, and allowing beneath the skirt glimpses of trim ankles in clocked stockings. Her hair was piled over a cushion and powdered; eyebrows and lashes were deftly darkened, and the carmine of cheek and mouth owed brilliancy to rouge-pot and hare’s foot. She was the belle of the ball to be held in the barn, and while waiting for the rest of the revelers, she began to recite, in soliloquy, the old rhymes of Money Musk.

At the second line, from an unseen orchestra, issued low and faint, like the echo of a spent strain, the popular dance tune. It stole so insidiously upon the air as to suggest the musical thought of the soliloquist, and was rather a background than an accompaniment to the recitative. Gradually, as the story went on, the lithe figure began to sway in perfect time to the phantom music; the eyes, smilingly eager, seemed to look upon what the lips described; the feet stirred and twinkled rhythmically; form and face were embodied melody. Vivified by reverie, expectant and reminiscent, the radiant impersonation of the poet’s picture floated airily through the enchanting measures. As a morning paper put it, “she seemed to respire the music to which she swayed and chanted.”

The audience, “though blasÉ with much merrymaking and sight-seeing, hung entranced upon every motion, until, wafted by gentle degrees toward the side-scene opposite to that by which she had entered, she vanished on the last word of the poem.”

Recalled by a tumult of applause, she courtesied in colonial fashion, and kissed her hand brightly to her admirers, but instead of vouchsafing a repetition of what had stirred the spectators out of their nil admirari mood, beckoned archly to the left and right. A troop of young men and girls obeyed the summons and fell into place in the country dance that went forward to the now ringing measures of Money Musk.

The comedietta to which this was the prelude had been composed by a well-known author, who was called out at the close of the second act, and led forward the prima donna of the clever piece.

The interlude showed a moonlighted dell. On the distant hilltop was the gleam of white tents; in the foreground stood a woman as colorless in robe and visage as the moonbeams. Her voice, silvery and plaintive, thrilled through the crowded rooms:

And so, in distinct, unimpassioned narrative up to—

Again the invisible orchestra bore up the uttered words; at first a single cornet bringing down the air from the tented hilltop; then deeper notes joining it, like men’s voices of varying tone and strength, but all singing “Annie Laurie.”

said dissonant, derisive tones at Arthur Cornell’s back, as the curtain fell. “Battered veterans of a dozen seasons are snivelling like ingenues of no season at all. What fools New Yorkers are to be humbugged with their eyes open!”

“The fair manager hath a way of whistling the tin out of our pockets,” replied a thin falsetto. “A wonderful creature, that same manager.”

A disagreeable, wheezing laugh finished the speech.

Arthur made an ineffectual effort to extricate himself from the packing crowd, a movement unnoticed or uncared-for by the speakers.

“I admire—and despise—that woman!” continued the harsh voice. “As an exhibition of colossal cheek she is unrivaled. For four years she has preyed upon the majority that is up to her little ‘dodge,’ and the minority that is not, pocketing her half of the profits of every ‘charitable’ show; borrowing from innocents that don’t know that she pays not again, and actually—so I am told—receiving a commission for introducing wild Westerners and provincial Easterners into what she calls ‘our best circles.’ And we go on buying her tickets and accepting her specimens, like the arrant asses we are.”

“Madame du Bois, upon a limited scale.”

“Exactly! Madame is her model. Her aping is more like monkeying, but the resemblance is not lost. New Yorkers rather enjoy the sublime audacity of Madame’s fleecing, and she does have the entrÉe of uppertendom, sham though she is, with her drawing-room readings, where geniuses are trotted out at big prices to ticket buyers, and no price at all to Madame, and ranchmen’s daughters are provided with blue-blooded Knickerbocker husbands. Her schemes are on a large scale. She engineers benevolent pow-wows, clears her one thousand dollars a night, and nobody dare charge her with pocketing a penny. You can see where Kit learned her trade. To my certain knowledge she dresses herself and pays for all her hospitable entertainments by these tricks.”

“Her latest investment isn’t a bad notion, but Kit is working the scheme for all it’s worth. Anybody but the newest of the new would see through the game.”

The other laughed gratingly.

