Paula reached her destination early the next morning. She had not slept during the night and as soon as the light began to dawn she raised the blind at her window and lay in her berth looking out drearily at the face of the country, growing constantly more familiar, but yet dimly descried and colorless as a scene in sepia, with the lagging night still clinging to the earth. Belts of white vapor lay in every depression; the forests along the horizon made a dark circumference for the whole; the stars were wan and sad of aspect and faded from the sky, one by one, as the eye dwelt upon them. The characteristic features of the swamp region had vanished. In many places the land was deeply gullied, showing as the day waxed a richly tinted red clay that made the somber landscape glow. Everywhere were the hedges of the evergreen Cherokee rose, defining the borders of fields, often untrimmed and encroaching in a great green billow on spaces unmeet for a mere boundary mark. The trees were huge; gigantic oaks and the spreading black-gum; and she was ready, her hat on, her wrap and furs adjusted, looking out eagerly at these dense bosky growths when the red wintry sun began to cast long shafts of quiet dull sheen adown their aisles, showing the white rime on the rough bark of the boughs, or among the russet leaves, still persistently clinging. More than once the conductor came in to consult her as to the precise point of stoppage, and, when a long warning whistle set the echoes astir in the quiet matutinal atmosphere and the train began to slow down, she was alertly on her feet.

“You are sure of the place, ma’am?” said the conductor, helping her descend the step; he was new to the road, and there seemed to him nothing here but woods.

She reassured him as she lightly ran down the steep incline, and then she stood for a moment, mechanically watching the train, epitome of the world, sweeping away and leaving her here, the dense forest before her, the smoke flaunting backward, the sun emblazoning its convolutions, the wondering faces of the passengers at the windows.

She remembered the time when this wonder would have nettled her. She had wanted a station platform built here, but her uncle had utilitarian theories, and, somehow, “never got round to it,” as he was wont to phrase it. So seldom, indeed, they boarded the train, so seldom it brought a visitor, that it seemed to him the least and last needed appurtenance of the plantation. She wondered if the stoppage had been not noted at the house. The woods were silent, as with mystery, as she took her way through “the grove.” The frost lay white on the grass, and there was even a glint of ice in the water lurking in the ruts of a wagon wheel in the road. She walked on these frozen edges after a fashion learned long ago to keep her feet dainty when not so expensively shod as now. Suddenly she heard the deep baying of a hound.

“Oh, old Hero!” she exclaimed pettishly. “He will tell them all I have come!”

For she had wished to slip in unobserved. The humiliation of her return in this wise seemed less when the kindly old roof should be above her head. But the dog met her, fierce and furious, at the fence of the door yard—how she had hated that fence; she had wanted the grove and yard thrown together like some fine park. As the old retainer recognized her the complication of his barks which he could not forego, in view of her capacity as stranger, with his wheezes and whines of ecstasy, as greeting to an old friend, while he leaped and gamboled about her, brought her uncle and aunt, every chick and child, the servants from the outhouses, and all the dogs on the place to make cheerful acclaim of welcome.

So long had it been since she had heard this hearty, genuine note of disinterested affection that it came like balm to her lacerated heart, and suddenly there seemed no more need for pride, for dissimulation, for self-restraint. She broke down and burst into a flood of tears, the group lachrymose in sympathy and wiping their eyes.

She had planned throughout the night how best and when to tell her story, but it was disclosed without preface or method, before she had been in the house ten minutes, her aunt cautiously closing the door of the sitting-room the instant Mr. Floyd-Rosney’s name was mentioned and her uncle looking very grave.

“You were quite right in coming at once to us, my dear,” he said kindly. “Be sure you shall not be shipped out of the country.”

He was a tall, heavy man, somewhat spare and angular, and his large well-formed features expressed both shrewdness and kindness. He had abundant grizzled hair and his keen gray eyes were deeply set under thick dark eyebrows. He was a fair-minded man one could see at a glance, a thoroughly reliable man in every relation of life, a gentleman of the old school.

“Some arrangement will surely be made about the baby; I shall love to see the little fellow again. Set your heart at rest. I will communicate at once with Mr. Floyd-Rosney, as your nearest relative, standing in loco parentis.”

“And give me some breakfast,” said Paula, lapsing into the old childish whine of a spoiled household pet. “I have had nothing to eat since yesterday at lunch.”

The husband and wife exchanged a glance over her head.

