Wealth

CHAPTER I

The days that followed were so many separate agonies, composed of an infinite number of lesser agonies, for Susan. Her only consolation, which weakened or strengthened with her moods, was that, inasmuch as this state of affairs was unbearable she would not be expected to bear it. Something must happen. Or, if nothing happened, she would simply disappear,--go on the stage, accept a position as a traveling governess or companion, run away to one of the big eastern cities where, under an assumed name, she might begin life all over again.

Hour after hour shame and hurt had their way with her. Susan had to face the office, to hide her heart from Thorny and the other girls, to be reminded by the empty desk in Mr. Brauer's office, and by every glimpse she had of old Mr. Baxter, of the happy dreams she had once dreamed here in this same place.

But it was harder far at home. Mrs. Lancaster alternated between tender moods, when she discussed the whole matter mournfully from beginning to end, and moods of violent rebellion, when everyone but Susan was blamed for the bitter disappointment of all their hopes. Mary Lou compared Peter to Ferd Eastman, to Peter's disadvantage. Virginia recommended quiet, patient endurance of whatever might be the will of Providence. Susan hardly knew which attitude humiliated and distressed her most. All her thoughts led her into bitterness now, and she could be distracted only for a brief moment or two from the memories that pressed so close about her heart. Ah, if she only had a little money, enough to make possible her running away, or a profession into which she could plunge, and in which she could distinguish herself, or a great talent, or a father who would stand by her and take care of her----

And the bright head would go down on her hands, and the tears have their way.

"Headache?" Thorny would ask, full of sympathy.

"Oh, splitting!" And Susan would openly dry her eyes, and manage to smile.

Sometimes, in a softer mood, her busy brain straightened the whole matter out. Peter, returning from Japan, would rush to her with a full explanation. Of course he cared for her--he had never thought of anything else--of course he considered that they were engaged! And Susan, after keeping him in suspense for a period that even Auntie thought too long, would find herself talking to him, scolding, softening, finally laughing, and at last--and for the first time!--in his arms.

Only a lovers' quarrel; one heard of them continually. Something to laugh about and to forget!

She took up the old feminine occupation of watching the post, weak with sudden hope when Mary Lou called up to her, "Letter for you on the mantel, Sue!" and sick with disappointment over and over again. Peter did not write.

Outwardly the girl went her usual round, perhaps a little thinner and with less laughter, but not noticeably changed. She basted cuffs into her office suit, and cleaned it with benzine, caught up her lunch and umbrella and ran for her car. She lunched and gossiped with Thorny and the others, walked uptown at noon to pay a gas-bill, took Virginia to the Park on Sundays to hear the music, or visited the Carrolls in Sausalito.

But inwardly her thoughts were like whirling web. And in its very center was Peter Coleman. Everything that Susan did began and ended with the thought of him. She never entered the office without the hope that a fat envelope, covered with his dashing scrawl, lay on the desk. She never thought herself looking well without wishing that she might meet Peter that day, or looking ill that she did not fear it. She answered the telephone with a thrilling heart; it might be he! And she browsed over the social columns of the Sunday papers, longing and fearing to find his name. All day long and far into the night, her brain was busy with a reconciliation,--excuses, explanations, forgiveness. "Perhaps to-day," she said in the foggy mornings. "To-morrow," said her undaunted heart at night.

The hope was all that sustained her, and how bitterly it failed her at times only Susan knew. Before the world she kept a brave face, evading discussion of Peter when she could, quietly enduring it when Mrs. Lancaster's wrath boiled over. But as the weeks went by, and the full wretchedness of the situation impressed itself upon her with quiet force, she sank under an overwhelming sense of wrong and loss. Nothing amazing was going to happen. She--who had seemed so free, so independent!--was really as fettered and as helpless as Virginia and Mary Lou. Susan felt sometimes as if she should go mad with suppressed feeling. She grew thin, dyspeptic, irritable, working hard, and finding her only relief in work, and reading in bed in the evening.

The days slowly pushed her further and further from those happy times when she and Peter had been such good friends, had gone about so joyfully together. It was a shock to Susan to realize that she had not seen him nor heard from him for a month--for two months--for three. Emily Saunders was in the hospital for some serious operation, would be there for weeks; Ella was abroad. Susan felt as if her little glimpse of their world and Peter's had been a curious dream.

Billy played a brother's part toward her now, always ready to take her about with him when he was free, and quite the only person who could spur her to anything like her old vigorous interest in life. They went very often to the Carrolls, and there, in the shabby old sitting-room, Susan felt happier than she did anywhere else. Everybody loved her, loved to have her there, and although they knew, and she knew that they knew, that something had gone very wrong with her, nobody asked questions, and Susan felt herself safe and sheltered. There was a shout of joy when she came in with Phil and Jo from the ferryboat. "Mother! here's Sue!" Betsey would follow the older girls upstairs to chatter while they washed their hands and brushed their hair, and, going down again, Susan would get the motherly kiss that followed Jo's. Later, when the lamp was lit, while Betsey and Jim wrangled amicably over their game, and Philip and Jo toiled with piano and violin, Susan sat next to Mrs. Carroll, and while they sewed, or between snatches of reading, they had long, and to the girl at least, memorable talks.

It was all sweet and wholesome and happy. Susan used to wonder just what made this house different from all other houses, and why she liked to come here so much, to eat the simplest of meals, to wash dishes and brush floors, to rise in the early morning and cross the bay before the time she usually came downstairs at home. Of course, they loved her, they laughed at her jokes, they wanted this thing repeated and that repeated, they never said good-by to her without begging her to come again and thought no special occasion complete without her. That affected her, perhaps. Or perhaps the Carrolls were a little nicer than most people; when Susan reached this point in her thoughts she never failed to regret the loss of their money and position. If they had done this in spite of poverty and obscurity, what MIGHTN'T they have done with half a chance!

In one of the lamplight talks Peter was mentioned, in connection with the patent window-washer, and Susan learned for the first time that he really had been instrumental in selling the patent for Mrs. Carroll for the astonishing sum of five hundred dollars!

"I BEGGED him to tell me if that wasn't partly from the washer and partly from Peter Coleman," smiled Mrs. Carroll, "and he gave me his word of honor that he had really sold it for that! So--there went my doctor's bill, and a comfortable margin in the bank!"

She admitted Susan into the secret of all her little economies; the roast that, cleverly alternated with one or two small meats, was served from Sunday until Saturday night, and no one any the worse! Susan began to watch the game that Mrs. Carroll made of her cooking; filling soups for the night that the meat was short, no sweet when the garden supplied a salad, or when Susan herself brought over a box of candy. She grew to love the labor that lay behind the touch of the thin, darned linen, the windows that shone with soapsuds, the crisp snowy ruffles of curtains and beds. She and Betts liked to keep the house vases filled with what they could find in the storm-battered garden, lifted the flattened chrysanthemums with reverent fingers, hunted out the wet violets. Susan abandoned her old idea of the enviable life of a lonely orphan, and began to long for a sister, a tumble-headed brother, for a mother above all. She loved to be included by the young Carrolls when they protested, "Just ourselves, Mother, nobody but the family!" and if Phil or Jimmy came to her when a coat-button was loose or a sleeve-lining needed a stitch, she was quite pathetically touched. She loved the constant happy noise and confusion in the house, Phil and Billy Oliver tussling in the stair-closet among the overshoes, Betts trilling over her bed-making, Mrs. Carroll and Jim replanting primroses with great calling and conference, and she and Josephine talking, as they swept the porches, as if they had never had a chance to talk before.

Sometimes, walking at Anna's side to the beach on Sunday, a certain peace and content crept into Susan's heart, and the deep ache lifted like a curtain, and seemed to show a saner, wider, sweeter region beyond. Sometimes, tramping the wet hills, her whole being thrilled to some new note, Susan could think serenely of the future, could even be glad of all the past. It was as if Life, into whose cold, stern face she had been staring wistfully, had softened to the glimmer of a smile, had laid a hand, so lately used to strike, upon her shoulder in token of good-fellowship.

With the good salt air in their faces, and the gray March sky pressing close above the silent circle of the hills about them, she and Anna walked many a bracing, tiring mile. Now and then they turned and smiled at each other, both young faces brightening.

"Noisy, aren't we, Sue?"

"Well, the others are making noise enough!"

Poverty stopped them at every turn, these Carrolls. Susan saw it perhaps more clearly than they did. A hundred delightful and hospitable plans came into Mrs. Carroll's mind, only to be dismissed because of the expense involved. She would have liked to entertain, to keep her pretty daughters becomingly and richly dressed; she confided to Susan rather wistfully, that she was sorry not to be able to end the evenings with little chafing-dish suppers; "that sort of thing makes home so attractive to growing boys." Susan knew what Anna's own personal grievance was. "These are the best years of my life," Anna said, bitterly, one night, "and every cent of spending money I have is the fifty dollars a year the hospital pays. And even out of that they take breakage, in the laboratory or the wards!" Josephine made no secret of her detestation of their necessary economies.

"Did you know I was asked to the Juniors this year?" she said to Susan one night.

"The Juniors! You weren't!" Susan echoed incredulously. For the "Junior Cotillion" was quite the most exclusive and desirable of the city's winter dances for the younger set.

"Oh, yes, I was. Mrs. Wallace probably did it," Josephine assured her, sighing. "They asked Anna last year," she said bitterly, "and I suppose next year they'll ask Betts, and then perhaps they'll stop."

"Oh, but Jo-why couldn't you go! When so many girls are just CRAZY to be asked!"

"Money," Josephine answered briefly.

"But not much!" Susan lamented. The "Juniors" were not to be estimated in mere money.

"Twenty-five for the ticket, and ten for the chaperone, and a gown, of course, and slippers and a wrap--Mother felt badly about it," Josephine said composedly. And suddenly she burst into tears, and threw herself down on the bed. "Don't let Mother hear, and don't think I'm an idiot!" she sobbed, as Susan came to kneel beside her and comfort her, "but--but I hate so to drudge away day after day, when I know I could be having GORGEOUS times, and making friends---!"

Betts' troubles were more simple in that they were indefinite. Betts wanted to do everything, regardless of cost, suitability or season, and was quite as cross over the fact that they could not go camping in the Humboldt woods in midwinter, as she was at having to give up her ideas of a new hat or a theater trip. And the boys never complained specifically of poverty. Philip, won by deep plotting that he could not see to settle down quietly at home after dinner, was the gayest and best of company, and Jim's only allusions to a golden future were made when he rubbed his affectionate little rough head against his mother, pony-fashion, and promised her every luxury in the world as soon as he "got started."

When Peter Coleman returned from the Orient, early in April, all the newspapers chronicled the fact that a large number of intimate friends met him at the dock. He was instantly swept into the social currents again; dinners everywhere were given for Mr. Coleman, box-parties and house-parties followed one another, the club claimed him, and the approaching opening of the season found him giving special attention to his yacht. Small wonder that Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's caught only occasional glimpses of him. Susan, somberly pursuing his name from paper to paper, felt that she was beginning to dislike him. She managed never to catch his eye, when he was in Mr. Brauer's office, and took great pains not to meet him.

However, in the lingering sweet twilight of a certain soft spring evening, when she had left the office, and was beginning the long walk home, she heard sudden steps behind her, and turned to see Peter.

"Aren't you the little seven-leagued booter! Wait a minute, Susan! C'est moi! How are you?"

"How do you do, Peter?" Susan said pleasantly and evenly. She put her hand in the big gloved hand, and raised her eyes to the smiling eyes.

"What car are you making for?" he asked, falling in step.

"I'm walking," Susan said. "Too nice to ride this evening."

"You're right," he said, laughing. "I wish I hadn't a date, I'd like nothing better than to walk it, too! However, I can go a block or two."

He walked with her to Montgomery Street, and they talked of Japan and the Carrolls and of Emily Saunders. Then Peter said he must catch a California Street car, and they shook hands again and parted.

It all seemed rather flat. Susan felt as if the little episode did not belong in the stormy history of their friendship at all, or as if she were long dead and were watching her earthly self from a distance with wise and weary eyes. What should she be feeling now? What would a stronger woman have done? Given him the cut direct, perhaps, or forced the situation to a point when something dramatic--satisfying--must follow.

"I am weak," said Susan ashamedly to herself; "I was afraid he would think I cared,--would see that I cared!" And she walked on busy with self-contemptuous and humiliated thoughts. She had made it easy for him to take advantage of her. She had assumed for his convenience that she had suffered no more than he through their parting, and that all was again serene and pleasant between them. After to-night's casual, friendly conversation, no radical attitude would be possible on her part; he could congratulate himself that he still retained Susan's friendship, and could be careful--she knew he would be careful!--never to go too far again.

Susan's estimate of Peter Coleman was no longer a particularly idealized one. But she had long ago come to the conclusion that his faults were the faults of his type and his class, excusable and understandable now, and to be easily conquered when a great emotion should sweep him once and for all away from the thought of himself. As he was absorbed in the thought of his own comfort, so, she knew, he could become absorbed in the thought of what was due his wife, the wider viewpoint would quickly become second nature with him; young Mrs. Peter Coleman would be among the most indulged and carefully considered of women. He would be as anxious that the relationship between his wife and himself should be harmonious and happy, as he was now to feel when he met her that he had no reason to avoid or to dread meeting Miss Susan Brown.

If Susan would have preferred a little different attitude on his part, she could find no fault with this one. She had for so many months thought of Peter as the personification of all that she desired in life that she could not readily dismiss him as unworthy. Was he not still sweet and big and clean, rich and handsome and popular, socially prominent and suitable in age and faith and nationality?

Susan had often heard her aunt and her aunt's friends remark that life was more dramatic than any book, and that their own lives on the stage would eclipse in sensational quality any play ever presented. But, for herself, life seemed deplorably, maddeningly undramatic. In any book, in any play, the situation between her and Peter must have been heightened to a definite crisis long before this. The mildest of little ingenues, as she came across a dimly lighted stage, in demure white and silver, could have handled this situation far more skillfully than Susan did; the most youthful of heroines would have met Peter to some purpose,--while surrounded by other admirers at a dance, or while galloping across a moor on her spirited pony.

What would either of these ladies have done, she wondered, at meeting the offender when he appeared particularly well-groomed, prosperous and happy, while she herself was tired from a long office day, conscious of shabby gloves, of a shapeless winter hat? What could she do, except appear friendly and responsive? Susan consoled herself with the thought that her only alternative, an icy repulse of his friendly advances, would have either convinced him that she was too entirely common and childish to be worth another thought, or would have amused him hugely. She could fancy him telling his friends of his experience of the cut direct from a little girl in Front Office,--no names named--and hear him saying that "he loved it--he was crazy about it!"

"You believe in the law of compensation, don't you, Aunt Jo?" asked Susan, on a wonderful April afternoon, when she had gone straight from the office to Sausalito. The two women were in the Carroll kitchen, Susan sitting at one end of the table, her thoughtful face propped in her hands, Mrs. Carroll busy making ginger cakes,--cutting out the flat little circles with an inverted wine-glass, transferring them to the pans with the tip of her flat knife, rolling the smooth dough, and spilling the hot cakes, as they came back from the oven, into a deep tin strainer to cool. Susan liked to watch her doing this, liked the pretty precision of every movement, the brisk yet unhurried repetition of events, her strong clever hands, the absorbed expression of her face, her fine, broad figure hidden by a stiffly-starched gown of faded blue cotton and a stiff white apron.

Beyond the open window an exquisite day dropped to its close. It was the time of fruit-blossoms and feathery acacia, languid, perfumed breezes, lengthening twilights, opening roses and swaying plumes of lilac. Sausalito was like a little park, every garden ran over with sweetness and color, every walk was fringed with flowers, and hedged with the new green of young trees and blossoming hedges. Susan felt a delicious relaxation run through her blood; winter seemed really routed; to-day for the first time one could confidently prophesy that there would be summer presently, thin gowns and ocean bathing and splendid moons.

"Yes, I believe in the law of compensation, to a great extent," the older woman answered thoughtfully, "or perhaps I should call it the law of solution. I truly believe that to every one of us on this earth is given the materials for a useful and a happy life; some people use them and some don't. But the chance is given alike."

"Useful, yes," Susan conceded, "but usefulness isn't happiness."

"Isn't it? I really think it is."

"Oh, Aunt Jo," the girl burst out impatiently, "I don't mean for saints! I dare say there ARE some girls who wouldn't mind being poor and shabby and lonesome and living in a boarding-house, and who would be glad they weren't hump-backed, or blind, or Siberian prisoners! But you CAN'T say you think that a girl in my position has had a fair start with a girl who is just as young, and rich and pretty and clever, and has a father and mother and everything else in the world! And if you do say so," pursued Susan, with feeling, "you certainly can't MEAN so---"

"But wait a minute, Sue! What girl, for instance?"

"Oh, thousands of girls!" Susan said, vaguely. "Emily Saunders, Alice Chauncey---"

"Emily Saunders! SUSAN! In the hospital for an operation every other month or two!" Mrs. Carroll reminded her.

"Well, but---" Susan said eagerly. "She isn't really ill. She just likes the excitement and having them fuss over her. She loves the hospital."

"Still, I wouldn't envy anyone whose home life wasn't preferable to the hospital, Sue."

"Well, Emily is queer, Aunt Jo. But in her place I wouldn't necessarily be queer."

"At the same time, considering her brother Kenneth's rather checkered career, and the fact that her big sister neglects and ignores her, and that her health is really very delicate, I don't consider Emily a happy choice for your argument, Sue."

"Well, there's Peggy Brock. She's a perfect beauty---"

"She's a Wellington, Sue. You know that stock. How many of them are already in institutions?"

"Oh, but Aunt Jo!" Susan said impatiently, "there are dozens of girls in society whose health is good, and whose family ISN'T insane,--I don't know why I chose those two! There are the Chickerings---"

"Whose father took his own life, Sue."

"Well, they couldn't help THAT. They're lovely girls. It was some money trouble, it wasn't insanity or drink."

"But think a moment, Sue. Wouldn't it haunt you for a long, long time, if you felt that your own father, coming home to that gorgeous house night after night, had been slowly driven to the taking of his own life?"

Susan looked thoughtful.

"I never thought of that," she admitted. Presently she added brightly, "There are the Ward girls, Aunt Jo, and Isabel Wallace. You couldn't find three prettier or richer or nicer girls! Say what you will," Susan returned undauntedly to her first argument, "life IS easier for those girls than for the rest of us!"

"Well, I want to call your attention to those three," Mrs. Carroll said, after a moment. "Both Mr. Wallace and Mr. Ward made their own money, started in with nothing and built up their own fortunes. Phil may do that, or Billy may do that--we can't tell. Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Wallace are both nice, simple women, not spoiled yet by money, not inflated on the subject of family and position, bringing up their families as they were brought up. I don't know Mrs. Ward personally, but Mrs. Wallace came from my own town, and she likes to remember the time when her husband was only a mining engineer, and she did her own work. You may not see it, Sue, but there's a great difference there. Such people are happy and useful, and they hand happiness on. Peter Coleman's another, he's so exceptionally nice because he's only one generation removed from working people. If Isabel Wallace,--and she's very young; life may be unhappy enough for her yet, poor child!--marries a man like her father, well and good. But if she marries a man like--well, say Kenneth Saunders or young Gerald, she simply enters into the ranks of the idle and useless and unhappy, that's all."

"She's beautiful, and she's smart too," Susan pursued, disconsolately, "Emily and I lunched there one day and she was simply sweet to the maids, and to her mother. And German! I wish you could hear her. She may not be of any very remarkable family but she certainly is an exceptional girl!"

"Exceptional, just because she ISN'T descended from some dead, old, useless stock," amended Mrs. Carroll. "There is red blood in her veins, ambition and effort and self-denial, all handed down to her. But marry that pampered little girl to some young millionaire, Sue, and what will her children inherit? And what will theirs, in time?--Peel these, will you?" went on Mrs. Carroll, interrupting her work to put a bowl of apples in Susan's hands. "No," she went on presently, "I married a millionaire, Sue. I was one of the 'lucky' ones!"

"I never knew it was as much as that!" Susan said impressed.

"Yes," Mrs. Carroll laughed wholesomely at some memory. "Yes; I began my married life in the very handsomest home in our little town with the prettiest presents and the most elaborate wardrobe--the papers were full of Miss Josie van Trent's extravagances. I had four house servants, and when Anna came everybody in town knew that her little layette had come all the way from Paris!"

"But,--good heavens, what happened?"

"Nothing, for awhile. Mr. Carroll, who was very young, had inherited a half-interest in what was then the biggest shoe-factory in that part of the world. My father was his partner. Philip--dear me! it seems like a lifetime ago!--came to visit us, and I came home from an Eastern finishing school. Sue, those were silly, happy, heavenly days! Well! we were married, as I said. Little Phil came, Anna came. Still we went on spending money. Phil and I took the children to Paris,--Italy. Then my father died, and things began to go badly at the works. Phil discharged his foreman, borrowed money to tide over a bad winter, and said that he would be his own superintendent. Of course he knew nothing about it. We borrowed more money. Jo was the baby then, and I remember one ugly episode was that the workmen, who wanted more money, accused Phil of getting his children's clothes abroad because his wife didn't think American things were good enough for them."

"YOU!" Susan said, incredulously.

"It doesn't sound like me now, does it? Well; Phil put another foreman in, and he was a bad man--in league with some rival factory, in fact. Money was lost that way, contracts broken---"

"BEAST!" said Susan.

"Wicked enough," the other woman conceded, "but not at all an uncommon thing, Sue, where people don't know their own business. So we borrowed more money, borrowed enough for a last, desperate fight, and lost it. The day that Jim was three years old, we signed the business away to the other people, and Phil took a position under them, in his own factory."

"Oo-oo!" Susan winced.

"Yes, it was hard. I did what I could for my poor old boy, but it was very hard. We lived very quietly; I had begun to come to my senses then; we had but one maid. But, even then, Sue, Philip wasn't capable of holding a job of that sort. How could he manage what he didn't understand? Poor Phil---" Mrs. Carroll's bright eyes brimmed with tears, and her mouth quivered. "However, we had some happy times together with the babies," she said cheerfully, "and when he went away from us, four years later, with his better salary we were just beginning to see our way clear. So that left me, with my five, Sue, without a cent in the world. An old cousin of my father owned this house, and she wrote that she would give us all a home, and out we came,--Aunt Betty's little income was barely enough for her, so I sold books and taught music and French, and finally taught in a little school, and put up preserves for people, and packed their houses up for the winter---"

"How did you DO it!"

"Sue, I don't know! Anna stood by me,--my darling!" The last two words came in a passionate undertone. "But of course there were bad times. Sometimes we lived on porridges and milk for days, and many a night Anna and Phil and I have gone out, after dark, to hunt for dead branches in the woods for my kitchen stove!" And Mrs. Carroll, unexpectedly stirred by the pitiful memory, broke suddenly into tears, the more terrible to Susan because she had never seen her falter before.

It was only for a moment. Then Mrs. Carroll dried her eyes and said cheerfully:

"Well, those times only make these seem brighter! Anna is well started now, we've paid off the last of the mortgage, Phil is more of a comfort than he's ever been--no mother could ask a better boy!--and Jo is beginning to take a real interest in her work. So everything is coming out better than even my prayers."

"Still," smiled Susan, "lots of people have things comfortable, WITHOUT such a terrible struggle!"

"And lots of people haven't five fine children, Sue, and a home in a big garden. And lots of mothers don't have the joy and the comfort and the intimacy with their children in a year that I have every day. No, I'm only too happy now, Sue. I don't ask anything better than this. And if, in time, they go to homes of their own, and we have some more babies in the family--it's all LIVING, Sue, it's being a part of the world!"

Mrs. Carroll carried away her cakes to the big stone jar in the pantry. Susan, pensively nibbling a peeled slice of apple, had a question ready for her when she came back.

"But suppose you're one of those persons who get into a groove, and simply can't live? I want to work, and do heroic things, and grow to BE something, and how can I? Unless---" her color rose, but her glance did not fall, "unless somebody marries me, of course."

"Choose what you want to do, Sue, and do it. That's all."

"Oh, that SOUNDS simple! But I don't want to do any of the things you mean. I want to work into an interesting life, somehow. I'll--I'll never marry," said Susan.

"You won't? Well; of course that makes it easier, because you can go into your work with heart and soul. But perhaps you'll change your mind, Sue. I hope you will, just as I hope all the girls will marry. I'm not sure," said Mrs. Carroll, suddenly smiling, "but what the very quickest way for a woman to marry off her girls is to put them into business. In the first place, a man who wants them has to be in earnest, and in the second, they meet the very men whose interests are the same as theirs. So don't be too sure you won't. However, I'm not laughing at you, Sue. I think you ought to seriously select some work for yourself, unless of course you are quite satisfied where you are."

