---

Throughout the months of May and June the battle had raged—Lavinia Trench’s battle, not with her family but with herself. She knew, as all those in her little world knew, that a visit to Bromfield was not the difficult thing she had made it. Times without number David had implored her to go with him especially when there was serious illness or death in one or the other of their families. And now that she had achieved her purpose, knowing all the while, somewhere in the depths of her, hope of conquest on a certain perfectly definite object, and had bent her tremendous energy in that direction—knowing all the while, somewhere in the depths of her, that the enemy lay entrenched in quite another quarter.

In those former struggles, in which she had invariably bent David to her will, she had rewarded him with a period of forced sweetness which he was glad to take in lieu of the comradeship he had long since ceased to hope for. It had been this way when they made the perilous move from Olive Hill, where he was doing remarkably well, working at a daily wage, to Springdale, where he must hazard all he had saved ... to give his wife the social advantage she could not find in a dirty mining town. But Lavinia had no instinct for society, derived no immediate satisfaction from such triumphs as had come to her. It appeared to David’s simple and always lucid mind that she created situations for the sheer purpose of annihilating them. In every crisis in their lives, he had owned in retrospect that Lavinia was right. Had he understood the situation, a frank discussion would have won him. It was her method of approach that seemed to him unnecessarily cruel.

She had, from childhood, viewed David Trench as an amiable yokel, to be blindfolded and led about by the hand. And now one sentence in his talk, that morning in the shop, rankled: “Who is it that you want to see in Bromfield?” She had been telling herself over and over again that there was no one in particular she wanted to see. Her essentially prudish mind shrank from the naked truth that stalked before her, in the dark hours of the night, with David peacefully sleeping at her side. But negation was not conquest. In vain she declared to her own soul that Calvin Stone was nothing to her. She could meet him without a tremor. She tried to picture him, old and scarred by life—shrinking from her gaze, because of the stain on his fair name. She saw him, instead, a debonair youth of three-and-twenty, the sort of fellow who would kiss a girl ... and argue about it afterward.

There had been periods, weeks and even months, when the foothills of her immediate environment had obscured that treeless mountain peak in her life—the irreparable injury she had suffered. But something always happened to bring her perfidious lover once more within her ken. Never so poignantly as when Mrs. Ascott unwittingly revealed the reason for Calvin’s hasty marriage. She had fancied such an explanation ... had been sure that the certainty of it would be anodyne for her deep hurt. Instead it had served only to tear open the old wound, to set it festering with the toxin of that other unstudied remark: “He afterward tried to get out of it.” Had not Calvin’s father foreshadowed this very contingency? Lettie’s husband might sicken of his bargain—might come back to his first love, to plead for her forgiveness and the boon of her restored favour.

She would keep this idea uppermost in her mind, when she went to Bromfield. It not only served to soothe her vanity, but it would be a whip with which to lash the man who had wronged her. No, she would not give him the satisfaction of thinking she regretted her own hasty marriage. She would make him believe she had been infinitely the gainer when she married David Trench. The idea was so preposterous that, given a less subjective sense of humour, she might have laughed at it. But David had been that kind of stalking horse before.

II

David leaned against the wall, his tired eyes resting fondly on the garden where his children had romped. He was telling Mrs. Ascott the origin of the summer house—that he had built as a surprise for his wife, the spring she went to visit Lary in Ithaca, his first year in college. In those days Sylvia was the honey-pot for a swarm of students, and an occasional mature man, and a folding tea table in an outdoor living-room covered with kudzu and crimson rambler was an added attraction. Lavinia joined them, her cheeks flushed, her dark eyes ablaze with animation.

“You are going to be compelled to get along without me for a few weeks, Mrs. Ascott. My husband is sick and tired of seeing me around, and he’s going to bundle me up and send me home to my own people. It’s the first trip I’ve had in years ... always tied down to home and my children. Is there anyone in Rochester you’d like to send a message to? I haven’t seen dear old New York state since I left there, twenty-eight years ago next November.”

“Why, Vine, I was just telling Mrs. Ascott about building the little summer house for you, when you went to see Lary.”

Lavinia Trench flushed, not the slow red that betokened deep wrath, but a light wave of crimson that swallowed up the hectic spots in her cheeks, that tinged the hollow of her temples and the taut skin of her high and slightly receding forehead. It was gone in an instant, leaving in its wash a strained look of embarrassment.

“I never think of that as a visit. I went in such a hurry—and then I didn’t have time to go over to Bromfield, because ... you wrote me that Sylvia had a cold and Robert had sprained his wrist. I never go away from home without something dreadful happening. I wonder what Sylvia will say when she gets my telegram to-night. I hope she won’t be frightened.”

“You are going to telegraph Sylvia? What for?”

“I want her to look after the children while I’m gone.”

“You aren’t taking them with you—after promising Eileen that she might spend the summer with her cousin, Alice Larimore?”

“A nice rest I would have—dragging two children around with me!”

“They don’t need to have their bottles fixed.” David smiled in spite of his perplexity. “I had counted on this summer—to break up the infatuation for young Marksley. I thought you agreed with me. It was your solution. You told me not to say anything about it until vacation, and that you would send Eileen away.”

David might have spared his breath. The telegram was already on the wire.

III

Sylvia Penrose came home in time for commencement. It was her first visit since the gold-lined catastrophe whereby she was shorn of the coveted “Mrs. Professor,” and she brought with her more pretty clothes than anyone in Springdale had dreamed of—outside a department store. Her father watched her uneasily, the first evening. He saw a marked change in her, and the quality of it disturbed him. Could a child of his acquire such a degree of cynical world-wisdom in a brief ten months? Had Sylvia changed, or was he seeing her for the first time, as she was?

David was not given to introspection. The chambers of his heart were filled with the ghosts of dreams and longings that had perished ... yet would not lie quiet in the graves to which his acquiescent mind had consigned them. One could always take refuge from the hurt of life in the tangible things that life had imposed. He took refuge, now, in his wife’s vivid charm, her spontaneous return to health and buoyancy. Barring a certain smugness, that had come to be an essential fibre of her mental woof, she was amazingly attractive.

“You might easily pass for Mrs. Penrose’s sister,” Judith exclaimed, astonished at the apparition of Lavinia in a cameo pink negligÉe with wide frills of cream lace. And, Lavinia, smarting under the lash of her daughter’s comments regarding the morning jacket—and the foolish old women who tried to prolong youth by such ill-considered devices—turned to preen herself before the mirror.

She had fully intended to prime Sylvia, with regard to Larimore and the dangerous widow; but that burst of spontaneous praise disarmed her. She did not, however, neglect to make plain her intentions in another quarter. Hal Marksley was to be treated with proper respect. It would not be a bad idea to have the engagement—the wedding, even—consummated before her return from Bromfield. Any one with a grain of sense must know that a fellow as popular and rich as Hal—with half the girls in town after him—would not stand such snubbing as he had received from the men of the household. He was of age ... and Eileen could easily pass herself off for eighteen or twenty if she did up her hair and went to Greenville where she was not known. Papa and Larimore were absolutely insane not to see that a girl with Eileen’s impetuous nature.... Mrs. Trench did not finish the sentence. She and Sylvia understood each other.

IV

After the train had gone the big house was unbearably lonely, reft of the all pervasive personality that dominated its moods of sunshine and gloom. Early Sunday afternoon David passed through the wicket gate and sought his neighbour in the summer house. One by one the other Trenches joined them. For a time Sylvia went about with her brother, examining old familiar objects, assuming charming attitudes, giving vent to laughter that rippled in measured cadence. Theodora watched her, wondering what kind of impression she was making. Sylvia was like mamma—always sure of herself. Lary and Eileen were like papa. And she—she wasn’t like anybody. Just a little remnant that had been patched together, out of the left-overs of the other children.

She came out of her musings to hear her father say: “Mrs. Ascott, you don’t know what it means to live with one person until that person becomes part of your very body. When Vine is away.... I do everything left-handed. It’s as if a piece of me was gone, here.” He slipped a hand under his left arm, and his eyes smiled mournfully. “I am always turning to look for her, and the vacancy makes me dizzy.”

How stupid to miss the first part of such a conversation! And now Lady Judith wouldn’t say anything in reply—because the others were coming for afternoon tea, with Nanny, an exaggerated cocoa girl in white cap and apron, bearing a steaming samovar and a wide range of accessories to suit the prejudice of those who preferred their Sunday afternoon tipple hot or cold.

“It’s so foolish for the Fourth to come on Sunday—and have to save up all your fire-crackers till to-morrow,” the child began disconsolately, choosing a macaroon from the embarrassing variety of small cakes in the silver basket. “Hal says the Governor can’t come; but there will be a better orator to spread the eagle in the stadium. He didn’t ask me to go with him and Eileen.”

“I thought all three of my daughters were going with me,” David pleaded, his eyes seeking Eileen’s. But Sylvia dispensed with argument:

“No, mamma said I was to take Theo to the stadium with us. There isn’t room for her in Hal’s little car. And besides, I know how I used to hate to have the younger children tagging after me, when I was having company. I’ve asked Dr. Schubert and Syd to join us, and they’ll come home for a spread, after the celebration. Mrs. Ascott, I hope you’ll come, too. I have already asked Hal. Syd has promised to help me with the serving. He ought to make some woman a good husband—the training I gave him when we were growing up.”

---

Judith was glad, afterward, that the responsibility for Eileen had been lifted from David Trench’s shoulders, howsoever humiliating the conditions might be. All that would have made for guidance had long since been wrested from his hands, and the inevitable pain would be robbed of the corrosive quality of self-reproach. She wondered what he was thinking, that portentous Monday evening, as he gazed past her and Theodora to the row of seats across the aisle where Hal and Eileen sat, munching popcorn and making audible comments on the speeches, comments that bubbled with cleverness not always refined in its quality.

Just as the perspiring statesman appeared on the flag-draped platform, bearing a message from the Governor of the state, Dr. Schubert and his son came down the aisle, looking to right and left with searching eyes. Theodora stood on tiptoe to signal them. There was a shifting of the original seating arrangement, so that Sydney and Sylvia might be together. The first few sentences of the florid oration were lost in the general confusion, and when Judith looked again into the row of seats across the aisle, two places were vacant. Hal and Eileen had gone.

II

After the fireworks the town went home. Sydney Schubert walked with Sylvia, talking of other Fourth of July experiences in a tone from which the restraint of the disappointed lover was wholly wanting. David played sweetheart to Theodora, a rÔle that had been developed by long practice. It came to Judith, walking behind them with Lary and Dr. Schubert, that David Trench was essentially a lover—and love must have something to feed upon.

“Will we wait for Eileen?” he asked, when the feast had been prepared.

“They’ll be here any minute,” Sylvia cried flippantly. Then, in a voice that echoed her mother’s objurgatory habit of speech: “For goodness’ sake, papa, stop worrying about that girl. She’s old enough to take care of herself. Syd and I were traipsing all over the country when I was her age, and I can’t remember that you sat up nights worrying about me.”

“Young Marksley isn’t Sydney Schubert,” her father reminded her.

III

It was one o’clock when the merry party separated, and still no Eileen. A light rain was falling, and the coat closet must be searched for umbrellas. Lary lingered at Judith Ascott’s door, unwilling to say good night. Some misshapen apprehension that had tormented him all evening struggled for expression.

“Do you believe, Judith, that whatever is, is right?”

“I can recall the time, less than six months ago, when I was convinced that whatever is—is wrong,” she answered, mystified.

“And now?” He searched her face, there in the moist dusk of the veranda. When he spoke again, it was with something of Theo’s kindling animation: “I don’t know what you have done to me. A moment ago I was facing a great onrushing wall of black water. And all at once it has broken into ripples of silver joy. Last night I watched a great black and yellow spider, playing with his web in the moonlight. He was such a handsome, capable fellow—and the moth was so blunderingly stupid. I wondered if there were not something to be said in favour of the spider. But—you will think me a fatalist, if I finish the thought I had in mind. You will believe me when I tell you that I am not, in the least?”

“No, Lary, I will not believe you—one whit more than I can believe that it was an empty accident that brought me to Springdale—to Vine Cottage—four months ago. You and Eileen and I are caught in the web. The spider is Fate. I begged the gods to burn my fingers with the fire of life ... and they heard my prayer....”

“You delicious pagan! I might fancy gentle Clotho spinning a silken strand for you. But to sear your fingers—” He caught them and pressed them to his lips. Then he hurried across the lawn in a panic, his bare head wet with the summer rain. Judith looked after him, Sylvia’s best umbrella in her hand. She wanted to call him back, but it would only mean a double wetting. And Sylvia need not know.

She went up to her room but not to sleep. Taking down the thick coils of her pale chestnut hair, she braided it deliberately. A strand, blown across her face by the breeze from the west window, reminded her, all at once, of the web. She relaxed weakly on a hassock, watching the glittering drops on the edge of the awning that shaded her window from the afternoon sun. Was the web inevitable ... Fate? As yet she was free. Could she view with equanimity a future that involved, not Lary and his two young sisters, but those others who were of his flesh? Could she bear the heartache that was David Trench? Could she.... Her head drooped low on the window sill and her mind drifted rudderless on a sea of dreams.

IV

When Hal and Eileen left the stadium it was in accordance with a prearranged plan to meet Ina and Kitten and two of the boys who had contrived the loan of a touring car for the evening. They would drive to Olive Hill for the celebration—the exciting part of it. Competitive drilling, not in gaudy uniforms, but that more useful drilling that had to do with ledges of shale and limestone. It was at best but a poor imitation of the annual drill contest in the gold mining country, where powerful muscles contended with steel bitted drills against the tough impediment of granite. Here the very ledge had to be faked—removed from the nearby hillside with infinite care, and mounted against an improvised wall of mine refuse. It was the best the coal mines of Illinois could afford, but it served its purpose. There were money prizes and lesser trophies—geese, chickens and baskets of provisions.

