IN an unfamiliar upper room of the Canderays' house Jason stood prepared for the signal to descend to his wedding. The ceremony was to occur at six o'clock; it was now only five minutes before—he had absently looked at his watch a great many times in a short space—and he was striving to think seriously of what was to follow. But in place of this he was passing again through a state of silent, incoherent surprise. This was the sort of thing for which a man might pinch himself to discover if he were awake or dreaming. In five, no, four, minutes now Honora Canderay was to become his, Jason Burrage's, wife.

A certain complacency had settled over him in the past few days, something of his inborn feeling of the Canderays as a house apart seemed to have evaporated; and, in addition, he had risen—Honora wouldn't take any just happen so. Jason was never notable for humility. Yet who, even after he had returned from California with his riches, could have predicted this evening? His astonishment was as much at himself, illuminated by extraordinary events, as at any exterior circumstance. At times he had the ability to see himself, as if from the outside; and that view, here, was amazing. Why, only a short while ago he had been drinking rum in the shed in back of “Pack” Clower's house, perhaps the least desirable shed in Cottarsport.

Of one fact, however, he was certain—no more promiscuous draughts of Medford. He recognized that he had taken so much not from the presence of desire, but from a total absence of it as well as of any other mental state. “Pack” and his associates, too, were now a thing of the past, a bitterly rough and vacant element. The glass lamp on a bureau was smoking: he stepped forward to lower the wick, when a knock fell on the door. A young Boston relative of Honora's—a supercilious individual in checked trousers and lemon-colored gloves—announced that they were waiting for Jason below. With a determined settling of his shoulders and tightly drawn lips, he marched resolutely forward.

The marriage was to be in the chamber across from the one in which he had generally sat. Smilax and white Killamey roses had been bowed over the mantel at the farthest end, and there Jason found the clergyman waiting. The room was half full of people occupying chairs brought from other parts of the house; and he was conscious of a sudden silence, an intent, curious scrutiny, as he entered. An instinctive antagonism to this deepened in him: he felt that, with the exception of his father and mother, he hadn't a friend in the room.

Such other local figures as were there were facilely imitating the cold stare of Honora's connections. He stood belligerently facing Mrs. Cozzens' glacial calm, the inspection of a man he had seen driving with Honora in Cottarsport, now accompanied by a pettish, handsome girl, evidently his wife. His father's weathered countenance, sunken and dry on its bones, was blank, except for a faint doubt, as if some mistake had been made which would presently be exposed, sending them about face. His mother, however, was triumphant pride and justification personified. Then the music commenced—a harp, violin, and double bass.

The wedding ring firmly secured, Jason stirred with a feeling of increasing awkwardness. He glared back, with a protruding lip, at the fellow with the young wife, at the small, aggressive group from Boston; and then he saw that Honora was in the room. She was coming slowly toward him. Her expression of absolute unconcern released him from all petty annoyance, any thought of the malicious onlookers. As she stopped at his side she gave him a slight nod and smile; and at that moment a tremendous, sheer admiration for her was born in him.

Honora had chosen to be unattended—she had coolly observed that she was well beyond the age for such sentimentality—and he realized that though the present would have been a racking occasion for most women, it was evident that she was not disturbed in the least. He had a general impression of sugary white satin, of her composed, almost disdainful face in a cloud of veil with little waxen orange flowers, of slender still hands, when they turned from the room to the minister.

They had gone over the marriage service together, he had read it again in the kitchen at home; he was fairly familiar with its periods and responses, and got through with only a slight hesitation and half prompting. But the thickness of his voice, in comparison with Honora's open, decisive utterance, vainly annoyed him. He wanted desperately to clear his throat. Suddenly it was over, and Honora, in a swirl of satin, was sinking to her knees. Beside her he listened with a feeling of comfortable lull to a lengthy prayer.

Rising, he perfunctorily clasped a number of indifferent palms, replied inanely to gabbled expressions of good will and hopes for the future unmistakably pessimistic in tone. Honora told him in a rapid aside the names of those approaching. She smiled radiantly at his father and mother, leaned forward and whispered in the latter's ear; and they followed the guests streaming into the dining room.

There champagne was being opened by the caterer's assistants from Boston. There were steaming platters of terrapin and oysters and fowl. The table bore pyramids of nuts and preserved fruit, hot Cinderellas in cups with sugar and wine, black case cake, Savoy biscuits, pumpkin paste, and frothed creams with preserved peach leaves. A laden plate was thrust into Jason's hand, and he sat with it in a clatter of voices and topics that completely ignored him. He was isolated in the absorption of food and wine, in a conversational exchange as strange to him as if had been spoken in a foreign language.

Honora was busily talking to young Mrs. Fifield—he remembered the name now. Apparently she had forgotten his existence. At first this annoyed him; he determined to force his way into their attention, but a wiser realization held him where he was. Honora was exactly right: he had nothing in common with these people, probably not one of them would come into his life or house again. And his wife, in the fact of her marriage, had clearly signified how little important they were to her. His father joined him.

“You made certain when the New York packet leaves?” he queried.

“Everything's fixed,” Jason reassured him.

“Your mother wanted to see you. But she got set and is kind of timid about moving.” Jason rose promptly, and, with the elder, found Mrs. Hazzard Burrage. “I'd like to have Honora, too,” the latter told them, and Jason turned sharply to find her. When they stood facing the old couple his mother hesitated doubtfully; then she put out her hand to the woman in wedding array. But Honora ignored it; leaning forward she kissed the round, bright cheek.