"I'm not," said Susan. "I'll never get more than forty where I am. And more than that, Thorny heard that Front Office is going to be closed up any day."

"But you could get another position, dear."

"Well, I don't know. You see, it's a special sort of bookkeeping. It wouldn't help any of us much elsewhere."

"True. And what would you like best to do, Sue?"

"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I think the stage. Or something with lots of traveling in it." Susan laughed, a little ashamed of her vagueness.

"Why not take a magazine agency, then? There's a lot of money---"

"Oh, no!" Susan shuddered. "You're joking!"

"Indeed I'm not. You're just the sort of person who would make a fine living selling things. The stage--I don't know. But if you really mean it, I don't see why you shouldn't get a little start somewhere."

"Aunt Jo, they say that Broadway in New York is simply LINED with girls trying---"

"New York! Well, very likely. But you try here. Go to the manager of the Alcazar, recite for him---"

"He wouldn't let me," Susan asserted, "and besides, I don't really know anything."

"Well, learn something. Ask him, when next some manager wants to make up a little road company---"

"A road company! Two nights in Stockton, two nights in Marysville--horrors!" said Susan.

"But that wouldn't be for long, Sue. Perhaps two years. Then five or six years in stock somewhere---"

"Aunt Jo, I'd be past thirty!" Susan laughed and colored charmingly. "I--honestly, I couldn't give up my whole life for ten years on the chance of making a hit," she confessed.

"Well, but what then, Sue?"

"Now, I'll tell you what I've often wanted to do," Susan said, after a thoughtful interval.

"Ah, now we're coming to it!" Mrs. Carroll said, with satisfaction. They had left the kitchen now, and were sitting on the top step of the side porch, reveling in the lovely panorama of hillside and waterfront, and the smooth and shining stretch of bay below them.

"I've often thought I'd like to be the matron of some very smart school for girls," said Susan, "and live either in or near some big Eastern city, and take the girls to concerts and lectures and walking in the parks, and have a lovely room full of books and pictures, where they would come and tell me things, and go to Europe now and then for a vacation!"

"That would be a lovely life, Sue. Why not work for that?"

"Why, I don't know how. I don't know of any such school."

"Well, now let us suppose the head of such a school wants a matron," Mrs. Carroll said, "she naturally looks for a lady and a linguist, and a person of experience---"

"There you are! I've had no experience!" Susan said, instantly depressed. "I could rub up on French and German, and read up the treatment for toothache and burns--but experience!"

"But see how things work together, Sue!" Mrs. Carroll exclaimed, with a suddenly bright face.

"Here's Miss Berrat, who has the little school over here, simply CRAZY to find someone to help her out. She has eight--or nine, I forget--day scholars, and four or five boarders. And such a dear little cottage! Miss Pitcher is leaving her, to go to Miss North's school in Berkeley, and she wants someone at once!"

"But, Aunt Jo, what does she pay?"

"Let me see---" Mrs. Carroll wrinkled a thoughtful brow. "Not much, I know. You live at the school, of course. Five or ten dollars a month, I think."

"But I COULDN'T live on that!" Susan exclaimed.

"You'd be near us, Sue, for one thing. And you'd have a nice bright sunny room. And Miss Berrat would help you with your French and German. It would be a good beginning."

"But I simply COULDN'T--" Susan stopped short. "Would you advise it, Aunt Jo?" she asked simply.

Mrs. Carroll studied the bright face soberly for a moment.

"Yes, I'd advise it, Sue," she said then gravely. "I don't think that the atmosphere where you are is the best in the world for you just now. It would be a fine change. It would be good for those worries of yours."

"Then I'll do it!" Susan said suddenly, the unexplained tears springing to her eyes.

"I think I would. I'll go and see Miss Berrat next week," Mrs. Carroll said. "There's the boat making the slip, Sue," she added, "let's get the table set out here on the porch while they're climbing the hill!"

Up the hill came Philip and Josephine, just home from the city, escorted by Betsey and Jim who had met them at the boat. Susan received a strangling welcome from Betts, and Josephine, who looked a little pale and tired after this first enervating, warm spring day, really brightened perceptibly when she went upstairs with Susan to slip into a dress that was comfortably low-necked and short-sleeved.

Presently they all gathered on the porch for dinner, with the sweet twilighted garden just below them and anchor lights beginning to prick, one by one, through the soft dusky gloom of the bay.

"Well, 'mid pleasures and palaces---" Philip smiled at his mother.

"Charades to-night!" shrilled Betts, from the kitchen where she was drying lettuce.

"Oh, but a walk first!" Susan protested. For their aimless strolls through the dark, flower-scented lanes were a delight to her.

"And Billy's coming over to-morrow to walk to Gioli's," Josephine added contentedly.

That evening and the next day Susan always remembered as terminating a certain phase of her life, although for perhaps a week the days went on just as usual. But one morning she found confusion reigning, when she arrived at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's. Front Office was to be immediately abolished, its work was over, its staff already dispersing.

Workmen, when she arrived, were moving out cases and chairs, and Mr. Brauer, eagerly falling upon her, begged her to clean out her desk, and to help him assort the papers in some of the other desks and cabinets. Susan, filled with pleasant excitement, pinned on her paper cuffs, and put her heart and soul into the work. No bills this morning! The office-boy did not even bring them up.

"Now, here's a soap order that must have been specially priced," said Susan, at her own desk, "I couldn't make anything of it yesterday---"

"Let it go--let it go!" Mr. Brauer said. "It iss all ofer!"

As the other girls came in they were pressed into service, papers and papers and papers, the drift of years, were tossed out of drawers and cubby-holes. Much excited laughter and chatter went on. Probably not one girl among them felt anything but pleasure and relief at the unexpected holiday, and a sense of utter confidence in the future.

Mr. Philip, fussily entering the disordered room at ten o'clock, announced his regret at the suddenness of the change; the young ladies would be paid their salaries for the uncompleted month--a murmur of satisfaction arose--and, in short, the firm hoped that their association had been as pleasant to them as it had been to his partners and himself.

"They had a directors' meeting on Saturday," Thorny said, later, "and if you ask me my frank opinion, I think Henry Brauer is at the bottom of all this. What do you know about his having been at that meeting on Saturday, and his going to have the office right next to J. G.'s--isn't that the extension of the limit? He's as good as in the firm now."

"I've always said that he knew something that made it very well worth while for this firm to keep his mouth shut," said Miss Cashell, darkly.

"I'll bet you there's something in that," Miss Cottle agreed.

"H. B. & H. is losing money hand over fist," Thorny stated, gloomily, with that intimate knowledge of an employer's affairs always displayed by an obscure clerk.

"Brauer asked me if I would like to go into the big office, but I don't believe I could do the work," Susan said.

"Yes; I'm going into the main office, too," Thorny stated. "Don't you be afraid, Susan. It's as easy as pie."

"Mr. Brauer said I could try it," Miss Sherman shyly contributed. But no other girl had been thus complimented. Miss Kelly and Miss Garvey, both engaged to be married now, Miss Kelly to Miss Garvey's brother, Miss Garvey to Miss Kelly's cousin, were rather congratulating themselves upon the turn of events; the other girls speculated as to the wisest step to take next, some talking vaguely of post-office or hospital work; Miss Cashell, as Miss Thornton later said to Susan, hopelessly proving herself no lady by announcing that she could get better money as a coat model, and meant to get into that line of work if she could.

"Are we going to have lunch to-day?" somebody asked. Miss Thornton thoughtfully drew a piece of paper toward her, and wet her pencil in her mouth.

"Best thing we can do, I guess," she said.

"Let's put ten cents each in," Susan suggested, "and make it a real party."

Thorny accordingly expanded her list to include sausages and a pie, cheese and rolls, besides the usual tea and stewed tomatoes. The girls ate the little meal with their hats and wraps on, a sense of change filled the air, and they were all a little pensive, even with an unexpected half-holiday before them.

Then came good-bys. The girls separated with many affectionate promises. All but the selected three were not to return. Susan and Miss Sherman and Thorny would come back to find their desks waiting for them in the main office next day.

Susan walked thoughtfully uptown, and when she got home, wrote a formal application for the position open in her school to little Miss Berrat in Sausalito.

It was a delightful, sunshiny afternoon. Mary Lou, Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia were making a mournful trip to the great institution for the blind in Berkeley, where Virginia's physician wanted to place her for special watching and treatment. Susan found two or three empty hours on her hands, and started out for a round of calls.

She called on her aunt's old friends, the Langs, and upon the bony, cold Throckmorton sisters, rich, nervous, maiden ladies, shivering themselves slowly to death in their barn of a house, and finally, and unexpectedly, upon Mrs. Baxter.

Susan had planned a call on Georgie, to finish the afternoon, for her cousin, slowly dragging her way up the last of the long road that ends in motherhood, was really in need of cheering society.

But the Throckmorton house chanced to be directly opposite the old Baxter mansion, and Susan, seeing Peter's home, suddenly decided to spend a few moments with the old lady.

After all, why should she not call? She had had no open break with Peter, and on every occasion his aunt had begged her to take pity on an old woman's loneliness. Susan was always longing, in her secret heart, for that accident that should reopen the old friendship; knowing Peter, she knew that the merest chance would suddenly bring him to her side again; his whole life was spent in following the inclination of the moment. And today, in her pretty new hat and spring suit, she was looking her best.

Peter would not be at home, of course. But his aunt would tell him that that pretty, happy Miss Brown was here, and that she was going to leave Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's for something not specified. And then Peter, realizing that Susan had entirely risen above any foolish old memory----

Susan crossed the street and rang the bell. When the butler told her, with an impassive face, that he would find out if Mrs. Baxter were in, Susan hoped, in a panic, that she was not. The big, gloomy, handsome hall rather awed her. She watched Burns's retreating back fearfully, hoping that Mrs. Baxter really was out, or that Burns would be instructed to say so.

But he came back, expressionless, placid, noiseless of step, to say in a hushed, confidential tone that Mrs. Baxter would be down in a moment. He lighted the reception room brilliantly for Susan, and retired decorously. Susan sat nervously on the edge of a chair. Suddenly her call seemed a very bold and intrusive thing to do, even an indelicate thing, everything considered. Suppose Peter should come in; what could he think but that she was clinging to the association with which he had so clearly indicated that he was done?

What if she got up and went silently, swiftly out? Burns was not in sight, the great hall was empty. She had really nothing to say to Mrs. Baxter, and she could assume that she had misunderstood his message if the butler followed her----

Mrs. Baxter, a little figure in rustling silk, came quickly down the stairway. Susan met her in the doorway of the reception room, with a smile.

"How do you do, how do you do?" Mrs. Baxter said nervously. She did not sit down, but stood close to Susan, peering up at her shortsightedly, and crumpling the card she held in her hand. "It's about the office, isn't it?" she said quickly. "Yes, I see. Mr. Baxter told me that it was to be closed. I'm sorry, but I never interfere in those things,--never. I really don't know ANYTHING about it! I'm sorry. But it would hardly be my place to interfere in business, when I don't know anything about it, would it? Mr. Baxter always prides himself on the fact that I don't interfere. So I don't really see what I could do."

A wave of some supreme emotion, not all anger, nor all contempt, nor all shame, but a composite of the three, rose in Susan's heart. She had not come to ask a favor of this more fortunate woman, but--the thought flashed through her mind--suppose she had? She looked down at the little silk-dressed figure, the blinking eyes, the veiny little hand, and the small mouth, that, after sixty years, was composed of nothing but conservative and close-shut lines. Pity won the day over her hurt girlish feeling and the pride that claimed vindication, and Susan smiled kindly.

"Oh, I didn't come about Front Office, Mrs. Baxter! I just happened to be in the neighborhood---" Two burning spots came into the older woman's face, not of shame, but of anger that she had misunderstood, had placed herself for an instant at a disadvantage.

"Oh," she said vaguely. "Won't you sit down? Peter---" she paused.

"Peter is in Santa Barbara, isn't he?" asked Susan, who knew he was not.

"I declare I don't know where he is half the time," Mrs. Baxter said, with her little, cracked laugh. They both sat down. "He has SUCH a good time!" pursued his aunt, complacently.

"Doesn't he?" Susan said pleasantly.

"Only I tell the girls they mustn't take Peter too seriously," cackled the sweet, old voice. "Dreadful boy!"

"I think they understand him." Susan looked at her hostess solicitously. "You look well," she said resolutely. "No more neuritis, Mrs. Baxter?"

Mrs. Baxter was instantly diverted. She told Susan of her new treatment, her new doctor, the devotion of her old maid; Emma, the servant of her early married life, was her close companion now, and although Mrs. Baxter always thought of her as a servant, Emma was really the one intimate friend she had.

Susan remained a brief quarter of an hour, chatting easily, but burning with inward shame. Never, never, never in her life would she pay another call like this one! Tea was not suggested, and when the girl said good-by, Mrs. Baxter did not leave the reception room. But just as Burns opened the street-door for her Susan saw a beautiful little coupe stop at the curb, and Miss Ella Saunders, beautifully gowned, got out of it and came up the steps with a slowness that became her enormous size.

"Hello, Susan Brown!" said Miss Saunders, imprisoning Susan's hand between two snowy gloves. "Where've you been?"

"Where've YOU been?" Susan laughed. "Italy and Russia and Holland!"

"Don't be an utter little hypocrite, child, and try to make talk with a woman of my years I I've been home two weeks, anyway."

"Emily home?"

Miss Saunders nodded slowly, bit her lip, and stared at Susan in a rather mystifying and very pronounced way.

"Emily is home, indeed," she said absently. Then abruptly she added: "Can you lunch with me to-morrow--no, Wednesday--at the Town and Country, infant?"

"Why, I'd love to!" Susan answered, dimpling.

"Well; at one? Then we can talk. Tell me," Miss Saunders lowered her voice, "is Mrs. Baxter in? Oh, damn!" she added cheerfully, as Susan nodded. Susan glanced back, before the door closed, and saw her meet the old lady in the hall and give her an impulsive kiss.

CHAPTER II

The little Town and Country Club, occupying two charmingly-furnished, crowded floors of what had once been a small apartment house on Post Street, next door to the old library, was a small but remarkable institution, whose members were the wealthiest and most prominent women of the fashionable colonies of Burlingame and San Mateo, Ross Valley and San Rafael. Presumably only the simplest and least formal of associations, it was really the most important of all the city's social institutions, and no woman was many weeks in San Francisco society without realizing that the various country clubs, and the Junior Cotillions were as dust and ashes, and that her chances of achieving a card to the Browning dances were very slim if she could not somehow push her name at least as far as the waiting list of the Town and Country Club.

The members pretended, to a woman, to be entirely unconscious of their social altitude. They couldn't understand how such ideas ever got about, it was "delicious"; it was "too absurd!" Why, the club was just the quietest place in the world, a place where a woman could run in to brush her hair and wash her hands, and change her library book, and have a cup of tea. A few of them had formed it years ago, just half a dozen of them, at a luncheon; it was like a little family circle, one knew everybody there, and one felt at home there. But, as for being exclusive and conservative, that was all nonsense! And besides, what did other women see in it to make them want to come in! Let them form another club, exactly like it, wouldn't that be the wiser thing?

Other women, thus advised and reassured, smiled, instead of gnashing their teeth, and said gallantly that after all they themselves were too busy to join any club just now, merely happened to speak of the Town and Country. And after that they said hateful and lofty and insulting things about the club whenever they found listeners.

But the Town and Country Club flourished on unconcernedly, buzzing six days a week with well-dressed women, echoing to Christian names and intimate chatter, sheltering the smartest of pigskin suitcases and gold-headed umbrellas and rustling raincoats in its tiny closets, resisting the constant demand of the younger element for modern club conveniences and more room.

No; the old members clung to its very inconveniences, to the gas-lights over the dressing-tables, and the narrow halls, and the view of ugly roofs and buildings from its back windows. They liked to see the notices written in the secretary's angular hand and pinned on the library door with a white-headed pin. The catalogue numbers of books were written by hand, too--the ink blurred into the shiny linen bands. At tea-time a little maid quite openly cut and buttered bread in a corner of the dining-room; it was permissible to call gaily, "More bread here, Rosie! I'm afraid we're a very hungry crowd to-day!"

Susan enormously enjoyed the club; she had been there more than once with Miss Saunders, and found her way without trouble to-day to a big chair in a window arch, where she could enjoy the passing show without being herself conspicuous. A constant little stream of women came and went, handsome, awkward school-girls, in town for the dentist or to be fitted to shoes, or for the matinee; debutantes, in their exquisite linens and summer silks, all joyous chatter and laughter; and plainly-gowned, well-groomed, middle-aged women, escorting or chaperoning, and pausing here for greetings and the interchange of news.

Miss Saunders, magnificent, handsome, wonderfully gowned, was surrounded by friends the moment she came majestically upstairs. Susan thought her very attractive, with her ready flow of conversation, her familiar, big-sisterly attitude with the young girls, her positiveness when there was the slightest excuse for her advice or opinions being expressed. She had a rich, full voice, and a drawling speech. She had to decline ten pressing invitations in as many minutes.

"Ella, why can't you come home with me this afternoon?--I'm not speaking to you, Ella Saunders, you've not been near us since you got back!--Mama's so anxious to see you, Miss Ella!--Listen, Ella, you've got to go with us to Tahoe; Perry will have a fit if you don't!"

"Mama's not well, and the kid is just home," Miss Saunders told them all good-naturedly, in excuse. She carried Susan off to the lunch-room, announcing herself to be starving, and ordered a lavish luncheon. Ella Saunders really liked this pretty, jolly, little book-keeper from Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's. Susan amused her, and she liked still better the evidence that she amused Susan. Her indifferent, not to say irreverent, air toward the sacred traditions and institutions of her class made Susan want to laugh and gasp at once.

"But this is a business matter," said Miss Saunders, when they had reached the salad, "and here we are talking! Mama and Baby and I have talked this thing all over, Susan," she added casually, "and we want to know what you'd think of coming to live with us?"

Susan fixed her eyes upon her as one astounded, not a muscle of her face moved. She never was quite natural with Ella; above the sudden rush of elation and excitement came the quick intuition that Ella would like a sensational reception of her offer. Her look expressed the stunned amazement of one who cannot credit her ears. Ella's laugh showed an amused pleasure.

"Don't look so aghast, child. You don't have to do it!" she said.

Again Susan did the dramatic and acceptable thing, typical of what she must give the Saunders throughout their relationship. Instead of the natural "What on earth are you talking about?" she said slowly, dazedly, her bewildered eyes on Ella's face:

"You're joking---"

"Joking! You'll find the Saunders family no joke, I can promise you that!" Ella said, humorously. And again Susan laughed.

"No, but you see Emily's come home from Fowler's a perfect nervous wreck," explained Miss Ella, "and; she can't be left alone for awhile,--partly because her heart's not good, partly because she gets blue, and partly because, if she hasn't anyone to drive and walk and play tennis with, and so on, she simply mopes from morning until night. She hates Mama's nurse; Mama needs Miss Baker herself anyway, and we've been wondering and wondering how we could get hold of the right person to fill the bill. You'd have a pretty easy time in one way, of course, and do everything the Kid does, and I'll stand right behind you. But don't think it's any snap!"

"Snap!" echoed Susan, starry-eyed, crimson-cheeked. "---But you don't mean that you want ME?"

"I wish you could have seen her; she turned quite pale," Miss Saunders told her mother and sister later. "Really, she was overcome. She said she'd speak to her aunt to-night; I don't imagine there'll be any trouble. She's a nice child. I don't see the use of delay, so I said Monday."

"You were a sweet to think of it," Emily said, gratefully, from the downy wide couch where she was spending the evening.

"Not at all, Kid," Ella answered politely. She yawned, and stared at the alabaster globe of the lamp above Emily's head. A silence fell. The two sisters never had much to talk about, and Mrs. Saunders, dutifully sitting with the invalid, was heavy from dinner, and nearly asleep. Ella yawned again.

"Want some chocolates?" she finally asked.

"Oh, thank you, Ella!"

"I'll send Fannie in with 'em!" Miss Ella stood up, bent her head to study at close range an engraving on the wall, loitered off to her own room. She was rarely at home in the evening and did not know quite what to do with herself.

Susan, meanwhile, walked upon air. She tasted complete happiness for almost the first time in her life; awakened in the morning to blissful reality, instead of the old dreary round, and went to sleep at night smiling at her own happy thoughts. It was all like a pleasant dream!

She resigned from her new position at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's exactly as she resigned in imagination a hundred times. No more drudgery over bills, no more mornings spent in icy, wet shoes, and afternoons heavy with headache. Susan was almost too excited to thank Mr. Brauer for his compliments and regrets.

Parting with Thorny was harder; Susan and she had been through many a hard hour together, had shared a thousand likes and dislikes, had loved and quarreled and been reconciled.

"You're doing an awfully foolish thing, Susan. You'll wish you were back here inside of a month," Thorny prophesied when the last moment came. "Aw, don't you do it, Susan!" she pleaded, with a little real emotion. "Come on into Main Office, and sit next to me. We'll have loads of sport."

"Oh, I've promised!" Susan held out her hand. "Don't forget me!" she said, trying to laugh. Miss Thornton's handsome eyes glistened with tears. With a sudden little impulse they kissed each other for the first time.

Then Susan, a full hour before closing, went down from the lunch-room, and past all the familiar offices; the sadness of change tugging at her heart-strings. She had been here a long time, she had smelled this same odor of scorching rubber, and oils and powders through so many slow afternoons, in gay moods and sad, in moods of rebellion and distaste. She left a part of her girlhood here. The cashier, to whom she went for her check, was all kindly interest, and the young clerks and salesmen stopped to offer her their good wishes. Susan passed the time-clock without punching her number for the first time in three years, and out into the sunny, unfamiliar emptiness of the streets.

At the corner her heart suddenly failed her. She felt as if she could not really go away from these familiar places and people. The warehouses and wholesale houses, the wholesale liquor house with a live eagle magnificently caged in one window, the big stove establishment, with its window full of ranges in shining steel and nickel-plate; these had been her world for so long!

But she kept on her way uptown, and by the time she reached the old library, where Mary Lou, very handsome in her well-brushed suit and dotted veil, with white gloves still odorous of benzine, was waiting, she was almost sure that she was not making a mistake.

Mary Lou was a famous shopper, capable of exhausting any saleswoman for a ten-cent purchase, and proportionately effective when, as to-day, a really considerable sum was to be spent. She regretfully would decline a dozen varieties in handkerchiefs or ribbons, saying with pleasant plaintiveness to the saleswoman: "Perhaps I am hard to please. My mother is an old Southern lady--the Ralstons, you know?--and her linen is, of course, like nothing one can get nowadays! No; I wouldn't care to show my mother this.

"My cousin, of course, only wants this for a little hack hat," she added to Susan's modest suggestion of price to the milliner, and in the White House she consented to Susan's selections with a consoling reminder, "It isn't as if you didn't have your lovely French underwear at home, Sue! These will do very nicely for your rough camping trip!"

Compared to Mary Lou, Susan was a very poor shopper. She was always anxious to please the saleswoman, to buy after a certain amount of looking had been done, for no other reason than that she had caused most of the stock to be displayed.

"I like this, Mary Lou," Susan would murmur nervously. And, as the pompadoured saleswoman turned to take down still another heap of petticoats, Susan would repeat noiselessly, with an urgent nod, "This will do!"

"Wait, now, dear," Mary Lou would return, unperturbed, arresting Susan's hand with a white, well-filled glove. "Wait, dear. If we can't get it here we can get it somewhere else. Yes, let me see those you have there---"

"Thank you, just the same," Susan always murmured uncomfortably, averting her eyes from the saleswoman, as they went away. But the saleswoman, busily rearranging her stock, rarely responded.

To-day they bought, besides the fascinating white things, some tan shoes, and a rough straw hat covered with roses, and two linen skirts, and three linen blouses, and a little dress of dotted lavender lawn. Everything was of the simplest, but Susan had never had so many new things in the course of her life before, and was elated beyond words as one purchase was made after another.

She carried home nearly ten dollars, planning to keep it until the first month's salary should be paid, but Auntie was found, upon their return in the very act of dissuading the dark powers known as the "sewing-machine men" from removing that convenience, and Susan, only too thankful to be in time, gladly let seven dollars fall into the oily palm of the carrier in charge.

"Mary Lou," said she, over her fascinating packages, just before dinner, "here's a funny thing! If I had gone bad, you know, so that I could keep buying nice, pretty, simple things like this, as fast as I needed them, I'd feel better--I mean truly cleaner and more moral--than when I was good!"