The contest finished, there was a dance in the pavilion. Hal had parked his roadster where he and Eileen could watch the antics of the dancers. He was not sorry when he learned that the borrowed car must be returned by midnight, and the others must be on their way towards Springdale. He and Eileen would be following in a little while, he said.

“I’ve been trying all evening to dodge them,” he added, as he waved farewell to the departing car. “Some people simply can’t take a hint.”

The girl nestled close. “Just you and me ... all alone in the universe.”

“Sweetheart,” Hal slipped his arm around her waist and laid his cheek against hers, “it’s all fixed with my father. He’s set on having me go to Pratt; but he’s agreed on an allowance that ought to take care of two. We’re in luck that you can cook. And you won’t mind a little flat? I can count on Adelaide to help us out if we get in a pinch. Of course my mother’ll raise Cain—and I’ll be on the lookout for a job, from the start. If they think I’m going to wait all that time for you—why, I can’t, Eileen!”

The girl’s breath came so thick, it choked her. The dancers swam dizzily before her eyes. The saplings in the little grove took up the dance, swaying with uncertain rhythm, their lithe trunks bending to the tumult in her brain. “Do you love me well enough to get along that way for a year or two? Will you come to me, sweetheart, when I send for you?”

And then the rain. Men and women went scurrying to places of shelter. The thin grove, the pavilion with its dilapidated roof, the mine house—whose inner spaces were always barred to the public as soon as the last workman had gone—these offered meagre protection. Over there behind the mine dump was a corn crib and feed room where provender for the now obsolete pit mules had formerly been kept. No one else had thought of this refuge. Hal and Eileen were alone, the rain pounding on the rusty tin roof to the tune of their madly beating hearts.

V

How long Judith lay asleep she did not know. She was aroused at length by voices, so close that they seemed to emanate from the lawn beneath her window. She tried to move. Her arm, her neck, her shoulder creaked with pain. She must have been there in that cramped position a long time. Her hair and her thin negligÉe were quite damp. As her scattered senses collected themselves she realized that the sound came from beyond the wall. A voice, hoarse with rapture, Eileen’s voice, murmured over and over:

“Oh, darling, I never knew I loved you until now.”

Some high platitude touching manly fidelity punctuated the girl’s impassioned utterance. The faÇade of the house lay in ghostly shadows that enveloped the figures completely. But out there across the lawn lay the white moonlight, frosting the wet grass with a shimmering incrustation of unearthly jewels. Hal Marksley’s substantial form came like a skulking wraith from the gloom, gliding along the thin edge of the shadow until he reached a convenient screen of shrubs, vaulted over the wall and crossed close beneath Judith’s casement. He was cranking the reluctant engine of his motor car, out there in the side street, as the clock in the chapel tower struck three.

VI

It was ten o’clock when Eileen came down stairs, refused breakfast and wandered listlessly out into the hot July air. She was pale and her full lips were swollen. Her eyes were set in murky pools of shadow, as yellow as ochre, beneath their screen of long lashes, and her blond braids hung stiff and obdurate. As she entered the summer house, Theodora greeted her with a derisive gesture.

“Lady Judith, tell her what she missed. I never saw the automobile yet that could take me away from such a lobster salad.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know about it.”

“Indeed she did. She made the mayonnaise herself. Sylvia can’t hit it one time in three. And mamma and Drusilla ... the oil always separates, on them.”

“Separates on them!” Eileen sniffed. “Where do you get that line of talk?”

She had relaxed on the oaken bench and sat kicking the gravel with the toe of her loose slipper. After a time she broke the sullen silence:

“I didn’t mean to be discourteous to you, Lady Judith. That’s what Sylvia scolded me about; but that wasn’t what she had in mind. She’s sore because I didn’t bring Hal to her party. I knew what kind of a frosty shoulder he’d get from Lary and papa. And the way she fawns over him! It makes me sick. He hates to be toadied to—because his people have money. He knows that if he didn’t have a rich father, mamma and Sylvia wouldn’t think any more of him than Lary does. He’d take me away from that house to-day, if he had his way about it. He knows what I’m in for ... Sylvia to order me around for a month. I almost wish mamma hadn’t gone to Bromfield.”

---

For a day or two Eileen was abstracted and moody, a flaccid resignation taking the place of the high spiritual enthusiasm that ushered in her surrender. But it was not in the girl’s nature to remain long depressed. She could not, as Lavinia did, nurture a grouch to its final fruition. Her return to normal was accompanied by a sequence of quarrels with her elder sister, and she shunned her father with studied aversion. Hal resumed his old habit of asking her to meet him on the campus or around the corner on Sherman Avenue. “To escape Sylvia’s sticky patronage,” she explained to Mrs. Ascott.

Towards the end of the week she went with Theodora to the shady west porch of Vine Cottage, to assist with the drawing of innumerable threads and the hemming of a fresh supply of napkins for the two linen closets. Her lap was overflowing with damask when the postman’s whistle shrilled through the sultry morning air. Theo bounded to her feet, her eyes wide with excitement. The coming of the postman was always an adventure, vicarious but none the less interesting. Some day he might bring.... No, she was not expecting letters for herself. But Lary had sent away a poem and an essay. And then, there ought to be a long letter for daddy. As yet there had been nothing but a stingy post card, with the hackneyed old Niagara Falls on one side and on the other that offensive old clichÉ: “Will write soon.” And mamma had sent such attractive cards to all the others, not omitting Nanny and Mrs. Dutton.

After a few minutes she came slowly back, all the joy gone out of her face. There was a long envelope addressed to Mr. Larimore Trench. She inverted the hateful thing in Judith’s lap. Letters of acceptance did not come in long envelopes. There was another one, square and perfumed, bearing the name, Mrs. Raoul Ascott. Who was this Raoul Ascott, that he should intrude here?

She had read the stanza in the back of one of Sylvia’s books ... written while Sylvia was temporarily engrossed with a young professor whose spouse had died. But, after all, it wasn’t quite fair to feel that way about people who couldn’t help being remembered. And Mr. Ascott had vacated the place that belonged rightfully to Lary. The third letter was from mamma. It bore, in Lavinia’s cramped writing, the name of Mrs. Oliver Penrose. The little girl raged impotently as she called her sister.

II

Sylvia pushed Eileen none too gently aside, to make room for herself in the hammock beside Mrs. Ascott. Then she fell upon her letter, reading aloud such passages as involved no violation of the family’s privacy. The journey had been hot and dusty—not a familiar face on the train from beginning to end. Theodore had met her in Rochester with the new car, and she had enjoyed the first part of the ride, along the Genesee. She was glad Ellen was not along. It gave Ted a chance to tell her ever so many things, that she would otherwise not have heard.

Ellen could think of nothing but the Stone scandal. Everybody felt sorry for Calvin. For her part, she thought he got only what he deserved. She had not seen him, as yet. His life was a terrible example of the consequences of sin. She hoped he had not forgotten how she tried for years to lead him into the church. She might remind him of this, when she saw him ... for Ellen had invited him—oh, much against her own wishes—to have dinner with them Sunday.

As Sylvia read, the long envelope addressed to Mr. Larimore Trench slipped from Judith’s lap and fell to the floor. Eileen stooped to restore it.

“Whee-oo! Lary’ll be down in the back cellar, eating coal to warm his heart,” she cried. “It certainly does take the tuck out of him to have the editors give him the back-fire.”

“I can imagine what you mean,” Mrs. Ascott smiled, “but you are wrong in your surmise. This is not a rejected manuscript. It is a business letter from one of my attorneys—not Mr. Ramsay.”

---

That evening, just as Hal and Eileen were driving away in the little roadster, with Sylvia watching them from a third-floor window, Lary sprang nimbly over the wall and hurried to the summer house, the long envelope in his hand. His feet scarce touched the grass ... he walked like Theodora in her most charming mood.

“It’s the contract for the plans. I couldn’t wait to let you know. It might have been the other thing. I wouldn’t let myself see how eager I was for ... success. Mr. Sanderson says they are charmed with the whole arrangement. They want me to come to New York at once for a conference. His daughter doesn’t care about the cow barn—since she isn’t operating a dairy. They would like to have me substitute a studio, somewhere out in the woods. It appears that the bride-to-be is a sculptor.”

“Yes, she and Hilda Travers were in Paris together—but of course you don’t know about Hilda.”

A queer, chilly feeling crept over Judith Ascott. She had forgotten Hilda. She had forgotten everything. It all belonged to another world, a story she had read in a book on an idle summer’s day.

“You didn’t—let the Marksleys have the cow barn?” she faltered.

“No.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. A lower nature than yours would have taken a mean revenge—by letting the dwelling of cattle shame the manor house.”

“It wasn’t that, Judith. They offered me a stiff price for that one set of plans, and I needed the money. But ... seeing anything of mine in that environment of cairngorms would make me feel the way it does to see Eileen running around with that—” He checked himself, and the slow red—Lavinia’s red that betokened impotent rage—crept above the line of his collar.

“When are they going to begin building? The Sandersons, I mean.”

“Immediately. They want me to go over the ground and outline the landscape features. I shall probably be back and forth the rest of the summer. They have asked me to serve in the capacity of supervising architect. We don’t do things that way in Springdale. But I have helped my father—long before I was out of college—so I have all the necessary experience. The only difference is that Mr. Sanderson will pay me a fee and flaunt my name on sign-boards all over the estate. I may as well get used to that part of it. I have always insisted that my father use his name, as contractor, in connection with the actual work. It’s a distinction I never relished. But if I’m going to invade the New York field—”

“I’m so happy. Have you told Sylvia?”

“No, I told the baby.”

“That was dear, Lary.”

Larimore Trench turned to look at her. The blue-grey eyes were suffused and the sweet lips trembled. The man wondered why he had no impulse to kiss so engaging a mouth. It was all spiritual, that strange contact that he was experiencing for the first time in his life. Then, too, kissing had always been associated with his mother, the outward symbol of a bond he knew did not exist.

“I am going down to the office to talk it over with papa. They have asked for an immediate answer by wire. It is not necessary to tell you what the answer will be. Won’t you come with me? I’ll turn the electric fan on you while we talk shop.”

“But, Lary, won’t I be horribly in the way?”

“How could the other half of me be in the way? Don’t you see, dear, you must be with me when my father has the proudest moment of his life. This will be the antidote for all that Marksley poison in his soul.”

---

That night Theodora wrote a long letter to her mother. It was devoted almost wholly to Lary’s triumph. The following week the Bromfield Sentinel heralded on its front page the news of Mr. Larimore Trench’s latest artistic success. The florid paragraph hinted of other successes. One must not infer that the designing of a New York millionaire’s country home was a novel experience to the brilliant young architect, whose parents were natives of Bromfield. The item ended with the announcement that Mrs. David Trench was a guest in the home of her brother, “the Honourable T. J. Larimore.”

“Whew! we’d better confiscate this thing before Lary sees it,” Eileen ejaculated. “Mamma always could pull the long bow; but she pretty near overshot herself this time. You’d think Lary was a corporation.”

“Would Sylvia be vexed?” Judith asked. Sylvia was out riding with Dr. Schubert when the garrulous sheet left the postman’s hand.

“Yes ... because it smacks of the small town. She hasn’t any better taste than mamma has. It wouldn’t jolt her the way it would Lary or papa. Lady Judith, I used to cringe and sweat blood when Hal said crass things before Lary. Now it doesn’t matter what my brother thinks. I want to shout Hal from the house-tops. I don’t care who knows that we love each other, and that we have broken all the silly shackles that our stodgy civilization thinks are so important. Papa dislikes him because he isn’t the Sunday school kind, and Lary says he’s crude and common. Well, just the way he is ... is exactly right for me. I’m no Dresden china shepherdess, myself. How would I feel, marrying a man who couldn’t stand for a little slang—or expressing your real feelings, now and then? With such a man as Lary or Syd Schubert, I’d be a fish out of water.”

“Are you quite sure you are a fish?” Judith asked searchingly. “Did it ever occur to you, my dear, that you have been in the water with Hal until you fancy yourself a fish of his kind? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be tossed up on the bank some day, a little drowned bird?”

“No! No!” Eileen screamed, her cheeks blanching. “Don’t take all the glory, all the wonder out of it. Don’t you understand that I am free? You talk about slave-women. Men don’t make slaves of them. It is their own selfishness that chains them. I wish I could pour out my heart to you ... make you see it as I do. Not the sordid thing that love usually is—Sylvia’s love for Oliver, that pays for a swell apartment and a bundle of gaudy rags. I want to be free, and I want to show other women the light.”

“My dear, dear girl,” Mrs. Ascott cried in alarm, “you are only sixteen. You haven’t even the rudiments of the system you are trying to teach. Can’t you get your feet on solid ground and stay there until you are a few years older? I was wrong when I suggested water. You are up in the clouds. If I thought it would serve to deter you from this madness, Eileen, I would open for you the darkest chapter of my life.”

“I know ... already. I heard mamma telling papa that you were divorced—that you tried to get even with your husband by running away with another man. It was contemptible of me to listen; but I did it because I wanted to see how bad she would make it out.”

Judith Ascott’s face flamed.

“And papa was quiet a long time—and then he said that there were some people who could touch pitch and not be defiled. When he said that—it got me by the heart, and I made a little gurgling noise in my throat. I was sure they heard me. But mamma flared back at him so furiously that I was half way down the stairs before they came out of their room. That was several weeks ago—a few days after you told her. And I wondered how it would affect him—towards you.”

“And—”

“The next morning at breakfast, he said you were the purest, noblest woman he had met in years. And Theo and Lary and I all raised such a chorus of approval that mamma ran out to the kitchen to tell Drusilla that the waffles were tough.”