“You have to be patient with them at times,” the mother said, looking up anxiously.

“I'm afraid Jason will need that warning,” Honora replied; “he is a very imprudent man.”

---

Jason's mind returned to this later, sitting in the house that had been the Canderays', but which now was his too. Honora's remark to his mother had been clear in itself, but it suggested wide speculations beyond his grasp. For instance—why, after all, had Honora married him? He was forced to acknowledge that it was not the result of any overwhelming feeling for him. The manner of their wedding, the complete absence of the emotion supposed to be the incentive of such consummations, Honora herself, all, denied any effort to fix such a personally satisfactory cause. That she might have had no other opportunity—Honora was not so young as she had been—he dismissed as obviously absurd. Why——

His gaze was fastened upon the carpet, and he saw that time and the passage of feet had worn away the design. He looked about the room, and was surprised to discover a general dinginess which he had never noticed before. He said nothing, but, in his movements about the house, examined the furnishings and walls, and an astonishing fact was thrust upon him—the celebrated dwelling was grievously run down. It was plain that no money had been spent on it for years. The carriage, too, and the astrakhan collar on Coggs' coat, were worn out.

He considered this at breakfast—his wife behind a tall Sheffield coffee urn—and he was aware of the cold edge of a distasteful possibility. The thought enveloped him insidiously, like the fog which often rolled through the Narrows and over the town, that the Canderays were secretly impoverished, and Honora had married him only for his money. Jason was not resentful of this in itself, since he had been searching for a motive he could accept, but it struck him in a peculiarly vulnerable spot—his admiration for his wife, for Honora. The idea, although he assured himself that the thing was readily comprehensible, somehow managed to diminish her, to tarnish the luster she held for him. It was far beneath the elevation on which Cottarsport had placed the Canderays; and he suffered a distinct sense of loss, a feeling of the staleness and disappointment of living.

The more he considered this explanation the more he was convinced of its probability. A great deal of his genuine warmth in his marriage evaporated. Still—Honora had married him, she had given herself in return for what material advantage he might bring; and he would have to perform his part thoroughly. He ought to have known that——

What he must do now was to save them both from any painful revelation by keeping for ever hid that he was aware of her purpose, he must never expose himself by a word or act; and he must make her understand that whatever he had was absolutely hers. It would be necessary for her to go to the money with entire freedom and without any accounting.

This, he found, was not so easy to establish as he thought. Honora was his wife, but nevertheless there was a well marked reticence between them, a formal nicety with which he was heartily in accord. He couldn't just thrust his fortune before her on the table. He hesitated through the day, on the verge of various blunders; and then, in the evening, said in a studied causality of manner:

“What do you think about fixing some of the rooms over new? You might get tired of seeing the same things for so long. I saw real elegant furniture in Boston.”

She looked about indifferently. “I think I wouldn't like it changed,” she remarked, almost in the manner of a defense. “I suppose it does seem worn to you; but I'm used to it; there are so many associations. I am certain I'd be lost in new hangings.”

Jason was so completely silenced by her reply that he felt he must have shown some confusion, for her gaze deliberately turned to him. “Is there any particular thing you would like repaired?” she inquired.

“No, of course not,” he said hastily. “I think it's all splendid. I wouldn't change a curtain, only—but....” He cursed himself for a clumsy fool while Honora continued to study him. He endeavored to shield himself behind the trivial business of lighting a cheroot; but he felt Honora's query searching him out. Finally, to his extreme dismay, he heard her say:

“Jason, I believe you think I married you for money!”

Pretense, he realized, would be no good now.

“Something like that did occur to me,” he acknowledged desperately.

“Really,” she told him sharply. “I could be cross very easily. You are too stupid. Father did wonderfully well on his voyages, and his profit was invested by Frederic Cozzens, one of the shrewdest financiers of his day. I have twice, probably three times, as much as you.”

She confronted him with a faintly sparkling resentment. However, the pleasure, the reassurance, in what he had just heard made him indifferent to the rest. It was impossible now to comprehend how he had been such a block! He even smiled at her, which, he was delighted to observe, obviously puzzled her.

“Perhaps I ought to tell you, Jason, and perhaps it is too late already, that I thought I married you because I was lonely, because I feared the future. Anyhow, that's what I told myself the night I sent for you. You might have a right to complain very bitterly about it.”

“If I have, I won't,” he assured her cheerfully.

“I thought that then; but now I am not at all sure. It no longer seems so simple, so easily explained. I used to feel that I understood myself very thoroughly, I could look inside and see what was there; but in the last month I haven't been able to; and it is very disturbing.”

“Anyhow we're married,” he announced comfortably.

“That's a beautiful way to feel,” she remarked. “I appear to get less sure of things as I grow older, which is pathetic.”

He wondered what, exactly, she meant by this. Honora said a great many little things which, their meaning escaping him, gave him momentary doubts. He discovered that she had a habit of saying things indirectly, and that, as the seriousness of the occasion increased, her manner became lighter and he could depend less on the mere order of her words. This continually disconcerted him, put him on the defensive and at small disadvantages: he was never quite at ease with Honora.