"Susan! Why, SUSAN!" Her cousin turned a shocked face from the window where she was carefully pasting newly-washed handkerchiefs, to dry in the night. "Do you remember who you ARE, dear, and don't say dreadful things like that!"

In the next few days Susan pressed her one suit, laundered a score of little ruffles and collars, cleaned her gloves, sewed on buttons and strings generally, and washed her hair. Late on Sunday came the joyful necessity of packing. Mary Lou folded and refolded patiently, Georgie came in with a little hand-embroidered handkerchief-case for Susan's bureau, Susan herself rushed about like a mad-woman, doing almost nothing.

"You'll be back inside the month," said Billy that evening, looking up from Carlyle's "Revolution," to where Susan and Mary Lou were busy with last stitches, at the other side of the dining-room table. "You can't live with the rotten rich any more than I could!"

"Billy, you don't know how awfully conceited you sound when you say a thing like that!"

"Conceited? Oh, all right!" Mr. Oliver accompanied the words with a sound only to be described as a snort, and returned, offended, to his book.

"Conceited, well, maybe I am," he resumed with deadly calm, a moment later. "But there's no conceit in my saying that people like the Saunders can't buffalo ME!"

"You may not see it, but there IS!" persisted Susan.

"You give me a pain, Sue! Do you honestly think they are any better than you are?"

"Of course they're not better," Susan said, heatedly, "if it comes right down to morals and the Commandments! But if I prefer to spend my life among people who have had several generations of culture and refinement and travel and education behind them, it's my own affair! I like nice people, and rich people ARE more refined than poor, and nobody denies it! I may feel sorry for a girl who marries a man on forty a week, and brings up four or five little kids on it, but that doesn't mean I want to do it myself! And I think a man has his nerve to expect it!"

"I didn't make you an offer, you know, Susan," said William pleasantly.

"I didn't mean you!" Susan answered angrily. Then with sudden calm and sweetness, she resumed, busily tearing up and assorting old letters the while, "But now you're trying to make me mad, Billy, and you don't care what you say. The trouble with you," she went on, with sisterly kindness and frankness, "is that you think you are the only person who really ought to get on in the world. You know so much, and study so hard, that you DESERVE to be rich, so that you can pension off every old stupid German laborer at the works who still wants a job when they can get a boy of ten to do his work better than he can! You mope away over there at those cottages, Bill, until you think the only important thing in the world is the price of sausages in proportion to wages. And for all that you pretend to despise people who use decent English, and don't think a bath-tub is a place to store potatoes; I notice that you are pretty anxious to study languages and hear good music and keep up in your reading, yourself! And if that's not cultivation---"

"I never said a word about cultivation!" Billy, who had been apparently deep in his book, looked up to snap angrily. Any allusion to his efforts at self-improvement always touched him in a very sensitive place.

"Why, you did TOO! You said---"

"Oh, I did not! If you're going to talk so much, Sue, you ought to have some faint idea what you're talking about!"

"Very well," Susan said loftily, "if you can't address me like a gentleman, we won't discuss it. I'm not anxious for your opinion, anyway."

A silence. Mr. Oliver read with passionate attention. Susan sighed, sorted her letters, sighed again.

"Billy, do you love me?" she asked winningly, after a pause.

Another silence. Mr. Oliver turned a page.

"Are you sure you've read every word on that page, Bill,--every little word?"

Silence again.

"You know, you began this, Bill," Susan said presently, with childish sweet reproach. "Don't say anything, Bill; I can't ask that! But if you still love me, just smile!"

By some miracle, Billy preserved his scowl.

"Not even a glimmer!" Susan said, despondently. "I'll tell you, Bill," she added, gushingly. "Just turn a page, and I'll take it for a sign of love!" She clasped her hands, and watched him breathlessly.

Mr. Oliver reached the point where the page must be turned. He moved his eyes stealthily upward.

"Oh, no you don't! No going back!" exulted Susan. She jumped up, grabbed the book, encircled his head with her arms, kissed her own hand vivaciously and made a mad rush for the stairs. Mr. Oliver caught her half-way up the flight, with more energy than dignity, and got his book back by doubling her little finger over with an increasing pressure until Susan managed to drop the volume to the hall below.

"Bill, you beast! You've broken my finger!" Susan, breathless and dishevelled, sat beside him on the narrow stair, and tenderly worked the injured member, "It hurts!"

"Let Papa tiss it!"

"You try it once!"

"Sh-sh! Ma says not so much noise!" hissed Mary Lou, from the floor above, where she had been summoned some hours ago, "Alfie's just dropped off!"

On Monday a new life began for Susan Brown. She stepped from the dingy boarding-house in Fulton Street straight into one of the most beautiful homes in the state, and, so full were the first weeks, that she had no time for homesickness, no time for letters, no time for anything but the briefest of scribbled notes to the devoted women she left behind her.

Emily Saunders herself met the newcomer at the station, looking very unlike an invalid,--looking indeed particularly well and happy, if rather pale, as she was always pale, and a little too fat after the idle and carefully-fed experience in the hospital. Susan peeped into Miss Ella's big room, as they went upstairs. Ella was stretched comfortably on a wide, flowery couch, reading as her maid rubbed her loosened hair with some fragrant toilet water, and munching chocolates.

"Hello, Susan Brown!" she called out. "Come in and see me some time before dinner,--I'm going out!"

Ella's room was on the second floor, where were also Mrs. Saunders' room, various guest-rooms, an upstairs music-room and a sitting-room. But Emily's apartment, as well as her brother's, were on the third floor, and Susan's delightful room opened from Emily's. The girls had a bathroom as large as a small bedroom, and a splendid deep balcony shaded by gay awnings was accessible only to them. Potted geraniums made this big outdoor room gay, a thick Indian rug was on the floor, there were deep wicker chairs, and two beds, in day-covers of green linen, with thick brightly colored Pueblo blankets folded across them. The girls were to spend all their days in the open air, and sleep out here whenever possible for Emily's sake.

While Emily bathed, before dinner, Susan hung over the balcony rail, feeling deliciously fresh and rested, after her own bath, and eager not to miss a moment of the lovely summer afternoon. Just below her, the garden was full of roses. There were other flowers, too, carnations and velvety Shasta daisies, there were snowballs that tumbled in great heaps of white on the smooth lawn, and syringas and wall-flowers and corn-flowers, far over by the vine-embroidered stone wall, and late Persian lilacs, and hydrangeas, in every lovely tone between pink and lavender, filled a long line of great wooden Japanese tubs, leading, by a walk of sunken stones, to the black wooden gates of the Japanese garden. But the roses reigned supreme--beautiful standard roses, with not a shriveled leaf to mar the perfection of blossoms and foliage; San Rafael roses, flinging out wherever they could find a support, great sprays of pinkish-yellow and yellowish-pink, and gold and cream and apricot-colored blossoms. There were moss roses, sheathed in dark-green film, glowing Jacqueminot and Papagontier and La France roses, white roses, and yellow roses,--Susan felt as if she could intoxicate herself upon the sweetness and the beauty of them all.

The carriage road swept in a great curve from the gate, its smooth pebbled surface crossed sharply at regular intervals by the clean-cut shadows of the elm trees. Here and there on the lawns a sprinkler flung out its whirling circles of spray, and while Susan watched a gardener came into view, picked up a few fallen leaves from the roadway and crushed them together in his hand.

On the newly-watered stretch of road that showed beyond the wide gates, carriages and carts, and an occasional motor-car were passing, flinging wheeling shadows beside them on the road, and driven by girls in light gowns and wide hats or by grooms in livery. Presently one very smart, high English cart stopped, and Mr. Kenneth Saunders got down from it, and stood whipping his riding-boot with his crap and chatting with the young woman who had driven him home. Susan thought him a very attractive young man, with his quiet, almost melancholy expression, and his air of knowing exactly the correct thing to do, whenever he cared to exert himself at all.

She watched him now with interest, not afraid of detection, for a small head, on a third story balcony, would be quite lost among the details of the immense facade of the house. He walked toward the stable, and whistled what was evidently a signal, for three romping collies came running to meet him, and were leaping and tumbling about him as he went around the curve of the drive and out of sight. Then Susan went back to her watching and dreaming, finding something new to admire and delight in every moment. The details confused her, but she found the whole charming.

Indeed, she had been in San Rafael for several weeks before she found the view of the big house from the garden anything but bewildering. With its wings and ells, its flowered balconies and French windows, its tiled pergola and flower-lined Spanish court, it stood a monument to the extraordinary powers of the modern architect; nothing was incongruous, nothing offended. Susan liked to decide into which room this casement window fitted, or why she never noticed that particular angle of wall from the inside. It was always a disappointment to discover that some of the quaintest of the windows lighted only linen-closets or perhaps useless little spaces under a sharp angle of roof, and that many of the most attractive lines outside were so cut and divided as to be unrecognizable within.

It was a modern house, with beautifully-appointed closets tucked in wherever there was an inch to spare, with sheets of mirror set in the bedroom doors, with every conceivable convenience in nickel-plate glittering in its bathrooms, and wall-telephones everywhere.

The girl's adjectives were exhausted long before she had seen half of it. She tried to make her own personal choice between the dull, soft, dark colors and carved Circassian walnut furniture in the dining-room, and the sharp contrast of the reception hall, where the sunlight flooded a rosy-latticed paper, an old white Colonial mantel and fiddle-backed chairs, and struck dazzling gleams from the brass fire-dogs and irons. The drawing-room had its own charm; the largest room in the house, it had French windows on three sides, each one giving a separate and exquisite glimpse of lawns and garden beyond. Upon its dark and shining floor were stretched a score of silky Persian rugs, roses mirrored themselves in polished mahogany, and here and there were priceless bits of carved ivory, wonderful strips of embroidered Chinese silks, miniatures, and exquisite books. Four or five great lamps glowing under mosaic shades made the place lovely at night, but in the heat of a summer day, shaded, empty, deliciously airy and cool, Susan thought it at its loveliest. At night heavy brocaded curtains were drawn across the windows, and a wood fire crackled in the fireplace, in a setting of creamy tiles. There was a small grand-piano in this room, a larger piano in the big, empty reception room on the other side of the house, Susan and Emily had a small upright for their own use, and there were one or two more in other parts of the house.

Everywhere was exquisite order, exquisite peace. Lightfooted maids came and went noiselessly, to brush up a fallen daisy petal, or straighten a rug. Not the faintest streak of dust ever lay across the shining surface of the piano, not the tiniest cloud ever filmed the clear depths of the mirrors. A slim Chinese houseboy, in plum-color and pale blue, with his queue neatly coiled, and his handsome, smooth young face always smiling, padded softly to and fro all day long, in his thick-soled straw slippers, with letters and magazines, parcels and messages and telegrams.

"Lizzie-Carrie--one of you girls take some sweet-peas up to my room," Ella would say at breakfasttime, hardly glancing up from her mail. And an hour later Susan, looking into Miss Saunders' apartment to see if she still expected Emily to accompany her to the Holmes wedding, or to say that Mrs. Saunders wanted to see her eldest daughter, would notice a bowl of the delicately-tinted blossoms on the desk, and another on the table.

The girls' beds were always made, when they went upstairs to freshen themselves for luncheon; tumbled linen and used towels had been spirited away, fresh blotters were on the desk, fresh flowers everywhere, windows open, books back on their shelves, clothes stretched on hangers in the closets; everything immaculately clean and crisp.

It was apparently impossible to interrupt the quiet running of the domestic machinery. If Susan and Emily left wet skirts and umbrellas and muddy overshoes in one of the side hallways, on returning from a walk, it was only a question of a few hours, before the skirts, dried and brushed and pressed, the umbrellas neatly furled, and the overshoes, as shining as ever, were back in their places. If the girls wanted tea at five o'clock, sandwiches of every known, and frequently of new types, little cakes and big, hot bouillons, or a salad, or even a broiled bird were to be had for the asking. It was no trouble, the tray simply appeared and Chow Yew or Carrie served them as if it were a real pleasure to do so.

Whoever ordered for the Saunders kitchen--Susan suspected that it was a large amiable person in black whom she sometimes met in the halls, a person easily mistaken for a caller or a visiting aunt, but respectful in manner, and with a habit of running her tongue over her teeth when not speaking that vaguely suggested immense capability--did it on a very large scale indeed. It was not, as in poor Auntie's case, a question of selecting stewed tomatoes as a suitable vegetable for dinner, and penciling on a list, under "five pounds round steak," "three cans tomatoes." In the Saunders' house there was always to be had whatever choicest was in season,--crabs or ducks, broilers or trout, asparagus an inch in diameter, forced strawberries and peaches, even pomegranates and alligator pears and icy, enormous grapefruit--new in those days--and melons and nectarines. There were crocks and boxes of cakes, a whole ice-chest just for cream and milk, another for cheeses and olives and pickles and salad-dressings. Susan had seen the cook's great store-room, lined with jars and pots and crocks, tins and glasses and boxes of delicious things to eat, brought from all over the world for the moment when some member of the Saunders family fancied Russian caviar, or Chinese ginger, or Italian cheese.

Other people's brains and bodies were constantly and pleasantly at work to spare the Saunders any effort whatever, and as Susan, taken in by the family, and made to feel absolutely one of them, soon found herself taking hourly service quite as a matter of course, as though it was nothing new to her luxury-loving little person. If she hunted for a book, in a dark corner of the library, she did not turn her head to see which maid touched the button that caused a group of lights, just above her, to spring suddenly into soft bloom, although her "Thank you!" never failed; and when she and Emily came in late for tea in the drawing-room, she piled her wraps into some attendant's arms without so much as a glance. Yet Susan personally knew and liked all the maids, and they liked her, perhaps because her unaffected enjoyment of this new life and her constant allusions to the deprivations of the old days made them feel her a little akin to themselves.

With Emily and her mother Susan was soon quite at home; with Ella her shyness lasted longer; and toward a friendship with Kenneth Saunders she seemed to make no progress whatever. Kenneth addressed a few kindly, unsmiling remarks to his mother during the course of the few meals he had at home; he was always gentle with her, and deeply resented anything like a lack of respect toward her on the others' parts. He entirely ignored Emily, and if he held any conversation at all with the spirited Ella, it was very apt to take the form of a controversy, Ella trying to persuade him to attend some dance or dinner, or Kenneth holding up some especial friend of hers for scornful criticism. Sometimes he spoke to Miss Baker, but not often. Kenneth's friendships were mysteries; his family had not the most remote idea where he went when he went out every evening, or where he was when he did not come home. Sometimes he spoke out in sudden, half-amused praise of some debutante, she was a "funny little devil," or "she was the decentest kid in this year's crop," and perhaps he would follow up this remark with a call or two upon the admired young girl, and Ella would begin to tease him about her. But the debutante and her mother immediately lost their heads at this point, called on the Saunders, gushed at Ella and Emily, and tried to lure Kenneth into coming to little home dinners or small theater parties. This always ended matters abruptly, and Kenneth returned to his old ways.

His valet, a mournful, silent fellow named Mycroft, led rather a curious life, reporting at his master's room in the morning not before ten, and usually not in bed before two or three o'clock the next morning. About once a fortnight, sometimes oftener, as Susan had known for a long time, a subtle change came over Kenneth. His mother saw it and grieved; Ella saw it and scolded everyone but him. It cast a darkness over the whole house. Kenneth, always influenced more or less by what he drank, was going down, down, down, through one dark stage after another, into the terrible state whose horrors he dreaded with the rest of them. He was moping for a day or two, absent from meals, understood to be "not well, and in bed." Then Mycroft would agitatedly report that Mr. Kenneth was gone; there would be tears and Ella's sharpest voice in Mrs. Saunders' room, pallor and ill-temper on Emily's part, hushed distress all about until Kenneth was brought home from some place unknown by Mycroft, in a cab, and gotten noisily upstairs and visited three times a day by the doctor. The doctor would come downstairs to reassure Mrs. Saunders; Mycroft would run up and down a hundred times a day to wait upon the invalid. Perhaps once during his convalescence his mother would go up to see him for a little while, to sit, constrained and tender and unhappy, beside his bed, wishing perhaps that there was one thing in the wide world in which she and her son had a common interest.

She was a lonesome, nervous little lady, and at these times only a little more fidgety than ever. Sometimes she cried because of Kenneth, in her room at night, and Ella braced her with kindly, unsympathetic, well-meant, uncomprehending remarks, and made very light of his weakness; but Emily walked her own room nervously, raging at Ken for being such a beast, and Mama for being such a fool.

Susan, coming downstairs in the morning sunlight, after an evening of horror and strain, when the lamps had burned for four hours in an empty drawing-room, and she and Emily, early in their rooms, had listened alternately to the shouting and thumping that went on in Kenneth's room and the consoling murmur of Ella's voice downstairs, could hardly believe that life was being so placidly continued; that silence and sweetness still held sway downstairs; that Ella, in a foamy robe of lace and ribbon, at the head of the table, could be so cheerfully absorbed in the day's news and the Maryland biscuit, and that Mrs. Saunders, pottering over her begonias, could show so radiant a face over the blossoming of the double white, that Emily, at the telephone could laugh and joke.

She was a great favorite with them all now, this sunny, pretty Susan; even Miss Baker, the mouse-like little trained nurse, beamed for her, and congratulated her upon her influence over every separate member of the family. Miss Baker had held her place for ten years and cherished no illusions concerning the Saunders.

Susan had lost some few illusions herself, but not many. She was too happy to be critical, and it was her nature to like people for no better reason than that they liked her.

Emily Saunders, with whom she had most to do, who was indeed her daily and hourly companion, was at this time about twenty-six years old, and so two years older than Susan, although hers was a smooth-skinned, baby-like type, and she looked quite as young as her companion. She had had a very lonely, if extraordinarily luxurious childhood, and a sickly girlhood, whose principal events were minor operations on eyes or ears, and experiments in diets and treatments, miserable sieges with oculists and dentists and stomach-pumps. She had been sent to several schools, but ill-health made her progress a great mortification, and finally she had been given a governess, Miss Roche, a fussily-dressed, effusive Frenchwoman, who later traveled with her. Emily's only accounts of her European experience dealt with Miss Roche's masterly treatment of ungracious officials, her faculty for making Emily comfortable at short notice and at any cost or place, and her ability to bring certain small possessions through the custom-house without unnecessary revelations. And at eighteen the younger Miss Saunders had been given a large coming-out tea, had joined the two most exclusive Cotillions,--the Junior and the Browning--had lunched and dined and gone to the play with the other debutantes, and had had, according to the admiring and attentive press, a glorious first season.

As a matter of fact, however, it had been a most unhappy time for the person most concerned. Emily was not a social success. Not more than one debutante in ten is; Emily was one of the nine. Before every dance her hopes rose irrepressibly, as she gazed at her dainty little person in the mirror, studied her exquisite frock and her pearls, and the smooth perfection of the hair so demurely coiled under its wreath of rosebuds, or band of shining satin. To-night, she would be a success, to-night she would wipe out old scores. This mood lasted until she was actually in the dressing-room, in a whirl of arriving girls. Then her courage began to ebb. She would watch them, as the maid took off her carriage shoes; pleasantly take her turn at the mirror, exchange a shy, half-absent greeting with the few she knew; wish, with all her heart, that she dared put herself under their protection. Just a few were cool enough to enter the big ballroom in a gale of mirth, surrender themselves for a few moments of gallant dispute to the clustered young men at the door, and be ready to dance without a care, the first dozen dances promised, and nothing to do but be happy.

But Emily drifted out shyly, fussed carefully with fans or glove-clasps while looking furtively about for possible partners, returned in a panic to the dressing-room on a pretense of exploring a slipper-bag for a handkerchief, and made a fresh start. Perhaps this time some group of chattering and laughing girls and men would be too close to the door for her comfort; not invited to join them, Emily would feel obliged to drift on across the floor to greet some gracious older woman, and sink into a chair, smiling at compliments, and covering a defeat with a regretful:

"I'm really only looking on to-night. Mama worries so if I overdo."

And here she would feel out of the current indeed, hopelessly shelved. Who would come looking for a partner in this quiet corner, next to old Mrs. Chickering whose two granddaughters were in the very center of the merry group at the door? Emily would smilingly rise, and go back to the dressing-room again.

The famous Browning dances, in their beginning, a generation earlier, had been much smaller, less formal and more intimate than they were now. The sixty or seventy young persons who went to those first dances were all close friends, in a simpler social structure, and a less self-conscious day. They had been the most delightful events in Ella's girlhood, and she felt it to be entirely Emily's fault that Emily did not find them equally enchanting.

"But I don't know the people who go to them very well!" Emily would say, half-confidential, half-resentful. Ella always met this argument with high scorn.

"Oh, Baby, if you'd stop whining and fretting, and just get in and enjoy yourself once!" Ella would answer impatiently. "You don't have to know a man intimately to dance with him, I should hope! Just GO, and have a good time! My Lord, the way we all used to laugh and talk and rush about, you'd have thought we were a pack of children!"

Ella and her contemporaries always went to these balls even now, the magnificent matrons of forty showing rounded arms and beautiful bosoms, and gowns far more beautiful than those the girls wore. Jealousy and rivalry and heartaches all forgot, they sat laughing and talking in groups, clustered along the walls, or played six-handed euchre in the adjoining card-room, and had, if the truth had been known, a far better time than the girls they chaperoned.

After a winter or two, however, Emily stopped going, except perhaps once in a season. She began to devote a great deal of her thought and her conversation to her health, and was not long in finding doctors and nurses to whom the subject was equally fascinating. Emily had a favorite hospital, and was frequently ordered there for experiences that touched more deeply the chords of her nature than anything else ever did in her life. No one at home ever paid her such flattering devotion as did the sweet-faced, low-voiced nurses, and the doctor--whose coming, twice a day, was such an event. The doctor was a model husband and father, his beautiful wife a woman whom Ella knew and liked very well, but Emily had her nickname for him, and her little presents for him, and many a small, innocuous joke between herself and the doctor made her feel herself close to him. Emily was always glad when she could turn from her mother's mournful solicitude, Kenneth's snubs and Ella's imperativeness, and the humiliating contact with a society that could get along very well without her, to the universal welcome she had from all her friends in Mrs. Fowler's hospital.

To Susan the thought of hypodermics, anesthetics, antisepsis and clinic thermometers, charts and diets, was utterly mysterious and abhorrent, and her healthy distaste for them amused Emily, and gave Emily a good reason for discussing and defending them.

Susan's part was to listen and agree, listen and agree, listen and agree, on this as on all topics. She had not been long at "High Gardens" before Emily, in a series of impulsive gushes of confidence, had volunteered the information that Ella was so jealous and selfish and heartless that she was just about breaking Mama's heart, never happy unless she was poisoning somebody's mind against Emily, and never willing to let Emily keep a single friend, or do anything she wanted to do.

"So now you see why I am always so dignified and quiet with Ella," said Emily, in the still midnight when all this was revealed. "That's the ONE thing that makes her mad!"

"I can't believe it!" said Susan, aching for sleep, and yawning under cover of the dark.

"I keep up for Mama's sake," Emily said. "But haven't you noticed how Ella tries to get you away from me? You MUST have! Why, the very first night you were here, she called out, 'Come in and see me on your way down!' Don't you remember? And yesterday, when I wasn't dressed and she wanted you to go driving, after dinner! Don't you remember?"

"Yes, but---" Susan began. She could dismiss this morbid fancy with a few vigorous protests, with a hearty laugh. But she would probably dismiss herself from the Saunders' employ, as well, if she pursued any such bracing policy.

"You poor kid, it's pretty hard on you!" she said, admiringly. And for half an hour she was not allowed to go to sleep.

Susan began to dread these midnight talks. The moon rose, flooded the sleeping porch, mounted higher. The watch under Susan's pillow ticked past one o'clock, past half-past one--

"Emily, you know really Ella is awfully proud of you," she was finally saying, "and, as for trying to influence your mother, you can't blame her. You're your mother's favorite--anyone can see that--and I do think she feels--"

"Well, that's true!" Emily said, mollified. A silence followed. Susan began to settle her head by imperceptible degrees into the pillow; perhaps Emily was dropping off! Silence--silence--heavenly delicious silence. What a wonderful thing this sleeping porch was, Susan thought drowsily, and how delicious the country night--

"Susan, why do you suppose I am Mama's favorite?" Emily's clear, wide-awake voice would pursue, with pensive interest.

Or, "Susan, when did you begin to like me?" she would question, on their drives. "Susan, when I was looking straight up into Mrs. Carter's face,--you know the way I always do!--she laughed at me, and said I was a madcap monkey? Why did she say that?" Emily would pout, and wrinkle her brows in pretty, childish doubt. "I'm not a monkey, and _I_ don't think I'm a madcap? Do you?"

"You're different, you see, Emily. You're not in the least like anybody else!" Susan would say.