An arm stole around the girl’s waist. What had come over Judith Ascott, that she should care ... that David Trench’s approval should mean so much? But Eileen misunderstood. In a sudden burst of confidence, she whispered:

“Will you take care of the wedding ring, along with the other?”

“You are married!”

“No, but we are going to be, before Hal leaves for college. We finally decided ... last night. Then I am going to him as soon as he is settled in Brooklyn. Of course his mother must not know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do this, you poor, infatuated child. Give Hal the advantage of a little perspective. Look at him when he comes home for the holidays. It isn’t a summer romance—or a drama, to be disposed of in the fourth act.”

“But what if he saw some girl in Brooklyn he liked better than me?”

“Then you couldn’t possibly hold him—if you were ten times married. That is just the danger. You and Hal will almost surely grow apart when you are removed from identical influences. A year from now you may detest him, and he is more than likely to lose interest in you.”

Eileen sprang up and ran stumbling from the room.

II

When she returned, an hour later, her eyes were red and swollen from crying. She went straight to the telephone and took down the receiver. She wanted Hal to come to Mrs. Ascott’s home at once. When the youth had yielded reluctant assent, she threw herself down on the window seat to wait.

“I am going to have an adjustment,” she cried passionately. “It can’t go on this way. I was so sure of my ground ... and every word you said was ... just one puncture after another. I could fairly feel the tires sagging under me. Once I was on the point of writing to mamma. She’s the only one who agrees with me about Hal. Even Sylvia has been throwing cold water on me, the last day or two. Says I could do better—and I ought to go around with the other boys to show him I don’t care. I won’t be a liar. I do care!”

When young Marksley came into Mrs. Ascott’s presence, there was a shamed droop to his shoulders and he was plainly embarrassed.

“Hal, I have told her everything,” Eileen began. “Now I want you to—”“You little fool!”

Judith Ascott sprang to her feet, but the youth was already striving to cover his blunder by an avalanche of apology. The expression was out of his mouth before he had time to think. He was shocked that Eileen should betray a secret they had sworn to keep. He hadn’t meant to be rude. He was stunned by her treachery.

“Well, we aren’t married yet. I only told her we intended to be—and wanted her to witness the ceremony, before you leave for college.”

Hal Marksley’s chest collapsed in a sigh of relief.

“When we get ready to be married, Mrs. Ascott, we’ll talk it over with you. Now, Eileen, run home and get your motor bonnet. I have to drive to Olive Hill on an errand for father. I left my car around the corner.”

III

At the side door of the Trench home, the girl had a sharp tilt with her sister, who had come back from the ride in time to see—and interpret—the tear-stained face. Sylvia would write to her mother. She would not continue to sponsor a love affair for a girl who had no sense. She would not play chaperone at long range. If Hal had any breeding, he would invite her to go with them.

“Oh, that’s the rub!” Eileen sneered.

“No, that isn’t the rub—and I might have known you wouldn’t appreciate anything I tried to do for you. If you keep on, the way you’re going, you’ll have Hal so sick and tired of you that he’ll be glad to get out of reach of the telephone. I tried to make you a little indifferent to him—and got insolence for my pains. If you had a grain of policy, you wouldn’t let him see that you are daft about him. That’s no way to hold a man’s love. I kept Syd Schubert dangling at my belt for four years by letting him half way think I cared.”

“Yes, and you lost Tom Henderson by the same tactics. Tom wanted whole hog or none, and you didn’t get on to the fact till he’d got sick of you.”

“Don’t, for heaven’s sake, use such vulgar expressions. Hal is such a gentleman, I don’t see how he stands you. Eileen, I wish you would see that I am doing this for your own good—and to please mamma. I have had experience, and I know what works with a man, nine times out of ten. I’ll hold Oliver Penrose to the end of the world ... by keeping him guessing. Look at the way mamma has kept papa on his knees for nearly twenty-eight years.”

“You think that a fine thing?” the girl flared. “If you pattern your life after mamma’s, at her age you’ll be as hard and cruel—”

“You outrageous, you impudent—” Words failed. “How do you dare speak that way about your parents? And Theo’s almost as bad. At your age, I never dreamed of being disrespectful, or saying a word back when mamma reproved me.”

“Oh, Sylvia, come off! Mamma says she never talked back to her mother. And then she forgets, and tells the impudent things she used to say—and how her grandmother Larimore took her part against all the rest of the family. But there’s Hal, tooting his horn for me. I’ll ask him to invite you to ride with us some evening next week. I’m sure he’ll be charmed!”

---

Life moved on another fortnight, with little to vary the monotony of motor rides, luncheons, and irritating disputes, and all at once Sylvia’s reason for prolonging her visit in Springdale was removed. Lavinia Trench came home! She startled the girls by driving up to the gate in Hafferty’s lumbering old cab, her trunk toppling precariously on the driver’s seat and her trim body hemmed in between boxes and travelling bags. A letter that had arrived that very morning announced that she would yield to Ellen’s pleading that she remain another week—unless she were greatly needed at home.

Without waiting for the ceremony of the bath and a change of raiment, she hurried to Vine Cottage to present the souvenir she had brought from Rochester. Judith forgot to thank her, so amazed was she by the astounding change in the woman’s countenance. Such a change she had witnessed in her garden when Dutton, with hoe and fine-toothed rake, had obliterated the ridges and hummocks of his spading. All that had been Lavinia was gone. It was not that she looked girlish, rejuvenated. In the past few months she had made many swift changes from youth to age—had rebounded from dank depression to hysterical buoyancy. This change was different. It was, in fact, as if Lavinia had lent her body to some other woman.

“I can’t stay a minute,” she fluttered. “My precious old sweetheart is coming home early, and he thinks no one can cook chicken the way I can. You ought to have heard him when I called him on the ’phone, a minute ago. I thought he’d let the receiver fall, he was so astonished ... and pleased.”

II

During the next few days Judith forgot Eileen, well-nigh forgot Lary, in her perplexed contemplation of their mother. Some thaumaturge, endowed with more than a magician’s power, must have his habitation in Bromfield. The most audacious quack would guarantee no such cure of a sick body and a doubly sick mind in four short weeks. Lavinia had subtracted twenty years from her normal age, as neatly as a reptile discards an outworn skin. Her step was short and vigorous, with none of the stumping determination that so long marked it. Her head was carried high and the black eyes beamed with amiability. The very quality of her voice had undergone change. She no longer swung from cloying sweetness to acrid outbursts. More than all else, a half gentleness—that she still wore uncomfortably, like a fur cloak in August—held her family in puzzled wonder.

David moved as one walking in his sleep. He was afraid to breathe, lest he fall to earth and awaken to the old barren reality. When it appeared likely that the mood would remain, he accepted the goods the gods had provided. He had waited long, and the reward was justly his.

One evening Theodora sought her Lady Judith. She was agitated to the point of inarticulateness. Her little brown face was drawn with fear and two red spots burned in the thin cheeks. Twice, thrice she essayed to speak, her throat swelling and her bird-like eyes darting their mute appeal.“Might I—might I sit in your lap?” she faltered at last. “I’m not so very heavy, and I can’t tell you unless I.... I have to tell you in your ear.”

“What are you afraid of, dearie?” Mrs. Ascott snuggled her close.

“It happened just a few minutes ago—and—I know I didn’t dream it. It was when Papa came downstairs from changing his clothes. You know, they are going to the reception for the Board of Trustees, and my daddy looked so handsome when he came in the library—with a pink carnation in his buttonhole.”

“There they go, now. Don’t you want to wave good-bye to them?”

“No, I don’t want to interrupt mamma. They don’t know I’m on earth. That’s what I came to tell you about. You see that mamma has on the yellow organdie dress. But you don’t know what that means—signifies,” she amended, weighing the word with unaccustomed deliberation. “Papa bought it for her, at a big store in St. Louis, when she was going away. And she was so hateful—wouldn’t put it on, or even take it with her. And to-night she said she was glad she’d saved it—just for him—because it was the prettiest dress she ever had.”

“I’m glad she said that, dear.”

“Oh, but that wasn’t all she said. She noticed that he picked a pink carnation, when everybody knows my daddy prefers red ones. I was sitting in the window niche, reading a book. Goodness knows, I was in plain sight. And they didn’t either one of them see me. Mamma came in first, talking to herself about how pretty her dress was ... and how happy she was....” Theodora’s breath came short, and the black eyes were luminous with tears.

“And, Lady Judith, all at once my daddy came in the room, and he tiptoed up behind her and cuddled her under the chin with his fingers. And she wheeled around and just nestled in his arms, like a kitten. And then she kissed him—the way you do when you just adore anyone.”

The voice sank to an awed whisper. Judith clasped the frail body, with its consuming emotional fire, her own heart pounding with vicarious passion.

“And she looked up in his eyes and told him he was the best man in the world, a million times handsomer and more successful than any man among their old friends. And she wanted to go back, on their anniversary, the first of November, to let all those silly people see for themselves what a fine man he had turned out to be. And papa looked as if he wanted to laugh and cry, at the same time, and his face was as beautiful as an angel’s, he was so happy. And I’m afraid my mamma is—going to—di-i-ie!” The voice broke in an agony of sobs.

“No, no, precious. She is just beginning to live.”

What had wrought the miracle? The absence that makes the heart grow fond? But Mrs. Trench had often been away from home and family, and it was certain that none of her former home-comings had had such sequential consummation. Had she, for some unfathomable reason, perceived David as he was? Had she fallen in love with her husband?

III

August was a glorious month for the circle that revolved around Vine Cottage. Eileen had been wooed by her mother to confession of her secret engagement, and David had given reluctant consent. He was too deeply steeped in his own belated bliss to deny any other human creature the benison of happiness. Hal would be leaving for Brooklyn the second week in September, and it was only right that the two young people should spend all their evenings together.

Occasionally they went across the street for a musical feast with Mrs. Nims—whom society was accepting, since it had been noised abroad that only three lives stood between her and a peerage. More often they explored strange highways beneath the starlight. Lary, at home for brief periods, viewed the situation with equanimity. He had made many compromises, and this was only a little more galling than some of the others. He found a modicum of compensation in his father’s sweet content, and in his mother’s almost pathetic devotion to the woman who had rounded out his own being.

“She quotes you on every possible occasion,” he told Judith. “If you advised her to forswear the moral code, she would obey you.”

“It’s a fearsome responsibility,” the woman averred. “What if I should blunder?”

“You couldn’t make her any less happy than she was when you came. She says you are better medicine than anything Dr. Schubert ever prescribed. And she insists it was you who compelled her to go to Bromfield.”

“Lary, you must have read a story—I don’t recall the title—one of Pierre Loti’s exotic conceits ... the faithless lover who was tormented by remorse until he went back to Constantinople and spent a night on the grave of the woman he had wronged. Do you think some fancy of your mother’s girlhood has been dispelled by her visit ... perhaps some illusion shattered by crass reality?”

“I don’t know how to gauge my mother—now less than ever before.”

IV

When Lary had gone, Mrs. Trench slipped in at the back door. She had been waiting her turn. It was like the old Lavinia to know exactly what she wanted. And again, it was like Lavinia to veil her request in mystery and innuendo.

“I want to ask your advice. You know so much more about the ways of the world than I do.” She drew from the pocket of her muslin dress a thick letter. “Do you think there are any circumstances under which it would be right for a married woman to receive—”

She was so naÏve, Judith could with difficulty repress a smile.

“I write a good many letters to my attorney, Mr. Ramsay. He has a wife.”

“But those are business letters.”

“Not always. I write to him when I am blue or in doubt. His wife detests letter-writing. She usually adds a postscript.”

“She sees the letters—and replies?”

“Why, to be sure. You mean, Mrs. Trench, the kind of letters a woman could not show her husband? I’m afraid that is never quite safe.”

“I ignored the first—and the second. This one came on Friday. And then the minister preached that sermon on regeneration through suffering. He said it was our duty to help God to chastise the wayward soul. This man ... the one who wrote to me....” She faltered, then went on resolutely: “He is very unhappy. It is a man I met on the train—and he fell in love with me. Of course I repulsed him. I told him what a splendid husband I had. And in this letter he says that when I praised David to him—on the train—it was all he could do to keep from carrying me off bodily—it threw him into such a jealous rage. I ought to be furious with him.” She stared into vacancy, adding slowly: “but I’m not.”

This new Lavinia had suddenly come upon some bewildering apparition. Her fingers twitched, and a yellow pallor drank up the flush in her rounded cheeks. A chance acquaintance on a railroad train! Eileen might have fallen beneath the glamour of such a romance. But for a woman of Mrs. Trench’s age and temperament! It was unthinkable.

“Mrs. Ascott, tell me ... do people ever really get over things?”

All the fire of her being leaped to her eyes as she put the question, leaving her face ghastly. It was as if her whole life hung on the answer.

“Sorrow and disappointment? Oh, I am sure they do. And, my dear Mrs. Trench, I wouldn’t lay too much stress on the infatuation of a man you met in the Pullman. To write to him—letters you couldn’t show your husband—might be followed by serious complications.”

“Don’t you think I have character—stability enough to—you won’t say anything about this to Larimore?”

“Surely not.”

V

That evening David and Lavinia went out to sprinkle the vegetable garden, their arms around each other’s waists, their attitude that of a honeymoon pair. When the task was done they came to the summer house for an hour’s visit. Not even Hal and Eileen, in the first fever of their revealed engagement, were more frankly devoted than they. It seemed to Judith, sitting with them, that the woman was the aggressor, that she multiplied endearing terms and half-concealed caresses, to assure herself that she truly felt what her lips were saying. For David these manifestations were unnecessary. His whole being was a caress.

