People who know life only on its surfaces were apt to pronounce Joan Blair a rather hard young person. She would herself have admitted to a certain hardness, secretly aware, however, that it was a trait she had deliberately cultivated for protective purposes. Hers was one of the unfortunate natures that are more attuned to the minor than the major chords of life.

Once in her childhood she had confessed to her mother, with a burst of sobbing, that she never expected to be entirely happy because of all the stray dogs running about the world, hungry and lonesome. As she grew older she discovered that it is not only the stray dogs who go hungry and lonesome.

She often wondered impatiently why it was that every one with whom she came into close contact seemed soon or late to develop a marked quality of pathos: her futile father, the struggling Misses Darcy, gruff old devoted Ellen, Effie May, Archie—and now more than all Stefan Nikolai. Despite his renown, his wide experience, his phenomenal rise in life from so handicapped a beginning, her friend seemed nevertheless to her a rather tragic figure, belonging to nobody, product of two countries and native of neither, without even a race to which he could claim complete allegiance. For his mother had been a Christian girl of high birth, outcast by her family because of her marriage with a Jew; who had been in turn rejected by his own people because of her.

Both had been killed in a pogrom, one of those appalling man-hunts that still take place in the Russian pale in the name of Christianity; and his father's sister, escaping to a land where there are no pogroms, had brought the child Stefan with her. It must have been a forlorn boyhood for a sensitive, gifted, half-alien lad, none too welcome in a poor and growing Jewish family of the slums; working his brilliant way through school and university, only to meet a crushing rebuff in this land of the free and equal at the hands of a girl who was afraid to marry him.

Joan understood why her mother had taken the hurt and lonely youth into her rare friendship. Aside from Nikolai's charm of companionship and her gratitude to him, she felt it an inherited duty to "make it up" to him for the sadness of his past. And where Joan gave, she gave unstintingly....

She did not pursue her headstrong course without receiving faint inklings now and then as to its effect upon the community. The warnings began with Ellen.

"I ain't sayin' he's not a quiet, pleasant-spoken enough gentleman, as free with his money as if he was a Christian—Most too free, if you ast me! What's he want out of it all? After all, a Jew's a Jew."

"Even if he happens to be a Unitarian?" (Nikolai, during his college life, had chanced to adopt that creed.)

"More 'n ever then," muttered Ellen darkly, "because his Jewness is all bottled up in him, ready to burst out on you unexpected, like a Jack-in-the-Box—You needn't laugh, Joie—you kin see it all in that eye of his. The rest of him don't look so Jewy, but if ever I see a Sheenier eye—! I don't hold with an eye that shows all it feels that way, myself. Seems sort of shameless."

"Indecent exposure of the eye," murmured Joan, "does not confine itself to the Semitic race, Nellen. It seems common to all people who do a good deal of thinking. One can't seem to mask the eye. The more that goes on behind it, the more it reflects—As witness my own," she added complacently.

Her next warning came from a higher quarter. Happening to encounter Mrs. Carmichael in the shops one day, that lady invited her to drive home in her carriage, where she proceeded to catechise her with tongue and lorgnon.

"You are looking very charming, dear child—one wonders at not seeing you about more? I hear your interesting friend is still in town, however. Perhaps it is he who absorbs so much of your time."

Joan admitted the imputation.

"Oh, really? Your husband is very complaisant!—Still, Mr. Blair would naturally be democratic in his point of view."

"Democratic? I think I don't understand."

The older lady shrugged; an Anglo-Saxon shrug, portentous in effect. "Oh, these writing-people—it's so difficult to tell who they are, isn't it? But Emily tells me you've always been singularly courageous."

"It does not take a great deal of courage," said Joan, flushing, "to continue my mother's friendship with the most brilliant man I know. There even seem to be people who envy me the opportunity."

(This shot told, Mrs. Carmichael having been one of the first and most eager to entertain the visiting celebrity.)

"Doubtless he is brilliant as a writer," she conceded. "That is his profession. But even as a writer (I know nothing of him, of course, otherwise!) do you consider him quite safe, my dear? Those plays, for instance."

"Have you read them?" asked Joan bluntly.

"Why, not yet. I bought them, of course—one does. But one has so little time for reading. I am told, however, that in one of them a child is born practically on the stage. At least the characters converse about it quite openly."

"Shocking of them," murmured Joan. "Those things should be managed by means of asterisks. But it's so hard to find actors who play asterisks acceptably."

Mrs. Carmichael's lorgnon busied itself. "I should be sorry," remarked its owner, "to think that any friend of my daughter's would care to encourage indelicacy, whether in literature or—or in life."

"Dear me, yes!—life is indelicate enough anyway, without our encouragement, isn't it?" murmured Joan.

She felt, perhaps justly, that she had come out of this encounter with the honors of war. But Joan could ill afford to make enemies....