"But WHY am I different?" And if it was possible, Emily might even come over to sit on the arm of Susan's chair, or drop on her knees and encircle Susan's waist with her arms.

"Well, in the first place you're terribly original, Emily, and you always say right out what you mean--" Susan would begin.

With Ella, when she grew to know her well, Susan was really happier. She was too honest to enjoy the part she must always play with Emily, yet too practically aware of the advantages of this new position, to risk it by frankness, and eventually follow the other companions, the governesses and trained nurses who had preceded her. Emily characterized these departed ladies as "beasts," and still flushed a deep resentful red when she mentioned certain ones among them.

Susan found in Ella, in the first place, far more to admire than she could in Emily. Ella's very size made for a sort of bigness in character. She looked her two hundred and thirty pounds, but she looked handsome, glowing and comfortable as well. Everything she wore was loose and dashing in effect; she was a fanatic about cleanliness and freshness, and always looked as if freshly bathed and brushed and dressed. Ella never put on a garment, other than a gown or wrap, twice. Sometimes a little heap of snowy, ribboned underwear was carried away from her rooms three or four times a day.

She was dictatorial and impatient and exacting, but she was witty and good-natured, too, and so extremely popular with men and women of her own age that she could have dined out three times a night. Ella was fondly nicknamed "Mike" by her own contemporaries, and was always in demand for dinners and lunch parties and card parties. She was beloved by the younger set, too. Susan thought her big-sisterly interest in the debutantes very charming to see and, when she had time to remember her sister's little companion now and then, she would carry Susan off for a drive, or send for her when she was alone for tea, and the two laughed a great deal together. Susan could honestly admire here, and Ella liked her admiration.

Miss Saunders believed herself to be a member of the most distinguished American family in existence, and her place to be undisputed as queen of the most exclusive little social circle in the world. She knew enough of the social sets of London and Washington and New York society to allude to them casually and intimately, and she told Susan that no other city could boast of more charming persons than those who composed her own particular set in San Francisco. Ella never spoke of "society" without intense gravity; nothing in life interested her so much as the question of belonging or not belonging to it. To her personally, of course, it meant nothing; she had been born inside the charmed ring, and would die there; but the status of other persons filled her with concern. She was very angry when her mother or Emily showed any wavering in this all-important matter.

"Well, what did you have to SEE her for, Mama?" Ella would irritably demand, when her autocratic "Who'd you see to-day? What'd you do?" had drawn from her mother the name of some caller.

"Why, dearie, I happened to be right there. I was just crossing the porch when they drove up!" Mrs. Saunders would timidly submit.

"Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord! Mama, you make me crazy!" Ella would drop her hands, fling her head back, gaze despairingly at her mother. "That was your chance to snub her, Mama! Why didn't you have Chow Yew say that you were out?"

"But, dearie, she seemed a real sweet little thing!"

"Sweet little--! You'll have me CRAZY! Sweet little nothing--just because she married Gordon Jones, and the St. Johns have taken her up, she thinks she can get into society! And anyway, I wouldn't have given Rosie St. John the satisfaction for a thousand dollars! Did you ask her to your bridge lunch?"

"Ella, dear, it is MY lunch," her mother might remind her, with dignity.

"Mama, did you ask that woman here to play cards?"

"Well, dearie, she happened to say--"

"Oh, happened to say--!" A sudden calm would fall upon Miss Ella, the calm of desperate decision. The subject would be dropped for the time, but she would bring a written note to the lunch table.

"Listen to this, Mama; I can change it if you don't like it," Ella would begin, kindly, and proceed to read it.

HIGH GARDENS. MY DEAR MRS. JONES:

Mother has asked me to write you that her little bridge lunch for Friday, the third, must be given up because of the dangerous illness of a close personal friend. She hopes that it is only a pleasure deferred, and will write you herself when less anxious and depressed. Cordially yours,

ELLA CORNWALLIS SAUNDERS.

"But, Ella, dear," the mother would protest, "there are others coming--"

"Leave the others to me! I'll telephone and make it the day before." Ella would seal and dispatch the note, and be inclined to feel generously tender and considerate of her mother for the rest of the day.

Ella was at home for a few moments, almost every day; but she did not dine at home more than once or twice in a fortnight. But she was always there for the family's occasional formal dinner party in which events Susan refused very sensibly to take part. She and Miss Baker dined early and most harmoniously in the breakfast-room, and were free to make themselves useful to the ladies of the house afterward. Ella would be magnificent in spangled cloth-of-gold; Emily very piquante in demure and drooping white, embroidered exquisitely with tiny French blossoms in color; Mrs. Saunders rustling in black lace and lavender silk, as the three went downstairs at eight o'clock. Across the wide hall below would stream the hooded women and the men in great-coats, silk hats in hand. Ella did not leave the drawing-room to meet them, as on less formal occasions, but a great chattering and laughing would break out as they went in.

Susan, sitting back on her knees in the upper hall, to peer through the railing at the scene below, to Miss Baker's intense amusement, could admire everything but the men guests. They were either more or less attractive and married, thought Susan, or very young, very old, or very uninteresting bachelors. Red-faced, eighteen-year-old boys, laughing nervously, and stumbling over their pumps, shared the honors with cackling little fifty-year-old gallants. It could only be said that they were males, and that Ella would have cheerfully consigned her mother to bed with a bad headache rather than have had one too few of them to evenly balance the number of women. The members of the family knew what patience and effort were required, what writing and telephoning, before the right number was acquired.

The first personal word that Kenneth Saunders ever spoke to his sister's companion was when, running downstairs, on the occasion of one of these dinners, he came upon her, crouched in her outlook, and thoroughly enjoying herself.

"Good God!" said Kenneth, recoiling.

"Sh-sh--it's only me--I'm watching 'em!" Susan whispered, even laying her hand upon the immaculate young gentleman's arm in her anxiety to quiet him.

"Why, Lord; why doesn't Ella count you in on these things?" he demanded, gruffly. "Next time I'll tell her--"

"If you do, I'll never speak to you again!" Susan threatened, her merry face close to his in the dark. "I wouldn't be down there for a farm!"

"What do you do, just watch 'em?" Kenneth asked sociably, hanging over the railing beside her.

"It's lots of fun!" Susan said, in a whisper. "Who's that?"

"That's that Bacon girl--isn't she the limit!" Kenneth whispered back. "Lord," he added regretfully, "I'd much rather stay up here than go down! What Ella wants to round up a gang like this for--"

And, sadly speculating, the son of the house ran downstairs, and Susan, congratulating herself, returned to her watching.

Indeed, after a month or two in her new position, she thought an evening to herself a luxury to be enormously enjoyed. It was on such an occasion that Susan got the full benefit of the bathroom, the luxuriously lighted and appointed dressing-table, the porch with its view of a dozen gardens drenched in heavenly moonlight. At other times Emily's conversation distracted her and interrupted her at her toilet. Emily gave her no instant alone.

Emily came up very late after the dinners to yawn and gossip with Susan while Gerda, her mother's staid middle-aged maid, drew off her slippers and stockings, and reverently lifted the dainty gown safely to its closet. Susan always got up, rolled herself in a wrap, and listened to the account of the dinner; Emily was rather critical of the women, but viewed the men more romantically. She repeated their compliments, exulting that they had been paid her "under Ella's very nose," or while "Mama was staring right at us." It pleased Emily to imagine a great many love-affairs for herself, and to feel that they must all be made as mysterious and kept as secret as possible.

It was the old story, thought Susan, listening sympathetically, and in utter disbelief, to these recitals. Mary Lou and Georgie were not alone in claiming vague and mythical love-affairs; Emily even carried them to the point of indicating old bundles of letters in her desk as "from Bob Brock--tell you all about that some time!" or alluding to some youth who had gone away, left that part of the country entirely for her sake, some years ago. And even Georgie would not have taken as seriously as Emily did the least accidental exchange of courtesies with the eligible male. If the two girls, wasting a morning in the shops in town, happened to meet some hurrying young man in the street, the color rushed into Emily's face, and she alluded to the incident a dozen times during the course of the day. Like most girls, she had a special manner for men, a rather audacious and attractive manner, Susan thought. The conversation was never anything but gay and frivolous and casual. It always pleased Emily when such a meeting occurred.

"Did you notice that Peyton Hamilton leaned over and said something to me very quickly, in a low voice, this morning?" Emily would ask, later, suddenly looking mischievous and penitent at once.

"Oh, ho! That's what you do when I'm not noticing!" Susan would upbraid her.

"He asked me if he could call," Emily would say, yawning, "but I told him I didn't like him well enough for that!"

Susan was astonished to find herself generally accepted because of her association with Emily Saunders. She had always appreciated the difficulty of entering the inner circle of society with insufficient credentials. Now she learned how simple the whole thing was when the right person or persons assumed the responsibility. Girls whom years ago she had rather fancied to be "snobs" and "stuck-up" proved very gracious, very informal and jolly, at closer view; even the most prominent matrons began to call her "child" and "you little Susan Brown, you!" and show her small kindnesses.

Susan took them at exactly their own valuation, revered those women who, like Ella, were supreme; watched curiously others a little less sure of their standing; and pitied and smiled at the struggles of the third group, who took rebuffs and humiliations smilingly, and fell only to rise and climb again. Susan knew that the Thayers, the Chickerings and Chaunceys and Coughs, the Saunders and the St. Johns, and Dolly Ripley, the great heiress, were really secure, nothing could shake them from their proud eminence. It gave her a little satisfaction to put the Baxters and Peter Coleman decidedly a step below; even lovely Isabel Wallace and the Carters and the Geralds, while ornamenting the very nicest set, were not quite the social authorities that the first-named families were. And several lower grades passed before one came to Connie Fox and her type, poor, pushing, ambitious, watching every chance to score even the tiniest progress toward the goal of social recognition. Connie Fox and her mother were a curious study to Susan, who, far more secure for the time being than they were, watched them with deep interest. The husband and father was an insurance broker, whose very modest income might have comfortably supported a quiet country home, and one maid, and eventually have been stretched to afford the daughter and only child a college education or a trousseau as circumstances decreed. As it was, a little house on Broadway was maintained with every appearance of luxury, a capped-and-aproned maid backed before guests through the tiny hall; Connie's vivacity covered the long wait for the luncheons that an irate Chinese cook, whose wages were perpetually in arrears, served when it pleased him to do so. Mrs. Fox bought prizes for Connie's gay little card-parties with the rent money, and retired with a headache immediately after tearfully informing the harassed breadwinner of the fact. She ironed Connie's gowns, bullied her little dressmaker, cried and made empty promises to her milliner, cut her old friends, telephoned her husband at six o'clock that, as "the girls" had not gone yet, perhaps he had better have a bite of dinner downtown. She gushed and beamed on Connie's friends, cultivated those she could reach assiduously, and never dreamed that a great many people were watching her with amusement when she worked her way about a room to squeeze herself in next to some social potentate.

She had her reward when the mail brought Constance the coveted dance-cards; when she saw her name in the society columns of the newspapers, and was able to announce carelessly that that lucky girlie of hers was really going to Honolulu with the Cyrus Holmes. Dolly Ripley, the heiress, had taken a sudden fancy to Connie, some two years before Susan met her, and this alone was enough to reward Mrs. Fox for all the privations, snubs and humiliations she had suffered since the years when she curled Connie's straight hair on a stick, nearly blinded herself tucking and embroidering her little dresses, and finished up the week's ironing herself so that her one maid could escort Connie to an exclusive little dancing-class.

Susan saw Connie now and then, and met the mother and daughter on a certain autumn Sunday when Ella had chaperoned the two younger girls to a luncheon at the Burlingame club-house. They had spent the night before with a friend of Ella's, whose lovely country home was but a few minutes' walk from the club, and Susan was elated with the glorious conviction that she had added to the gaiety of the party, and that through her even Emily was having a really enjoyable time. She met a great many distinguished persons to-day, the golf and polo players, the great Eastern actress who was the center of a group of adoring males, and was being entertained by the oldest and most capable of dowagers, and Dolly Ripley, a lean, eager, round-shouldered, rowdyish little person, talking as a professional breeder might talk of her dogs and horses, and shadowed by Connie Fox. Susan was so filled with the excitement of the occasion, the beauty of the day, the delightful club and its delightful guests, that she was able to speak to Miss Dolly Ripley quite as if she also had inherited some ten millions of dollars, and owned the most expensive, if not the handsomest, home in the state.

"That was so like dear Dolly!" said Mrs. Fox later, coming up behind Susan on the porch, and slipping an arm girlishly about her waist.

"What was?" asked Susan, after greetings.

"Why, to ask what your first name was, and say that as she hated the name of Brown, she was going to call you Susan!" said Mrs. Fox sweetly. "Don't you find her very dear and simple?"

"Why, I just met her--" Susan said, disliking the arm about her waist, and finding Mrs. Fox's interest in her opinion of Dolly Ripley quite transparent.

"Ah, I know her so well!" Mrs. Fox added, with a happy sigh. "Always bright and interested when she meets people. But I scold her--yes, I do!--for giving people a false impression. I say, 'Dolly,'--I've known her so long, you know!--'Dolly, dear, people might easily think you meant some of these impulsive things you say, dear, whereas your friends, who know you really well, know that it's just your little manner, and that you'll have forgotten all about it to-morrow!' I don't mean YOU, Miss Brown," Mrs. Fox interrupted herself to say hastily. "Far from it!----Now, my dear, tell me that you know I didn't mean you!"

"I understand perfectly," Susan said graciously. And she knew that at last she really did. Mrs. Fox was fluttering like some poor bird that sees danger near its young. She couldn't have anyone else, especially this insignificant little Miss Brown, who seemed to be making rather an impression everywhere, jeopardize Connie's intimacy with Dolly Ripley, without using such poor and obvious little weapons as lay at her command to prevent it.

Standing on the porch of the Burlingame Club, and staring out across the gracious slopes of the landscape, Susan had an exhilarated sense of being among the players of this fascinating game at last. She must play it alone, to be sure, but far better alone than assisted as Connie Fox was assisted. It was an immense advantage to be expected to accompany Emily everywhere; it made a snub practically impossible, while heightening the compliment when she was asked anywhere without Emily. Susan was always willing to entertain a difficult guest, to play cards or not to play with apparently equal enjoyment--more desirable than either, she was "fun," and the more she was laughed at, the funnier she grew.

"And you'll be there with Emily, of course, Miss Brown," said the different hostess graciously. "Emily, you're going to bring Susan Brown, you know!--I'm telephoning, Miss Brown, because I'm afraid my note didn't make it clear that we want you, too!"

Emily's well-known eccentricity did not make Susan the less popular; even though she was personally involved in it.

"Oh, I wrote you a note for Emily this morning, Mrs. Willis," Susan would say, at the club, "she's feeling wretchedly to-day, and she wants to be excused from your luncheon to-morrow!"

"Oh?" The matron addressed would eye the messenger with kindly sharpness. "What's the matter--very sick?"

"We-ell, not dying!" A dimple would betray the companion's demureness.

"Not dying? No, I suppose not! Well, you tell Emily that she's a silly, selfish little cat, or words to that effect!"

"I'll choose words to that effect," Susan would assure the speaker, smilingly.

"You couldn't come, anyway, I suppose?"

"Oh, no, Mrs. Willis! Thank you so much!"

"No, of course not." The matron would bite her lips in momentary irritation, and, when they parted, the cause of that pretty, appreciative, amusing little companion of Emily Saunders would be appreciably strengthened.

One winter morning Emily tossed a square, large envelope across the breakfast table toward her companion.

"Sue, that looks like a Browning invitation! What do you bet that he's sent you a card for the dances!"

"He couldn't!" gasped Susan, snatching it up, while her eyes danced, and the radiant color flooded her face. Her hand actually shook when she tore the envelope open, and as the engraved card made its appearance, Susan's expression might have been that of Cinderella eyeing her coach-and-four.

For Browning--founder of the cotillion club, and still manager of the four or five winter dances--was the one unquestioned, irrefutable, omnipotent social authority of San Francisco. To go to the "Brownings" was to have arrived socially; no other distinction was equivalent, because there was absolutely no other standard of judgment. Very high up, indeed, in the social scale must be the woman who could resist the temptation to stick her card to the Brownings in her mirror frame, where the eyes of her women friends must inevitably fall upon it, and yearly hundreds of matrons tossed through sleepless nights, all through the late summer and the fall, hoping against hope, despairing, hoping again, that the magic card might really be delivered some day in early December, and her debutante daughter's social position be placed beyond criticism once more. Only perhaps one hundred persons out of "Brownie's" four hundred guests could be sure of the privilege. The others must suffer and wait.

Browning himself, a harassed, overworked, kindly gentleman, whose management of the big dances brought him nothing but responsibility and annoyance, threatened yearly to resign from his post, and yearly was dragged back into the work, fussing for hours with his secretary over the list, before he could personally give it to the hungrily waiting reporters with the weary statement that it was absolutely correct, that no more names were to be added this year, that he did not propose to defend, through the columns of the press, his omission of certain names and his acceptance of others, and that, finally, he was off for a week's vacation in the southern part of the state, and thanked them all for their kindly interest in himself and his efforts for San Francisco society.

It was the next morning's paper that was so anxiously awaited, and so eagerly perused in hundreds of luxurious boudoirs--exulted over, or wept over and reviled,--but read by nearly every woman in the city.

And now he had sent Susan a late card, and Susan knew why. She had met the great man at the Hotel Rafael a few days before, at tea-time, and he had asked Susan most affectionately of her aunt, Mrs. Lancaster, and recalled, with a little emotion, the dances of two generations before, when he was a small boy, and the lovely Georgianna Ralston was a beauty and a belle. Susan could have kissed the magic bit of pasteboard!

But she knew too well just what Emily wanted to think of Browning's courtesy, to mention his old admiration for her aunt. And Emily immediately justified her diplomatic silence by saying:

"Isn't that AWFULLY decent of Brownie! He did that just for Ella and me--that's like him! He'll do anything for some people!"

"Well, of course I can't go," Susan said briskly. "But I do call it awfully decent! And no little remarks about sending a check, either, and no chaperone's card! The old duck! However, I haven't a gown, and I haven't a beau, and you don't go, and so I'll write a tearful regret. I hope it won't be the cause of his giving the whole thing up. I hate to discourage the dear boy!"

Emily laughed approvingly.

"No, but honestly, Sue," she said, in eager assent, "don't you know how people would misunderstand--you know how people are! You and I know that you don't care a whoop about society, and that you'd be the last person in the world to use your position here--but you know what other people might say! And Brownie hates talk--"

Susan had to swallow hard, and remain smiling. It was part of the price that she paid for being here in this beautiful environment, for being, in every material sense, a member of one of the state's richest families. She could not say, as she longed to say, "Oh, Emily, don't talk ROT! You know that before your own grandfather made his money as a common miner, and when Isabel Wallace's grandfather was making shoes, mine was a rich planter in Virginia!" But she knew that she could safely have treated Emily's own mother with rudeness, she could have hopelessly mixed up the letters she wrote for Ella, she could have set the house on fire or appropriated to her own use the large sums of money she occasionally was entrusted by the family to draw for one purpose or another from the bank, and been quickly forgiven, if forgivness was a convenience to the Saunders family at the moment. But to fail to realize that between the daughter of the house of Saunders and the daughter of the house of Brown an unspanned social chasm must forever stretch would have been, indeed, the unforgivable offense.

It was all very different from Susan's old ideals of a paid companion's duties. She had drawn these ideals from the English novels she consumed with much enjoyment in early youth--from "Queenie's Whim" and "Uncle Max" and the novels of Charlotte Yonge. She had imagined herself, before her arrival at "High Gardens," as playing piano duets with Emily, reading French for an hour, German for an hour, gardening, tramping, driving, perhaps making a call on some sick old woman with soup and jelly in her basket, or carrying armfuls of blossoms to the church for decoration. If one of Emily's sick headaches came on, it would be Susan's duty to care for her tenderly, and to read to her in a clear, low, restful voice when she was recovering; to write her notes, to keep her vases filled with flowers, to "preside" at the tea-table, efficient, unobtrusive, and indispensable. She would make herself useful to Ella, too; arrange her collections of coins, carry her telephone messages, write her notes. She would accompany the little old mother on her round through the greenhouses, read to her and be ready to fly for her book or her shawl. And if Susan's visionary activities also embraced a little missionary work in the direction of the son of the house, it was of a very sisterly and blameless nature. Surely the most demure of companions, reading to Mrs. Saunders in the library, might notice an attentive listener lounging in a dark corner, or might color shyly when Ken's sisters commented on the fact that he seemed to be at home a good deal these days.

It was a little disillusioning to discover, as during her first weeks in the new work she did discover, that almost no duties whatever would be required of her. It seemed to make more irksome the indefinite thing that was required of her; her constant interested participation in just whatever happened to interest Emily at the moment. Susan loved tennis and driving, loved shopping and lunching in town, loved to stroll over to the hotel for tea in the pleasant afternoons, or was satisfied to lie down and read for an hour or two.

But it was very trying to a person of her definite impulsive briskness never to know, from one hour or one day to the next, just what occupation was in prospect. Emily would order the carriage for four o'clock, only to decide, when it came around, that she would rather drag the collies out into the side-garden, to waste three dozen camera plates and three hours in trying to get good pictures of them. Sometimes Emily herself posed before the camera, and Susan took picture after picture of her.

"Sue, don't you think it would be fun to try some of me in my Mandarin coat? Come up while I get into it. Oh, and go get Chow Yew to get that Chinese violin he plays, and I'll hold it! We'll take 'em in the Japanese garden!" Emily would be quite fired with enthusiasm, but before the girls were upstairs she might change in favor of her riding habit and silk hat, and Susan would telephone the stable that Miss Emily's riding horse was wanted in the side-garden. "You're a darling!" she would say to Susan, after an exhausting hour or two. "Now, next time I'll take you!"

But Susan's pictures never were taken. Emily's interest rarely touched twice in the same place.

"Em, it's twenty minutes past four! Aren't we going to tea with Isabel Wallace?" Susan would ask, coming in to find Emily comfortably stretched out with a book.

"Oh, Lord, so we were! Well, let's not!" Emily would yawn.

"But, Em, they expect us!"

"Well, go telephone, Sue, there's a dear! And tell them I've got a terrible headache. And you and I'll have tea up here. Tell Carrie I want to see her about it; I'm hungry; I want to order it specially."

Sometimes, when the girls came downstairs, dressed for some outing, it was Miss Ella who upset their plans. Approving of her little sister's appearance, she would lure Emily off for a round of formal calls.

"Be decent now, Baby! You'll never have a good time, if you don't go and do the correct thing now and then. Come on. I'm going to town on the two, and we can get a carriage right at the ferry--"

But Susan rarely managed to save the afternoon. Going noiselessly upstairs, she was almost always captured by the lonely old mistress of the house.

"Girls gone?" Mrs. Saunders would pipe, in her cracked little voice, from the doorway of her rooms. "Don't the house seem still? Come in, Susan, you and I'll console each other over a cup of tea."

Susan, smilingly following her, would be at a loss to account for her own distaste and disappointment. But she was so tired of people! She wanted so desperately to be alone!

The precious chance would drift by, a rich tea would presently be served; the little over-dressed, over-fed old lady was really very lonely; she went to a luncheon or card-party not oftener than two or three times a month, and she loved company. There was almost no close human need or interest in her life; she was as far from her children as was any other old lady of their acquaintance.

Susan knew that she had been very proud of her sons and daughters, as a happy young mother. The girl was continually discovering, among old Mrs. Saunders' treasures, large pictures of Ella, at five, at seven, at nine, with straight long bangs and rosetted hats that tied under her chin, and French dresses tied with sashes about her knees, and pictures of Kenneth leaning against stone benches, or sitting in swings, a thin and sickly-looking little boy, in a velvet suit and ribboned straw hat. There were pictures of the dead children, too, and a picture of Emily, at three months, sitting in an immense shell, and clad only in the folds of her own fat little person. On the backs of these pictures, Mrs. Saunders had written "Kennie, six years old," and the date, or "Totty, aged nine"--she never tired of looking at them now, and of telling Susan that the buttons on Ella's dress had been of sterling silver, "made right from Papa's mine," and that the little ship Kenneth held had cost twenty-five dollars. All of her conversation was boastful, in an inoffensive, faded sort of way. She told Susan about her wedding, about her gown and her mother's gown, and the cost of her music, and the number of the musicians.