VI

August passed, and the first hot days of September—their discomfort forgotten in the excitement of Eileen’s entrance into college. There was yet another week before Hal must depart for his examinations, and on Thursday evening he failed to report, either in person or by telephone. The omission elicited no comment. But when the week had slipped by, and it became known that the youth had departed for New York without calling to say good-bye, Lavinia made bold to question her daughter.

“If he didn’t want to come, I’m sure nobody was going to ask him,” the girl flung back, her eyes darkening.

“Never mind, dear. These little quarrels only prove that it is true love. You and Hal will make it all up in your letters.”

“There aren’t going to be any letters.”

After her mother had gone into the house, Theodora drew near the hammock where Eileen had been studying Christian Ethics, squinting her burning eyes as the daylight waned, striving to focus her mind on the empty paragraphs.

“What did you and Hal quarrel about? Go on—tell me,” the child teased.

“Get out and let me alone. Don’t you know any better than to interrupt a fellow who has to bone freshman ethics? I almost had a philosophic thought by the tail, when you butted in on my painful ratiocinations.”

“I don’t want to pry, Eileen. Honest, I don’t. But you’ve cried every night since Wednesday. And when you talked in your sleep, last night—”

“I did!” The girl sat up, sending the textbook flying across the lawn. “What did I say? Tell me every word.”

“You’d been kind of mumbling, and all at once you said right out loud: ‘Hal Marksley, to think I could have loved a dirty calf like you.’”

“I didn’t say ‘calf’—I said—” She clapped her hand to her mouth and her cheeks went white. “I’m going to have a separate room. That’s all there is about it. If I can’t keep from babbling in my sleep....”

---

Four days without incident ... and then Eileen fainted at the dressmaker’s. The afternoon was hot and she had stood for a long fitting. It was nothing unusual to the seamstress, but it was a thrilling experience for the girl who had never known oblivion other than that of normal sleep. She went home with a bump on her head, to tell how near she came to being impaled on Miss Denison’s shears. Saturday morning she fainted again. It was after a long telephone conversation with Kitten Henderson. Lavinia sent for Dr. Schubert. He was making a country call. In a panic of fear she summoned Mrs. Ascott. When they had chafed the girl’s hands and bathed her temples with brandy, consciousness returned slowly.

“I thought I was dying,” she murmured between stiffened lips. “My hands felt like clubs, and all at once my whole body seemed to be climbing into my head.”

A cry—the sudden baffled scream of a trapped animal—burst from Lavinia Trench, as she sprang to the side of the divan. “What have you done? Oh, my God, what have you done?”

“My dear Mrs. Trench,” Judith expostulated, “what has come over you!”

“You don’t know what it means. You haven’t been through it six times. I never fainted at any other time—and that scapegrace of a Hal Marksley off to college without a word. Oh, I’ll go mad!”Relief came in a torrential flood of abuse, of self-pity. All the store that had been repressed since the early days of July poured its acrid waters over the girl. In vain Eileen sought to defend herself, to declare furiously that her mother’s accusation was untrue. In such moods, Lavinia was never careful to choose her words. When the tirade became insulting, beyond endurance, she sprang from the couch and fled to a room on the third floor where she could lock herself in and defy the family to drag her forth.

Judith went home, dumb with anguish. Would Eileen do violence to herself? Would David’s heart break? Would Lary.... She paused, panting, to frame the question: “Would Lary rise to the occasion?” On the answer hung all her hope. After an hour of thinking, such as she had never done before, she went again through the wicket gate. She would take the girl with her for the laboratory experiment—an unusually important one, that called for an extra pair of hands. Lavinia was nowhere in sight; but from the cellar came the sound of mop and broom. Absinthe might give surcease to the rouÉ in the boulevard restaurant but for Lavinia Trench the safety-valve was hard manual labor.

II

The experiment, that morning, narrowly missed success. At the moment when three pairs of eyes were watching with anxious interest, the fumes from a heated retort were wafted into Eileen’s face, and she collapsed in Dr. Schubert’s arms. Judith turned off the flame beneath the mass of glowing coal and hurried to the consultation room where the girl lay, white and deathlike.

“Unfasten her corsets, quick! Her pulse is almost gone.” The physician’s command held an unwonted blend of terror. Eileen Trench was the core of his soul. He could not be impersonal, where she was concerned. At an opportune moment Sydney arrived, to lend a hand.

It was decided that the girl must lie quiet for an hour. And of course Mrs. Ascott would stop for luncheon. Luncheon! Could one eat food, with the world in shambles? She went to the divan, choking with distress. The amber eyes were half closed and great tears welled over the lids.

“It’s beastly to be such a nuisance to those we love....” The blue lips scarcely moved to articulate the poignantly empty words. Then the long lashes drooped in utter weariness, and Eileen slept.

Judith Ascott left the office. She wanted to get away from herself, away from every familiar thing. Unconsciously she turned her back on the cross-street that would have led to the campus and thence to her home. How many miles she walked, she could not guess. She was hazily conscious of smiling meadows and orchards, panting beneath their load of ruddy fruit. Winding hill roads, ankle-deep in dust, and brooks that laughed at obstructing pebbles; pastures where cattle grazed, and acres of coreopsis, resplendent with their wealth of fleeting gold, she viewed with eyes that saw not.

When at last her strength waned and hunger overcame her, she perceived that she was approaching a town. She would go to the station and inquire for a train to Springdale. A little way to her left, graders were at work with shovels that scarred the helpless earth. Great piles of stone and other piles of yellow brick and moulded terra cotta crowned the rising ground. In the midst of all this orderly confusion she perceived a sign-board, insolent with new paint:

DAVID TRENCH
BUILDING CONTRACTOR

She stared in astonishment. Then, by some magic of the mind the solid earth beneath her feet shifted. She was no longer facing south. This was Springdale, and she was approaching her home from the west. The work on Henry Marksley’s mansion had already begun. She shuddered as she thought of David.

From the high point in the parked boulevard, near which the sign-board stood, she could see the distant tower clock, its face gilded by the late afternoon sun. And over there on the newly paved extension of Sherman Avenue the foolish little trolley car was bobbing serenely along. She could catch it on the return trip if she hurried.

---

Early Sunday morning Mrs. Trench came to the back door, brushed Nanny aside as if her redundant bulk had been a wisp of grass in the path, crossed the immaculate kitchen, and climbed the rear stairs. She knew that the mistress of Vine Cottage was having breakfast in her bedroom, and the ultimate degree of privacy was necessary. She was no longer the gentle Lavinia of those seven charmed weeks. All the softness had vanished from her countenance, and her voice was flinty as she spoke. There was no need of mincing words. Mrs. Ascott was in the secret, and she might as well know the worst. Eileen was guilty. There was no excuse and no help for it. She had confessed the whole thing to her father.

“I have been afraid from the first that she was in danger. She is too young to discriminate, and she was madly in love. Have you told her brother?”

“Yes. It was lucky for Larimore that that dog of a Hal Marksley was safe out of town. There would have been murder, and another scandal.”

“And her father?”

“David! He makes me sick. He sits and stares at the carpet as if he’d been turned to stone. Oh, why did I marry such a dolt! If he would only whip her—anything to show that he is a man! Mrs. Ascott, you are a woman of the world. You have had affairs of your own, and have got through them unscathed. Can’t you help me? Don’t you see that I am distracted?”

“You may count on me for anything I can do,” Judith told her coldly.

II

When the heavy Sunday dinner was over, and Drusilla had gone out for the afternoon, Lary and Theodora walked hand in hand to the shop behind the vegetable garden. A minute later, Judith saw the child flitting across the alley in the direction of the Stevens home. She knew that now Larimore Trench would come to her.

Her heart stood still and all her senses swam.

When, after an interminable period of waiting—how stupid the clock that measures our travail by its rigid tape of minutes!—the man stood before her, she saw that his face was white with grief and his hands shook.

“Are you willing to come to us? All the manhood has gone out of me. I can’t go through it alone.”

“Yes, Lary.” And they crossed the lawn together.

III

The library blinds were drawn and the room was hot and still. Eileen lay back in the chaise longue, her eyes half closed, her lips pouting surlily. Her father paced the floor, his blue eyes lost in shadow.

“Mrs. Ascott,” he began in a choked voice, “you know the pitiful thing that has come upon us. You have been a good neighbour, and we come to you for advice. We are simple people, and my wife feels that you....” He finished the sentence with his deep, appealing eyes. “I wanted to go to Mr. Marksley and insist that his son make restitution.”

“Yes!” Lavinia screamed, the remnant of her self-control tearing to tatters as she looked at her daughter, “and that idiot of a girl threatening to kill herself if we go a step.”

“I won’t be married to any man at the point of a gun—as long as there is a river in Springdale where people can be drowned.”

“It is a mortal sin to take your own life,” her father pleaded. “You couldn’t face your God with such a crime on your hands.”

“When it comes to a choice between facing God and you people—I’d take my chances with God any day. If I have committed the unpardonable sin, I don’t see how marrying Hal Marksley would make it any better.”

She sat bolt upright and her eyes blazed.

“What is right? What is sin? You would hound a woman to death because she has a child without being tied body and soul to a man she despises. Hal’s mother and father hate each other ... and look at their children. There isn’t one of them that’s fit to live. Look at us. We are another family of misfits. And why? Mamma hates papa, lets him follow her around like a hungry dog begging for a bone.”

“You insolent girl!” Lavinia gasped.

“You don’t know anything about love—and what it means to come into the world all warped and out of tune. Do you imagine that I am going to tie myself to a cad—let him be responsible for other children of mine? There isn’t any fidelity in a man who is born of hate. If you knew what a contemptible pup he is, you’d see why the river looks better to me.”

“You might have thought of that, before—” David offered gently.

“I didn’t know him till it was too late.” She relaxed ever so little. “We had talked it all over, and he had the most advanced ideas. But when it came to facing the music.... Bah! I despise a man who whimpers. He was afraid of his mother. I could have stood even that. But when he wanted to take me to Sutton, to a doctor he said was in the habit of helping those factory girls out of their scrapes ... I slapped him; I beat him with my two fists; I spit in his face. I told him that if he was not a man, I would take the consequences alone.”

She paused to gather breath, her cheeks burning, her gaze detached. She was living over again that monstrous cataclysm. “He tried to defend himself by saying I had no right to disgrace his family. Imagine! Disgrace Henry Marksley and Adelaide Nims! I told him I wasn’t going through life with murder on my soul.”

“I’m glad you told him that, daughter,” David said, his eyes warming.

Judith Ascott crossed the room and laid a hand protectingly on Eileen’s shoulder. “May I offer a solution? You have asked me to use my wits. I know of a case—not unlike this one—a young girl who made the same blunder. She had a married sister who had no child. Among all their friends, I am the only one who knows that the splendid little boy is not that sister’s child.”

“How—how was it managed?” Lavinia’s practical mind demanded.

“They went together to a sanitarium, where not even the superintendent knew which was the wife of the man whose name the baby was to bear. I should suggest sending at once for Sylvia. She and Eileen could—”

“Never work in the world!” Lavinia exploded. “Oliver detests children. He won’t let Sylvia have one of her own—even if she wanted it. And he’d leave her ... if he knew there was such a disgrace in the family.”“Yes,” Eileen said with bitter scorn, “he was born in Salem, where they put scarlet letters on women who sin. I guess it’s the river for me.”

“There is another way,” Judith cried, defiant and exultant. “I can take the baby for my own. I will go away with you, until it’s over, and you can come back alone, with nobody to know—”

“You mean—” Lavinia Trench stood up, her eyes wild, her throat swelling—“you mean, marry Larimore and palm the child off as his?”

“That—if no other way can be found. We could go to New York, where the building of the Sanderson home would provide the necessary explanation. Eileen might take lessons from Professor Auersbach for several months. She could come home in a year. I would not return until a child in my arms would cause no remark.”

David moved to her side and pressed his lips reverently to her brow. “Daughter,” he murmured, his eyes overflowing.

IV

That evening Lary came to the summer house. There was a crescent moon and the air was heavy with the scent of flowers.

“I can’t let you make this sacrifice for me,” he began huskily.

“Sacrifice? Oh, my darling.... I have been so hungry for you. I could cry for joy that Eileen has opened the way.”

“Dear, my heart went cold when she said what she did about the children of hate. Are you willing to trust me?”

“You born of hate? Lary, Lary ... such love as your father’s ... the love that could survive twenty-eight years of starvation!”

The man gripped her hand until it hurt. Then he drew her into his arms and his cheek rested against hers. The young moon sank to sleep; the garden throbbed in the velvet darkness; a moon-flower burst its bonds, just above them, sending forth a shower of perfume.

“You are too wonderful,” he murmured. “Judith, I know the man that is in me. I have met him face to face. I saw him reflected in your eyes, there in the library. Now I shall never be alone. I have attained the unattainable.”

---

Monday morning found Eileen too ill to be out of bed. Dr. Schubert came in response to an urgent request from her father, looked at her tongue, felt her pulse, smiled tolerantly ... and prescribed a nerve sedative. Later in the day the girl who had twined her baby fingers about the emotional center which in a man of science does duty as a heart asserted her right to consideration. He went home and talked it over with Sydney.

“Use your intuition, boy. I can’t have her going to pieces like this. She has always been free from hysteria—so different from her mother.”

“She has had her first love affair—and Hal Marksley is off to college.”

“Sydney! That thick-lipped youth! Besides, Eileen is only a child.”

“You remember the day she was born, and you forget the days between. I have been wretched over it all summer. One night I met them, half way over to Greenville—the night I was called to see the Hemple baby. I spoke to Sylvia about it. And she reminded me of the night—on that same road—when old Selim cast a shoe, and we didn’t get home until almost morning. Once I was on the point of taking it up with Lary; but he’s too deeply in love to see.”

