Hildegarde passed a wakeful night of troubled thought. Only after the tardy dawn of the early spring was in the room did she fall into the dull slumber of exhaustion, from which she roused at last, unrefreshed and languid. Before she broke her fast she dispatched a note to Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, declining on second thoughts the invitation to make the trip to New Orleans and St. Simon’s Island, which she had welcomed so enthusiastically when it was broached the previous day. She gave no reason for her change of mind, but expressed her thanks very prettily and courteously; the conventional, suave phrases exacted by decorum incongruous with the pale, stern, set face that bent above them. Her mother cried out in surprise and solicitude when she came into the library, with this mask, so to speak, alien to the joyous countenance she was wont to wear, so soft and glowing, so bland and gay, but she petulantly put aside all inquiries, declaring that she was quite well and only wanted to be left alone. To be quit of the family she escaped into the solitary sun-parlor, and sat there in a wicker chair among the palms, and watched the blooms in the window-boxes that illumined the space with their vivid glintings. For there was no sun to-day—a hazy, soft, gray day, and but for the gleam of her white dress in the leafy shadows Randal Ducie might not have seen her there when he was ushered into the library; after somewhat perfunctory greetings to her father and mother he strode, with the freedom of an acknowledged friend of the family, through the room into the sun-parlor and sat down beside her.

She was wearing a house dress of white wool, sparsely trimmed with only a band of Persian embroidery about the sleeves and belt and around the neck, which was cut in a high square, showing her delicate throat. She looked up embarrassed as he came in, conscious that she had on no guimpe, and no lace on the sleeves, and murmured something about not being fit to be seen. But in his masculine inexperience he perceived no lack in point of the finish of her attire, though the change of her countenance instantly struck his attention.

“Oh, what has happened?” he cried, solicitously. “What is the matter?”

“Nothing—nothing at all,” she replied, scarcely lifting her heavily lidded eyes. “I wish everybody would quit asking me that.”

“I can see that something is troubling you dreadfully,” he protested. “Won’t you let me help you? I could brush it away with one hand.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she declared, irritably.

For a few moments there was silence between them as he sat gazing at her pallid and listless face, with its downcast and dreary eyes, her languid, half-reclining attitude, her idle, nerveless hands clasped in her lap. The change in her was pathetic,—appealing.

“See here, Miss Dean, trust me; if you have stolen a horse, I will hide him for you.”

An unwilling smile crept to the verge of her drooping lips, but she ejaculated impatiently:

“Oh, nonsense!”

“I don’t want to intrude on your confidence, but,—but”—with deep gravity and a lowered voice, “have you allowed yourself to become involved in some—conspiracy against the government?”

The unwelcome laugh had crept into her eyes as she lifted her heavy lids and glanced at him.

“Oh, you know I haven’t!”

Then the contending emotions were resolved into tears, and slowly and painfully they overflowed her sapphire eyes, coursing one by one down her white cheeks.

“I should not have spoken,” he said, contritely, “I only add to your distress. Forgive me. I’d better go.”

“No—no—don’t. But I can’t explain. I’ve promised—only this I know—I can’t say how I know, but I know that my best friend has told me a lie—a wicked, defamatory, deliberate lie—and I can’t forgive it.”

“Why should you forgive it?” he asked. “It is the limit, the unforgivable.”

There was a momentary pause. The tears welled up anew in the blue eyes and the white cheeks were all wet with them; however, she mopped them with her handkerchief rolled into a little ball for the purpose.

“It was such a cruel lie, deliberately planned, so circumstantial,” she sobbed, “so plausible, apparently confirmed by facts. I do believe it would have deceived anybody, everybody, but me. I can’t controvert it—the circumstances are out of my scope. But I know—I know—I know of my own accord,—I can’t say how,—but every breath I draw, every fiber in me is a witness of the truth—the eternal truth!”

She burst into a tempest of sobs, and Ducie was carried beyond bounds.

“Oh, you must not, you shall not, give yourself so much pain for this vile liar, whoever it is. Have some mercy on me, if not on yourself. I can’t endure to see you so distressed—it breaks my heart. I have loved you too long, too devotedly——”

He paused abruptly; he had not intended to broach the subject thus, to put his fate to the touch while she was hardly herself, overwhelmed by the agony of some poignant, covert grief which he could not share. Surely this was not the moment to decide the course of his future life and hers. He had had his grave misgivings as to her preference. She was joyous and lovely, and sweet and congenial to many alike who basked in the radiance of her charm. She was the reigning belle of the winter, and doubtless her relatives entertained high ambitions as to her settlement in life. Since the loss of Duciehurst from his material hopes and prospects he had scarcely felt himself justified in asking her to share his restrictions and limited resources. He lived on the look in her eyes, a chance word among all the others, and he had not had hope enough, encouragement enough of her preference to urge his suit upon her. He felt as if he stood in an illumination of heaven and earth when she turned her face suddenly, and asked:

“How long?”