Mrs. Saunders, Susan used to think, letting her thoughts wander as the old lady rambled on, was an unfortunately misplaced person. She had none of the qualities of the great lady, nothing spiritual or mental with which to fend off the vacuity of old age. As a girl, a bride, a young matron, she had not shown her lack so pitiably. But now, at sixty-five, Mrs. Saunders had no character, no tastes, no opinions worth considering. She liked to read the paper, she liked her flowers, although she took none of the actual care of them, and she liked to listen to music; there was a mechanical piano in her room, and Susan often heard the music downstairs at night, and pictured the old lady, reading in bed, calling to Miss Baker when a record approached its finish, and listening contentedly to selections from "Faust" and "Ernani," and the "Chanson des Alpes." Mrs. Saunders would have been far happier as a member of the fairly well-to-do middle class. She would have loved to shop with married daughters, sharply interrogating clerks as to the durability of shoes, and the weight of little underflannels; she would have been a good angel in the nurseries, as an unfailing authority when the new baby came, or hushing the less recent babies to sleep in tender old arms. She would have been a judge of hot jellies, a critic of pastry. But bound in this little aimless groove of dressmakers' calls, and card-parties, she was quite out of her natural element. It was not astonishing that, like Emily, she occasionally enjoyed an illness, and dispensed with the useless obligation of getting up and dressing herself at all!

Invitations, they were really commands, to the Browning dances were received early in December; Susan, dating her graceful little note of regret, was really shocked to notice the swift flight of the months. December already! And she had seemed to leave Hunter, Baxter & Hunter only last week. Susan fell into a reverie over her writing, her eyes roving absently over the stretch of wooded hills below her window. December--! Nearly a year since Peter Coleman had sent her a circle of pearls, and she had precipitated the events that had ended their friendship. It was a sore spot still, the memory; but Susan, more sore at herself for letting him mislead her than with him, burned to reestablish herself in his eyes as a woman of dignity and reserve, rather than to take revenge upon him for what was, she knew now, as much a part of him as his laughing eyes and his indomitable buoyancy.

The room in which she was writing was warm. Furnace heat is not common in California, but, with a thousand other conveniences, the Saunders home had a furnace. There were winter roses, somewhere near her, making the air sweet; the sunlight slanted in brightly across the wide couch where Emily was lying, teasing Susan between casual glances at her magazine. A particularly gay week had left both girls feeling decidedly unwell. Emily complained of headache and neuralgia; Susan had breakfasted on hot soda and water, her eyes felt heavy, her skin hot and dry and prickly.

"We all eat too much in this house!" she said aloud, cheerfully. "And we don't exercise enough!" Emily did not answer, merely smiled, as at a joke. The subject of diet was not popular with either of the Misses Saunders. Emily never admitted that her physical miseries had anything to do with her stomach; and Ella, whose bedroom scales exasperated her afresh every time she got on them, while making dolorous allusions to her own size whenever it pleased her to do so, never allowed anyone else the privilege. But even with her healthy appetite, and splendid constitution, Susan was unable to eat as both the sisters did. Every other day she resolved sternly to diet, and frequently at night she could not sleep for indigestion; but the Saunders home was no atmosphere for Spartan resolutions, and every meal-time saw Susan's courage defeated afresh. She could have remained away from the table with far less effort than was required, when a delicious dish was placed before her, to send it away untouched. There were four regular meals daily in the Saunders home; the girls usually added a fifth when they went down to the pantries to forage before going to bed; and tempting little dishes of candy and candied fruits were set unobtrusively on card-tables, on desks, on the piano where the girls were amusing themselves with the songs of the day.

It was a comfortable, care-free life they led, irresponsible beyond any of Susan's wildest dreams. She and Emily lounged about their bright, warm apartments, these winter mornings, until nine o'clock, lingered over their breakfast--talking, talking and talking, until the dining-room clock struck a silvery, sweet eleven; and perhaps drifted into Miss Ella's room for more talk, or amused themselves with Chow Yew's pidgin English, while he filled vases in one of the pantries. At twelve o'clock they went up to dress for the one o'clock luncheon, an elaborate meal at which Mrs. Saunders plaintively commented on the sauce Bechamel, Ella reviled the cook, and Kenneth, if he was present, drank a great deal of some charged water from a siphon, or perhaps made Lizzie or Carrie nearly leap out of their skins by a sudden, terrifying inquiry why Miss Brown hadn't been served to salad before he was, or perhaps growled at Emily a question as to what the girls had been talking about all night long.

After luncheon, if Kenneth did not want the new motor-car, which was supposed to be his particular affectation, the girls used it, giggling in the tonneau at the immobility of Flornoy, the French chauffeur; otherwise they drove behind the bays, and stopped at some lovely home, standing back from the road behind a sweep of drive, and an avenue of shady trees, for tea. Susan could take her part in the tea-time gossip now, could add her surmises and comment to the general gossip, and knew what the society weeklies meant when they used initials, or alluded to a "certain prominent debutante recently returned from an Eastern school."

As the season ripened, she and Emily went to four or five luncheons every week, feminine affairs, with cards or matinee to follow. Dinner invitations were more rare; there were men at the dinners, and the risk of boring a partner with Emily's uninteresting little personality was too great to be often taken. Her poor health served both herself and her friends as an excuse. Ella went everywhere, even to the debutante's affairs; but Emily was too entirely self-centered to be popular.

She and Susan were a great deal alone. They chattered and laughed together through shopping trips, luncheons at the clubs, matinees, and trips home on the boat. They bought prizes for Ella's card-parties, or engagement cups and wedding-presents for those fortunate girls who claimed the center of the social stage now and then with the announcement of their personal plans. They bought an endless variety of pretty things for Emily, who prided herself on the fact that she could not bear to have near her anything old or worn or ugly. A thousand little reminders came to Emily wherever she went of things without which she could not exist.

"What a darling chain that woman's wearing; let's go straight up to Shreve's and look at chains," said Emily, on the boat; or "White-bait! Here it is on this menu. I hadn't thought of it for months! Do remind Mrs. Pullet to get some!" or "Can't you remember what it was Isabel said that she was going to get? Don't you remember I said I needed it, too?"

If Susan had purchases of her own to make, Emily could barely wait with patience until they were completed, before adding:

"I think I'll have a pair of slippers, too. Something a little nicer than that, please"; or "That's going to make up into a dear wrapper for you, Sue," she would enthusiastically declare, "I ought to have another wrapper, oughtn't I? Let's go up to Chinatown, and see some of the big wadded ones at Sing Fat's. I really need one!"

Just before Christmas, Emily went to the southern part of the state with a visiting cousin from the East, and Susan gladly seized the opportunity for a little visit at home. She found herself strangely stirred when she went in, from the bright winter sunshine, to the dingy, odorous old house, encountering the atmosphere familiar to her from babyhood, and the unaltered warm embraces of Mary Lou and her aunt. Before she had hung up her hat and coat, she was swept again into the old ways, listening, while she changed her dress, to Mary Lou's patient complaints and wistful questions, slipping out to the bakery just before dinner to bring home a great paper-bag of hot rolls, and ending the evening, after a little shopping expedition to Fillmore Street, with solitaire at the dining-room table. The shabbiness and disorder and a sort of material sordidness were more marked than ever, but Susan was keenly conscious of some subtle, touching charm, unnoticed heretofore, that seemed to flavor the old environment to-night. They were very pure and loving and loyal, her aunt and cousins, very practically considerate and tender toward each other, despite the flimsy fabric of their absurd dreams; very good, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, if not very successful or very clever.

They made much of her coming, rejoiced over her and kissed her as if she never had even in thought neglected them, and exulted innocently in the marvelous delights of her new life. Georgie was driven over from the Mission by her husband, the next day, in Susan's honor, and carried the fat, loppy baby in for so brief a visit that it was felt hardly worth while to unwrap and wrap up again little Myra Estelle. Mrs. Lancaster had previously, with a burst of tears, informed Susan that Georgie was looking very badly, and that, nursing that heavy child, she should have been spared more than she was by the doctor's mother and the old servant. But Susan, although finding the young mother pale and rather excited, thought that Georgie looked well, and admired with the others her heavy, handsome new suit and the over-trimmed hat that quite eclipsed her small face. The baby was unmanageable, and roared throughout the visit, to Georgie's distress.

"She never cries this way at home!" protested young Mrs. O'Connor.

"Give her some ninny," Mrs. Lancaster suggested, eagerly, but Georgie, glancing at the street where Joe was holding the restless black horse in check, said nervously that Joe didn't like it until the right time. She presently went out to hand Myra to Susan while she climbed into place, and was followed by a scream from Mrs. Lancaster, who remarked later that seeing the black horse start just as Susan handed the child up, she had expected to see them all dashed to pieces.

"Well, Susan, light of my old eyes, had enough of the rotten rich?" asked William Oliver, coming in for a later dinner, on the first night of her visit, and jerking her to him for a resounding kiss before she had any idea of his intention.

"Billy!" Susan said, mildly scandalized, her eyes on her aunt.

"Well, well, what's all this!" Mrs. Lancaster remarked, without alarm. William, shaking out his napkin, drawing his chair up to the table, and falling upon his dinner with vigor, demanded:

"Come on, now! Tell us all, all!"

But Susan, who had been chattering fast enough from the moment of her arrival, could not seem to get started again. It was indeed a little difficult to continue an enthusiastic conversation, unaffected by his running fire of comment. For in these days he was drifting rapidly toward a sort of altruistic socialism, and so listened to her recital with sardonic smiles, snorts of scorn, and caustic annotations.

"The Carters--ha! That whole bunch ought to be hanged," Billy remarked. "All their money comes from the rents of bad houses, and--let me tell you something, when there was a movement made to buy up that Jackson Street block, and turn it into a park, it was old Carter, yes, and his wife, too, who refused to put a price on their property!"

"Oh, Billy, you don't KNOW that!"

"I don't? All right, maybe I don't," Mr. Oliver returned growlingly to his meal, only to break out a moment later, "The Kirkwoods! Yes; that's a rare old bunch! They're still holding the city to the franchise they swindled the Government out of, right after the Civil War! Every time you pay taxes--"

"I don't pay taxes!" Susan interrupted frivolously, and resumed her glowing account. Billy made no further contribution to the conversation until he asked some moments later, "Does old Brock ever tell you about his factories, while he's taking you around his orchid-house? There's a man a week killed there, and the foremen tell the girls when they hire them that they aren't expected to take care of themselves on the wages they get!"

But the night before her return to San Rafael, Mr. Oliver, in his nicest mood, took Susan to the Orpheum, and they had fried oysters and coffee in a little Fillmore Street restaurant afterward, Billy admitting with graceful frankness that funds were rather low, and Susan really eager for the old experience and the old sensations. Susan liked the brotherly, clumsy way in which he tried to ascertain, as they sat loitering and talking over the little meal, just how much of her thoughts still went to Peter Coleman, and laughed outright, as soon as she detected his purpose, as only an absolutely heart-free girl could laugh, and laid her hand over his for a little appreciative squeeze before they dismissed the subject. After that he told her of some of his own troubles, the great burden of the laboring classes that he felt rested on his particular back, and his voice rose and he pounded the table as he talked of the other countries of the world, where even greater outrages, or where experimental solutions were in existence. Susan brought the conversation to Josephine Carroll, and watched his whole face grow tender, and heard his voice soften, as they spoke of her.

"No; but is it really and truly serious this time, Bill?" she asked, with that little thrill of pain that all good sisters know when the news comes.

"Serious? GOSH!" said the lover, simply.

"Engaged?"

"No-o. I couldn't very well. I'm in so deep at the works that I may get fired any minute. More than that, the boys generally want me to act as spokesman, and so I'm a sort of marked card, and I mightn't get in anywhere else, very easily. And I couldn't ask Jo to go with me to some Eastern factory or foundry town, without being pretty sure of a job. No; things are just drifting."

"Well, but Bill," Susan said anxiously, "somebody else will step in if you don't! Jo's such a beauty--"

He turned to her almost with a snarl.

"Well, what do you want me to do? Steal?" he asked angrily. And then softening suddenly he added: "She's young,--the little queen of queens!"

"And yet you say you don't want money," Susan said, drily, with a shrug of her shoulders.

The next day she went back to Emily, and again the lazy, comfortable days began to slip by, one just like the other. At Christmas-time Susan was deluged with gifts, the holidays were an endless chain of good times, the house sweet with violets, and always full of guests and callers; girls in furs who munched candy as they chattered, and young men who laughed and shouted around the punch bowl. Susan and Emily were caught in a gay current that streamed to the club, to talk and drink eggnog before blazing logs, and streamed to one handsome home after another, to talk and drink eggnog before other fires, and to be shown and admire beautiful and expensive presents. They bundled in and out of carriages and motors, laughing as they crowded in, and sitting on each other's laps, and carrying a chorus of chatter and laughter everywhere. Susan would find herself, the inevitable glass in hand, talking hard to some little silk-clad old lady in some softly lighted lovely drawing-room, to be whisked away to some other drawing-room, and to another fireside, where perhaps there was a stocky, bashful girl of fourteen to amuse, or somebody's grandfather to interest and smile upon.

Everywhere were holly wreaths and lights, soft carpets, fires and rich gowns, and everywhere the same display of gold picture frames and silver plates, rock crystal bowls, rugs and cameras and mahogany desks and tables, furs and jeweled chains and rings. Everywhere were candies from all over the world, and fruitcake from London, and marrons and sticky candied fruit, and everywhere unobtrusive maids were silently offering trays covered with small glasses.

Susan was frankly sick when the new year began, and Emily had several heart and nerve attacks, and was very difficult to amuse. But both girls agreed that the holidays had been the "time of their lives."

It was felt by the Saunders family that Susan had shown a very becoming spirit in the matter of the Browning dances. Ella, who had at first slightly resented the fact that "Brownie" had chosen to honor Emily's paid companion in so signal a manner, had gradually shifted to the opinion that, in doing so, he had no more than confirmed the family's opinion of Susan Brown, after all, and shown a very decent discrimination.

"No EARTHLY reason why you shouldn't have accepted!" said Ella.

"Oh, Duchess," said Susan, who sometimes pleased her with this name, "fancy the talk!"

"Well," drawled Ella, resuming her perusal of a scandalous weekly, "I don't know that I'm afraid of talk, myself!"

"At the same time, El," Emily contributed, eagerly, "you know what a fuss they made when Vera Brock brought that Miss De Foe, of New York!"

Ella gave her little sister a very keen look,

"Vera Brock?" she said, dreamily, with politely elevated brows.

"Well, of course, I don't take the Brocks seriously--" Emily began, reddening.

"Well, I should hope you wouldn't, Baby!" answered the older sister, promptly and forcibly. "Don't make an UTTER fool of yourself!"

Emily retired into an enraged silence, and a day or two later, Ella, on a Sunday morning late in February, announced that she was going to chaperone both the girls to the Browning dance on the following Friday night.

Susan was thrown into a most delightful flutter, longing desperately to go, but chilled with nervousness whenever she seriously thought of it. She lay awake every night anxiously computing the number of her possible partners, and came down to breakfast every morning cold with the resolution that she would make a great mistake in exposing herself to possible snubbing and neglect. She thought of nothing but the Browning, listened eagerly to what the other girls said of it, her heart sinking when Louise Chickering observed that there never were men enough at the Brownings, and rising again when Alice Chauncey hardily observed that, if a girl was a good dancer, that was all that mattered, she couldn't help having a good time! Susan knew she danced well--

However, Emily succumbed on Thursday to a heart attack. The whole household went through its usual excitement, the doctor came, the nurse was hurriedly summoned, Susan removed all the smaller articles from Emily's room, and replaced the bed's flowery cover with a sheet, the invalid liking the hospital aspect. Susan was not very much amazed at the suddenness of this affliction; Emily had been notably lacking in enthusiasm about the dance, and on Wednesday afternoon, Ella having issued the casual command, "See if you can't get a man or two to dine with us at the hotel before the dance, Emily; then you girls will be sure of some partners, anyway!" Emily had spent a discouraging hour at the telephone.

"Hello, George!" Susan had heard her say gaily. "This is Emily Saunders. George, I rang up because--you know the Browning is Friday night, and Ella's giving me a little dinner at the Palace before it--and I wondered--we're just getting it up hurriedly--" An interval of silence on Emily's part would follow, then she would resume, eagerly, "Oh, certainly! I'm sorry, but of course I understand. Yes, indeed; I'll see you Friday night--" and the conversation would be ended.

And, after a moment of silence, she would call another number, and go through the little conversation again. Susan, filled with apprehensions regarding her own partners, could not blame Emily for the heart attack, and felt a little vague relief on her own account. Better sure at home than sorry in the dreadful brilliance of a Browning ball!

"I'm afraid this means no dance!" murmured Emily, apologetically.

"As if I cared, Emmy Lou!" Susan reassured her cheerfully.

"Well, I don't think you would have had a good time, Sue!" Emily said, and the topic of the dance was presumably exhausted.

But when Ella got home, the next morning, she reopened the question with some heat. Emily could do exactly as Emily pleased, declared Ella, but Susan Brown should and would come to the last Browning.

"Oh, please, Duchess--!" Susan besought her.

"Very well, Sue, if you don't, I'll make that kid so sorry she ever--"

"Oh, please!--And beside--" said Susan, "I haven't anything to wear! So that DOES settle it!"

"What were you going to wear?" demanded Ella, scowling.

"Em said she'd lend me her white lace."

"Well, that's all right! Gerda'll fix it for you--"

"But Emily sent it back to Madame Leonard yesterday afternoon. She wanted the sash changed," Susan hastily explained.

"Well, she's got other gowns," Ella said, with a dangerous glint in her eyes. "What about that thing with the Persian embroidery? What about the net one she wore to Isabel's?"

"The net one's really gone to pieces, Duchess. It was a flimsy sort of thing, anyway. And the Persian one she's only had on twice. When we were talking about it Monday she said she'd rather I didn't--"

"Oh, she did? D'ye hear that, Mama?" Ella asked, holding herself in check. "And what about the chiffon?"

"Well, Ella, she telephoned Madame this morning not to hurry with that, because she wasn't going to the dance."

"Was she going to wear it?"

"Well, no. But she telephoned Madame just the same--I don't know why she did," Susan smiled. "But what's the difference?" she ended cheerfully.

"Quite a Flora McFlimsey!" said Mrs. Saunders, with her nervous, shrill little laugh, adding eagerly to the now thoroughly aroused Ella. "You know Baby doesn't really go about much, Totty; she hasn't as many gowns as you, dear!"

"Now, look here, Mama," Ella said, levelly, "if we can manage to get Susan something to wear, well and good; but--if that rotten, selfish, nasty kid has really spoiled this whole thing, she'll be sorry! That's all. I'd try to get a dress in town, if it wasn't so late! As it is I'll telephone Madame about the Persian--"

"Oh, honestly, I couldn't! If Emily didn't want me to!" Susan began, scarlet-cheeked.

"I think you're all in a conspiracy to drive me crazy!" Ella said angrily. "Emily shall ask you just as nicely as she knows how, to wear--"

"Totty, she's SICK!" pleaded Emily's mother.

"Sick! She's chock-full of poison because she never knows when to stop eating," said Kenneth, with fraternal gallantry. He returned to his own thoughts, presently adding, "Why don't you borrow a dress from Isabel?"

"Isabel?" Ella considered it, brightened. "Isabel Wallace," she said, in sudden approval. "That's exactly what I'll do!" And she swept magnificently to the little telephone niche near the dining-room door. "Isabel," said she, a moment later, "this is Mike--"

So Susan went to the dance. Miss Isabel Wallace sent over a great box of gowns from which she might choose the most effective, and Emily, with a sort of timid sullenness, urged her to go. Ella and her charge went into town in the afternoon, and loitered into the club for tea. Susan, whose color was already burning high, and whose eyes were dancing, fretted inwardly at Ella's leisurely enjoyment of a second and a third sup. It was nearly six o'clock, it was after six! Ella seemed willing to delay indefinitely, waiting on the stairs of the club for a long chat with a passing woman, and lingering with various friends in the foyer of the great hotel.

But finally they were in the big bedrooms, with Clemence, Ella's maid, in eager and interested attendance. Clemence had laid Susan's delicious frills and laces out upon the bed; Susan's little wrapper was waiting her; there was nothing to do now but plunge into the joy of dressing. A large, placid person known to Susan vaguely as the Mrs. Keith, who had been twice divorced, had the room next to Ella, and pretty Mary Peacock, her daughter, shared Susan's room. The older ladies, assuming loose wrappers, sat gossiping over cocktails and smoking cigarettes, and Mary and Susan seized the opportunity to monopolize Clemence. Clemence arranged Susan's hair, pulling, twisting, flinging hot masses over the girl's face, inserting pins firmly, loosening strands with her hard little French fingers. Susan had only occasional blinded glimpses of her face, one temple bare and bald, the other eclipsed like a gipsy's.

"Look here, Clemence, if I don't like it, out it comes!" she said.

"Mais, certainement, ca va sans dire!" Clemence agreed serenely. Mary Peacock, full of amused interest, watched as she rubbed her face and throat with cold cream.

"I wish I had your neck and shoulders, Miss Brown," said Miss Peacock. "I get so sick of high-necked gowns that I'd almost rather stay home!"

"Why, you're fatter than I am!" Susan exclaimed. "You've got lovely shoulders!"

"Yes, darling!" Mary said, gushingly. "And I've got the sort of blood that breaks out, in a hot room," she added after a moment, "don't look so scared, it's nothing serious! But I daren't ever take the risk of wearing a low gown!"

"But how did you get it?" ejaculated Susan. "Are you taking something for it?"

"No, love," Mary continued, in the same, amused, ironic strain, "because I've been traveling about, half my life, to get it cured, Germany and France, everywhere! And there ain't no such animal! Isn't it lovely?"

"But how did you get it?" Susan innocently persisted. Mary gave her a look half exasperated and half warning; but, when Clemence had stepped into the next room for a moment, she said:

"Don't be an utter fool! Where do you THINK I got it?

"The worst of it is," she went on pleasantly, as Clemence came back, "that my father's married again, you know, to the sweetest little thing you ever saw. An only girl, with four or five big brothers, and her father a minister! Well--"

"Voici!" exclaimed the maid. And Susan faced herself in the mirror, and could not resist a shamed, admiring smile. But if the smooth rolls and the cunning sweeps and twists of bright hair made her prettier than usual, Susan was hardly recognizable when the maid touched lips and cheeks with color and eyebrows with her clever pencil. She had thought her eyes bright before; now they had a starry glitter that even their owner thought effective; her cheeks glowed softly--

"Here, stop flirting with yourself, and put on your gown, it's after eight!" Mary said, and Clemence slipped the fragrant beauty of silk and lace over Susan's head, and knelt down to hook it, and pushed it down over the hips, and tied the little cord that held the low bodice so charmingly in place. Clemence said nothing when she had finished, nor did Mary, nor did Ella when they presently joined Ella to go downstairs, but Susan was satisfied. It is an unfortunate girl indeed who does not think herself a beauty for one night at least in her life; Susan thought herself beautiful tonight.

They joined the men in the Lounge, and Susan had to go out to dinner, if not quite "on a man's arm," as in her old favorite books, at least with her own partner, feeling very awkward, and conscious of shoulders and hips as she did so. But she presently felt the influence of the lights and music, and of the heating food and wine, and talked and laughed quite at her ease, feeling delightfully like a great lady and a great beauty. Her dinner partner presently asked her for the "second" and the supper dance, and Susan, hoping that she concealed indecent rapture, gladly consented. By just so much was she relieved of the evening's awful responsibility. She did not particularly admire this nice, fat young man, but to be saved from visible unpopularity, she would gladly have danced with the waiter.

It was nearer eleven than ten o'clock when they sauntered through various wide hallways to the palm-decorated flight of stairs that led down to the ballroom. Susan gave one dismayed glance at the brilliant sweep of floor as they descended.

"They're dancing!" she ejaculated,--late, and a stranger, what chance had she!

"Gosh, you're crazy about it, aren't you?" grinned her partner, Mr. Teddy Carpenter. "Don't you care, they've just begun. Want to finish this with me?"

But Susan was greeting the host, who stood at the foot of the stairs, a fat, good-natured little man, beaming at everyone out of small twinkling blue eyes, and shaking hands with the debutantes while he spoke to their mothers over their shoulders.

"Hello, Brownie!" Ella said, affectionately. "Where's everybody?"

Mr. Browning flung his fat little arms in the air.

"I don't know," he said, in humorous distress. "The girls appear to be holding a meeting over there in the dressing-room, and the men are in the smoker! I'm going to round 'em up! How do you do, Miss Brown? Gad, you look so like your aunt,--and she WAS a beauty, Ella!--that I could kiss you for it, as I did her once!"

"My aunt has black hair and brown eyes, Miss Ella, and weighs one hundred and ninety pounds!" twinkled Susan.