“Lary in love! Who’s the charmer?”“You dear old scientific abstraction. Have you had Mrs. Ascott at your elbow four days a week—and do you think a fellow with Lary’s temperament could spend all his evenings with her, and escape?”

“That’s—beautiful! But what about her ... a woman who has exhausted New York and Paris? Would she be satisfied with a simple nature like Lary’s?”

“Lary’s nature is about as simple in its refractions as a rose diamond! Mrs. Ascott mothers him. I have tried to make up that deficit in his life—but of course a boy he grew up with couldn’t do it, as a sensitive woman could. He knows I understand about Mrs. Ascott. Oh, not that we have ever talked about it. That would be too crude for Lary.”

“You are like your mother, boy. She spoke three languages—and could dispense with all of them. But we have gone miles from Eileen. I need your help, desperately.”

II

While the two physicians discussed a disturbing case, the one with understanding, the other blindly, a different conversation was under way in Eileen’s bedroom. Mrs. Trench had sent for Judith as soon as the coast was clear of tale-bearers.

“He—said this morning that he was going to take you and Eileen with him when he goes to New York, Thursday night. I thought we’d better lay out the details.”

It was all so bald, so matter-of-fact. The woman cringed, as from a desecration. She turned for relief to the white face on the pillow. Mercurial tears glistened in the dove-gray shadows that lurked beneath the swollen eyes, and the mouth wore the old rebellious look. Eileen was still smarting from the crass, polluting things her mother had said, after the physician’s departure. She had brought this disgraceful thing on the family, and Lavinia did not intend that she should shirk one minim of her punishment.

“For my part, I don’t see how you are going to hide it by going to New York ... where everybody knows you. All your friends will see at the first glance that Larimore and Eileen are brother and sister. They look exactly alike.”

“Thanks for the compliment!” The girl tossed aside the sheet and sat up. “We both have noses running lengthwise of our faces, and mouths that cut across. That’s all the resemblance you ever saw—when you were telling me how handsome Lary was and how ugly I was. I have it all figured out. I am going to be Lary’s cousin—young Mrs. Winthrop, whose husband was lost on that Alaska steamer that foundered two weeks ago. Ina and I worked out the situation in a play we did last winter.”

“And Ina will recognize your situation—and spread it all over town.”

“Mamma! Please credit me with a little sense. This story isn’t for home consumption. It’s for Judith’s friends—when we get to New York.”

“There will be few of them,” Mrs. Ascott interrupted. “That danger is negligible. A few acquaintances at Pelham and Larchmont. With the exception of my father and the Ramsays, who live at Rye—”

“But the neighbours!” Lavinia cried irritably.

“There are none. We can go up and down in the same lift with them for months without knowing what they look like. New York is too self-absorbed to care about any one’s happiness or misery.”

“But your father!” the woman snapped. Her triumph was short-lived.“Papa could live in the same house with Eileen for a year without knowing whether she was Miss Trench or Mrs. Winthrop—Lary’s cousin or mine. He has forgotten all but the outstanding facts of my life. As for the Ramsays, they would take the situation as I do—if it should become necessary to tell them.”

Vine shook her head. She had no words with which to express her disapproval of a city that could be thus cold-bloodedly immoral. What sort of people were the Ramsays, that one could tell them of a girl’s fall from virtue without shocking them? What sort of woman was Mrs. Ascott, that she could carry out such a wickedly dishonest piece of business? Still, we must praise the bridge that carries us over.

III

Lary stopped by on his way to the office after luncheon to assure himself that it was not all an iridescent dream. On him, too, Lavinia’s stolid acceptance of Judith’s solution had a dampening effect. The rose had been stripped of its blossoms and stood stark and thorny before him. A few minutes of random talk, in which each sought to sound the other’s depths, and then the man said, as if it were an inconsequential afterthought:

“Would Wednesday evening do for the ceremony? Not that it makes any difference. I feel as if we had been married from the beginning of time. I told the baby about it, and she pleaded for Wednesday. Some lucky omen, I believe. She said there was no use taking chances. I wish I had her philosophy of life.”

“I wish I had her,” Judith cried, foolish tears rushing to her eyes.

“Why, you have all of us—from my father down. I never saw a conquest more complete.” The man’s eyes were moist and shining. “But, dear, the baby said another thing. She wants you to let Eileen serve as maid of honour. Another omen—that she heard when Oliver’s sister came from Brookline to attend Sylvia. It presages a happy marriage for the girl.”

“I know another old superstition that might apply—in a sinister way. My grandmother was full of them. To serve as a bride’s attendant, or as godmother at a christening, she held, was fatal to the little—”

Her voice broke and a wave of crimson tumbled over the fair cheek. A shrug of swift annoyance. Why should she be blushing like an unsophisticated school-girl? Larimore Trench caught his breath, and his heart ceased its monotonous beating.

“You adorable being! You vestal-hearted woman! Don’t let me touch you. Judith, Judith, I shall go mad with ecstasy.” He retreated a step, and all at once he laughed, a laugh of sardonic triumph.

“Poor old fool gods! They thought they were destroying man when they cleft him in two. Olympus never realized a thrill like this. Send me to the office, sweetheart. I have to finish the specifications for Miss Sanderson’s studio. How can a man build little tawdry boxes of wood and stone, when his eyes have looked into heaven?”

Judith Ascott was sobbing on his shoulder.

IV

When he had gone, she did an unaccountable thing. She sent a telegram to her father. It was simple and direct. She would be married on Wednesday. It would please her if he could be with her. There would be a train through Littlefield at four o’clock in the afternoon, and she would have Dutton meet him with the car. He could return, via Detroit, at eleven the same night. When the message had gone, she fell to wondering what motive had actuated her. She and her father were, as Griff Ramsay had said, strangers. Lary’s mother? The thought angered her. Yes, she had had recourse to her father ... the only available shield against the small-town criticism that would be reiterated, in veiled innuendo, the rest of her life. It was her father who had pursued her—brought her back to the path of rectitude. Such a father would lend reasonable sanctity to her second marriage! Was she, too, in the thrall of that woman, the slave of that cunning, provincial mind?

She sought for relief in the meeting between Lary and her father. Would he see in her beloved nothing more than a village architect? Would her mother be furious—her mother who had approved Raoul?

At six o’clock the reply came. Mr. Denslow was starting Tuesday for the southwest, where he was to look over some oil properties. He would stop off in Springdale, providing he could get a late train to St. Louis. His explicit telegram made no mention of the occasion for his brief visit in his daughter’s home.

V

The train schedule was propitious. He came. The instant after he had deposited his travelling bag on the floor of the guest room, he began to ply Judith with questions concerning the deucedly clever fellow who was building Avis Sanderson’s house. He had driven over the place with some friends, had inspected the drawings, and had commissioned Ramsay to enter into negotiations with the architect. By-the-way, he had sold the house at Pelham. He was thinking of a princely estate on Long Island—French chÂteau style—to be finished before her mother’s return from Paris. This man, Trench, would be the one to handle it.

“Papa, you don’t seem to understand that I am going to marry Larimore Trench this evening!”

“Oh, quite so, quite so. Ramsay told me he would be the one. It’s a singular piece of good fortune. I never liked the idea of putting Ben in one of those big offices, where a young draughtsman is swallowed up. The boy hasn’t brains enough to go it alone. This way, Trench can take him into a partnership. I’ll talk it over with his mother. I’m crossing, the first of December, for a couple of months in London and on the Continent. I’m worn out, and the doctors say—Damn it all, Judith, I can’t give up ... go to the wall at fifty four, with a family to support. Black specks floating in the air, no appetite for breakfast. It’s a dog’s life, and they’ll skin me out of my eye teeth while I’m gone.” He stopped, disconsolate. After a moment he resumed, his manner somewhat detached:

“I was thinking that you might have the apartment. I’m not in it once a week. Hotel so much more convenient. Maids sleep their heads off—nothing to do. I sold off everything, at Pelham, except the rugs and a few pictures that the beggars wouldn’t give me a price for. Thought I didn’t know what Orientals were worth. Offered me thirty dollars for that little Blakelock. An idiotic smear of red and yellow paint; but it’ll be worth money some day, mark my word. And that reminds me ... Jack has got over his craze for flying machines and wants to study art. The boy’s a failure—no good on earth. Perhaps Trench will steady him.”

“Larimore, his name is, papa.”

“Larimore? Ramsay said the name was Trench.”

Judith gave it up.

VI

At dusk the simple ceremony was read, Dr. Clarkson of the College officiating. Sydney Schubert played the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin as Mr. Denslow descended the stairs with his daughter. Before them Eileen walked, her head bowed, her face pale and serious. In the cozy angle of the hall, Lary and Dr. Schubert met them. The formality was a concession to Theodora. The murmured responses were all but extinguished by Mrs. Trench’s sudden flood of weeping. When it was over, Eileen said to Judith, between lips that hissed with anger:

“I could have choked her. She just did that for effect. Mrs. Henderson cried when her daughter was married, and mamma thinks it’s the proper thing. She nearly disrupted Sylvia’s wedding—and every one in church knew she was pleased as Punch to get Sylvia off her hands.”

Mrs. Trench led the way to the dining-room, where the bridal party was served by Nanny and Drusilla, with Mrs. Dutton in the kitchen. In the domestic realm of the two households the colour line had never been drawn. Nanny hailed from that section of New England where a dark skin excites the same kind of interest that a green rose or a two-headed calf would elicit. Mrs. Dutton, Judith perceived early in the days of her tenancy, found a malicious pleasure in her own function as a social link between Mrs. David Trench and her negro cook—a link that Mrs. Trench saw fit to ignore, since the breaking of it had thus far baffled even her resourcefulness.

Later in the evening, while Syd and Eileen played poignant melodies, with David leaning over the piano, and Lavinia told Dr. Clarkson of the great Denslow wealth—her daughter-in-law’s exalted social position—Mr. Denslow and Dr. Schubert talked of old times in Rochester, where the youthful physician had had his first hospital experience, where Denslow, a poor boy with an iron will, had found the open path to fortune through a painful accident and a sojourn in a hospital ward. They drifted to the laboratory experiments, which Judith’s father had never taken the trouble to inquire about. This was just another of the girl’s wild goose chases. He wondered why he had such a damnably unsatisfactory family.

“I shall miss her, cruelly. You don’t know what it has meant to my boy and me—having a woman in the house four mornings a week. I wanted to train Eileen to help me with the experiments; but your daughter tells me they are taking the child with them, to study under a famous violinist. I have salvaged only one thing out of the wreck of our two households. They are leaving Nanny with me. I have worried with six housekeepers since my faithful Sophie died, two years ago.”

The disposition of Nanny was Lavinia’s bright inspiration. Obviously Nanny must not go to New York—to return a year later and spread gossip.

When Dutton had taken Mr. Denslow to the station, the wedding guests went home. At the door, Theodora paused and looked ruefully back. They had ignored her completely, and was not she responsible for it all? Even Lary’s kiss had been abstracted. But then, Lary did not know. None of the others knew why there was a wedding at Vine Cottage, that evening. Only she and Judith understood—and one of them must have forgotten, now that the fairy tale had come true.

She looked at the Beloved, standing there in the light of the little apricot lamp, and her throat swelled with loneliness and misery. She was not jealous—even if they were taking Eileen for a year in New York. Some one had to stay and take care of daddy—and she could do that much better than Eileen, or even Lary. Another thought came to her, just as Judith perceived her and held out her enticing arms.

“You—you still think it was dishonourable—showing you the poem Lary wrote?”

“No, darling. It was a stroke of genius. You have the head of a diplomat. I want you to do something really truly dishonourable for your sister Judith. After we have gone, I want you to rummage through Lary’s things until you find those two sheets of paper—the original ones. Pry open the lid of his desk, if there is no other way, and send them to me. I am going to have them framed!”

---

A little while before the expressman called for the trunks, Judith went for the last time through the wicket gate. She and Eileen had been packing all day, and she was weary to the verge of collapse. Theodora had hovered over her ever since she came from school, up in the attic where winter garments must be looked over, down in the pantry and cellar, where the Duttons were receiving orders for the temporary closing of Vine Cottage. Through it all she had been silent and unobtrusive, her face wearing an expression that well-nigh broke the heart of the woman who loved her. Only once did she offer speech:

“I guess it’s better for my mamma to get natural again—because—the other way she couldn’t have lived.”

The remedy that would work such magic once ought to be efficacious again. Lavinia’s altered attitude towards her husband was, beyond peradventure, the result of her visit in Bromfield. When Judith found opportunity, she asked:

“Do you think you will be coming to New York this fall? There will always be a guest room for you and father.”

“David can’t get away before spring, with the Marksley contract crowding him to the wall, and Larimore gone all the time. If he had any system about him, he wouldn’t let things crowd him that way. If I was a contractor—”“Then, perhaps you will come alone, and stop off at Bromfield on the way home. Your visit there in July certainly gave you great benefit.”

“How much benefit—no one will ever know!” The black eyes snapped. “It almost paid for all that has happened since. To see some one that you thought was rich and prosperous—and find out that they have actually less than you have—” She stopped, and the even white teeth clicked. “I mean my brother Ted.” In crimson confusion she hurried to the window, where she stood dumbly contemplating the street. When she turned, it was to abuse Eileen so extravagantly that she became aware of the blunder she was making.

“Mrs. Ascott, you mustn’t listen to what I am saying,” she floundered.

“Won’t you call me Judith, now that I am no longer Mrs. Ascott?”

Mrs. Trench laughed foolishly.

“I forgot that you and Larimore were married last night. I’ll forget my own name if I have to live in this nightmare much longer.”