“And before I forget it——” she raised herself to an upright position and took from her bag the twenty dollar bill. “Please write and return this to old Colonel Kenwynton. I should be ashamed to sign my name to such a letter. He would lend it to me—though I didn’t need it after he and Adrian Ducie—Randal Ducie’s brother—had lent me the money to buy my ticket.”

Mrs. Majoribanks was a stern-faced woman with rigid ideas of the acceptable in conduct. Her dark hair, definitely streaked with gray, banded smoothly along her high forehead, her serious, compelling, gray eyes, the extreme neatness and accuracy of adjustment of her dress, her precise method of enunciation, intimated an uncompromising personality, possessing high ideals religiously followed,—somewhat narrow of view, perhaps, and severe of judgment, but unfalteringly, immovably upright.

“But, Paula, why didn’t you buy your own ticket with your own money? To allow another to buy it was inappropriate.”

“I had no money,” Paula explained humbly. “Mr. Floyd-Rosney lets me buy anything I want on account, but he never gives me any money to spend as I like.” Once more the husband and wife looked significantly at each other. All that they possessed was his, but the privileges of ownership were exercised in common, the expenditures a matter of mutual confidence and agreement, and it may be doubted if he ever took a step in business affairs without consultation with her.

The spare, sober decorum of the aspect of the house appealed to Paula in her present state of mind, her taste for magnificence glutted, and she remembered, with a sort of wonder, her intolerance of the stiff old furniture of the sitting-room covered with hair-cloth; the crimson brocade, well frayed, of the parlor glimpsed through the open door, with the old-fashioned lambrequins at the windows and carefully mended lace curtains, and the family portraits in oil on the walls; the linoleum on the floor of the hall that had been there seeming indestructible since she could remember; the barometer hanging over the long sofa; the grandfather’s clock in the corner, still allotting the hours, however lives might wax or wane; the dining-room, with the burly sideboard and the peacock fly-brush, and the white-jacketed waiter, and the brisk little darkey that ran in and out with the relays of hot buttered waffles. It all seemed so sane, so simple, so safe. Here and there, conspicuously placed, were gifts which she and Mr. Floyd-Rosney had made, ostentatiously handsome. She thought them curiously out of accord with the tone of the place, and, oddly enough, she felt ashamed of them.

She asked herself how and why had such an obsession as had possessed her ever come to her—the hankering for the empty life of show, and fashion, and wealth. Had she not had every reasonable wish gratified, enjoyed every advantage of a solid and careful education, had every social opportunity in a circle, limited, certainly, but characterized by refinement, and dignity, and seemliness, that was the gentility of long traditions of gentlefolks—not pretty manners, picked up the day before yesterday. She had come back to it now—her wings clipped, her feathers drooping.

She could not enter into the old home life as of yore—it seemed strangely alien, though so familiar. She would look vaguely at her young cousins, each altered and much more mature in the five years that had passed since she was an inmate of the household—well grown, handsome, intelligent boys they were, instead of the romping children she had left. They spent the mornings with a tutor who came from the neighboring town to read with them, and the eldest was much given to argument with his father, insisting vivaciously on his theories of government, of religion, of politics, of the proper method of construing certain Latin verses; the two younger were absorbed in their dogs, their rabbits, their games—the multitudinous little interests of people of their age, so momentous to them. Always their world was home—she wondered what the real world would seem to them when they should emerge into it, what the theories of government, the phrasing of Latin verses, the home absorptions would prove as preparation for life as she knew it. Certainly they did not formulate it. She said to herself that a more secluded existence could hardly be matched outside a monastery. She did not believe any of the three had ever seen a game of football or baseball; the life of cities, of travel, of association with their fellows was as a sealed book to them. In their minds Ingleside was a realm; their father was their comrade; their mother was the court of last resort.

But Paula’s absorbed thoughts refused all but the slightest speculation upon the subject of their future and she could urge herself to only the shadow of interest in her aunt’s pursuits and absorptions. Even the room of her girlhood—she could not enter there, she could not sleep there, for dreams—dreams—dreams! They might have there faculties of visualization or unseen they could stab her unaware. Never again should her spirit encounter these immaterial essences. She asked her aunt to give her her grandmother’s room. It was small comfort in laying her head on that pillow which had never known a selfish thought, an unsanctified desire, to feel the difference, the distance. But here all good influences abode, and she was consoled in a sort for the unappreciated affliction of that saintly death, to whisper into the downy depth—“I have come back—scourged—scourged!”

How she remembered that that good grandmother had so grievously deprecated the course toward Randal Ducie; that she had declared the greatest of all disasters is a marriage without love, and that a promise is a promise; many times she shook her head, and shed some shy, shy tears over Randal’s dismissal, though Paula wrote the letter in a frenzy of careless energy, without erasing a word or troubling to take a copy.