"Kiss her again for that, Brownie, and introduce me," said a tall, young man at the host's side easily. "I'm going to have this, aren't I, Miss Brown? Come on, they're just beginning--"

Off went Susan, swept deliciously into the tide of enchanting music and motion. She wasn't expected to talk, she had no time to worry, she could dance well, and she did.

Kenneth Saunders came up in the pause before the dance was encored, and asked for the "next but one,"--there were no cards at the Brownings; all over the hall girls were nodding over their partners' shoulders, in answer to questions, "Next, Louise?" "Next waltz--one after that, then?" "I'm next, remember!"

Kenneth brought a bashful blonde youth with him, who instantly claimed the next dance. He did not speak to Susan again until it was over, when, remarking simply, "God, that was life!" he asked for the third ensuing, and surrendered Susan to some dark youth unknown, who said, "Ours? Now, don't say no, for there's suicide in my blood, girl, and I'm a man of few words!"

"I am honestly all mixed up!" Susan laughed. "I think this is promised--"

It didn't appear to matter. The dark young man took the next two, and Susan found herself in the enchanting position of a person reproached by disappointed partners. Perhaps there were disappointed and unpopular girls at the dance, perhaps there was heart-burning and disappointment and jealousy; she saw none of it. She was passed from hand to hand, complimented, flirted with, led into the little curtained niches where she could be told with proper gravity of the feelings her wit and beauty awakened in various masculine hearts. By twelve o'clock Susan wished that the ball would last a week, she was borne along like a feather on its glittering and golden surface.

Ella was by this time passionately playing the new and fascinating game of bridge whist, in a nearby room, but Browning was still busy, and presently he came across the floor to Susan, and asked her for a dance--an honor for which she was entirely unprepared, for he seldom danced, and one that she was quick enough to accept at once.

"Perhaps you've promised the next?" said Browning.

"If I have," said the confident Susan, "I hereby call it off."

"Well," he said smilingly, pleased. And although he did not finish the dance, and they presently sat down together, she knew that it had been the evening's most important event.

"There's a man coming over from the club, later," said Mr. Browning, "he's a wonderful fellow! Writer, and a sort of cousin of Ella Saunders by the way, or else his wife is. He's just on from New York, and for a sort of rest, and he may go on to Japan for his next novel. Very remarkable fellow!"

"A writer?" Susan looked interested.

"Yes, you know him, of course. Bocqueraz--that's who it is!"

"Not Stephen Graham Bocqueraz!" ejaculated Susan, round-eyed.

"Yes--yes!" Mr. Browning liked her enthusiasm.

"But is he here?" Susan asked, almost reverently. "Why, I'm perfectly crazy about his books!" she confided. "Why--why--he's about the biggest there IS!"

"Yes, he writes good stuff," the man agreed. "Well, now, don't you miss meeting him! He'll be here directly," his eyes roved to the stairway, a few feet from where they were sitting. "Here he is now!" said he. "Come now, Miss Brown---"

"Oh, honestly! I'm scared--I don't know what to say!" Susan said in a panic. But Browning's fat little hand was firmly gripped over hers and she went with him to meet the two or three men who were chatting together as they came slowly, composedly, into the ball-room.

CHAPTER III

From among them she could instantly pick the writer, even though all three were strangers, and although, from the pictures she had seen of him, she had always fancied that Stephen Bocqueraz was a large, athletic type of man, instead of the erect and square-built gentleman who walked between the other two taller men. He was below the average height, certainly, dark, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, with a thin-lipped, wide, and most expressive mouth, and sleek hair so black as to make his evening dress seem another color. He was dressed with exquisite precision, and with one hand he constantly adjusted and played with the round black-rimmed glasses that hung by a silk ribbon about his neck. Susan knew him, at this time, to be about forty-five, perhaps a little less. If her very first impression was that he was both affected and well aware of his attractiveness, her second conceded that here was a man who could make any affectation charming, and not the less attractive because he knew his value.

"And what do I do, Mr. Br-r-rowning," asked Mr. Bocqueraz with pleasant precision, "when I wish to monopolize the company of a very charming young lady, at a dance, and yet, not dancing, cannot ask her to be my partner?"

"The next is the supper dance," suggested Susan, dimpling, "if it isn't too bold to mention it!"

He flashed her an appreciative look, the first they had really exchanged.

"Supper it is," he said gravely, offering her his arm. But Browning delayed him for a few introductions first; and Susan stood watching him, and thinking him very distinguished, and that to study a really great man, so pleasantly at her ease, was very thrilling. Presently he turned to her again, and they went in to supper; to Susan it was all like an exciting dream. They chose a little table in the shallow angle of a closed doorway, and watched the confusion all about them; and Susan, warmed by the appreciative eyes so near her, found herself talking quite naturally, and more than once was rewarded by the writer's unexpected laughter. She asked him if Mrs. Bocqueraz and his daughter were with him, and he said no, not on this particular trip.

"Julie and her mother are in Europe," he said, with just a suggestion of his Spanish grandfather in his clean-clipped speech. "Julie left Miss Bence's School at seventeen, had a coming-out party in our city house the following winter. Now it seems Europe is the thing. Mrs. Bocqueraz likes to do things systematically, and she told me, before Julie was out of the nursery, that she thought it was very nice for a girl to marry in her second winter in society, after a European trip. I have no doubt my daughter will announce her engagement upon her return."

"To whom?" said Susan, laughing at his precise, re-signed tone.

"That I don't know," said Stephen Bocqueraz, with a twinkle in his eye, "nor does Julie, I fancy. But undoubtedly her mother does!"

"Here is somebody coming over for a dance, I suppose!" he said after a few moments, and Susan was flattered by the little hint of regret in his tone. But the newcomer was Peter Coleman, and the emotion of meeting him drove every other thought out of her head. She did not rise, as she gave him her hand; the color flooded her face.

"Susan, you little turkey-buzzard--" It was the old Peter!--"where've you been all evening? The next for me!"

"Mr. Bocqueraz, Mr. Coleman," Susan said, with composure, "Peter, Mr. Stephen Graham Bocqueraz."

Even to Peter the name meant something.

"Why, Susan, you little grab-all!" he accused her vivaciously. "How dare you monopolize a man like Mr. Bocqueraz for the whole supper dance! I'll bet some of those women are ready to tear your eyes out!"

"I've been doing the monopolizing," Mr. Bocqueraz said, turning a rather serious look from Peter, to smile with sudden brightness at Susan. "When I find a young woman at whose christening ALL the fairies came to dance," he added, "I always do all the monopolizing I can! However, if you have a prior claim--"

"But he hasn't!" Susan said, smilingly. "I'm engaged ten deep," she added pleasantly to Peter. "Honestly, I haven't half a dance left! I stole this."

"Why, I won't stand for it," Peter said, turning red.

"Come, it seems to me Mr. Coleman deserves something!" Stephen Bocqueraz smiled. And indeed Peter looked bigger and happier and handsomer than ever.

"Not from me," Susan persisted, quietly pleasant. Peter stood for a moment or two, not quite ready to laugh, not willing to go away. Susan busied herself with her salad, stared dreamily across the room. And presently he departed after exchanging a few commonplaces with Bocqueraz.

"And what's the significance of all that?" asked the author when they were alone again.

Susan had been wishing to make some sort of definite impression upon Mr. Stephen Graham Bocqueraz; wishing to remain in his mind as separated from the other women he had met to-night. Suddenly she saw this as her chance, and she took him somewhat into her confidence. She told him of her old office position, and of her aunt, and of Peter, and that she was now Emily Saunders' paid companion, and here only as a sort of Cinderella.

Never did any girl, flushing, dimpling, shrugging her shoulders over such a recital, have a more appreciative listener. Stephen Bocqueraz's sympathetic look met hers whenever she looked up; he nodded, agreed, frowned thoughtfully or laughed outright. They sat through the next dance, and through half the next, hidden in one of the many diminutive "parlors" that surrounded the ball-room, and when Susan was surrendered to an outraged partner she felt that she and the great man were fairly started toward a real friendship, and that these attractive boys she was dancing with were really very young, after all.

"Remember Stephen Bocqueraz that Brownie introduced to you just before supper?" asked Ella, as they went home, yawning, sleepy and headachy, the next day. Ella had been playing cards through the supper hour.

"Perfectly!" Susan answered, flushing and smiling.

"You must have made a hit," Ella remarked, "because--I'm giving him a big dinner on Tuesday, at the Palace--and when I talked to him he asked if you would be there. Well, I'm glad you had a nice time, kiddy, and we'll do it again!"

Susan had thanked her gratefully more than once, but she thanked her again now. She felt that she truly loved Ella, so big and good natured and kind.

Emily was a little bit cold when Susan told her about the ball, and the companion promptly suppressed the details of her own successes, and confined her recollections to the girls who had asked for Emily, and to generalities. Susan put her wilting orchids in water, and went dreamily through the next two or three days, recovering from the pleasure and excitement. It was almost a week before Emily was quite herself again; then, when Isabel Wallace came running in to Emily's sick-room to beg Susan to fill a place at their dinner-table at a few hours' notice, Susan's firm refusal quite won Emily's friendship back.

"Isabel's a dear," said Emily, contentedly settling down with the Indian bead-work in which she and Susan had had several lessons, and with which they filled some spare time, "but she's not a leader. I took you up, so now Isabel does! I knew--I felt sure that, if Ella let you borrow that dress, Isabel would begin to patronize you!"

It was just one of Emily's nasty speeches, and Emily really wasn't well, so Susan reminded herself, when the hot, angry color burned in her face, and an angry answer came to her mind. What hurt most was that it was partly true; Emily HAD taken her up, and, when she ceased to be all that Emily required of sympathy and flattery and interest, Emily would find someone else to fill Miss Brown's place. Without Emily she was nobody, and it did not console Susan to reflect that, had Emily's fortune been hers and Emily in her position, the circumstances would be exactly reversed. Just the accident of having money would have made Miss Brown the flattered and admired, the safe and secure one; just the not having it would have pushed Emily further even than Susan was from the world of leisure and beauty and luxury.

"This world IS money!" thought Susan, when she saw the head-waiter come forward so smilingly to meet Ella and herself at the Palm Garden; when Leonard put off a dozen meekly enduring women to finish Miss Emily Saunders' gown on time; when the very sexton at church came hurrying to escort Mrs. Saunders and herself through the disappointed crowds in the aisles, and establish them in, and lock them in, the big empty pew. The newspapers gave half a column of blame to the little girl who tried to steal a two-dollar scarf from the Emporium, but there was nothing but admiration for Ella on the day when she and a twenty-year-old boy, for a wager, led a woolly white toy lamb, a lamb costing twenty-five dollars, through the streets, from the club to the Palace Hotel. The papers were only deeply interested and amused when Miss Elsa Chisholm gave a dinner to six favorite riding-horses, who were entertained in the family dining-room after a layer of tan-bark had been laid on the floor, and fed by their owners from specially designed leather bags and boxes; and they merely reported the fact that Miss Dolly Ripley had found so unusual an intelligence in her gardener that she had deeded to him her grandfather's eighty-thousand-dollar library. "He really has ever so much better brains than I have, don't you know?" said Miss Ripley to the press.

In return for the newspapers' indulgent attitude, however, they were shown no clemency by the Saunders and the people of their set. On a certain glorious, golden afternoon in May, Susan, twisting a card that bore the name of Miss Margaret Summers, representing the CHRONICLE, went down to see the reporter. The Saunders family hated newspaper notoriety, but it was a favorite saying that since the newspapers would print things anyway, they might as well get them straight, and Susan often sent dinner or luncheon lists to the three morning papers.

However, the young woman who rose when Susan went into the drawing-room was not in search of news. Her young, pretty face was full of distress.

"Miss Saunders?" asked she.

"I'm Miss Brown," Susan said. "Miss Saunders is giving a card-party and I am to act for her."

Miss Summers, beginning her story, also began to cry. She was the society editor, she explained, and two weeks before she had described in her column a luncheon given by Miss Emily Saunders. Among the list of guests she had mentioned Miss Carolyn Seymour.

"Not Carolyn Seymour!" said Susan, shocked. "Why, she never is here! The Seymours---" she shook her head. "I know people do accept them," said Susan, "but the Saunders don't even know them! They're not in the best set, you know, they're really hardly in society at all!"

"I know NOW," Miss Summers said miserably. "But all the other girls--this year's debutantes--were there, and I had to guess at most of the names, and I chanced it! Fool that I was!" she interrupted herself bitterly. "Well, the next day, while I was in the office, my telephone rang. It was Thursday, and I had my Sunday page to do, and I was just RUSHING, and I had a bad cold,--I've got it yet. So I just said, 'What is it?' rather sharply, you know, and a voice said, in a businesslike sort of way, 'How did you happen to put Miss Carolyn Seymour's name on Miss Emily Saunders' lunch list?' I never dreamed that it was Miss Saunders; how should I? She didn't say 'I' or 'me' or anything--just that. So I said, 'Well, is it a matter of international importance?'"

"Ouch!" said Susan, wincing, and shaking a doubtful head.

"I know, it was awful!" the other girl agreed eagerly. "But--" her anxious eyes searched Susan's face. "Well; so the next day Mr. Brice called me into the office, and showed me a letter from Miss Ella Saunders, saying--" and Miss Summers began to cry again. "And I can't tell Mamma!" she sobbed. "My brother's been so ill, and I was so proud of my position!"

"Do you mean they--FIRED you?" Susan asked, all sympathy.

"He said he'd have to!" gulped Miss Summers, with a long sniff. "He said that Saunders and Babcock advertise so much with them, and that, if she wasn't appeased somehow--"

"Well, now, I'll tell you," said Susan, ringing for tea, "I'll wait until Miss Saunders is in a good mood, and then I'll do the very best I can for you. You know, a thing like that seems small, but it's just the sort of thing that is REALLY important," she pursued, consolingly. She had quite cheered her caller before the tea-cups were emptied, but she was anything but hopeful of her mission herself.

And Ella justified her misgivings when the topic was tactfully opened the next day.

"I'm sorry for the little thing," said Ella, briskly, "but she certainly oughtn't to have that position if she doesn't know better than that! Carolyn Seymour in this house--I never heard of such a thing! I was denying it all the next day at the club and it's extremely unpleasant. Besides," added Ella, reddening, "she was extremely impertinent about it when I telephoned---"

"Duchess, she didn't dream it was you! She only said that she didn't know it was so important---" Susan pleaded.

"Well," interrupted Miss Saunders, in a satisfied and final tone, "next time perhaps she WILL know who it is, and whether it is important or not! Sue, while you're there at the desk," she added, "will you write to Mrs. Bergess, Mrs. Gerald Florence Bergess, and tell her that I looked at the frames at Gump's for her prizes, and they're lovely, from fourteen up, and that I had him put three or four aside---"

After the dance Peter began to call rather frequently at "High Gardens," a compliment which Emily took entirely to herself, and to escort the girls about on their afternoon calls, or keep them and Ella, and the old mistress of the house as well, laughing throughout the late and formal dinner. Susan's reserve and her resolutions melted before the old charm; she had nothing to gain by snubbing him; it was much pleasanter to let by-gones be by-gones, and enjoy the moment. Peter had every advantage; if she refused him her friendship a hundred other girls were only too eager to fill her place, so she was gay and companionable with him once more, and extracted a little fresh flavor from the friendship in Emily's unconsciousness of the constant interchange of looks and inflections that went on between Susan and Peter over her head. Susan sometimes thought of Mrs. Carroll's old comment on the popularity of the absorbed and busy girl when she realized that Peter was trying in vain to find time for a personal word with her, or was resenting her interest in some other caller, while she left Emily to him. She was nearer to Peter than ever, a thousand times more sure of herself, and, if she would still have married him, she was far less fond of him than she had been years ago.

Susan asked him some questions, during one idle tea-time, of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter. His uncle had withdrawn from the firm now, he told her, adding with characteristic frankness that in his opinion "the old guy got badly stung." The Baxter home had been sold to a club; the old people had found the great house too big for them and were established now in one of the very smartest of the new apartment houses that were beginning to be built in San Francisco. Susan called, with Emily, upon Mrs. Baxter, and somehow found the old lady's personality as curiously shrunk, in some intangible way, as was her domestic domain in actuality. Mrs. Baxter, cackling emphatically and disapprovingly of the world in general, fussily accompanying them to the elevator, was merely a rather tiresome and pitiful old woman, very different from the delicate little grande dame of Susan's recollection. Ella reported the Baxter fortune as sadly diminished, but there were still maids and the faithful Emma; there were still the little closed carriage and the semi-annual trip to Coronado. Nor did Peter appear to have suffered financially in any way; although Mrs. Baxter had somewhat fretfully confided to the girls that his uncle had suggested that it was time that Peter stood upon his own feet; and that Peter accordingly had entered into business relations with a certain very wealthy firm of grain brokers. Susan could not imagine Peter as actively involved in any very lucrative deals, but Peter spent a great deal of money, never denied himself anything, and took frequent and delightful vacations.

He took Emily and Susan to polo and tennis games, and, when the season at the hotel opened, they went regularly to the dances. In July Peter went to Tahoe, where Mrs. Saunders planned to take the younger girls later for at least a few weeks' stay. Ella chaperoned them to Burlingame for a week of theatricals; all three staying with Ella's friend, Mrs. Keith, whose daughter, Mary Peacock, had also Dolly Ripley and lovely Isabel Wallace for her guests. Little Constance Fox, visiting some other friends nearby, was in constant attendance upon Miss Ripley, and Susan thought the relationship between them an extraordinary study; Miss Ripley bored, rude, casual, and Constance increasingly attentive, eager, admiring.

"When are you going to come and spend a week with me?" drawled Miss Ripley to Susan.

"You'll have the loveliest time of your life!" Connie added, brilliantly. "Be sure you ask me for that week, Dolly!"

"We'll write you about it," Miss Ripley said lazily, and Constance, putting the best face she could upon the little slight, slapped her hand playfully, and said:

"Oh, aren't you mean!"

"Dolly takes it so for granted that I'm welcome at her house at ANY time," said Constance to Susan, later, "that she forgets how rude a thing like that can sound!" She had followed Susan into her own room, and now stood by the window, looking down a sun-steeped vista of lovely roads and trees and gardens with a discontented face. Susan, changing her dress for an afternoon on the tennis-courts, merely nodded sympathetically.

"Lord, I would like to go this afternoon!" added Constance, presently.

"Aren't you going over for the tennis?" Susan asked in amazement. For the semi-finals of the tournament were to be played on this glorious afternoon, and there would be a brilliant crowd on the courts and tea at the club to follow.

"No; I can't!" Miss Fox said briefly. "Tell everyone that I'm lying down with a terrible headache, won't you?"

"But why?" asked Susan. For the headache was obviously a fiction.

"You know that mustard-colored linen with the black embroidery that Dolly's worn once or twice, don't you?" asked Connie, with apparent irrelevancy.

Susan nodded, utterly at a loss.

"Well, she gave it to me to-day, and the hat and the parasol," said Constance, with a sort of resigned bitterness. "She said she had got the outfit at Osbourne's, last month, and she thought it would look stunning on me, and wouldn't I like to wear it to the club this afternoon?"

"Well--?" Susan said, as the other paused. "Why not?"

"Oh, why not!" echoed Connie, with mild exasperation. "Don't be a damned fool!"

"Oh, I see!" Susan said, enlightened. "Everybody knows it's Miss Ripley's, of course! She probably didn't think of that!"

"She probably did!" responded Connie, with a rather dry laugh. "However, the fact remains that she'll take it out of me if I go and don't wear it, and Mamma never will forgive me if I do! So, I came in to borrow a book. Of course, Susan, I've taken things from Dolly Ripley before, and I probably will again," she added, with the nearest approach to a sensible manner that Susan had ever seen in her, "but this is going a little TOO far!"

And, borrowing a book, she departed, leaving Susan to finish her dressing in a very sober frame of mind. She wondered if her relationship toward Emily could possibly impress any outsider as Connie's attitude toward Dolly Ripley impressed her.

With Isabel Wallace she began, during this visit, the intimate and delightful friendship for which they two had been ready for a long time. Isabel was two years older than Susan, a beautiful, grave-eyed brunette, gracious in manner, sweet of voice, the finest type that her class and environment can produce. Isabel was well read, musical, traveled; she spoke two or three languages besides her mother tongue. She had been adored all her life by three younger brothers, by her charming and simple, half-invalid mother, and her big, clever father, and now, all the girls were beginning to suspect, was also adored by the very delightful Eastern man who was at present Mrs. Butler Holmes' guest in Burlingame, and upon whom all of them had been wasting their prettiest smiles. John Furlong was college-bred, young, handsome, of a rich Eastern family, in every way a suitable husband for the beautiful woman with whom he was so visibly falling in love.

Susan watched the little affair with a heartache, not all unworthy. She didn't quite want to be Isabel, or want a lover quite like John. But she did long for something beautiful and desirable all her own; it was hard to be always the outsider, always alone. When she thought of Isabel's father and mother, their joy in her joy, her own pleasure in pleasing them, a thrill of pain shook her. If Isabel was all grateful, all radiant, all generous, she, Susan, could have been graceful and radiant and generous too! She lay awake in the soft summer nights, thinking of what John would say to Isabel, and what Isabel, so lovely and so happy, would reply.

"Sue, you will know how wonderful it is when it comes to you!" Isabel said, on the last night of their Burlingame visit, when she gave Susan a shy hint that it was "all RIGHT," if a profound secret still.

The girls did not stay for the theatricals, after all. Emily was deeply disgusted at being excluded from some of the ensembles in which she had hoped to take part and, on the very eve of the festivities, she became alarmingly ill, threw Mrs. Keith's household into utter consternation and confusion, and was escorted home immediately by Susan and a trained nurse.

Back at "High Gardens," they settled down contentedly enough to the familiar routine. Emily spent two-thirds of the time in bed, but Susan, fired by Isabel Wallace's example, took regular exercises now, airing the dogs or finding commissions to execute for Emily or Mrs. Saunders, made radical changes in her diet, and attempted, with only partial success, to confine her reading to improving books. A relative had sent Emily the first of the new jig-saw puzzles from New York, and Emily had immediately wired for more. She and Susan spent hours over them; they became in fact an obsession, and Susan began to see jig-saw divisions: in everything her eye rested on; the lawn, the clouds, or the drawing-room walls.

Sometimes Kenneth joined them, and Susan knew that it was on her account. She was very demure with him; her conversation for Emily, her eyes all sisterly unembarrassment when they met his. Mrs. Saunders was not well, and kept to her room, so that more than once Susan dined alone with the man of the house. When this happened Kenneth would bring his chair down from the head of the table and set it next to hers. He called her "Tweeny" for some favorite character in a play, brought her some books she had questioned him about, asked her casually, on the days she went to town for Emily, at what time she would come back, and joined her on the train.

Susan had thought of him as a husband, as she thought of every unattached man, the instant she met him. But the glamour of those early views of Kenneth Saunders had been somewhat dimmed, and since her arrival at "High Gardens" she had tried rather more not to displease this easily annoyed member of the family, than to make a definite pleasant impression upon him. Now, however, she began seriously to consider him. And it took her a few brief moments only to decide that, if he should ask her, she would be mad to refuse to become his wife. He was probably as fine a match as offered itself at the time in all San Francisco's social set, good-looking, of a suitable age, a gentleman, and very rich. He was so rich and of so socially prominent a family that his wife need never trouble herself with the faintest thought of her own standing; it would be an established fact, supreme and irrefutable. Beside him Peter Coleman was a poor man, and even Isabel's John paled socially and financially. Kenneth Saunders would be a brilliant "catch" for any girl; for little Susan Brown--it would be a veritable triumph!

Susan's heart warmed as she thought of the details. There would be a dignified announcement from Mrs. Saunders. Then,--Babel! Telephoning, notes, telegrams! Ella would of course do the correct thing; there would be a series of receptions and dinners; there would be formal affairs on all sides. The newspapers would seize upon it; the family jewels would be reset; the long-stored silver resurrected. There would be engagement cups and wedding-presents, and a trip East, and the instant election of young Mrs. Saunders to the Town and Country Club. And, in all the confusion, the graceful figure of the unspoiled little companion would shine serene, poised, gracious, prettily deferential to both the sisters-in-law of whom she now, as a matron, took precedence.

Kenneth Saunders was no hero of romance; he was at best a little silent and unresponsive; he was a trifle bald; his face, Susan had thought at first sight, indicated weakness and dissipation. But it was a very handsome face withal, and, if silent, Kenneth could be very dignified and courteous in his manner; "very much the gentleman," Susan said to herself, "always equal to the situation"!