Obversely—the ugly shade of mercenary purpose dispelled—close at hand his admiration for her grew. Every detail of her living was as fine as that publicly exposed in the drawing room. She was not rigidly and impossibly perfect, in, for instance, the inflexible attitude of Olive Stanes; Honora had a very human impatience, she could be disagreeable, he found, in the morning, and she undoubtedly felt herself superior to the commonalty of life. But in the ordering of her person there was a wonderfully exact delicacy and fragrant charm. Just as she had no formal manner, so, he discovered, she possessed no “good” clothes; she dressed evidently from some inner necessity, and not merely for the sake of impression. She had, too, a remarkable vigor of expression; Honora was not above swearing at contradictory circumstance; and she was so free of small pruderies that often she became a cause of embarrassment to him. At times he would tell himself uneasily that her conduct was not quite ladylike; but at the same instant his amusement in her would mount until it threatened him with laughter.

There was a great deal to be learned from Honora, he told himself; and then he would speculate whether he were progressing in that acquisition; and whether she were happy; no, not happy, but contented. Ignorant of her reason for marrying, he vaguely dreaded the possibility of its departure, mysterious as it had come, leaving her regarding him with surprise and disdain. He tried desperately, consciously, to hold her interest and esteem.

That was the base of his conception of their married existence, which, then, he was entirely willing to accept.

---

However, as the weeks multiplied without bringing him any corresponding increase in the knowledge of either Honora or their true situation, he was aware of a disturbance born of his very pleasure in her; an uncomfortable feeling of insecurity fastened upon him. But all this he was careful to keep hidden. There was evidently no doubt in the minds of Cottarsport of the enviableness of his position—with all that gold, wedded to Honora Canderay, living in the Canderay mansion. The more solid portion of the town gave him a studied consideration denied to the mere acquisition of wealth; and the rough element, once his companion but now relentlessly held at a distance, regarded him with a loud disdain fully as humanly flattering. Sometimes with Honora he passed the latter, and they grumbled an obscure acknowledgment of his curt greeting; when he was alone, they openly disparaged his attainments and qualified pride.

There were “Pack” Clower, an able seaman whose indolent character had dissipated his opportunities of employment without harming his slow, powerful body; Emery Radlaw, the brother of the apothecary and a graduate of Williams College, a man of vanished refinements and taker of strange drugs, as thin and erratically rapid in movements as Clower was slow; Steven, an incredibly soiled Swede; John Vleet, the master and part owner of a fishing schooner, a capable individual on the sea, but an insanely violent drunkard on land. There were others, all widely different, but alike in the bitterness of a common failure and the habit of assuaging doubtful self-esteem, of ministering to crawling nerves, with highly potential stimulation.

Jason passed “Pack” and Emery Radlaw on a day of late March, and a mocking and purposely audible aside almost brought him to an adequate reply. He had disposed of worse men than these in California and the Isthmus. His arrogant temper rose and threatened to master him; but something more powerful held him steadily and silently on his way. This was his measureless admiration for Honora, his determination to involve her in nothing that would detract from her fineness and erect pride. Brawling on the street would not do for her husband. He must give her no cause to lessen what incomprehensible feeling, liking, she might have for him, give life to no regrets for a hasty and perhaps only half considered act. After this, in passing any of his late temporary associates, he failed to express even the perfunctory consciousness of their being.

---

In April he was obliged to admit to himself that he knew no more of Honora's attitude toward him than on the day of their wedding. He recognized that she made no show of emotion; it was an essential part of her to seem at all times unmoved. That was well enough for the face she turned toward the world; but directed at him, her husband, its enigmatic quality began to obsess his mind. What Honora thought of him, why she had married him, became an almost continuous question.

It bred an increasing sense of instability that became loud, defiant. More than once he was at the point of self-betrayal: query, demand, objection, would rise on a temporary angry flood to his lips. But, struggling, behind a face as unmoved as Honora's own, he would suppress his resentment, the sense of injury, and smoke with the appearance of the greatest placidity.

His regard for his wife placed an extraordinary check on his impulses and utterance. He deliberated carefully over his speech, watched her with an attention not far from a concealed anxiety, and was quick to absorb any small conventions unconsciously indicated by her remarks. She never instructed or held anything over him; he would have been acutely sensitive to any air of superiority, and immediately antagonized. But Honora was entirely free from pretensions of that variety; she was as clear and honest as a goblet of water.

Jason's regard for her grew pace by pace with the feeling of baffling doubt. He was passing through the public square, and his thoughts were interrupted by a faint drifting sweetness. “I believe the lilacs are out,” he said unconsciously aloud and stopping. His surrounding was remarkably serene, withdrawn—the courthouse, a small block of brick with white corniced windows, flat Ionic portico, and slatted wood lantern with a bell, stood in the middle of the grassy common shut in by an irregular rectangle of dwellings with low eaves and gardens. The sun shone with a beginning warmth in a vague sky that intensified the early green. It seemed that he could see, against a house, the lavender blur of the lilac blossoms.

Then his attention was attracted by the figure of a man, at once strange and familiar, coming toward him with a dragging gait. Jason studied the other until a sudden recognition clouded his countenance, filled him with a swift, unpleasant surprise.

“Thomas!” he exclaimed. “Whenever did you get back?”

“Yesterday,” said Thomas Gast.

Well, here was Thomas returned from California like himself. Yet the most negligent view of the latter revealed that there was a vast difference between Jason and this last Argonaut—Thomas Gast's loosely hung jaw, which gave to his countenance an air of irresolution, was now exaggerated by an aspect of utter defeat. His ill conditioned clothes, sodden brogans, and stringy handkerchief still knotted miner-fashion about his throat, all multiplied the fact of failure proclaimed by his attitude.

“How did you strike it?” Jason uselessly asked.