She would note with a sort of apologetic affection the details of this familiar room that she had early learned to stigmatize as old-fashioned, and in her schoolgirl phrase “tacky”—the chintz curtains with their big flowers; the hair-cloth covered rocking chairs; the four-poster mahogany bedstead with its heavily corniced tester, the red cloth goffered to the center to focus in a big gilt star; the mahogany bureau, so tall that the mirror made good headway to the ceiling; the floriated Brussels carpet so antique of pattern that she used to say she believed it was manufactured before the flood and so staunch of web that it was destined to last till doomsday; the little work-table, with its drawers still filled with spools, and buttons, and reels of embroidery silk, and balls of wool for knitting and crochet—doubtless some piece of her grandmother’s beautiful handiwork still lay where her busy fingers had placed it, with the needle yet in the stitch.

The rose curtained window gave on no smiling scene—it was one of the few outlooks from the house that was not of bosky presentment. But the grove had ceased ere these precincts were reached and the view was of a dull bit of pasture and beyond a dreary stretch of cornfields, in which the stalks still stood, stripped of the ears, pallid with frost and writhen into fantastic postures by wind and weather. It was but a dreary landscape, trembling under slanting lines of rain, and later of sleet, for the halcyon weather had vanished at last, and winter had come in earnest. A mist hung much of the time between the earth and a leaden sky, and the woods that lay along the low horizon were barely glimpsed as a dull, indistinct smudge.

Nothing, she said to herself, could ever rehabilitate the universe for her. This crisis was so comprehensive, so significant. She clenched her hands when she reviewed the past few years with a nervous fury so intense that the nails marked the palms. Her memories and her self-reproach seared her consciousness like hot iron. Whelmed in the luxury of wealth, proud of her preËminence of station, sharing as far as might be her husband’s domineering assumptions toward others, cravenly submitting when his humor required her, too, to crook the knee, she had subverted her every opinion, her inmost convictions, to theories of life she would once have despised, to estimate as of paramount value the things she had been taught to hold as dross. She had cast aside all her standards of intrinsic worth. Sometimes she would spring from sleep and walk the floor, the red glow of the embers on the wall, the shadows glooming about her, the events of those tumultuous years, in the fierce white light of actuality rather than the glimpses of memories, deploying before her. Resist his influence——? She had flattered, she had surrounded him with an atmosphere of adulation. She had loved so much his possessions and her realized ambitions that she had imbibed the theory that she had loved him. True, she had admired him—his impressive presence, his domineering habit of mind, his expensive culture, his discrimination in matters of art and music, the cringing attitude toward him of his employees, his humble friends, and now and then a man on his own plane, unable to sustain his individuality before that coercive influence. Bring tribute—bring tribute! In every relation of life that fiat went forth. And she had permitted herself to believe that her craven acquiescence in this demand was—love! And, doubtless, the tyrant, unabashed by the glaring improbability, had believed it too.

The phases of fashionable life are never so minimized as in the presence of some great and grave actuality of human experience—she looked back upon them now with a disgusted wonder and an averse contempt. The world for which she had longed in her quiet rural home, which had opened its doors so unexpectedly, so beatifically, to her trembling entrance, seemed to her now full of dull and commonplace people, all eagerly pursuing some sordid scheme of advancement, regardful of their fellows only to envy values which they do not share, to cringe before consequence and station which only belittle them, to pull down, if occasion permit, those who are on the up-grade, to alternately court and decry their superiors, and to revile and baffle the humble. And for a share in this world, this outlook, this atmosphere, she had bartered her happiness, had destroyed her identity, as nearly as she might, had achieved the lot of a lifelong victim to intolerable tyranny.

In all her beclouded spiritual sky there had glowed the radiance of one single star, one pure and genuine emotion, her maternal love, bought by no price, asking naught, giving in an ecstasy of self-abnegation that made sacrifice a luxury and suffering a joy.

And now this light of her life was obscured by dense clouds, and who could say how and when it would emerge.

The change of place, the sense of escape acted in some sort as a respite, but there was possible no surcease of anguished solicitude. Her uncle began almost immediately the concoction of a letter to Mr. Floyd-Rosney, which should be a triumph of epistolary art to accomplish its ends. He desired to remonstrate against the enforced expatriation of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, to insist on the propriety of restoring her son to her care, and to condemn the cruelty of the separation, all expressed in such soft choice locutions as to give no offense to the gusty temper of her husband and to make no reflections on the justice of his conduct. He wished to take a tone of authority and seniority as being the nearest and eldest relative of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, and thus entitled to offer his views and advice in her behalf, yet to avoid seeming intrusive and guilty of interference between husband and wife.