Other things, more serious things, she liked to think she was woman of the world enough to condone. He drank to excess, of course; no woman could live in the same house with him and remain unaware of that; Susan had often heard him raging in the more intense stages approaching delirium tremens. There had been other things, too;--women, but Susan had only a vague idea of just what that meant, and Kenneth's world resolutely made light of it.

"Ken's no molly-coddle!" Ella had said to her complacently, in connection with this topic, and one of Ella's closest friends had added, "Oh, Heaven save me from ever having one of my sons afraid to go out and do what the other boys do. Let 'em sow their wild oats, they're all the sooner over it!"

So Susan did not regard this phase of his nature very seriously. Indeed his mother often said wailingly that, if Kenneth could only find some "fine girl," and settle down, he would be the steadiest and best fellow in the world. It was Mrs. Saunders who elucidated the last details of a certain episode of Kenneth's early life for Susan. Emily had spoken of it, and Ella had once or twice alluded to it, but from them Susan only gathered that Kenneth, in some inexplicable and outrageous way, had been actually arrested for something that was not in the least his fault, and held as a witness in a murder case. He had been but twenty-two years old at the time, and, as his sisters indignantly agreed, it had ruined his life for years following, and Ken should have sued the person or persons who had dared to involve the son of the house of Saunders in so disgraceful and humiliating an affair.

"It was in one of those bad houses, my dear," Mrs. Saunders finally contributed, "and poor Ken was no worse than the thousands of other men who frequent 'em! Of course, it's terrible from a woman's point of view, but you know what men are! And when this terrible thing happened, Ken wasn't anywhere near--didn't know one thing about it until a great big brute of a policeman grabbed hold of his arm---! And of course the newspapers mentioned my poor boy's name in connection with it, far and wide!"

After that Kenneth had gone abroad for a long time, and whether the trained nurse who had at that time entered his life was really a nurse, or whether she had merely called herself one, Susan could not quite ascertain. Either the family had selected this nurse, to take care of Kenneth who was not well at the time, or she had joined him later and traveled with him as his nurse. Whatever it was, the association had lasted two or three years, and then Kenneth had come home, definitely disenchanted with women in general and woman in particular, and had settled down into the silent, cynical, unresponsive man that Susan knew. If he ever had any experiences whatever with the opposite sex they were not of a nature to be mentioned before his sisters and his mother. He scorned all the women of Ella's set, and was bitingly critical of Emily's friends.

One night, lying awake, Susan thought that she heard a dim commotion from the direction of the hallway--Kenneth's voice, Ella's voice, high and angry, some unfamiliar feminine voice, hysterical and shrill, and Mrs. Saunders, crying out: "Tottie, don't speak that way to Kennie!"

But before she could rouse herself fully, Mycroft's soothing tones drowned out the other voices; there was evidently a truce. The episode ended a few moments later with the grating of carriage wheels on the drive far below, and Susan was not quite sure, the next morning, that it had been more than a dream.

But Kenneth's history, summed up, was not a bit less edifying, was not indeed half as unpleasant, as that of many of the men, less rich and less prominent than he, who were marrying lovely girls everywhere, with the full consent and approval of parents and guardians. Susan had seen the newspaper accounts of the debauch that preceded young Harry van Vleet's marriage only by a few hours; had seen the bridegroom, still white-faced and shaking, lead away from the altar one of the sweetest of the debutantes. She had heard Rose St. John's mother say pleasantly to Rose's promised husband, "I asked your Chinese boy about those little week-end parties at your bungalow, Russell; I said, 'Yoo, were they pretty ladies Mr. Russ used to have over there?' But he only said 'No can 'member!'"

"That's where his wages go up!" the gentleman had responded cheerfully.

And, after all, Susan thought, looking on, Russell Lord was not as bad as the oldest Gerald boy, who married an Eastern girl, an heiress and a beauty, in spite of the fact that his utter unfitness for marriage was written plain in his face; or as bad as poor Trixie Chauncey's husband, who had entirely disappeared from public view, leaving the buoyant Trixie to reconcile two infant sons to the unknown horrors and dangers of the future.

If Kenneth drank, after his marriage, Mycroft would take care of him, as he did now; but Susan honestly hoped that domesticity, for which Kenneth seemed to have a real liking, would affect him in every way for good. She had not that horror of drink that had once been hers. Everybody drank, before dinner, with dinner, after dinner. It was customary to have some of the men brighten under it, some overdo it, some remain quite sober in spite of it. Susan and Emily, like all the girls they knew, frequently ordered cocktails instead of afternoon tea, when, as it might happen, they were in the Palace or the new St. Francis. The cocktails were served in tea-cups, the waiter gravely passed sugar and cream with them; the little deception was immensely enjoyed by everyone. "Two in a cup, Martini," Emily would say, settling into her seat, and the waiter would look deferentially at Susan, "The same, madam?"

It was a different world from her old world; it used a different language, lived by another code. None of her old values held here; things she had always thought quite permissible were unforgivable sins; things at which Auntie would turn pale with horror were a quietly accepted part of every-day life. No story was too bad for the women to tell over their tea-cups, or in their boudoirs, but if any little ordinary physical misery were alluded to, except in the most flippant way, such as the rash on a child's stomach, or the preceding discomforts of maternity, there was a pained and disgusted silence, and an open snub, if possible, for the woman so crude as to introduce the distasteful topic.

Susan saw good little women ostracized for the fact that their husbands did not appear at ease in evening dress, for their evident respect for their own butlers, or for their mere eagerness to get into society. On the other hand, she saw warmly accepted and admired the beautiful Mrs. Nokesmith, who had married her second husband the day after her release from her first, and pretty Beulah Garrett, whose father had swindled a hundred trusting friends out of their entire capital, and Mrs. Lawrence Edwards, whose oldest son had just had a marriage, contracted with a Barbary Coast woman while he was intoxicated, canceled by law. Divorce and disease, and dishonesty and insanity did not seem so terrible as they once had; perhaps because they were never called by their real names. The insane were beautifully cared for and safely out of sight; to disease no allusion was ever made; dishonesty was carried on in mysterious business avenues far from public inspection and public thought; and, as Ella once pointed out, the happiest people in society were those who had been married unhappily, divorced, and more fortunately mated a second time. All the married women Ella knew had "crushes"--young men who lounged in every afternoon for tea and cigarettes and gossip, and filled chairs at dinner parties, and formed a background in a theater box. Sometimes one or two matrons and their admirers, properly chaperoned, or in safe numbers, went off on motoring trips, and perhaps encountered, at the Del Monte or Santa Cruz hotels their own husbands, with the women that they particularly admired. Nothing was considered quite so pitiful as the wife who found this arrangement at all distressing. "It's always all right," said Ella, broadly, to Susan.

CHAPTER IV

In the autumn Susan went home for a week, for the Lancaster family was convulsed by the prospect of Alfie's marriage to a little nobody whose father kept a large bakery in the Mission, and Susan was needed to brace Alfred's mother for the blow. Mary Lou's old admirer and his little, invalid wife, were staying at the house now, and Susan found "Ferd" a sad blow to her old romantic vision of him: a stout, little, ruddy-cheeked man, too brilliantly dressed, with hair turning gray, and an offensive habit of attacking the idle rich for Susan's benefit, and dilating upon his own business successes. Georgie came over to spend a night in the old home while Susan was there, carrying the heavy, lumpy baby. Myra was teething now, cross and unmanageable, and Georgie was worried because a barley preparation did not seem to agree with her, and Joe disapproved of patent foods. Joe hoped that the new baby--Susan widened her eyes. Oh, yes, in May, Georgie announced simply, and with a tired sigh,--Joe hoped the new baby would be a boy. She herself hoped for a little girl, wouldn't it be sweet to call it May? Georgie looked badly, and if she did not exactly break down and cry during her visit, Susan felt that tears were always close behind her eyes.

Billy, beside her somewhat lachrymose aunt and cousins, shone out, during this visit, as Susan had never known him to do before. He looked splendidly big and strong and well, well groomed and erect in carriage, and she liked the little compliment he paid her in postponing the German lesson that should have filled the evening, and dressing himself in his best to take her to the Orpheum. Susan returned it by wearing her prettiest gown and hat. They set out in great spirits, Susan chattering steadily, in the relief it was to speak her mind honestly, and Billy listening, and now and then shouting out in the laughter that never failed her spirited narratives.

He told her of the Carrolls,--all good news, for Anna had been offered a fine position as assistant matron in one of the best of the city's surgical hospitals; Betts had sold a story to the Argonaut for twelve dollars, and Philip was going steadily ahead; "you wouldn't believe he was the same fellow!" said Billy. Jimmy and Betts and their mother were to go up in a few days for a fortnight's holiday in the little shooting-box that some Eastern friends had built years ago in the Humboldt woods. The owners had left the key with Mrs. Carroll, and she might use the little cabin as much as she liked.

"And what about Jo?" Susan asked.

This was the best news of all. Jo was to go East for the winter with one of her mother's friends, whose daughter was Jo's own age. They were to visit Boston and Washington, New York for the Opera, Palm Beach in February, and New Orleans for the Mardi Gras. Mrs. Frothingham was a widow, and had a son at Yale, who would join them for some of the holidays. Susan was absolutely delighted at the news, and alluded to it over and over again.

"It's so different when people DESERVE a thing, and when it's all new to them," she said to Billy, "it makes it seem so much more glorious!"

They came out of the theater at eleven, cramped and blinking, and Susan, confused for a moment, was trying to get her bearings, when Billy touched her arm.

"The Earl of Somerset is trying to bow to you, Sue!"

She laughed, and followed the direction of his look. It was Stephen Bocqueraz who was smiling at her, a very distinguished figure under the lamp-post, with his fur-lined great-coat, his round tortoise-shell eye-glasses and his silk hat. He came up to them at once, and Susan, pleasantly conscious that a great many people recognized the great man, introduced him to Billy.

He had just gotten back from a long visit in the Southern part of the state, he said, and had been dining to-night with friends at the Bohemian Club, and was walking back to his hotel. Susan could not keep the pleasure the meeting gave her out of her eyes and voice, and Billy showed a sort of boyish and bashful admiration of the writer, too.

"But this--this is a very felicitous occasion," said Mr. Bocqueraz. "We must celebrate this in some fitting manner!"

So he took them to supper, dismissing their hesitation as unworthy of combat; Susan and Billy laughed helplessly and happily as they sat down at the little table, and heard the German waiter's rapture at the commands Stephen Bocqueraz so easily gave him in his mother tongue. Billy, reddening but determined, must at once try his German too, and the waiter and Bocqueraz laughed at him even while they answered him, and agreed that the young man as a linguist was ganz wunderbar. Billy evidently liked his company; he was at his best to-night, unaffected, youthful, earnest. Susan herself felt that she had never been so happy in her life.

Long afterward she tried to remember what they had talked about. She knew that the conversation had been to her as a draught of sparkling wine. All her little affections were in full play to-night, the little odds and ends of worldly knowledge she had gleaned from Ella and Ella's friends, the humor of Emily and Peter Coleman. And because she was an Irishman's daughter a thousand witticisms flashed in her speech, and her eyes shone like stars under the stimulus of another's wit and the admiration in another's eyes.

It became promptly evident that Bocqueraz liked them both. He began to call Billy "lad," in a friendly, older-brotherly manner, and his laughter at Susan was alternated with moments of the gravest, the most flattering attention.

"She's quite wonderful, isn't she?" he said to Billy under his breath, but Susan heard it, and later he added, quite impersonally, "She's absolutely extraordinary! We must have her in New York, you know; my wife must meet her!"

They talked of music and musicians, and Bocqueraz and Billy argued and disputed, and presently the author's card was sent to the leader of the orchestra, with a request for the special bit of music under discussion. They talked of authors and poets and painters and actors, and he knew many of them, and knew something of them all. He talked of clubs, New York clubs and London clubs, and of plays that were yet to be given, and music that the public would never hear.

Susan felt as if electricity was coursing through her veins. She felt no fatigue, no sleepiness, no hunger; her champagne bubbled untouched, but she emptied her glass of ice-water over and over again. Of the lights and the music and the crowd she was only vaguely conscious; she saw, as if in a dream, the hands of the big clock, at the end of the room, move past one, past two o'clock, but she never thought of the time.

It was after two o'clock; still they talked on. The musicians had gone home, lights were put out in the corners of the room, tables and chairs were being piled together.

Stephen Bocqueraz had turned his chair so that he sat sideways at the table; Billy, opposite him, leaned on his elbows; Susan, sitting between them, framing her face in her hands, moved her eyes from one face to the other.

"And now, children," said the writer, when at last they were in the empty, chilly darkness of the street, "where can I get you a carriage? The cars seem to have stopped."

"The cars stop at about one," said William, "but there's a place two blocks up where we can get a hack. Don't let us take you out of your way."

"Good-night, then, lad," said Bocqueraz, laying his hand affectionately on Billy's shoulder. "Good-night, you wonderful little girl. Tell my wife's good cousins in San Rafael that I am coming over very soon to pay my respects."

He turned briskly on his heel and left them, and Susan stood looking after him for a moment.

"Where's your livery stable?" asked the girl then, taking Billy's arm.

"There isn't any!" Billy told her shamelessly. "But I've got just a dollar and eighty cents, and I was afraid he would put us into a carriage!"

Susan, brought violently to earth, burst out laughing, gathered her skirts up philosophically, and took his arm for the long walk home. It was a cool bright night, the sky was spattered thickly with stars, the moon long ago set. Susan was very silent, mind and heart swept with glorious dreams. Billy, beyond the remark that Bocqueraz certainly was a king, also had little to say, but his frequent yawns indicated that it was rather because of fatigue than of visions.

The house was astir when they reached it, but the confusion there was too great to give anyone time to notice the hour of their return. Alfie had brought his bride to see his mother, earlier in the evening, and Ma had had hysterics the moment that they left the house. These were no sooner calmed than Mrs. Eastman had had a "stroke," the doctor had now come and gone, but Mary Lou and her husband still hovered over the sufferer, "and I declare I don't know what the world's coming to!" Mrs. Lancaster said despairingly.

"What is it-what is it?" Mary Lord was calling, when Susan reached the top flight. Susan went in to give her the news, Mary was restless to-night, and glad of company; the room seemed close and warm. Lydia, sleeping heavily on the couch, only turned and grunted occasionally at the sound of the girls' voices.

Susan lay awake until almost dawn, wrapped in warm and delicious emotion. She recalled the little separate phases of the evening's talk, brought them from her memory deliberately, one by one. When she remembered that Mr. Bocqueraz had asked if Billy was "the fiance," for some reason she could not define, she shut her eyes in the dark, and a wave of some new, enveloping delight swept her from feet to head. Certain remembered looks, inflections, words, shook the deeps of her being with a strange and poignantly sweet sense of weakness and power: a trembling joy.

The new thrill, whatever it was, was with her when she wakened, and when she ran downstairs, humming the Toreador's song, Mary Lou and her aunt told her that she was like a bit of sunshine in the house; the girl's eyes were soft and bright with dreams; her cheeks were glowing.

When the postman came she flew to meet him. There was no definite hope in her mind as she did so, but she came back more slowly, nevertheless. No letter for her.

But at eleven o'clock a messenger boy appeared with a special delivery letter for Miss Susan Brown, she signed the little book with a sensation that was almost fear. This--this was beginning to frighten her----

Susan read it with a fast-beating heart. It was short, dignified. Mr. Bocqueraz wrote that he was sending her the book of which he had spoken; he had enjoyed nothing for a long time as much as their little supper last evening; he hoped to see her and that very fine lad, Billy, very soon again. His love to them both. He was her faithful friend, all ways and always, Stephen Graham Bocqueraz.

She slipped it inside her blouse, ignored it for a few moments, returned to it from other thoughts with a sense of infinite delight, and read it again. Susan could not quite analyze its charm, but in her whole being she was conscious of a warmth, a lightness, and a certain sweet and heady happiness throughout the entire day and the next day.

Her thoughts began to turn toward New York. All young Californians are conscious, sooner or later in their growth, of the call of the great city, and just now Susan was wrapped in a cloud of dreams that hung over Broadway. She saw herself one of the ebbing and flowing crowd, watching the world from her place at the breakfast table in a great hotel, sweeping through the perfumed warmth and brightness of a theater lobby to her carriage.

Stephen Bocqueraz had spoken of her coming to New York as a matter of course. "You belong there," he decided, gravely appraising her. "My wife will write to ask you to come, and we will find you just the niche you like among your own sort and kind, and your own work to do."

"Oh, it would be too wonderful!" Susan had gasped.

"New York is not wonderful," he told her, with smiling, kindly, disillusioned eyes, "but YOU are wonderful!"

Susan, when she went back to San Rafael, was seized by a mood of bitter dissatisfaction with herself. What did she know--what could she do? She was fitted neither for the stage nor for literature, she had no gift of music or of art. Lost opportunities rose up to haunt her. Ah, if she had only studied something, if she were only wiser, a linguist, a student of poetry or of history. Nearing twenty-five, she was as ignorant as she had been at fifteen! A remembered line from a carelessly read poem, a reference to some play by Ibsen or Maeterlinck or d'Annunzio, or the memory of some newspaper clipping that concerned the marriage of a famous singer or the power of a new anaesthetic,--this was all her learning!

Stephen Bocqueraz, on the Sunday following their second meeting, called upon his wife's mother's cousin. Mrs. Saunders was still at the hospital, and Emily was driven by the excitement of the occasion behind a very barrier of affectations, but Kenneth was gracious and hospitable, and took them all to the hotel for tea. Here they were the center of a changing, admiring, laughing group; everybody wanted to have at least a word with the great man, and Emily enjoyed a delightful feeling of popularity. Susan, quite eclipsed, was apparently pleasantly busy with her tea, and with the odds and ends of conversation that fell to her. But Susan knew that Stephen Bocqueraz did not move out of her hearing for one moment during the afternoon, nor miss a word that she said; nor say, she suspected, a word that she was not meant to hear. Just to exist, under these conditions, was enough. Susan, in quiet undertones, laughed and chatted and flirted and filled tea-cups, never once directly addressing the writer, and never really addressing anyone else.

Kenneth brought "Cousin Stephen" home for dinner, but Emily turned fractious, and announced that she was not going down.

"YOU'D rather be up here just quietly with me, wouldn't you, Sue?" coaxed Emily, sitting on the arm of Susan's chair, and putting an arm about her.

"Of course I would, old lady! We'll send down for something nice, and get into comfortable things," Susan said.

It hardly disappointed her; she was walking on air. She went demurely to the library door, to make her excuses; and Bocqueraz's look enveloped her like a shaft of sunlight. All the evening, upstairs, and stretched out in a long chair and in a loose silk wrapper, she was curiously conscious of his presence downstairs; whenever she thought of him, she must close her book, and fall to dreaming. His voice, his words, the things he had not said ... they spun a brilliant web about her. She loved to be young; she saw new beauty to-night in the thick rope of tawny hair that hung loosely across her shoulder, in the white breast, half-hidden by the fold of her robe, in the crossed, silk-clad ankles. All the world seemed beautiful tonight, and she beautiful with the rest.

Three days later she came downstairs, at five o'clock on a gloomy, dark afternoon, in search of firelight and tea. Emily and Kenneth, Peter Coleman and Mary Peacock, who were staying at the hotel for a week or two, were motoring. The original plan had included Susan, but at the last moment Emily had been discovered upstairs, staring undecidedly out of the window, humming abstractedly.

"Aren't you coming, Em?" Susan had asked, finding her.

"I--I don't believe I will," Emily said lightly, without turning. "Go on, don't wait for me! It's nothing," she had persisted, when Susan questioned her, "Nothing at all! At least," the truth came out at last, "at least, I think it looks ODD. So now go on, without me," said Emily.

"What looks odd?"

"Nothing does, I tell you! Please go on."

"You mean, three girls and two men," Susan said slowly.

Emily assented by silence.

"Well, then, you go and I'll stay," Susan said, in annoyance, "but it's perfect rubbish!"

"No, you go," Emily said, pettishly.

Susan went, perhaps six feet; turned back.

"I wish you'd go," she said, in dissatisfaction.

"If I did," Emily said, in a low, quiet tone, still looking out of the window, "it would be simply because of the looks of things!"

"Well, go because of the looks of things then!" Susan agreed cheerfully.

"No, but you see," Emily said eagerly, turning around, "it DOES look odd--not to me, of course! But mean odd to other people if you go and I don't-don't you think so, Sue?"

"Ye-es," drawled Susan, with a sort of bored and fexasperated sigh. And she went to her own room to write letters, not disappointed, but irritated so thoroughly that she could hardly control her thoughts.

At five o'clock, dressed in a childish black velvet gown--her one pretty house gown--with the deep embroidered collar and cuffs that were so becoming to her, and with her hair freshly brushed and swept back simply from her face, she came downstairs for a cup of tea.

And in the library, sunk into a deep chair before the fire, she found Stephen Bocqueraz, his head resting against the back of the chair, his knees crossed and his finger-tips fitted together. Susan's heart began to race.

He got up and they shook hands, and stood for too long a moment looking at each other. The sense of floating--floating--losing her anchorage--began to make Susan's head spin. She sat down, opposite him, as he took his chair again, but her breath was coming too short to permit of speech.

"Upon my word I thought the woman said that you were all out!" said Bocqueraz, appreciative eyes upon her, "I hardly hoped for a piece of luck like this!"

"Well, they are, you know. I'm not, strictly speaking, a Saunders," smiled Susan.

"No; you're nobody but yourself," he agreed, following a serious look with his sudden, bright smile. "You're a very extraordinary woman, Mamselle Suzanne," he went on briskly, "and I've got a nice little plan all ready to talk to you about. One of these days Mrs. Bocqueraz--she's a wonderful woman for this sort of thing!--shall write to your aunt, or whoever is in loco parentis, and you shall come on to New York for a visit. And while you're there---" He broke off, raised his eyes from a study of the fire, and again sent her his sudden and sweet and most disturbing smile.

"Oh, don't talk about it!" said Susan. "It's too good to be true!"

"Nothing's too good to be true," he answered. "Once or twice before it's been my extraordinary good fortune to find a personality, and give it a push in the right direction. You'll find the world kind enough to you--Lillian will see to it that you meet a few of the right people, and you'll do the rest. And how you'll love it, and how they'll love you!" He jumped up. "However, I'm not going to spoil you," he said, smilingly.

He went to one of the bookcases and presently came back to read to her from Phillips' "Paolo and Francesca," and from "The Book and the Ring." And never in later life did Susan read either without hearing his exquisite voice through the immortal lines:

"A ring without a poesy, and that ring mine?
O Lyric Love! ..."

"O Lord of Rimini, with tears we leave her, as we leave a child,
Be gentle with her, even as God has been...."

"Some day I'll read you Pompilia, little Suzanne," said Bocqueraz. "Do you know Pompilia? Do you know Alice Meynell and some of Patmore's stuff, and the 'Dread of Height'?"

"I don't know anything," said Susan, feeling it true. "Well," he said gaily, "we'll read them all!"

Susan presently poured his tea; her guest wheeling his great leather chair so that its arm touched the arm of her own.

"You make me feel all thumbs, watching me so!" she protested.

"I like to watch you," he answered undisturbed. "Here, we'll put this plate on the arm of my chair,--so. Then we can both use it. Your scones on that side, and mine on this, and my butter-knife between the two, like Prosper Le Gai's sword, eh?"

Susan's color heightened suddenly; she frowned. He was a man of the world, of course, and a married man, and much older than she, but somehow she didn't like it. She didn't like the laughter in his eyes. There had been just a hint of this--this freedom, in his speech a few nights ago, but somehow in Billy's presence it had seemed harmless--

"And why the blush?" he was askingly negligently, yet watching her closely, as if he rather enjoyed her confusion.

"You know why," Susan said, meeting his eyes with a little difficulty.

"I know why. But that's nothing to blush at. Analyze it. What is there in that to embarrass you?"

"I don't know," Susan said, awkwardly, feeling very young.

"Life is a very beautiful thing, my child," he said, almost as if he were rebuking her, "and the closer we come to the big heart of life the more wonderful things we find. No--no--don't let the people about you make you afraid of life." He finished his cup of tea, and she poured him another. "I think it's time to transplant you," he said then, pleasantly, "and since last night I've been thinking of a very delightful and practical way to do it. Lillian--Mrs. Bocqueraz has a very old friend in New York in Mrs. Gifford Curtis--no, you don't know the name perhaps, but she's a very remarkable woman--an invalid. All the world goes to her teas and dinners, all the world has been going there since Booth fell in love with her, and Patti--when she was in her prime!--spent whole Sunday afternoons singing to her! You'll meet everyone who's at all worth while there now, playwrights, and painters, and writers, and musicians. Her daughters are all married to prominent men; one lives in Paris, one in London, two near her; friends keep coming and going. It's a wonderful family. Well, there's a Miss Concannon who's been with her as a sort of companion for twenty years, but Miss Concannon isn't young, and she confided to me a few months ago that she needed an assistant,--someone to pour tea and write notes and play accompaniments---"

"A sort of Julie le Breton?" said Susan, with sparkling eyes. She resolved to begin piano practice for two hours a day to-morrow.