“Perhaps you can get it off your mind if you go to Bromfield for a few weeks. I am sure Dr. Schubert and Nanny will look after—”

“I never want to see Bromfield again.”

II

Judith put the puzzle aside and went home to dress for the train. At the station she kissed David and said, reassuringly:

“Don’t brood over it, father. Eileen will come through without a blemish.”

“If there is any one who can save her it is you. We had to get her away from her mother. Not that I blame my wife for this. She is the most conscientious woman I have ever known, the most positive in her convictions of morality. She has always set a good example for her children.”

Just then the engine whistled for the crossing below Springdale, and there was a hurrying to and fro on the platform, for the crashing wheels scarcely came to rest in the little college town. Judith was glad of the interruption. Were all good men blind? A moment later she was waving farewell from the rear Pullman, as David stood beside the track, Theodora’s hand clasped in his.

III

On Saturday Eileen had her first glimpse of the Hudson. That evening the Ramsays called, and then ... Aladdin’s lamp was relegated to the attic along with the other wonders that had survived their day of glory. New York was the real fairy land. From the hippopotamus in the Bronx to the hippocampus in Battery Park, the girl saw it all. Sometimes with Judith, more often with Laura Ramsay or her mother, she went from elevated to subway, from the amusing little cross-town horse-cars that were more primitive even than Springdale, to the thrilling taxicab and the Fifth Avenue bus, with a zest that whetted the jaded appetites of the women for whom the city had long since lost its novelty.

After two weeks she decided that she had taken in all the impressions she could hold, and settled down to her music in earnest. There were daily letters from her father, empty because of that fullness he dared not express. Twice a week Theodora wrote—exhaustive discourses on the city, which her imagination rendered more real than reality itself. There were letters, long or brief, to Lary from Lavinia, with never a mention of Eileen. The girl wrote four times to her mother, and then her spirit revolted.

“She can go to grass before I’ll ever know she’s on earth. I suppose she’s afraid of contaminating herself. I’d like to tell her there are some thinking people—people whose opinions count—who don’t consider it half as immoral to go to the devil with the man you believe you love—as it is to bear six children for the man you know you hate.”

“Dearest, don’t do it,” Judith pleaded. “You must not stir up all that rancour in your soul. Remember what you are stamping on the mind and character of the child I am going to call my own. You owe it to me—not to make my burden too hard. And, Eileen, your mother is no more responsible for her limitations than you are for yours. She was brought up to a belief that there is something supernatural in a marriage certificate. Morality is wholly a matter of external forms. And she has the clear advantage of standing with the majority.”

“Yes, she always grabs a front seat in the bandwagon. If it ever gets popular to run off with some other woman’s husband—you’ll find her in the procession. No! you won’t find her. She’s too set in her ideas for that. But after the way she cottoned to Mrs. Nims—when it suited her purpose—and other swells in Springdale—” She choked, her face growing scarlet. “I hope I’ll never be intolerant.”

Judith sensed the thought that had flared up in the girl’s mind, from which she had retrieved herself in a swift change of subject. Ignoring Mrs. Trench’s reason for that first neighbourly call on Adelaide Nims, after her return from Bromfield, she fell back on the nature of toleration.

“My dear, don’t you know that you are just as intolerant of your mother as she is of you—that you are like her, when you justify to yourself the thing you want to do—and spare your lacerated feelings, when things go wrong, by finding flaws to pick in some other person’s conduct?”

Eileen hung her head. From infancy she had been branded as a Trench. And now it shamed her to be told that she resembled her mother, her mother in whom she could see nothing but bourgeois complacence. After a moment she said:

“You always get the nub of it, Judith. How can you see the inside of things so quick? I can work a thing out, when once I get a good grip on an idea. I guess I’m like mamma there, too. Only—Lary says you have to be careful what ideas you give her—because she’s like as not to apply them upside down. I suppose there’s only one thing for me to do. I’ll have to take myself apart and see what my inner works are like. You shan’t have any such vixen as I was, to take care of. I clawed Dr. Schubert in the eye before I was an hour old. It wasn’t an accident, either. I was just naturally vicious. It was because mamma had put in a whole winter hating me and papa and the fool Creator who put all the burden of bearing children on the wife. At least I haven’t any such feeling as that. I don’t even blame—” Her cheeks crimsoned again. “I don’t blame any one but myself.”

There were other serious talks, touching the deep hidden things of life; but as the autumn passed these became more and more impersonal. Once a week Eileen went to visit the Ramsays at Rye, usually on Saturday when she could spend the night, and Laura’s mother saw to it that the violin was never left at home. In the suburban town, young Mrs. Winthrop was an immediate social success.

---

November was half gone when Judith wrote to David, the letter she had yearned to write, weeks ago:

“We are on the eve of victory, the great spiritual victory that I know means more than anything else to you. Eileen puts in four hours a day practicing. This evening she is giving a recital at the church Mrs. Ramsay’s mother attends. She is a great favourite in Rye, where the story of her tragic widowhood first stimulated interest. I know, father, how distasteful this kind of subterfuge is to you; but Lary agrees with me that it is necessary. As yet no one suspects. But we must plan a long way ahead.

“I have it all arranged, even to the wording of the announcement cards I hope to send out, some time next July. But I shall not dare to show myself in Springdale for another year. There are too many experienced mothers, who would know whether a baby was three weeks or three months old. I could not conceal the telltale marks. I don’t know what a baby ought to look like!

“Don’t say anything about this to Lary’s mother. She would only worry, and she might do something, inadvertently, to spoil all our planning. Lary would like to have us accompany him when he makes his next business trip to Springdale. It is perfectly safe, as far as Eileen is concerned, I assure you. I do so want you to hear her play. It is not merely technique. I can fairly hear her soul grow. She is having her growing pains, but they are good for her. She never speaks of the ordeal that is before her, and for a week I thought she had forgotten it. When she brought me an exquisite little garment she had made, every stitch by hand, I knew I was mistaken.

“Professor Auersbach sees a great career for her. The strain in her nature that will militate against high artistic success, such as he hopes for, is her salvation now. She rebounds from disagreeable things with the resiliency of a rubber ball. Lary doesn’t want her to be famous. He only wants her to grow into a good woman. It would make you happy to see the little intimacy that is growing up between them. She doesn’t at all see in him the demigod he is to me; but I had the advantage of seeing him first through Theodora’s eyes. Tell her how I miss her, and give her a big hug from her Sister Judith.”

II

David put the letter away in the safe, with his few priceless possessions. He wanted to see his children—the two whose likeness to him had been a cause for half humorous apology or bitter reproach. He walked home from the office, lost in a flood of incoherent longing. If only Lavinia had never been kind! There was to be a concert in the college chapel on Thanksgiving evening. Perhaps Eileen could play in public. His soul revolted at such philandering with the truth; but he had taught himself to make peace with the powers that were stronger than his will or his ability. He quickened his step. He would offer the suggestion to Vine.

“It’s just the thing. I’ll go right over and tell Mrs. Henderson about it! The women of Springdale will remember the date—if anything should ever leak out. Eileen is built like the Trenches. I remember, your sister Edith was at church the Sunday before little Buddie was born—and when he came, it was a complete surprise. Nobody suspected anything.”

David covered his face with his hands. His wife’s bald physical view of Eileen’s soul-tragedy filled him with loathing. At long intervals, in the years that were gone, she had forced him to look within the steel-girt casket of her being, and always he had turned away horrified eyes—to restore as best he might the priceless jewels of his imagining. Could he censure his daughter because she had believed in Hal Marksley, to her hurt? How had he judged the one he loved, the woman he had given Eileen for a mother?

He put the thought aside as wickedly disloyal. Vine was the mother of his children. She had taken him, a simple-hearted boy with no ambition beyond the making of beautiful furniture, and she had made of him a successful business man. He could no longer make beautiful things. His fingers had lost their sure touch. But he had given his children the cultural advantages his own boyhood had lacked, and he had laid by enough to care for his family, if he should be taken. He had not been happy. He knew, all at once, that he had not been happy. He had never thought of it before. Still, what right had mortals to demand happiness? Had Vine been sympathetic, he might never have risen above the rank of a carpenter. His children would have toiled with their hands, to measure the stolid level of Bromfield or Olive Hill. It was Vine, with her far-seeing eyes and her two-edged tongue, who had made Lary’s achievement possible, who had given Sylvia the satisfaction of a marriage to her liking. It was patent that Sylvia, at least, was satisfied with her lot.

His eyes turned inward, he began to take stock of his children. Bob and Isabel were in heaven. The acts of God were not to be challenged. Lary had periods of morbid brooding, when life looked worse than worthless. It would be different, now that he had a wife to love him ... a wife who saw in him a demigod. Such devotion had stimulated him to greater endeavour than he had deemed worth while. It might not have worked that way with Lary’s father ... if he had had a wife to soothe and admire him. He might have been too happy to exert himself. He could not be sure.

The very qualities which had won Judith were fostered by Vine’s determination to send Larimore to Cornell. Just why Cornell, David had no means of knowing. Lary had not gone to Bromfield for any of his vacations. So the proximity of the old home town had nothing to do with it. With all his cultural charm, he might not have won Mrs. Ascott, had there been no strong incentive to action. He was inclined to drift, to shun the crass grip of reality. His happiness had been thrust upon him, because of Eileen’s drastic need.

Theodora was too young to be estimated with any degree of finality. As she was, so had Vine Larimore appeared to him when, as a boy, he had looked upon her with yearning eyes. In the after years Vine had been the prototype of Sylvia. She might have bargained better with her beauty—as Sylvia had bargained. What had prompted Vine to the breaking of that other engagement? She had told him, times without number, that he had won her—against her better judgment—by his persistent devotion ... had taken her by storm, and had thereby driven his rival to a hasty and ill-starred marriage. How could he have taken any woman by storm? He felt a little foolish pride in the thought that for one rash moment he had been bold.

He once heard his wife counselling Sylvia, when she was on the point of marrying for pique, an elderly widower in the college faculty. She could afford to swallow Tom Henderson’s neglect, Vine had said, if thereby she might some day step into Mrs. Dr. Henderson’s shoes. But Sylvia was in no need of advice. She would always make the best of her situation—glamour it over with a value calculated to inspire envy in the minds of her friends. It would have been the same, had she occupied a three-room cottage in Olive Hill, with miners’ wives for her social equals. She was developing into a snob. David had not known the meaning of the word until he felt it in Sylvia, that summer.

He turned for relief to Theodora, the one who was still plastic. His mind had climbed awkwardly over Eileen. He must do his work, and a father could not contemplate that catastrophe and live. Theo understood him, as none of the others did. She had rejoiced with him in the seven weeks of his belated honeymoon, and she sorrowed with him in the bitterness of the aftermath.

III

“What in the world is the matter with you? Have you gone stone deaf? I have spoken to you three times, and you haven’t turned a hair.” He was aroused from his musings by Vine’s raucous voice.

“I suppose my mind was wandering. What do you want, dear?”

“What were you thinking?” Her eyes were dark with suspicion.

“I—I believe I was thinking about old Selim, the saddle horse ... you know, Vine, that Dr. Schubert used to ride when the roads were too muddy for the buggy. And what sore places the saddle would make on the poor old fellow’s back—and how the sores would turn into kindly calluses after the saddle had been worn a few weeks. It was taking the saddle off, and putting it back on again, that made the new sores. It would be better never to feel relief from the calloused places than to have to harden them all over again.”“Yes! I wish I had never gone to Bromfield. Not that the trip didn’t benefit my health wonderfully. But we wouldn’t be in all this trouble if I had stayed at home. And the worst of it isn’t Eileen, either. I had to give in to let Larimore marry that grass widow. That’s the part that can’t be so easily undone.”

“Vine!” David Trench towered his full height, his face stiff with indignation. “Have you no decency, no gratitude, no human kindness in your heart? For shame, to let such words pass your lips!”

Lavinia laughed, a strangled, empty giggle, while the red crept up her neck.

“I was only joking. Larimore says I have no sense of humour. I think you are the one who can’t see a joke.”

“I can’t see a joke in things that are not to be joked about. Judith is a noble woman and she has saved you from disgrace. We are the last people in the world who have a moral right to bring up her past. We all make mistakes, even you—”

“I made the mistake of my life when I married a man who always sides against me, no matter what comes up.” She began to weep loudly.

IV

David was wont to coax and comfort until the storm was over; but this time he put on his hat and left the house without a word. When he returned at dinner time the sky was serene and the atmosphere almost balmy. Lavinia kissed him on both cheeks and turned to pick a thread from his coat with wifely care. Her lips wore a satisfied smirk.

“It’s all fixed. I had the luck to run into a meeting of the committee at Mrs. Henderson’s, and they want Eileen to play three numbers. I have written Judith to get her the finest dress in New York—not to mind the cost—and to send the titles by return mail. I’m going to give a big reception, Friday afternoon.”

David smiled wearily. Another whirlpool in his domestic stream had been navigated, safely. Before him lay a week of tranquillity. Vine was always amiable, with some such absorbing task in prospect.

---

The trio arrived Wednesday morning, with half the freshman class at the station to meet Eileen. It was all so different from her going away. How strange the town looked, how tranquil and confiding the faces of her friends! What a long, long time she had been gone! Could she ever again talk to Kitten and Ina as in the old life? Could she adjust herself, for even a few days, to the environment that had been her whole world?

The change was not all in herself. There was her mother—kissing her ecstatically before all that crowd, telling her how sweet she looked, how lonely the big house was without her. And—did she hear aright?—declaring in ringing tones that she should not go back to New York with Larimore and Judith, but should enter college at the beginning of the second semester. A moment later Mrs. Trench passed from this demonstration to embrace Judith with equal warmth, to address her as “my dear daughter” and lament the shortness of the visit. The girl was bewildered. Only Theodora was unchanged. She bubbled and vibrated as of old, pouting disconsolately when the chapel bell summoned her.