“What chance has the prospector today?” the other heatedly and indirectly demanded. “At first a man could pan out something for himself; but now it's all companies, all capital. The state's interfered too, claims are being held up in court while their owners might starve; there are new laws and trimmings every week. I struck it rich on the Reys, but I was drove out before I could get my stakes in. They tell me you did good.”

“At last,” Jason replied.

“And married Honora Canderay, too.”

The other assented shortly.

“Some are shot with luck,” Thomas Gast proclaimed; “they'd fall and skin their face on a nugget.”

“How did you come back?”

“Worked my passage in a crazy clipper with moon-sails and the halliards padlocked to the rail. Carried away the foretopmast and yard off the Horn and ran from port to port in a hundred and four days.”

The conversation dwindled and expired. Thomas Gast gazed about moodily, and Jason, with a tight mouth, nodded and moved on. His mind turned back abruptly to Eddie Lukens, the man who had robbed him of his find in the early days of cradle mining, the man he had killed.

He had said nothing of this to Honora; the experience with Olive Stanes had convinced him of the advisability of keeping past accident where, he now repeated, it belonged. He despaired of ever being able, in Cottarsport, to explain the place and times that had made his act comprehensible. How could he picture, here, the narrow ravines cut by swift rivers from the stupendous slopes and forests of the Sierra Nevada, the isolation of a handful of men with their tents by a plunging stream in' a rift so deep that there would be only a brief glimmer of sunlight at noon? And, failing that, the ignorant could never grasp the significance of the stillness, the timeless shadows, which the miners penetrated in their madness for gold. They'd never realize the strangling passion of this search in a wilderness without habitation or law or safety. They could not understand the primary justice of such rude courts as the miners were able to maintain on the more populous outskirts of the region.

He, Jason Burrage, had been tried by a jury for killing Eddie Lukens, and had been exonerated. It had been months since he had reiterated this dreary and only half satisfying formula. The inner necessity filled him with a shapeless concern such as might have been caused by a constant, unnatural shadow flickering out at his back. He almost wished that he had told Honora at the beginning; and then he fretfully cursed the incertitude of life—whatever he did appeared, shortly after, wrong.

But it was obvious that he couldn't go to her with the story today; the only time for that had been before his marriage; now it would have the look of a confession of weakness, opportunely timed; and he could think of nothing more calculated to antagonize Honora than such a crumbling admission.

All this had been re-animated by the mere presence of Thomas Gast in Cottarsport; certainly, he concluded, an insufficient reason for his troubling. Gast had been a miner, too, he was familiar with the conditions in the West.... There was a great probability that he hadn't even heard of the unfortunate affair; while Olive Stanes would be dragged to death rather than garble a word of what he had told her: Jason willingly acknowledged this of Olive. He resolutely banished the whole complication from his mind; and, walking with Honora after supper over the garden in back of their house, he was again absorbed by her vivid delicate charm.

The garden was deep and narrow, a flight of terraces connected by a flagged path and steps. At the bottom were the bergamot pear trees that had been Ithiel Canderay's especial charge in his last, retired years. Their limbs, faintly blurred with new foliage, rose above the wall, against a tranquil evening sky with a white slip of May moon. The peace momentarily disturbed in Jason Burrage's heart flooded back, a sense of great well-being settled over him. Honora rested her hand within his arm at an inequality of the stone walk.

“I am really a very bad wife, Jason,” she said suddenly; “self-absorbed and inattentive.”

“You suit me,” he replied inadequately. He was extraordinarily moved by her remark: she had never before even suggested that she was conscious of obligation. He wanted to put into words some of the warmth of feeling which filled his heart, but suitable speech evaded him. He could not shake off the fear that such protestations might be displeasing to her restrained being. Moving slightly away from him she seemed, in the soft gloom, more wonderful than ever. Set in white against the depths of the garden, her face, dimly visible, appeared to be without its customary faintly mocking smile.

“Do you remember, Jason,” she continued, “how I once said I thought I was marrying you because I was lonely, and that I found out it wasn't so? I didn't know why.” She paused.

He was enveloped by an intense eagerness to hear her to the end: it might be that something beyond his greatest hopes was to follow. But disappointment overtook him.

“I was certain I'd see more clearly into myself soon, but I haven't; it's been useless trying. And I've decided to do this—to give up thinking about things for myself, and to wait for you to show me.”

“But I can't do that,” he protested, facing her; “more-than half the time I wonder over almost that same question—why you ever married me?”

“This is a frightful situation,” she observed with a return of her familiar manner; “two mature people joined for life, and neither with the slightest idea of the reason. Anyhow I have given it up.... I suppose I'll die in ignorance. Perhaps I was too old—-”

He interrupted her with an uncustomary incivility, a heated denunciation of what she had been about to say.

“So you are not sorry,” he remarked after a little.

“No,” she answered slowly, “and I'm certain I shan't be. I'm not that sort of person. I would go down to ruin sooner than regret.” She said no more, but went into the house, leaving Jason in the potent spring night.

There was no longer any doubt about the lilacs: the air was laden with their scent. An entire hedge of them must have blossomed as he was standing there. He moved to the terrace below: there might be buds on the pear trees. But it was impossible to see the limbs. How could Honora expect him to make their marriage clear? He had never before seen her face so serene. He thought that he heard a vague stir outside the wall, and he remembered the presence of a semi-public path. Now there was a cautious mutter of voices. He advanced a step, then stopped at a scrambling of shoes against the wall. A vague form shouldered into view, momentarily clinging above him, and a harsh voice cried:

“Murderer!”