The finish of Nikolai's book postponed itself from week to week. Spring came, and early summer, that most witching of seasons in the middle South, languid with the scent of magnolia-blossoms, gay with the bright parasols and fragile muslins that flutter forth like butterflies at the first touch of sun. With Nikolai to share it, the gray old town regained something of its former glamour for Joan. She had many favorite spots to show him—a quiet tree-arched street of patriarchal mansions in the midst of warehouses, with all the charm and old-world dignity of a London square; a certain secluded nook low on the bank of the slow, yellow river, undiscovered save by an occasional working-girl and her shirt-sleeved "gentleman-friend," with whom Nikolai conversed as pleasantly as with old acquaintances. He had not the Major's elegant distaste for the canaille.

Through his trained eyes, Joan began to note again certain picturesque touches which had charmed her when first she came to Louisville; a primitive, two-wheeled cart bobbing along a crowded street, drawn by mules hitched tandem-fashion, on one of which a dusky muleteer perched sidewise, singing. "That might be Spain," said Nikolai. Or perhaps two mulatto women, dressed in the extreme of fashion even to rouge and face-veils, greeting each other with lifted, outflung hand—a gesture as savage and typically African as if they were only a few weeks out of the jungle, instead of a few generations—Joan found that with Nikolai it was possible to do a good deal of traveling right at home.

Meanwhile the scandal of their association grew and spread; and at last Emily, distressed at the magnitude of the storm of which her friend was the center, decided to interfere. Not with words, however. Long social experience had given her tact, if not wisdom.

Thereafter it began to be noticed that Mrs. Blair and her distinguished friend were not to be seen so often alone together. There was usually a third on their expeditions, and frequently a fourth, whenever Archie could be pressed into service.

"Now that I've got some one to talk to myself, I don't feel so in the way," he confessed naÏvely.

Emily formed a habit of dropping in at the Blairs' in the early afternoon (just at the finish of writing hours), so that she had naturally to be included in any plans that were afoot.

"I don't know what's come over you, dear," remarked Joan once, half laughing. "You're positively rushing me nowadays!—or is it Nikolai? I begin to suspect you of designs upon Stefan."

"And why not? He's perfectly eligible. We old maids have to keep a weather eye out, you know—But how do you know it isn't Archie I'm pursuing?" asked Emily calmly. "I appreciated him long before you did, you know."

"Emmy, Emmy, such indelicacy!" sighed Joan. "And him a married party, too! What would your mother say?"

"I'm feeding her Shaw lately in broken doses. She's prepared for almost anything—You don't really mind my trailing you about this way, do you, Joan?" she asked, sobering. "I love hearing you two talk. Am I in the way, if I just keep quiet as a mouse?"

"Mind? Of course not!" Joan kissed her. "You and Stefan are my two dearest friends, and I love to have you friends with each other. Besides, he says you have an 'interesting mind,' my dear. Welcome to our city!"

So Emily continued to make a courageous third in their walks and talks and studies; accepted by Nikolai with his usual courteous friendliness, and by the gossips with feelings which were not unmixed.

"It's the husband's doings—he's awake at last!" declared one faction.

"Men are so fickle. He's had a good deal of her—and Emily Carmichael is looking particularly well this year. Poor Joan!" murmured the other faction, composed of her more intimate acquaintances.

Joan's feelings on the matter were also not unmixed. She loved Emily; her presence was always a pleasure; she had assuredly nothing to discuss with Nikolai that could not be discussed before so devoted an audience. And yet—

Stefan came to take the other girl's company so much for granted that one evening, when Joan suggested a row up the river for their next day's outing, it was natural enough for him to say, "That sounds charming! and I think Miss Carmichael will enjoy it, too."

This innocent remark produced surprising results; as surprising to Joan as to himself. She jumped to her feet. "Look here, Stefan! If you want Emily so much, why don't you take her by yourself?" she cried, and bursting into tears she fled from the room.

Nikolai stared blankly at Archie.

"Will you tell me what I have said?"

For once the other was the first to understand.

"Don't you see?" he replied with his patient smile (and there is nothing sadder to see in life than patience on the face of a young man). "It's come about just as I thought it would, Mr. Nikolai. She's—she's jealous of you. That's all."

That night Stefan Nikolai, usually very regular in habit, sat so late by his open window that the servant Sacha emerged at intervals to investigate.

"Is Excellency ill, that he neither sleeps nor reads?"

"Not ill, Sacha. Go to bed."

There was a lilac-tree blooming below the window, and the scent of the young summer came in to him, flooding his heart, his senses—

The servant appeared again.

"Has Excellency sadness?"

"Not sadness, Sacha. I think—it is happiness."

"And yet he sighs?"

Nikolai stirred, and got to his feet.

"That is because our wandering begins again. The book is done. In a few days we go."

The servant took an eager step toward him. "Not alone?"

Nikolai started. He had forgotten, as so many forget, the watching eyes of those who serve us. "Certainly, alone!" he said sharply. "Am I not always alone?"

Sacha's eyes dropped. "In my country," he suggested gently, "when we see a woman which we need, we take her."

The other smiled. The two had been through much together. "And if she chances to belong to some one else?"

"Then"—with an eloquent thrust of the hand—"we kill!" But seeing that the hint was unlikely to bear fruit, he added dispiritedly, "Excellency is not, however, a peasant. Sometimes to be a peasant is good."