II

The afternoon was taken up with rehearsal for to-morrow evening’s program in the college chapel. Once Eileen was on the brink of the sordid past. She had met Adelaide Nims with unruffled composure; but when Kitten joked her about her prospective sister-in-law, and Ina wanted to know how many evenings a week Hal was in the habit of spending with her, she almost forgot the rÔle she had been playing ... that in New York she was Mrs. Winthrop, whereas in Springdale she was still Eileen Trench, and presumably betrothed to Mrs. Nims’ brother.

“You can’t fool us,” Miss Henderson teased. “I bet Ina a pair of gold-buckled garters that you’d follow Hal to New York, instead of going to college here. And your mother didn’t get by, this morning, with that line of talk about keeping you at home. She wouldn’t tear you and Hal apart for the world.”

Eileen felt a sinking in the region of her solar plexus, but she contrived a flippant retort, and took up her violin. She had not remembered that Hal Marksley was in Brooklyn ... that she was likely to meet him in the subway or at the theatre, any day. In the onrush of her first disillusionment he had been carried beyond her ken, as an obstruction of logs and floating dÉbris is torn from its moorings and scattered in meaningless fragments by the violence of a spring flood.

III

Judith, after a few hours with Mrs. Dutton and a hurried visit from Nanny—indeed the Doctors Schubert were dears; but her heart was still with her mistress—found Lary in the hall where, less than three months ago, she promised to love, honour and obey him. He must make a hurried run to Littlefield, on business for his father. It was a glorious autumn afternoon and the road was in fair condition. At his suggestion, Judith took an extra wrap, for the air would be chill after the sun went down.It was the twenty-fourth of November, and the temperature was that of late spring; but the air held a dreamy content, as if the earth and her children were drunk with rare old amber wine. On the brow of a hill, a little way out from town, Lary stopped the car to point out a great diadem of irregular rubies, in a setting of Etruscan gold. That, he explained, was a scattering of scarlet oaks in a grove composed largely of soft maples. Here and there a flavescent green asserted itself, thinly.

“Walnuts,” he said, his face taking on a boyish look. “We had every tree marked, when Bob and Syd and I were youngsters. You have to pick out the location ... and remember it. The walnut has no community instinct. It seldom grows in friendly groups, like the sweet gums and sugar maples. The leaves are only yellowed by a frost that turns the oaks crimson over night, and their formation gives the effect of delicate filigree. Look at that sumac bush, Judith—like a great sang de boeuf vase, with a red on the shoulder that would have filled an ancient Chinese potter with awe. The flame-red in the sang de boeuf porcelain was supposed to be derived from the breath of the gods, while the kiln was at white heat. This red, that gives a flambÉ touch to so many of these sumacs, is an insolent growth of rhus toxicodendron, that has run wild all over these hills.”

“Poison ivy,” Judith cried. “Yes, we have it in New York and Connecticut—all up to the Sound. During the summer, city people often mistake it for Virginia creeper, to their sorrow. But after frost, its coral colour betrays it.”

Something on the grassy slope caught her eye, and she asked for explanation. Cobwebs. The shrubs were festooned with them, long streamers floating in the breeze, like knotted gossamer threads. Over the short grass they formed a continuous fabric, as delicate as crÊpe chiffon.

“Millions of spiders set to work with their spinning, the morning after the first hard frost. No naturalist has ever explained, to my satisfaction, where they come from, or what purpose they serve by throwing out all this maze of webs. I can’t believe that there is any utilitarian end in view. As if nature couldn’t squander a little effort on pure beauty!”

When the car had rounded the shoulder of the hill, Judith touched her husband’s arm. “Look, Lary, is that fire? Not the red of the foliage, but that film of smoke, away beyond the field.”

He followed the lead of her gaze, across a dun field dotted at more or less regular intervals with huge shocks of withered corn, beside some of which lay piles of yellow and white ears, husked and ready for the crib. Beyond this were broad acres of wheat stubble, glistening silver in the sun. And then the creek, half hidden from view by a tangle of wild grape and trumpet creeper that well-nigh suffocated the stunted trees along its bank. Over the field, the stream, the low woods beyond, was a silver mist that deepened first to azure, then to smoky purple, as it met the far horizon.

“That isn’t the result of fire, dear. That is our much vaunted Indian Summer haze. The Indians had a legend to explain it. Ask Theo to tell you. It’s one of her favourites.”

“Yes, yes.... I had forgotten. I shall always associate it with Dr. Schubert—the peace that came to him after the long years of tragedy and the final shock of sudden death. Lary, do you think....”

“I am afraid not, dearest. My mother was born in an off season. Nothing in her case works out on normal lines.”

Then they rode on in silence, each wondering how the other had caught the unvoiced question that was in both minds.

IV

The concert, for the benefit of the scholarship fund, the following evening, was the social event of the season. Mrs. Trench was disappointed in the dress Judith had bought for Eileen—a simple affair of white chiffon, in long graceful lines, over a satin slip that showed a tracery of silver threads—until she heard Mrs. Nims whisper to Mrs. Henderson that it must have been a late Paris importation. After that she caught the “style” her village eyes had not perceived. It was worth the price, to have Mrs. Nims say that to Mrs. Henderson.

But Eileen’s appearance, as she emerged upon the chapel stage from the sheltering screen of palms, was no disappointment to her mother. As the burst of spontaneous applause died away—the violinist bowing recognition, as graciously as if this were a matter of daily occurrence—she heard Kitten exclaim to the girls near her:

“Gee, isn’t she stunning! If ten weeks in New York could do that for Eileen Trench, ten days of it ought to make a howling beauty of me.” Then she clapped her hand to her mouth, remembering Mrs. Trench’s lynx-ears.

V

The visit was one continuous triumphal procession for the girl. There was her mother’s reception, Friday afternoon, at which—according to the formally engraved cards of invitation—the best people of Springdale were requested to meet Mrs. Larimore Trench. But Eileen, behind the coffee urn, was the real attraction. On Saturday Mrs. Henderson and Mrs. Clarkson joined in a musical tea, and together they prevailed on the girl to play Schubert’s Ave Maria at church, Sunday morning.

When it was ended, and Sunday night saw her safely on the train, her mother went home to a three days’ sick headache. If she could “put that over” on the smartest people in Springdale, perhaps there was nothing to fear. Larimore had some ridiculous story he used to quote ... about a boy who held a fox under his cloak while it tore his vitals out. It was a stolen fox, she reminded herself. After all, it didn’t matter much what you did—so long as you had the grit to keep it under your cloak.

---

The winter wore away. Larimore Trench was too deeply occupied to give much time to his small family. “Success had come to him unsought: not the success he had hoped for or desired. Griffith Ramsay opened the way when, as toast-master at a convention banquet, he introduced Lary as Consulting Architect—a title the opulent New Yorker took seriously. And it was Ramsay who looked after the contracts, stipulating enormous fees for the service Lary would have given gratuitously, had he been left to his own devices.

“I feel like a robber,” he told Judith when he handed her a check in four figures—compensation for work that had actually consumed only a few hours of his time. “You know, I met the man at a stag dinner, early in December, and took a real liking to him. He had an option on a place, and he asked me to go out and look at it. It was one of the worst atrocities I ever saw—and I didn’t mince words with him. It was such a bargain that he could afford to spend a little money on drastic changes—and I told him what to do. I have often given that kind of advice to a friend. I wouldn’t think of sending in a bill.”

“And it hurts your pride, to be selling your taste.”

Lary looked at her, a light dawning in his limpid brown eyes.

“You are the most remarkable woman in the world. You have the insight of a sage ... and the intuition of a poet. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. And in a second you put your finger on the tender spot. It is precisely the feeling I had the first time an editor sent me a check for a poem. You don’t sell things that come out of your soul. To take money for them is like rubbing the bloom from the grape. It leaves your soul shiny and bare.”

“But, Lary, an artist takes money for his pictures. It is bad for his art if he lives by any other means. The painter who has no need to work is almost sure to go stale in a few years. If you had been born when Greece was at the climax of her glory—”

“I would have been an artisan—taking wages for my work, like Apollodorus and Praxiteles—with no more social opportunity and aspiration than an upper servant,” Lary retorted, laughing whimsically. “The Greeks had no illusions about art. It was as closely knit with the kitchen as with the temple. This idea that artists are fit associates for millionaires—that is, for the aristocracy—is purely a figment of modern times. My repugnance for money is not the result of my classical training. It was burned into my mind by the gruelling conflict of opinions between my father and mother. My father and I were born to an age that knows only the money standard. The world—and my mother—are not to blame, if he and I are out of joint with the times.”

“But you won’t let it hurt you, Lary ... let it embitter you?”

“No, sweetheart. I’ll make a joke of it. I’ll tell Ramsay to double his infamous bills.” And Larimore Trench went forth to rob another rich man.

II

Later in the day Laura came to the apartment. It was a dreary February morning and the outlook from the front windows was bleak and cheerless. Eileen had sat for an hour contemplating the waste of sullen water, and Judith had let her alone. She was thinking things out. She would come to her sister for help when she needed it. At times the older woman could follow her thought process by an intuition that was almost uncanny. This morning not a glimmer of light came through. Scarcely had Mrs. Ramsay disposed of her furs and selected her favourite rocker when the girl began, her face whiter than usual and her lips compressed:

“Judith, I am going to tell her. I can’t go on feeling like a dirty sneak.”

“You—what, Eileen?” Laura asked, her hazel eyes opening in wonder.

“May I, Judith? You know what I mean.”

“If you feel that it is right, dear. You know how it looks to you.”

“Then here goes! Mrs. Ramsay, you and your husband have been perfectly splendid to me—and I owe it to you, not to have you go on this way any longer. As far as your mother is concerned—she’s been a darling; but I’ve paid that with my violin. I don’t need to tell her. But I do need to tell you that I am not Mrs. Winthrop, and my husband didn’t drown in that Alaska steamship disaster. I am Eileen Trench—and I never had a husband....” She set her teeth hard, then went on heroically: “There won’t be any name for the baby that comes, the first of May.”

“Eileen, are you mad! Judith, what has come over the girl?”

“No. It’s just cold facts. I’m not twenty years. I’ll be seventeen, the last of March. Long before I was sixteen I was crazy mad in love with a man. It was mostly my fault—that he wasn’t the hero I made him out, I mean. We were engaged and we talked things over—things that aren’t safe for a girl and a man to talk about before they are married. I don’t need to tell you the rest.”

“And the contemptible cur deserted you?”

“Not exactly ... deserted. When we found out, he said at first that he would be loyal, and would marry me after he got through with college. To save my reputation, he wanted me to commit murder.”

“What did you say to him? How did you answer the cad?”

“I blacked his eye.”

The words fell cold and mirthless.

“I was going to kill myself, but Judith wouldn’t let me. She married Lary, so that they could take—”

Laura Ramsay’s usually placid face took on an expression of intense emotion. She rose to her feet and walked hurriedly to the window.

“If you are going to cut me off—well, that’s all the more reason why I had to tell you,” Eileen said, following her. “It’s what I have to expect.”

“But I don’t intend to cut you off, child. Judith, why couldn’t I do for her what I did in Nelka’s case? Especially if it turns out to be a little girl. Junior is wild for a sister—and it’s the only way I can hope to get one for him. And of course I’d be game, if it were another boy. Won’t you, Judith? I’m sure Griff would approve. Why—why, Eileen, what is the matter?”

The girl had flung herself on her knees, her face in Judith’s lap, her slender body shaken with sobs. When the paroxysm had passed, she slipped to the floor and sat looking from one to the other with a wry smile.

“There is only one stumbling block in the way, Mrs. Ramsay—and that’s me. Judith and I are going to the sanitarium, the middle of April. After the baby comes, I am to hand it over to her and forget about it. Why, I can’t. I croon over it every night, in my dreams. When I’m wide awake, I see him, a splendid man, thrilling audiences with his violin. Wouldn’t I lose my head, some day—go raving mad and tell the whole thing?”

“All the more reason why it should be in the nursery, out at Rye, where you wouldn’t see it. Boy or girl, you must let me have it. The child will be a musical genius,” Laura cried, her eyes beaming with expectant mother-pride.

III

That night Judith talked it over with Lary. She had known, all along, that the thought of this child, with the Marksley brand, filled him with dread. The following day Laura came again, with a whole chest of dainty things. She and her sister had made them before Junior’s coming, and he was such a robust baby that they were outgrown before they had been worn. Griff was as eager as she.

Gradually, as the weeks passed, Judith divorced herself from the thought of the child. Had she a right, when the Ramsays offered sanctuary to the nameless waif—especially in view of Eileen’s preternatural mother-love, and the great loneliness that had been Lary’s, before her coming? There might some day be a child of her own. Her homesickness for Theodora gave her pause—and Theodora had not twined tendrils of helplessness around her heart. Yes, it was best to let Laura have the baby....

---

March came, and the layette was practically finished. Judith Trench looked up from her sewing to realize with a strange thrill that it was just a year since first she heard the name of Springdale. She and Lary would be going to the theatre, that evening. She wondered whether he had remembered, when he got the tickets. Eileen was leaving for Rye on an early afternoon train—indeed she must be well on the way, going directly from Professor Auersbach’s studio. The train must pass Pelham in a few minutes.

A year ago, Judith Ascott had gone out to Pelham with the buoyancy of a toy balloon released from its tether, to break the epoch-making news to her mother. Now the house at Pelham was in alien hands. Father was still abroad, was still complaining of floating specks in the air and a disheartening lack of appetite for breakfast. Mother was rapturous over the new house Lary was building for her. Ben was eager to get back to America, to try his hand at concrete construction. Jack thought he wanted to be a landscape architect—with brother Lary to instruct him. That would beat the Beaux Arts all hollow.