Even above the discordant dash of his startled sensibilities rose the fear, instantaneously born, that Honora had heard. All the vague uneasiness which had possessed him at Thomas Gust's return solidified into a recognizable, leaden dread—the conviction that his wife must learn the story of his misadventure, told with animus and lies. Then a more immediate dread held him rigidly attentive: there might be a second cry, a succession of them shouted discordantly to the sky. Honora would come out, the servants gather, while that accusing voice, indistinguishable and disembodied by the night, proclaimed his error. This was not the shooting of Eddie Lukens, but the neglect to comprehend Honora Canderay.

Absolute silence followed. He made a motion toward the wall, but, oppressed by the futility of such an act, arrested himself in the midst of a step and stood with a foot extended. The stillness seemed to thicken the air until he could hardly breathe; he was seized by a sullen anger at the events which had gathered to betray him. The crying tones had been like a chemical acting on his complexity, changing him to an entirely different entity, darkening his being; the peace and fragrance of the night were destroyed by the anxiety that now sat upon him.

Convinced that nothing more was to follow here, he was both impelled into the house, to Honora, and held motionless by the fear of seeing her turn toward him with her familiar light surprise and a question. However, he slowly retraced his way over the terraces, through a trellis hung with grape vines, and into the hall. As he hoped, Honora was on the opposite side of the dwelling. She had heard nothing. Jason sat down heavily, his gaze lowered and somber.

The feeling smote him that he should tell Honora of the whole miserable business at once, make what excuse for himself was possible, and prepare her for the inevitable public revelation. He pronounced her name, with the intention of doing this; but she showed him such a tranquil, superfine face that he was unable to proceed. Her interrogation held for a moment and then left him, redirected to a minute, colorful square of glass beads.

A multiplication of motives kept him silent, but principal among them was the familiar shrinking from appearing to his wife in any little or mean guise. It was precisely into such a peril that he had been forced. He felt, now, that she would overlook a murder such as the one he had committed far more easily than an intangible error of spirit. He could actually picture Honora, in his place, shooting Eddie Lukens; but he couldn't imagine her in his humiliating situation of a few minutes before.

He turned to the consideration of who it might be that had called over the wall, and immediately recognized that it was one of a small number, one of “Pack” Clower's gang: Thomas Gast would have gravitated quickly to their company, and their resentment of his, Jason Burrage's, place in life must have been nicely increased by Gast's jealousy. The latter, Jason knew, had not washed an honest pan of gravel in his journey and search for a mythical easy wealth; he had hardly left the littered fringe of San Francisco, but had filled progressively menial places in the less admirable resorts and activities.

With so much established beyond doubt he was confronted by the necessity for immediate action, the possibility of yet averting all that threatened him, of preserving his good opinion in Honora's eyes. Clower and Emery Radlaw and the rest, with the balance of neither property nor position, lawless and inflamed with drink, were a difficult opposition. He repeated that he had mastered worse, but out in California, where a man had been nakedly a man; and then he hadn't been married. There he would have found them at once, and an explosion of will, perhaps of powder, would soon have cleared the atmosphere. But in Cottarsport, with so much to keep intact, he was all but powerless.

Yet, the following day, when he saw the apothecary's brother enter the combined drug and liquor store, he followed; and, to his grim satisfaction, found Thomas Gast already inside. The apothecary gave Jason an inhospitable stare, but the latter ignored him, striding toward Gast. “Just what is it you've brought East about me?” he demanded.

The other avoided the query, his gaze shifting over the floor. “Well?” Jason insisted, after a pause. Thomas Gast was leaning against a high counter at one side, behind which shelves held various bottles and paper boxes and tins. The counter itself was laden with scales and a mortar, powders and vividly striped candy in tall glass jars.

“You know well as I do,” Gast finally admitted.

“Then we're both certain there's no reason for name-calling over my back wall.”

“You shot him, didn't you?” the other asked thinly. “You can't get away from the fact that you killed a pardner.”

“I did,” said Jason Burrage harshly. “He robbed me. But I didn't shout thief at him from the safety of the dark; it was right after dinner, the middle of the day. He was ready first, too; but I shot him. Can you get anything from that?”

“You ought to realize this isn't San Francisco,” Radlaw, the drug taker, put in. “A man couldn't be coolly derringered in Cottarsport. There's law here, there's order.” He had a harried face, dulled eyes under a fine brow, a tremulous flabby mouth, with white crystals of powder adhering to its corners, and a countenance like the yellow oilskins of the fishermen.

Jason turned darkly in his direction. “What have you or Clower got to do with law?”

“Not only them,” the apothecary interposed, “but all the other men of the town are interested in keeping it orderly. We'll have no western rowdyism in Cottarsport.”

“Then hear this,” Jason again addressed Thomas Gast; “see that you tell the truth and all the truth. My past belongs to me, and I don't aim to have it maligned by any empty liar back from the Coast. And either of you Radlaws—I'm not going to be blanketed by the town drunkards or old women, either. If I have shot one man I can shoot another, and I care this much for your talk—if any of this muck is allowed to annoy Mrs. Burrage I'll kill whoever starts it, spang in the middle of day.”

“That's where it gets him,” the ex-scholar stated. “Just there,” Jason agreed; “and this Gast, who has brought so much back from California, can tell you this, too—that I had the name of finishing what I began.”