“‘New’ is a mild way of putting it. We call her ‘Kit’s windfall’ at our Club. Madame’s disciple had, as she fondly imagined, netted a couple of veritable musical lions, and ten people were invited to hear their after-dinner roar. The very day before the feast the male lion fell sick, and the lioness wouldn’t or couldn’t leave her mate. Kitty was tearing her false bang over the note apprising her of the disaster when a card was brought in, telling her that an old schoolmate who had been educated as a music-teacher, and had a niceish talent for recitation, had removed to the city. Kit caught at the straw; raced around to inspect her, judged her to be more than eligible, and roped her in. Delorme was at the dinner and told me the story, which his wife had from Kit’s own lips. The new ‘find’ had beauty as well as a voice and a taste for theatricals, and a neat income, so Kit says—some thirty thousand a year. Moreover, she is tremendously grateful for the lift in the world, and so daft with enjoyment of her first glimpse of le bon ton that she would send Kit ten out of the thirty thousand sooner than lose her social standing. She doesn’t guess that she will be tossed aside like a squeezed orange next year, poor thing!”

Arthur leaned against the door-frame, too giddy and sick to move, had action been practicable in such a press. One of the tedious “waits” inseparable from amateur performances gave every woman there a chance to outscream her neighbor. It might be dishonorable not to make himself known to the gossips who considered themselves absolved by the payment of an entrance fee from the obligation to speak well, or not at all, of their hosts. He did not put the question to himself whether or not he should continue to listen. In a judicial mood he would have weighed the pros and cons of fact or fiction in the tale he had heard. Every word had, to his consciousness, the stamp of authenticity. In the shock of the confirmation of his worst misgivings with regard to his wife’s chosen intimate, his ruling thought was of the anguish the truth would cause her. How best to lessen the shock to her tender, loving heart, how to mitigate her mortification, began already to put his deliberate faculties upon the strain.

The wiry falsetto and wheezy laugh struck in from his very elbow.

“Kit’s exemplary spouse may not share her pecuniary profits, but he has an eye to innings of another sort. I met him at the Club last night, and saw that he had about six champagnes and four cocktails more than his brain could balance. An hour later, I was passing the house of our pretty prima donna when a carriage drew up and out stepped Jack and turned to help out his wife’s favorite. And, by Jove! the way he did it was to put his arm about her waist, swing her to the side-walk and try to kiss her! She espied me, I suppose, for she broke away from him with a little screech, and flew up her steps like a lapwing. She must have had her latchkey all ready, for she got the door open in a twinkling, and slammed it. I guffawed outright, and didn’t Jack swear!”

“What a beastly cad he is!” said the deep voice disgustfully.

Few men in the circumstances would have kept so forcibly in mind the shame to wife and children that would follow a blow and quarrel then and there, as the commonplace husband upon whose ear and heart every vile word had fallen like liquid fire. He rent a path through the throng, got his hat and coat and went out of the abhorrent place. He had seen to it that Susie’s hired carriage was always driven by the same man—a steady, middle-aged American—and recognizing him upon the box, signaled him to draw up to the sidewalk, stepped into the vehicle, and prepared to wait as patiently as might be until the man’s number should be called by the attendant policeman.

The “show” was not over for an hour longer, and his carriage was the last called. The fair manager had detained her lieutenant to exchange felicitations over the triumph of the evening. Susie appeared, finally, running down the steps so fast that her attendant only overtook her at the curbstone. He had come out bareheaded, and without other protection against the bitter March wind than his evening dress and thin shoes. Mrs. Cornell’s hand was on the handle of the carriage door, and he covered it with his own.

“Are you cruel or coquettish, sweet Annie Laurie?” he asked in accents thickened by liquor and laughter.

By the electric light Arthur saw the pale terror of her face, as she tried to wrest her fingers from the ruffianly grasp. Without a second’s hesitation the husband leaped out through the other door, passed behind the carriage, lifted the man, taller and heavier than himself, by the nape of the neck, and laid him in the gutter.

“The fellow is drunk!” he remarked contemptuously to the policeman who hastened up, imagining that the gentleman had tripped and fallen. “It is lucky you are here to look after him.”

He handed his trembling wife into the carriage, swung himself in after her, and bade the coachman drive home.

Then—for as I have expressly affirmed, this man was heroic in naught save his love for wife and children—he put strong tender arms about the sinking woman, who clung to his neck, convulsed by sobs, as one snatched from destruction might hang upon the saving hand.

“There, my darling! It is all over! I ought to have taken better care of you. The old account is closed. We’ll begin another upon a clean page.”

He was only a bank cashier, you see, and familiar with no figures except such as he used every day.