From one to another of the family, her mind flitted. Had they not accepted Lary without reservation? Was not her own life complete? She turned questioning eyes towards the door. A key in the outer lock. Had Lary come home early ... remembering? Was he ill? The living-room door opened, slowly, as if it were pushing some imponderable but deadly weight. In an instant she was on her feet.

“Eileen! What has happened?”

The girl sank into the nearest chair and buried her face from sight. After a moment she said, in a voice hollow and remote:

“There’s no use torturing you with suspense. I’m not hurt.”

“But something has happened to you—something dreadful.”

“Judith, you don’t need to go out of your way to hunt punishment, when you’ve sinned. And you don’t need to dodge it, either. A little while ago I would have thrown myself in front of a subway train, if I hadn’t been a coward. Last summer I thought I had done something heroic. But when I saw him, this afternoon—”

“Hal Marksley? Eileen!”

“Now you know the worst.” She nodded slowly. “If you’ll let me, Judith, I’ll tell you from the beginning. I guess I’m like mamma in that, too. She has to tell a thing all in one piece, or she loses the thread of it. In the first place, I had a great lesson. I was the last, before luncheon, and Professor Auersbach stopped to compliment me. It was the first time. He explained the meaning of hypsos, the sublime reach of spiritual exaltation—and he said it had come into my playing because of what I had suffered. He talked like Syd Schubert. I went out of the studio walking on air. I don’t know what I ate—or where. All I remember is that I left too large a tip, because the change came out wrong.

“I went to the Grand Central and bought a ticket. It was ever so long before train time, but I thought I’d better scout around and see how to get down to the tracks. You know, the construction people change the route every few days. The first passage I tried had been barricaded. I went half way up the stairs when I came face to face with three men. The one in the middle was Hal.”

“He recognized you?”

“Not at first—and I hurried past them and into a side aisle. It was a blind pocket, and before I could get out of it I heard him calling my name. Judith, I was all alone. Hundreds of people within hearing, and I was all alone with the man I loathe. It was like a nightmare—my feet hobbled with ropes. Before I knew it, he had me in his arms and was kissing me. I suppose I fainted. When I began to see things again, we were in that little temporary waiting-room, and my head was on his shoulder. I looked at him through a mist ... and every minute of last summer rolled over me. It was a flood from a sewer. They say you review your life when you are about to die. You don’t need any hell after that.”

When the tumultuous beating of her heart subsided a little, she went on:

“He wanted to call a taxicab and take me to a hotel. I didn’t get his meaning at first. When I did—life came back to me. I suppose the people around us thought we were a married couple, having our first public quarrel. Once he looked at me with a leer and said: ‘So you were mistaken about what you told me, the first of September—or else you took my advice’. I told him I was mistaken about a good many things, last summer. Then he said he had gone to the studio to look me up, after his sister wrote him that I was studying music in New York, and the secretary said there was no one enrolled there by the name of Trench. He chuckled and said I was a smart kid, and he had half a mind to take me with him to Rio.”

“Rio?”

“Yes. He hasn’t been at Pratt Institute at all. He flunked his entrance exams. He didn’t let his people know, but has been taking all the money they’d sent him. Has a position in a Brazilian importing house, and has been studying Portuguese all winter. They are sending him down there in an important place—and he hopes he’ll never see this ratty old country again. He even said he’d marry me, if ...”

“And there was no return of the old ardour?”

“No, Judith, only a sick disgust.”

II

They were still talking when Larimore came home, surprised and a shade annoyed when he found that Eileen was there. He had but two tickets, and he wanted to be alone with his wife.

“Don’t tell him,” the girl whispered when he left the room to dress for dinner. “He is just beginning to respect me a little. I so want his—respect.”

When dinner was over she went to her room. No, she was not ill. She only wanted to be alone. If Lary had planned an evening at the theatre, thinking that she would spend the night at Rye, there was no reason for a change in his plans. She was glad they were going out, so that she might be alone. She knew the meaning of hypsos, now that she had made the descent, within the brief space of an hour, from that height to bathos, the lowest depth of sordid physical reality. She wanted to play again the winged notes that had carried her beyond the farthest reach of her own being—to purge her soul of the earth-taint that was in her.

“You are perfectly sure you are all right?” Judith asked when she told her good-night. “You won’t brood or cry?”

“No, I am past all that. When you strike bottom—there isn’t any farther to go.”

III

After the play there was a little supper, and then the long ride in the taxicab. It was nearing two o’clock when Judith looked into Eileen’s room. The bed was empty. In swift alarm she turned, to catch a faint cry from the bathroom.

“I came in here to get some hot water—and—I couldn’t get back,” the girl groaned, striving to make light of a desperate situation.

“Oh, it was heartless of me to leave you alone, at such a time.”

“Not at all. I’ve had a wonderful evening. I took my violin ... and we worked it out together. I went to bed and slept like a rock until—oh, oh!”

“Lary!” Judith cried in fright, “telephone for a doctor. Eileen is dreadfully ill.” The tortured girl had striven to rise, but fell back convulsed on the rug.

When Larimore had carried her to her bed, he said huskily:

“Only this evening, when we were going out, I was thinking how fortunate it was to have a doctor here in the apartment. He came up in the elevator with us. He may not care to take this kind of case, but—”

“Lary, you must be mistaken. It’s not to be for almost two months. And if you were right—wouldn’t it be over by this time? She’s been suffering two hours.”

“The first one is often premature. Eileen is a highly emotional nature. And I suspected at dinner that something was wrong. As to the duration—no one can gauge that. I was with my mother for three hours before Theodora was born. My father was out of town, and mamma wouldn’t have Sylvia around. Bob had been sent for the nurse, and there was nothing to do but wait. Dr. Schubert knew my mother’s habits. He said there was no hurry.” They had reached the outer door of the apartment, his hand on the knob. “In those three hours, Judith, I was transformed from a sentimental boy to a morbid, cynical man. Syd has tried to change my viewpoint; but all his reasoning is empty. He will never be called upon to bear children.”

A few minutes later he returned with the physician, in bathrobe and slippers. It was almost morning before a nurse arrived; but one of the maids was herself a mother, and intelligent help was not wanting. After an hour Lary led his wife from the room.

“Sweetheart, you can’t help her, and you are enduring every pang she suffers. Her pain is mostly physical now. Yours is both physical and mental. You must not squander your strength. We will need it for the harder part to come. Won’t you lie down and try to sleep?”

“Sleep! when the most terribly significant thing in the world is under way? How can we grow so callous? I never realized the marvel of life until now. I must go through every heart-throb of it. I need it! I will have more pity for your mother, more toleration for my own mother, more love for you, Lary—if there is any more.”

Larimore Trench closed his eyes, bitter self-abasement surging through his being. He had never been at grips with life. Nay, rather, he had turned from it in a superior attitude of disdain. He would not touch the woman he loved. She was too holy for his coward’s hands.

IV

As the grey dawn was breaking over the snow-whitened Hudson, the nurse aroused the two who dozed in their chairs in the living-room.

“You’d better come,” she said excitedly. “Mrs. Winthrop isn’t going to hold out.”

At the door the physician waved them back. Judith caught a glimpse of Eileen’s deathlike face and she ran sobbing down the hall. A long time she stood, her husband’s cherishing arms around her. Then a petulant wail from the room at the end of the long hall told them it was over.

At noon a letter to David was posted.

“You must be prepared for the worst. Early this morning a little girl came. It weighs less than four pounds. The doctor says, considering its premature condition, the extreme youth of the mother, and the circumstances of delivery, there is not one chance in ten that it will survive. We are more concerned for the mother. I will telegraph you, only in case of extremity.”

V

Laura Ramsay had come, in response to a long-distance call, and she and Judith stood beside the nurse when, after twelve hours of earth-life, the unformed morsel of humanity gave up the struggle.

It was not until the following morning that they told Eileen her baby had died. Lary was with them. He had looked for a passionate outburst. He could not fathom her mood as she lay, quite tranquil, on her pillow, a smile gathering radiance in her deepset eyes.“It’s the only way,” she said at length. “I’m glad it won’t have to face life—with such a handicap. It’s better for all of us.”

Lary stooped and kissed her. He wondered why women were so much stronger than men, why, in most of life’s crises, they must bear the shock.

---

Eileen’s strength returned slowly. It was the middle of April before she ventured out to Rye, a pallid wraith of her former self. Griff and Laura were afraid for her ... a fear that was transformed into action by the potent chemistry of a woman’s mind.

“Round up a bunch of Lary’s patrons,” Mrs. Ramsay said in her decisive way, “and convince them that they ought to send him abroad to buy furnishings for their new homes. He and Judith can take Eileen along. The sea voyage will—”

“Capital!” Griff cut in. “Only yesterday I had Parkinson on my neck for an hour, howling about the difficulty of getting draperies and rugs for the stunning place Lary has made of his old junk heap. Commissioned a fellow in Paris to send him some things and—Lord love us! You should have seen the consignment! It wasn’t the price. But Parkinson hates to be laughed at, when he’s been stung.”

“Lary’s orderly mind would take care of the needs of a dozen men like Parkinson, and it would give him a chance to see Europe—right!”

II

Thus it came about that on a serene May morning Judith Trench dismissed the maids, closed the apartment and set her face towards the rising sun. For her it was the real adventure. She had looked at Europe so often. Now she would see through the shell, with Lary’s eyes.

At the Cherbourg pier Mr. Denslow met them. Mamma and the boys could hardly wait to see Judith’s new husband. But after a week Lary’s importance was blurred, sent into almost complete occultation, as Eileen’s vivid youth asserted itself. Ben was her slave from the first. The night after they left her in Brussels, to have a few lessons with Ysaye, and Lary and Judith set forth on their real honeymoon, he confided to his mother that he was going to add another Trench to the Denslow family, as soon as he was sure he could earn a living for two.

“Have you asked her?” Mrs. Denslow quizzed.

“No. She thinks I’m a boy. You might tell her that I’m nearly five years older than she. I thought I’d grow whiskers—to impress her.”

III

From Antwerp to Munich, from Venice to Constantinople, and thence by boat to Naples and the eastern coast of Spain, Lary and the other half of his being wandered, too happy to remember the fiery ordeal wherein their severed selves had been fused again. When they reached Paris, the middle of August, a great pile of letters awaited them. Lary thrust one of them into his inside pocket. It was from his mother. Another he tore open with eager fingers. A moment later he handed it to Judith, his eyes shining. It bore the signature of a discriminating editor:

“I never knew why Renaissance art, with all its brilliance and charm, was unsatisfying to me, until I read your keenly analytical essay. We would be glad to consider a series of essays, covering other architectural periods and styles.”

Mr. Denslow read the letter with indifference, but the accompanying check had weight. He was coming to believe that his daughter had made a first-rate investment when she went to look after her interests in Olive Hill, and incidentally acquired a husband who could make good in New York in six months.

Judith followed Lary to his room, whither he had retreated to read the letters from home. One glance at his face satisfied her that all was not well. A moment he wavered, on the point of thrusting that disturbing letter out of sight. Then he recognized, in his feeling, not loyalty to his mother but a raw personal chagrin. Judith was his wife. She had earned the right to share even his humiliation. Yet he dared not look at her while she read the closely written pages.

His father was breaking. It was his duty to come home and assume the burden, now that the reason for his absence from Springdale, with Judith and Eileen, had been removed by an unhoped-for act of Providence. The building of a great place like the Marksley home was too much for David, who never could shoulder responsibility. She had tried to fire his ambition—make him see how proud he ought to be, to get a chance to put up such fine buildings. It was wasted breath. He went about as if he had a sack of concrete on his shoulders. He would certainly have to forfeit money on the contract. She was outdone with him, and must have help.

“Dearest, cable your father to throw over that contract, no matter what it costs. Can’t she see that his soul is being ground—because of you and Eileen?”

“I couldn’t send such a cablegram, dear. I didn’t want ever to see Springdale again. You and Eileen can stay on here with your mother.”

“But, Lary, I shouldn’t mind Springdale. David and Theo are there—and an arbour with a summer house—and Indian Summer coming. It would be worth all the rest ... a cheap price to pay, for another such afternoon as we had last November, on the road to Littlefield. Is it always as glorious as that, Lary?”

“Usually, but not always. I remember, once when I was a young boy, there was no frost at all until the first week of December. The glorious tints and that silver haze in the air are the result of a heavy frost that catches the foliage in full sap. But that year—it was the winter Theo was born—the trees were a sickly gray-green, and all the shrubs and vines looked as if they were suffering from some wasting disease. The leaves had shrivelled, and still they clung. The morning after the frost they fell like rain. Within three days the branches were stark and bare. It was absolutely startling.”

“You had no crimson and gold, no chiffon webs on the grass?”

“Not that year. It was an open winter, with a frost late in the spring, that killed all the fruit. Don’t set your heart on—I mean, dear, don’t go back to Springdale ... just for the Indian Summer.”

“I was going, Lary, to comfort your father.”

IV

That evening they told Mrs. Denslow that they would book passage for an early return to New York. And that lady, whose plans had been changed so often within the past year, was glad to have her shifting course in life directed by some one with a real necessity. They would all go home together, especially as Ben was eager to get to work. Not at his instance, but rather because the girl promised relief from the boredom that had begun to weigh heavy on her, Mrs. Denslow urged Eileen to spend the winter in New York.“Papa’s health is failing. He needs me,” was the eminently satisfactory reply. To Judith the girl confided another reason. The apartment overlooking the Hudson held memories she did not wish to revive. She was done with that chapter of her story. She had climbed, with bleeding feet, to a hilltop ... and the future lay misty with promise before her.

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