But, once more outside, alone, his appearance of resolution vanished: the merest untraceable rumor would be sufficient to accomplish all that he feared, damage him irreparably with Honora. He was far older in spirit and body than he had been back on Indian Bar; he had passed the tumultuous years of living. The labor and privation, the continuous immersion in frigid streams, had lessened his vitality, sapped his ability for conflict. All that he now wished was the happiness of his wife, Honora, and the quietude of their big, peaceful house; the winter evenings by the Franklin stove and the spring evenings with the windows open and the candles guttering in the mild, lilac-hung air.

---

Together with his uncertainty the pleasure in the sheer fact of his wife increased; and with it the old wonderment at their situation returned. What, for instance, did she mean by saying that he must explain her to herself? He tried again all the conventional reasons for marriage without satisfaction: the sentimental and material equally failed. Jason felt that if he could penetrate this mystery his grasp on actuality would be enormously improved; he might, with such knowledge, successfully defy Thomas Gast and all that past which equally threatened to reach out destructively into the future.

His happiness, in its new state of fragility, became infinitely precious; a thing to dwell on at nights, to ponder over walking through the town. Then, disagreeably aware of what overshadowed him, he would watch such passersby as spoke, searching for some sign of the spreading of his old fault. Often he imagined that he saw such an indication, and he would hurry home, in a panic of haste—which was, too, intense reluctance—to discover if Honora yet knew.

He approached her a hundred times determined to end his misery of suspense, and face the incalculable weight of her disdain; but on each occasion he failed as he had at the first. Now his admission seemed too damned roundabout; in an unflattering way forced upon him. His position was too insecure, he told himself.... Perhaps the threat in the apothecary's shop would be sufficient to shut the mouth of rumor. It had not been empty; he was still capable of uncalculating rage. How closely was Honora bound to him? What did she think of him at heart?

He couldn't bear to remember how he had laid open her dignity, the dignity and position of the Canderays in Cottarsport, to whispered vilification. Connected with him she was being discussed in “Pack” Clower's shanty. His mind revolved endlessly about the same few topics, he elaborated and discarded countless schemes to secure Honora. He even considered giving Thomas Gast a sum of money to repair what harm the latter had wrought. Useless—his danger flourished on hatred and envy and malice. However exculpable the killing of Eddie Lukens had been, the results were immeasurably unfortunate, for a simple act of violent local justice.

They were in the carriage above Cottarsport; Coggs had died through the winter, and his place been taken by a young coachman from the city. The horses rested somnolently in their harness, the bright bits of rubbed silver plate shining. Honora was looking out over the harbor, a gentian blue expanse. “Good Heavens,” she cried with sudden energy, “I am getting old at a sickening rate. Only last year the schooners and sea made me as restless as a gull. I wanted to sail to the farthest places; but now the boats are—are no more than boats. It fatigues me to think of their jumping about; and I haven't walked down to the wharves for six weeks. Do I look a haggard fright?”

“You seem as young as before I went to California,” he replied simply. She did. A strand of hair had slipped from its net, and wavered across her flawless cheek, her lips were bright and smooth, her shoulders slimly square.

“You're a marvelous woman, Honora,” he told her.

She gazed at him, smiling. “I wonder if you realize that that is your first compliment of our entire wedded life?”

“Ridiculous,” he declared incredulously.

“Isn't it?”

“I mean I'm complimenting you all the time. I think——”

“You can hardly expect me to hear thoughts,” she interrupted.

He silently debated another—it was to be about the ribbon on her throat—but decided against giving it voice. Why, like the reasons for so much else, he was unable to say; they all had their root in the blind sense of the uncertainty of his situation.

Throughout the evening his thoughts shifted ceaselessly from one position to another. This, he realized, could not continue indefinitely; soon, from within or out, Honora and himself must be revealed to each other. He was permeated by the weariness of constant strain; the peace of the past months had been destroyed; it seemed to him that he had become an alien to the serenity of the high, tranquil rooms and of his wife.

He rose early the following morning, and descended into a rapt purity of sunlight and the ecstatic whistling of robins. The front door had not been opened; and, as he turned its shining brass knob, his gaze fell upon a sheet of paper projecting below. Jason bent, securing it, and, with a premonition of evil, thrust the folded scrap into his pocket. He turned through the house into the garden; and there privately scrutinized a half sheet with a clumsily formed, disguised writing:

“This,” he read, “will serve you notice to move on. Dangerous customers are not desired here. Take a suggestion in time and skip bad consequences. You can't hide back of your wife's hoops.” It was signed “Committee.”

A robin was thrilling the air with melody above his head. Jason listened mechanically as the bird ended his song and flew away. Then the realization of what he had found overwhelmed him with a strangling bitterness: he, Jason Burrage, had been ordered from his birthplace, he had been threatened and accused of hiding behind a woman, by the off-scouring of the alleys and rum holes. A feeling of impotence thrust its chilling edge into the swelling heat of his resentment. He would have to stand like a condemned animal before the impending fatal blow; he was held motionless, helpless, by every circumstance of his life and hopes.

He crumpled the warning in a clenched hand. How Cottarsport would point and jeer at him, at Jason Burrage who was Honora Canderay's husband, a murderer; Jason, who had returned from California with the gold fleece! It wasn't golden, he told himself, but stained—a fleece dark with blood, tarnished from hellish unhappiness, a thing infected with immeasurable miseries. Its edge had fallen on Olive Stanes and left her—he had passed her only yesterday—dry-lipped and shrunken into sterile middle age. It promised him only sorrow, and now its influence was reaching up toward Honora, in herself serenely apart from the muck and defilement out of which he thought he had struggled.

The sun, rising over the bright spring foliage, filled the garden with sparkling color. His wife, in a filmy white dress, called him to breakfast. She waited for him with her faint smile, against the cool interior. He went forward isolated, lonely, in his secret distress.