As he wrote at his desk in the sitting-room, his intent grizzled head bent over the repeated drafts of this effort, Paula, passing in the hall without, catching a glimpse of his occupation, had space in her multifarious anguish for a sense of deep humiliation that this should be going forward in her interest. How she had flaunted the achievement of her great marriage in this her simple home, in the teeth of their misgivings, their covert reservations, their deprecation of her treatment of Randal Ducie. She had piqued herself on the fact that not many girls so placed, so far from the madding crowd, could have made such a ten-strike in the matrimonial game. Her standards were not theirs; her life was regulated on a plane which did not conform to their ideals, but as time went on they had ventured to hope for the best, and when Geoffrey Majoribanks had been asked occasionally if his niece had not made a very rich marriage he would add “and a very happy one.” This he had believed, although in view of Floyd-Rosney’s imperious temperament and the process of his wife’s evident subjugation, it must seem that the wish had constrained his credulity. Now the illusion was dispelled, the bubble had burst, and it devolved upon him to patch up from its immaterial constituent elements some semblance of conjugal reconciliation and the possibility of a degree of happiness in the future.

He was a ready scribe, as were most men of his day, and had a neat gift of expression. But he called for help continually in this instance, now from his wife, and throwing ceremony to the winds, in view of the importance of the missive, once his hearty, resonant voice summoned the party most in interest, Paula herself.

“Our object is to get the child restored to your care and to compass a cessation of this insistence that you shall go abroad,—not to win in an argument. Now do you think this phrasing could offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney, or wound his feelings?”

Paula, standing tall, pale, listless, beside the desk, leaning on one hand among the litter of discarded papers of the voluminous epistle, looked down into his anxious, upturned face, beneath his tousled, grizzled hair, pitying the limitations of his perceptions.

“Any phrasing will offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney if he wishes to be offended,” she replied languidly, “and he has no feelings to wound.”

She went slowly out of the room, leaving him meditatively biting the handle of his pen.

The letter bade fair to become a permanent occupation. He worked at it late at night and all the forenoon of the next day, and when, at the two o’clock dinner, his wife suggested that he should take Paula out for a drive about the country,—she would be interested in seeing how little it had changed since she was a resident here—he shook his head doggedly over the big turkey that he was deftly carving.

“No,—no,” he said, “I must get back to that—that document. You and one of the boys can take her to drive.”

The “document” was duly finished at last and duly mailed. Then expectation held the household to fever heat. The return mail brought nothing; the next post was not more significant; nor the next; nor the next. A breathless suspense supervened.

One Monday morning Major Majoribanks came into the sitting-room with a sheaf of newspapers in his trembling hand, a ghastly white face and eyes of living fire. He could not speak; he could scarcely control his muscles sufficiently to open a journal and point with a shaking finger to a column with great headlines. He placed the newspaper in the hands of his wife, who was alone in the room, then he went softly to the door, closed it, and sank down in an armchair, gasping for breath. His wife, too, turned pale as she read, but her hand was steady.

Mr. Edward Floyd-Rosney, the paper recited, to the great amazement of the city, had brought suit against his wife for divorce. The allegations of the bill set forth that she had fled from her home with Randal Ducie, who was named as co-respondent, and the husband made oath that in seeking to intercept and reclaim her, following her to the station as soon as he discovered her absence, he had witnessed her departure in company with Randal Ducie just as the train moved out of the shed.

Major Majoribanks presently hirpled, for he could scarcely walk, across the room, and laid his finger on another column in a different portion of the paper, and treating of milder sensations.

“I didn’t need this to prove that—that—a base lie——” his stiff lips enunciated with difficulty.

This paragraph treated of the current cotton interests, giving extracts from an address made by Randal Ducie in New Orleans at a banquet of an association interested in levee protection, on the evening and also at the hour when he was represented in Floyd-Rosney’s bill as fleeing with his neighbor’s wife in a city five hundred miles distant. He had made himself conspicuous as an advocate of certain methods of levee protection, and his views were both ardently upheld and rancorously contested even at the festive board. The occasion was thus less harmonious than such meetings should be, and the local papers had much “write-up” besides the menu and the toasts, in the views of various planters and several engineer officers, guests of the occasion, lending themselves to a spirited discussion of Randal Ducie’s recommendations.