He had both her little hands in his when he strove to differentiate for her just when and how he first recognized the unfolding of this flower of love to irradiate his life with bloom and fragrance and then to urge upon her some word of promise to set his plunging heart at rest.

Her face, all fluctuating with happy smiles and flushes, grew affectedly grave as she seemed to consider.

“I am not much like a parched flower,” she said, “but I have been waiting some time for this dewdrop.”

“Oh, if I had only known, how much I could have saved myself,” exclaimed Randal, voicing the sentiment of many an accepted lover.

“I expected this—remark—of yours,” she declared, her blue eyes archly glancing, “at the De Lille reception—’way back, ’way back in the Middle Ages, when you said in such an impassioned voice, ‘Will you—will you have some more frappÉ?’”

Then they both laughed out joyously, and her father in the library, turning over the journal in his hand to get at the river news, had a vague realization of the instability of the moods of women and especially of girls, and was pleased that Hildegarde had recovered her equanimity since her tiff against Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, as he interpreted it, had induced her to forego her charming springtide outing.

The cruise, though somewhat delayed, that the party of guests might be selected anew and assembled, took place according to the plans of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, at once the most discriminating and lavish of hostesses; but before the Aglaia weighed anchor the news of the engagement was sown broadcast in the town and it became the subject of conversation one day as the yacht steamed down the Mississippi on her mission of pleasure. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, whose experience and training had developed great powers of self-control, hearkened with special interest to the details of the gossip, and often commented characteristically. The bride-elect, it was surmised, would receive splendid presents, in view of her many wealthy relatives and friends and her great popularity, but none could compare with the necklace of Ducie diamonds, the gift of the groom, which it was said she would wear with her wedding dress of white satin.

“And how ridiculous for people of their limited means,” cried Mrs. Floyd-Rosney. Her late husband himself could hardly have seemed more scornful of moderate circumstances.

“Except that the necklace is an heirloom,” said Colonel Kenwynton.

“A man in love thinks nothing is too fine,” suggested one of the ladies.

“Randal Ducie is not and never was in love with Hildegarde,” said Mrs. Floyd-Rosney with an air of much discernment. “She is not of the type that would appeal to him; but she was very instant in bringing herself to his notice and diverting his mind, and taking him out of himself after his bereavement and so became a sort of consolatory habit.”

“That is a beautiful idea,” said Colonel Kenwynton warmly,—“to add to the blessed relation of a wife the sacred mission of a ministering angel.”

This was not in the least what Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had intended to intimate, as was abundantly manifest by the thinly veiled anger and repugnance on her face, which was now beginning to have need of all the suavity and grace she could command. It was growing perceptibly hard in these days, and its incipient angularities were more definitely asserted. There was a recurrent expression of bitter antagonism in her eyes that gave added emphasis to the satiric fleer in the occasional upward lift of her chin. People were already commenting on the strange deterioration in her beauty of late, and although Colonel Kenwynton was in no degree aware of the reason for her state of mind, he felt vaguely depressed by her look and manner.

He rose presently and strolled away from the group on the deck, smoking his cigar and scanning the weather signs of the coming evening. The stress of the subject of Randal Ducie’s bereavement weighed heavily on his nerves in this vicinity. If, under all the circumstances, it could be so easily and openly mentioned here he was not sure of his ability to listen with discretion. The world was growing strange to him,—he felt himself indeed a survival. He did not understand such views as seemed to possess this woman, such standards of right, such induration of sensibilities. Man and soldier though he was, he could look only with glooming and averse eyes at the wreck of the Cherokee Rose, where a dread deed was wrought, lying white and stark, skeleton-wise, like bleaching bones on the sand-bar in that immaterial region between the pallid mists of the evening and the gray sheen of the river. Very melancholy the aspect of the forlorn craft, he thought in passing, and he scarcely wondered at the prevalence of the riverside legend that strange presences were wont to revisit the glimpses of the moon on this grim, storied wreck of the Mississippi.

He could not imagine how Mrs. Floyd-Rosney in pursuit of pleasure could endure to pass this poignantly ghastly reminder, and still further down the stream to approach the site of Duciehurst under its swirling depths,—the packets now made a landing called by the name a mile to the rearward of the spot where the old mansion had stood. But presently the graceful yacht was steaming swiftly down this glamourous reach of the river, and beneath its gliding shadow in inconceivable depths lay this epitome of the past,—the demolished home altar, with its spent incense of domestic affection, the lost hopes, with their lure of tenuous illusions; the futile turmoils of grief; the transient elation of joy; the final climax of death,—all the constituent elements of human experience. Now they were naught, nullified, while the world swept on uncaring, typified by the swift yacht, leaving astern the site of oblivion.

THE following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author, and new fiction.