This communication, like the spoken accusation of a previous evening, was, apparently, bare of other consequences. Jason's exterior life progressed without a deviation from its usual smooth course. It was clear to him that no version of the facts about the killing of Eddie Lukens had yet spread in Cottarsport. This, he decided, considering the character of Thomas Gast, the oblique quality of his statements, was natural. He could not doubt that such public revelation, if threat and intimidation failed, must come. Meanwhile he was victimized by a growing uncertainty—from what direction would the next attack thrust?

He smiled grimly to himself at the memory of the withdrawn and secure aspect of the town when he had first returned from the West. To him, striding across the hills from the Dumner stage, it had resembled an ultimate haven. The seeming harmony and peace of the grey fold of houses about their placid harbor had concealed possibilities of debasement as low as California's worst camps. Now, successful, when he had looked for the reward of his long years of brutal toil, the end of struggle, he was confronted by the ugliest situation of his existence.

He was glad that he had always been a silent man, or Honora would have noticed and demanded the cause of the moroseness which must have settled over him. They sat no longer before the stove in the drawing room, but on a side porch that commanded an expanse of lawn and a high privet hedge, while he smoked morosely at the inevitable cheroots, gloomily searching for a way from the difficulty closing in upon him.

Honora had been to Boston, and she was describing lightly an encounter with her aunt, Herriot Cozzens. He was only half conscious of her amused voice. Clouds had obscured the evening sky, and there was an air of suspense, like that preceding a thunder storm, in the thickening dark. A restlessness filled Jason which he was unable to resist; and, with a short, vague explanation, he rose and proceeded out upon the street. There, his hands clasped behind his back and head lowered, he wandered on, lost in inner despondence.

He turned into the courthouse square, dimly lighted by gas lamps at its outer confines, and paced across the grass, stirring a few wan fireflies. It was blacker still beyond the courthouse. He stumbled slightly, recovered himself, and wearily commenced a return home. But he had scarcely taken a step when a figure closed in upon him, materializing suddenly out of the darkness. He stopped and was about to speak when a violent blow from behind grazed his head and fell with a splintering impact on his shoulder. He stood for a moment bewildered by the unexpected pain; then, as he saw another shape, and another, gather around him, he came sharply to his senses. His hand thrust into a pocket, but it was empty—he had laid aside the derringer in Cottarsport.

His assailants grappled with him swiftly, and he swayed struggling and hitting out with short blows in the center of a silent, vicious conflict. A rough hard palm was crushed against his mouth, a head ground into his throat, and a heavy, mucous breath of rum smote him. There was muttered cursing, and low, disregarded commands. A cotton handkerchief, evidently used as a mask, tore off in Jason's hand; strained voices, their caution lost in passion, took unmistakably the accents of “Pack” Clower and the Swede, Steven. A thinner tone outside the swirling bodies cried low and urgent, “Get it done with.” A fist was driven again Jason's side, leaving a sharp, stabbing hurt, a heavy kick tore his thigh. Then he got his fingers into a neck and put into the grip all the sinewy strength got by long years with a miner's pan and shovel. A choked sob responded, and blood spread stickily over his palms.

It seemed to Jason Burrage that he was shaking himself free, that he was victorious; with a final supreme wrench he stood alone, breathing in gusts. There was a second's imponderable stillness, and then the entire night appeared to crash down upon his head...

He thought it was the flumed river, all their summer's labor, bursting over him. He was whirled downward through a swift course of jagged pains, held under the hurtling water and planks and stones. He fought, blind and strangled, but he was soon crushed into a supine nothingness. Far below, the river discharged him: he was lying beside a slaty bank in which the gold glittered like fine and countless fish scales. But he couldn't move, and the bank flattened into a plain under a gloomy ridge, with a camp of miners. He saw that it was Sunday, for the men were all grouped before the tents singing. There was Eddie Lukens gravely waving a hand to the beat of the melody:=

"'Don't you cry for me.

I'm going to Calaveras

With my wash bowl on my knee.'”=

It was undoubtedly Eddie, his partner, but he had never seen him so white and—why, he had a hole over his eye! Eddie Lukens was dead; it wasn't decent for him to be standing up, flapping his hands and singing. Jason bent forward to remonstrate, to persuade him to go back—back to where the dead belonged. Then he remembered, but it was too late: Eddie had him in an iron clutch, he was dragging him, too, down.

Jason made a convulsive effort to escape, he threw back his head, gasping; and saw Honora, his wife, bending over him. The tormenting illusion slowly perished—this was Cottarsport and not California, he was back again in the East, the present, married to Honora Canderay. An astounding fact, but so. Through the window of his room he could see the foliage of a great horse-chestnut tree that stood by the side walk; it was swelling into flower. Full memory now flooded back upon him, and with it the realization that probably his happiness was destroyed.

It was impossible to tell how much Honora knew of the cause of the assault upon him. She was always like that—enigmatic. But, whatever she knew now, soon she would have to hear all. Even if he wished to lie, it would be impossible to fabricate, maintain, a convincing cover for what had happened. The most superficial, necessary investigation would expose the story brought home by Thomas Gast.

The time had come when he must confide everything to Honora; perhaps she would overlook his cowardice. About to address her, he fell into a bottomless coma, and a day passed before he had gathered himself sufficiently to undertake his task. She was sitting facing him, her chair by a window, where her fingers were swiftly and smoothly occupied. Her features were a little blurred against the light, and—her disconcerting scrutiny veiled—he felt this to be an assistance.

“Those men who broke me up,” he began dis-jointedly, surprised at the thin uncertainty of his voice, “I know pretty well who they are. Ought to get most of them.”

“We thought you could say,” she rejoined in an even tone. “Some guesses were made, but it was better to wait till you could give a statement.”

“Am I badly hurt, Honora?” he asked suddenly. “Not dangerously,” she assured him. “You have splendid powers of recuperation.”

“I'll have to go on,” he added hurriedly, “and tell you the rest—why I was beaten.”

“It would be better not,” she stated. “You ought to be as calm as possible. It may quiet you, Jason, to hear that I know now.”

“You know what the town has been saying,” he cried in bitter revolt, “what lies Thomas Gast spread. You've heard all the envy and malice and drunken vileness of sots. It isn't right for you to think you know before I could speak a word of defense.”

“Not only what the town says, Jason,” she replied simply, “but the truth. Olive Stanes told me.”

“Then——.” An excited weakness broke his voice in a sob, and Honora rose, crossing the room to his bed. “You must positively stop talking of this now,” she directed. “If you attempt it I shall go away and send a nurse.”

He was helpless against her will, and sank into semi-slumberous wonder. Honora knew all: Olive Stanes had told her. She was as noncommittal, he complained to himself, as a wooden Indian. She might have excused him without a second thought, and it might be that she had finished with him entirely, that she was merely dispensing a charity and duty; and, moving uneasily, or lying propped up in a temporary release from suffering, he would study her every movement in an endeavor to gain her all-important opinion of him as he had been lately revealed. It was useless; he was always, Jason felt, in a state of disturbing suspense.

He determined to end it, however, in spite of what Honora had said, on an afternoon when he was supported down to the street and the carriage. His wife took her place at his side, and they rolled forward into the expansive warmth of summer. Jason was impressed by the sheer repetition of life; and it seemed to him that this was the greatest happiness possible—such a procession of days and drives, with Honora.

Her throat rose delicately from ruffled lace, circled by a narrow black velvet band with a clasp of remarkable diamonds; and he smiled at the memory of how he had once thought she was marrying him for money. That seemed years ago, but he was no nearer the solution of her motive now than then. Her slim hands were folded in her lap—how beautifully they were joined at the wrists; her tapering fingers were like ivory. As he studied them he was startled at their suddenly meeting in a rigid clasp, the knuckles white and sharp. He looked up and saw that they were drawing near a small group of men outside the apothecary's shop.

A curious silence fell upon these as the carriage approached: there were the two Radlaws, one saturnine and bleak, the other greenish, shattered by drugs; Thomas Gast; Vleet, the fishing schooner's master, and a casual, familiar passerby. Jason Burrage stared at them with a stony ominous countenance, at which Gast made a gesture of combined insolence and uncertainty. Jason had sunk back on the cushions when he was astonished by Honora's commanding the coachman to stop. It was evident that she was about to descend; he put out a hand to restrain her, but she disregarded him. His astonishment increased to incredulity and then fear; he rose hurriedly, but relaxed with a mutter of pain.

Honora, a Canderay, had taken the carriage whip from its holder, and was walking, direct and composed, toward Thomas Gast. She stopped a short distance away: before an exclamation, a movement, was possible she had swept the thong of the whip across Gast's face. The blow was swung with force, and the man faltered, a burning welt on the pallor of his countenance. The coachman and Jason Burrage in the carriage, the men together on the sidewalk, seemed part of an inanimate group of which the only thing endowed with life was the whip flickering again, cutting and wrapping, about a face.

There was a curiously ruthless impersonality about Honora's erect presence, her icy cold profile. Memories of old stories of Ithiel Canderay, the necessary salt cruelness of punishment in ships, flashed through Jason's mind. An intolerable weight of time seemed to drag upon him. Thomas Gast gave a hoarse gurgle and lurched forward, but the relentless lash drove him back.

“You whisperer!” Honora said in her ringing voice, “you liar and slabbering coward! It's necessary to cut the truth out of you. When you talk again about Mr. Burrage and the man he shot in California don't leave out the smallest detail of his exoneration. Say that he had been robbed, the other broke one of the first laws of miners and should have been killed. You'd not have done it—a knife in the back would be your thought—but a man would!”

She flung the whip down on the bricks.

Thomas Gast pressed his hands to his face, and slow red stains widened through his fingers. The apothecary stood transfixed; his brother was shaking in a febrile and congested horror. The woman turned disdainfully, moving to the carriage; the coachman descended and offered his arm as she mounted to the seat. The reins were drawn and the horses started forward in a walk.

Honora's gaze was set, looking directly ahead; her hands, in her lap of flowered muslin, were now relaxed; they gave an impression of crushing weariness. Jason's heart pounded like a forge hammer; a tremendous realization was forced into his brain—he need never again question why Honora had married him; his doubts were answered, stopped, for ever. He turned to her to speak an insignificant part of his measureless gratitude, but he was choked, blinded, by a passion of honor and homage.

Her gaze sought him, and there was a faint tremor of her lips; it grew into the shadow of an ironic smile. Suddenly it was borne upon his new, acquiescent serenity that Honora would always be a Canderay for him, he must perpetually think of her in the terms of his early habit; she would eternally be a little beyond him, a being to approach, to attend, with ceremony. The memory and sweep of all California, the pageant of life he had seen on the way, his own boasted success and importance, faded before the solid fact of Honora's commanding heritage in life, in Cottarsport.