"I beg pardon? Yes--yes, exactly, so I'm going to write Lillian at once, and she'll put the wheels in motion!"

"I don't know what good angel ever made you think of ME," said Susan.

"Don't you?" the man asked, in a low tone. There was a pause. Both stared at the fire. Suddenly Bocqueraz cleared his throat.

"Well!" he said, jumping up, "if this clock is right it's after half-past six. Where are these good people?"

"Here they are--there's the car coming in the gate now!" Susan said in relief. She ran out to the steps to meet them.

A day or two later, as she was passing Ella's half-open doorway, Ella's voice floated out into the hall.

"That you, Susan? Come in. Will you do your fat friend a favor?" Ella, home again, had at once resumed her despotic control of the household. She was lying on a couch at this moment, lazily waving a scribbled half sheet of paper over her head.

"Take this to Mrs. Pullet, Sue," said she, "and ask her to tell the cook, in some confidential moment, that there are several things written down here that he seems to have forgotten the existence of. I want to see them on the table, from time to time. While I was with the Crewes I was positively MORTIFIED at the memory of our meals! And from now on, while Mr. Bocqueraz's here, we'll be giving two dinners a week."

"While--?" Susan felt a delicious, a terrifying weakness run like a wave from head to feet.

"He's going to be here for a month or two!" Ella announced complacently. "It was all arranged last night. I almost fell off my feet when he proposed it. He says he's got some work to finish up, and he thinks the atmosphere here agrees with him. Kate Stanlaws turned a lovely pea-green, for they were trying to get him to go with them to Alaska. He'll have the room next to Mamma's, with the round porch, and the big room off the library for a study. I had them clear everything out of it, and Ken's going to send over a desk, and chair, and so on. And do try to do everything you can to make him comfortable, Sue. Mamma's terribly pleased that he wants to come," finished Ella, making a long arm for her novel, "But of course he and I made an instant hit with each other!"

"Oh, of course I will!" Susan promised. She went away with her list, pleasure and excitement and a sort of terror struggling together in her heart.

Pleasure prevailed, however, when Stephen Bocqueraz was really established at "High Gardens," and the first nervous meeting was safely over. Everybody in the house was the happier and brighter for his coming, and Susan felt it no sin to enjoy him with the rest. Meal times became very merry; the tea-hour, when he would come across the hall from his workroom, tired, relaxed, hungry, was often the time of prolonged and delightful talks, and on such evenings as Ella left her cousin free of dinner engagements, even Emily had to admit that his reading, under the drawing-room lamp, was a rare delight.

Sometimes he gave himself a half-holiday, and joined Emily and Susan in their driving or motoring. On almost every evening that he did not dine at home he was downstairs in time for a little chat with Susan over the library fire. They were never alone very long, but they had a dozen brief encounters every day, exchanged a dozen quick, significant glances across the breakfast table, or over the book that he was reading aloud.

Susan lived in a dazed, wide-eyed state of reasonless excitement and perilous delight. It was all so meaningless, she assured her pretty vision in the mirror, as she arranged her bright hair,--the man was married, and most happily married; he was older than she; he was a man of honor! And she, Susan Brown, was only playing this fascinating game exceptionally well. She had never flirted before and had been rather proud of it. Well, she was flirting now, and proud of that, too! She was quite the last girl in the world to fall SERIOUSLY in love, with her eyes wide open, in so extremely undesirable a direction! This was not falling in love at all. Stephen Bocqueraz spoke of his wife half a dozen times a day. Susan, on her part, found plenty of things about him to dislike! But he was clever, and--yes, and fascinating, and he admired her immensely, and there was no harm done so far, and none to be done. Why try to define the affair by cut-and-dried rules; it was quite different from anything that had ever happened before, it stood in a class quite by itself.

The intangible bond between them strengthened every day. Susan, watching him when Ella's friends gathered about him, watching the honest modesty with which he evaded their empty praises, their attempts at lionizing, could not but thrill to know that HER praise stirred him, that the deprecatory, indifferent air was dropped quickly enough for HER! It was intoxicating to know, as she did know, that he was thinking, as she was, of what they would say when they next had a moment together; that, whatever she wore, he found her worth watching; that, whatever her mood, she never failed to amuse and delight him! Her rather evasive beauty grew more definite under his eyes; she bubbled with fun and nonsense. "You little fool!" Ella would laugh, with an approving glance toward Susan at the tea-table, and "Honestly, Sue, you were killing tonight!" Emily, who loved to be amused, said more than once.

One day Miss Brown was delegated to carry a message to Mr. Bocqueraz in his study. Mrs. Saunders was sorry to interrupt his writing, but a very dear old friend was coming to dinner that evening, and would Cousin Stephen come into the drawing-room for a moment, before he and Ella went out?

Susan tripped demurely to the study door and rapped.

"Come in!" a voice shouted. Susan turned the knob, and put her head into the room. Mr. Bocqueraz, writing at a large table by the window, and facing the door across its shining top, flung down his pen, and stretched back luxuriously in his chair.

"Well, well!" said he, smiling and blinking. "Come in, Susanna!"

"Mrs. Saunders wanted me to ask you---"

"But come in! I've reached a tight corner; couldn't get any further anyway!" He pushed away his papers. "There are days, you know, when you're not even on bowing acquaintance with your characters."

He looked so genial, so almost fatherly, so contentedly lazy, leaning back in his big chair, the winter sunshine streaming in the window behind him, and a dozen jars of fragrant winter flowers making the whole room sweet, that Susan came in, unhesitatingly. It was the mood of all his moods that she liked best; interested, interesting, impersonal.

"But I oughtn't--you're writing," said Susan, taking a chair across the table from him, and laying bold hands on his manuscript, nevertheless. "What a darling hand you write!" she observed, "and what enormous margins. Oh, I see, you write notes in the margins--corrections?"

"Exactly!" He was watching her between half-closed lids, with lazy pleasure.

"'The only,' in a loop," said Susan, "that's not much of a note! I could have written that myself," she added, eying him sideways through a film of drifting hair.

"Very well, write anything you like!" he offered amusedly.

"Oh, honestly?" asked Susan with dancing eyes. And, at his nod, she dipped a pen in the ink, and began to read the story with a serious scowl.

"Here!" she said suddenly, "this isn't at all sensible!" And she read aloud:

"So crystal clear was the gaze with which he met her own, that she was aware of an immediate sense, a vaguely alarming sense, that her confidence must be made with concessions not only to what he had told her--and told her so exquisitely as to indicate his knowledge of other facts from which those he chose to reveal were deliberately selected--but also to what he had not--surely the most significant detail of the whole significant episode--so chosen to reveal!"

"Oh, I see what it means, when I read it aloud," said Susan, cheerfully honest. "But at first it didn't seem to make sense!"

"Go ahead. Fix it anyway you like."

"Well---" Susan dimpled. "Then I'll--let's see--I'll put 'surely' after 'also,'" she announced, "and end it up, 'to what he had not so chosen to reveal!' Don't you think that's better?"

"Clearer, certainly.--On that margin, Baby."

"And will you really let it stay that way?" asked the baby, eying the altered page with great satisfaction.

"Oh, really. You will see it so in the book."

His quiet certainty that these scattered pages would surely be a book some day thrilled Susan, as power always thrilled her. Just as she had admired Thorny's old scribbled prices, years before, so she admired this quiet mastery now. She asked Stephen Bocqueraz questions, and he told her of his boyhood dreams, of the early struggles in the big city, of the first success.

"One hundred dollars for a story, Susan. It looked a little fortune!"

"And were you married then?"

"Married?" He smiled. "My dear child, Mrs. Bocqueraz is worth almost a million dollars in her own right. No--we have never faced poverty together!" There was almost a wistful look in his eyes.

"And to whom is this book going to be dedicated?" asked Susan.

"Well, I don't know. Lillian has two, and Julie has one or two, and various men, here and in London. Perhaps I'll dedicate this one to a bold baggage of an Irish girl. Would you like that?"

"Oh, you couldn't!" Susan said, frightened.

"Why couldn't I?"

"Because,--I'd rather you wouldn't! I--and it would look odd!" stammered Susan.

"Would you care, if it did?" he asked, with that treacherous sudden drop in his voice that always stirred her heart so painfully.

"No-o---" Susan answered, scarcely above a whisper.

"What are you afraid of, little girl?" he asked, putting his hand over hers on the desk.

Susan moved her hand away.

"Because, your wife---" she began awkwardly, turning a fiery red.

Bocqueraz abruptly left his seat, and walked to a window.

"Susan," he said, coming back, after a moment, "have I ever done anything to warrant--to make you distrust me?"

"No,--never!" said Susan heartily, ashamed of herself.

"Friends?" he asked, gravely. And with his sudden smile he put his two hands out, across the desk.

It was like playing with fire; she knew it. But Susan felt herself quite equal to anyone at playing with fire.

"Friends!" she laughed, gripping his hands with hers. "And now," she stood up, "really I mustn't interrupt you any longer!"

"But wait a moment," he said. "Come see what a pretty vista I get--right across the Japanese garden to the woods!"

"The same as we do upstairs," Susan said. But she went to stand beside him at the window.

"No," said Stephen Bocqueraz presently, quietly taking up the thread of the interrupted conversation, "I won't dedicate my book to you, Susan, but some day I'll write you a book of your own! I have been wishing," he added soberly, his eyes on the little curved bridge and the dwarfed shrubs, the pond and the stepping-stones across the garden, "I have been wishing that I never had met you, my dear. I knew, years ago, in those hard, early days of which I've been telling you, that you were somewhere, but--but I didn't wait for you, Susan, and now I can do no more than wish you God-speed, and perhaps give you a helping hand upon your way! That's all I wanted to say."

"I'm--I'm not going to answer you," said Susan, steadily, composedly.

Side by side they looked out of the window, for another moment or two, then Bocqueraz turned suddenly and catching her hands in his, asked almost gaily:

"Well, this is something, at least, isn't it--to be good friends, and to have had this much of each other?"

"Surely! A lot!" Susan answered, in smiling relief. And a moment later she had delivered her message, and was gone, and he had seated himself at his work again.

How much was pretense and how much serious earnest, on his part, she wondered. How much was real on her own? Not one bit of it, said Susan, fresh from her bath, in the bracing cool winter morning, and walking briskly into town for the mail. Not--not much of it, anyway, she decided when tea-time brought warmth and relaxation, the leaping of fire-light against the library walls, the sound of the clear and cultivated voice.

But what was the verdict later, when Susan, bare-armed and bare-shouldered, with softened light striking brassy gleams from her hair, and the perfumed dimness and silence of the great house impressing every sense, paused for a message from Stephen Bocqueraz at the foot of the stairs, or warmed her shining little slipper at the fire, while he watched her from the chair not four feet away?

When she said "I--I'm not going to answer you," in the clear, bright morning light, Susan was enjoyably aware of the dramatic value of the moment; when she evaded Bocqueraz's eye throughout an entire luncheon she did it deliberately; it was a part of the cheerful, delightful game it pleased them both to be playing.

But not all was posing, not all was pretense. Nature, now and then, treacherously slipped in a real thrill, where only play-acting was expected. Susan, laughing at the memory of some sentimental fencing, was sometimes caught unaware by a little pang of regret; how blank and dull life would be when this casual game was over! After all, he WAS the great writer; before the eyes of all the world, even this pretense at an intimate friendship was a feather in her cap!

And he did not attempt to keep their rapidly developing friendship a secret; Susan was alternately gratified and terrified by the reality of his allusions to her before outsiders. No playing here! Everybody knew, in their little circle, that, in the nicest and most elder-brotherly way possible, Stephen Bocqueraz thought Susan Brown the greatest fun in the world, and quoted her, and presented her with his autographed books. This side of the affair, being real, had a tendency to make it all seem real, and sometimes confused, and sometimes a little frightened Susan.

"That a woman of Emily's mental caliber can hire a woman of yours, for a matter of dollars and cents," he said to Susan whimsically, "is proof that something is radically wrong somewhere! Well, some day we'll put you where values are a little different. Anybody can be rich. Mighty few can be Susan!"

She did not believe everything he said, of course, or take all his chivalrous speeches quite seriously. But obviously, some of it was said in all honesty, she thought, or why should he take the trouble to say it? And the nearness of his bracing personality blew across the artificial atmosphere in which she lived like the cool breath of great moors or of virgin forests. Genius and work and success became the real things of life; money but a mere accident. A horrible sense of the unreality of everything that surrounded her began to oppress Susan. She saw the poisoned undercurrent of this glittering and exquisite existence, the selfishness, the cruelties, the narrowness. She saw its fundamental insincerity. In a world where wrongs were to be righted, and ignorance enlightened, and childhood sheltered and trained, she began to think it strange that strong, and young, and wealthy men and women should be content to waste enormous sums of money upon food to which they scarcely ever brought a normal appetite, upon bridge-prizes for guests whose interest in them scarcely survived the moment of unwrapping the dainty beribboned boxes in which they came, upon costly toys for children whose nurseries were already crowded with toys. She wondered that they should think it worth while to spend hours and days in harassing dressmakers and milliners, to make a brief appearance in the gowns they were so quickly ready to discard, that they should gratify every passing whim so instantly that all wishes died together, like little plants torn up too soon.

The whole seemed wonderful and beautiful still. But the parts of this life, seriously analyzed, seemed to turn to dust and ashes. Of course, a hundred little shop-girls might ache with envy at reading that Mrs. Harvey Brock was to give her debutante daughter a fancy-dress ball, costing ten thousand dollars, and might hang wistfully over the pictures of Miss Peggy Brock in her Dresden gown with her ribbon-tied crook; but Susan knew that Peggy cried and scolded the whole afternoon, before the dance, because Teddy Russell was not coming, that young Martin Brock drank too much on that evening and embarrassed his entire family before he could be gotten upstairs, and that Mrs. Brock considered the whole event a failure because some favors, for which she had cabled to Paris, did not come, and the effect of the german was lost. Somehow, the "lovely and gifted heiress" of the newspapers never seemed to Susan at all reconcilable with Dolly Ripley, vapid, overdressed, with diamonds sparkling about her sallow throat, and the "jolly impromptu" trip of the St. Johns to New York lost its point when one knew it was planned because the name of young Florence St. John had been pointedly omitted from Ella Saunders dance list.

Boasting, lying, pretending--how weary Susan got of it all! She was too well schooled to smile when Ella, meeting the Honorable Mary Saunders and Sir Charles Saunders, of London, said magnificently, "We bear the same arms, Sir Charles, but of course ours is the colonial branch of the family!" and she nodded admiringly at Dolly Ripley's boyish and blunt fashion of saying occasionally "We Ripleys,--oh, we drink and gamble and do other things, I admit; we're not saints! But we can't lie, you know!"

"I hate to take the kiddies to New York, Mike," perhaps some young matron would say simply. "Percy's family is one of the old, old families there, you know, shamelessly rich, and terribly exclusive! And one doesn't want the children to take themselves seriously yet awhile!"

"Bluffers!" the smiling and interested Miss Brown would say to herself, as she listened. She listened a great deal; everyone was willing to talk, and she was often amused at the very slight knowledge that could carry a society girl through a conversation. In Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's offices there would be instant challenges, even at auntie's table affectation met its just punishment, and inaccuracy was promptly detected. But there was no such censorship here.

"Looks like a decent little cob!" some girl would say, staring at rider passing the hotel window, at teatime.

"Yes," another voice would agree, "good points. Looks thoroughbred."

"Yes, he does! Looks like a Kentucky mount."

"Louisa! Not with that neck!"

"Oh, I don't know. My grandfather raised fancy stock, you know. Just for his own pleasure, of course, So I DO know a good horse!"

"Well, but he steps more like a racer," somebody else would contribute.

"That's what I thought! Loose-built for a racer, though."

"And what a fool riding him--the man has no seat!"

"Oh, absolutely not! Probably a groom, but it's a shame to allow it!"

"Groom, of course. But you'll never see a groom riding a horse of mine that way!"

"Rather NOT!"

And, an ordinary rider, on a stable hack, having by this time passed from view, the subject, would be changed.

Or perhaps some social offense would absorb everybody's attention for the better part of half-an-hour.

"Look, Emily," their hostess would say, during a call, "isn't this rich! The Bridges have had their crest put on their mourning-stationery! Don't you LOVE it! Mamma says that the girls must have done it; the old lady MUST know better! Execrable bad taste, I call it."

"Oh, ISN'T that awful!" Emily would inspect the submitted letter with deep amusement.

"Oh, Mary, let's see it--I don't believe it!" somebody else would exclaim.

"Poor things, and they try so hard to do everything right!" Kindly pity would soften the tones of a fourth speaker.

"But you know Mary, they DO do that in England," somebody might protest.

"Oh, Peggy, rot! Of course they don't!"

"Why, certainly they do!" A little feeling would be rising. "When Helen and I were in London we had some friends--"

"Nonsense, Peggy, it's terribly vulgar! I know because Mamma's cousin--"

"Oh honestly, Peggy, it's never done!"

"I never heard of such a thing!"

"You might use your crest in black, Peg, but in color--!"

"Just ask any engraver, Peg. I know when Frances was sending to England for our correct quarterings,--they'd been changed--"

"But I tell you I KNOW," Miss Peggy would say angrily. "Do you mean to tell me that you'd take the word of a stationer--"

"A herald. You can't call that a stationer--"

"Well, then a herald! What do they know?"

"Why, of course they know!" shocked voices would protest. "It's their business!"

"Well," the defender of the Bridges would continue loftily, "all I can say is that Alice and I SAW it--"

"I know that when WE were in London," some pleasant, interested voice would interpose, modestly, "our friends--Lord and Lady Merridew, they were, you know, and Sir Henry Phillpots--they were in mourning, and THEY didn't. But of course I don't know what other people, not nobility, that is, might do!"

And of course this crushing conclusion admitted of no answer. But Miss Peggy might say to Susan later, with a bright, pitying smile:

"Alice will ROAR when I tell her about this! Lord and Lady Merridew,--that's simply delicious! I love it!"

"Bandar-log," Bocqueraz called them, and Susan often thought of the term in these days. From complete disenchantment she was saved, however, by her deepening affection for Isabel Wallace, and, whenever they were together, Susan had to admit that a more lovely personality had never been developed by any environment or in any class. Isabel, fresh, unspoiled, eager to have everyone with whom she came in contact as enchanted with life as she was herself, developed a real devotion for Susan, and showed it in a hundred ways. If Emily was away for a night, Isabel was sure to come and carry Susan off for as many hours as possible to the lovely Wallace home. They had long, serious talks together; Susan did not know whether to admire or envy most Isabel's serene happiness in her engagement, the most brilliant engagement of the winter, and Isabel's deeper interest in her charities, her tender consideration of her invalid mother, her flowers, her plan for the small brothers.

"John is wonderful, of course," Isabel would agree in a smiling aside to Susan when, furred and glowing, she had brought her handsome big lover into the Saunders' drawing-room for a cup of tea, "but I've been spoiled all my life, Susan, and I'm afraid he's going right on with it! And--" Isabel's lovely eyes would be lighted with an ardent glow, "and I want to do something with my life, Sue, something BIG, in return for it all!"

Again, Susan found herself watching with curious wistfulness the girl who had really had an offer of marriage, who was engaged, openly adored and desired. What had he said to her--and she to him--what emotions crossed their hearts when they went to watch the building of the beautiful home that was to be theirs?

A man and a woman--a man and a woman--loving and marrying--what a miracle the familiar aspects of approaching marriage began to seem! In these days Susan read old poems with a thrill, read "Trilby" again, and found herself trembling, read "Adam Bede," and shut the book with a thundering heart. She went, with the others, to "Faust," and turned to Stephen Bocqueraz a pale, tense face, and eyes brimming with tears.

The writer's study, beyond the big library, had a fascination for her. At least once a day she looked in upon him there, sometimes with Emily, sometimes with Ella, never, after that first day, alone.

"You can see that he's perfectly devoted to that dolly-faced wife of his!" Ella said, half-contemptuously. "I think we all bore him," Emily said. "Stephen is a good and noble man," said his wife's old cousin. Susan never permitted herself to speak of him. "Don't you like him?" asked Isabel. "He seems crazy about you! I think you're terribly fine to be so indifferent about it, Susan!"

On a certain December evening Emily decided that she was very unwell, and must have a trained nurse. Susan, who had stopped, without Emily, at the Wallaces' for tea, understood perfectly that the youngest Miss Saunders was delicately intimating that she expected a little more attention from her companion. A few months ago she would have risen to the occasion with the sort of cheerful flattery that never failed in its effect on Emily, but to-night a sort of stubborn irritation kept her lips sealed, and in the end she telephoned for the nurse Emily fancied, a Miss Watts, who had been taking care of one of Emily's friends.

Miss Watts, effusive and solicitous, arrived, and Susan could see that Emily was repenting of her bargain long before she, Susan, had dressed for dinner. But she ran downstairs with a singing heart, nevertheless. Ella was to bring two friends in for cards, immediately after dinner; Kenneth had not been home for three days; Miss Baker was in close attendance upon Mrs. Saunders, who had retired to her room before dinner; so Susan and Stephen were free to dine alone. Susan had hesitated, in the midst of her dressing, over the consideration of a gown, and had finally compromised with her conscience by deciding upon quite the oldest, plainest, shabbiest black silk in the little collection.

"Most becoming thing you ever put on!" said Emily, trying to reestablish quite cordial relations.

"I know," Susan agreed guiltily.

When she and Stephen Bocqueraz came back into one of the smaller drawing-rooms after dinner Susan walked to the fire and stood, for a few moments, staring down at the coals. The conversation during the softly lighted, intimate little dinner had brought them both to a dangerous mood. Susan was excited beyond the power of reasonable thought. It was all nonsense, they were simply playing; he was a married man, and she a woman who never could by any possibility be anything but "good," she would have agreed impatiently and gaily with her own conscience if she had heard it at all--but just now she felt like enjoying this particular bit of foolery to the utmost, and, since there was really no harm in it, she was going to enjoy it! She had not touched wine at dinner, but some subtler intoxication had seized her, she felt conscious of her own beauty, her white throat, her shining hair, her slender figure in its clinging black, she felt conscious of Stephen's eyes, conscious of the effective background for them both that the room afforded; the dull hangings, subdued lights and softly shining surfaces.

Her companion stood near her, watching her. Susan, still excitedly confident that she controlled the situation, began to feel her breath come deep and swift, began to wish that she could think of just the right thing to say, to relieve the tension a little-began to wish that Ella would come in--

She raised her eyes, a little frightened, a little embarrassed, to his, and in the next second he had put his arms about her and crushed her to him and kissed her on the mouth.

"Susan," he said, very quietly, "you are my girl--you are MY girl, will you let me take care of you? I can't help it--I love you."

This was not play-acting, at last. A grim, an almost terrible earnestness was in his voice; his face was very pale; his eyes dark with passion. Susan, almost faint with the shock, pushed away his arms, walked a few staggering steps and stood, her back turned to him, one hand over her heart, the other clinging to the back of a chair, her breath coming so violently that her whole body shook.

"Oh, don't--don't--don't!" she said, in a horrified and frightened whisper.

"Susan"--he began eagerly, coming toward her. She turned to face him, and breathing as if she had been running, and in simple entreaty, she said:

"Please--please--if you touch me again--if you touch me again--I cannot--the maids will hear--Bostwick will hear--"

"No, no, no! Don't be frightened, dear," he said quickly and soothingly. "I won't. I won't do anything you don't want me to!"

Susan pressed her hand over her eyes; her knees felt so weak that she was afraid to move. Her breathing slowly grew more even.

"My dear--if you'll forgive me!" the man said repentantly. She gave him a weary smile, as she went to drop into her low chair before the fire.

"No, no, Mr. Bocqueraz, I'm to blame," she said quietly. And suddenly she put her elbows on her knees, and buried her face in her hands.

"Listen, Susan--" he began again. But again she silenced him.

"Just--one--moment--" she said pleadingly. For two or three moments there was silence.

"No, it's my fault," Susan said then, more composedly, pushing her hair back from her forehead with both hands, and raising her wretched eyes. "Oh, how could I--how could I!" And again she hid her face.

Stephen Bocqueraz did not speak, and presently Susan added, with a sort of passion:

"It was wicked, and it was COMMON, and no decent woman--"

"No, you shan't take that tone!" said Bocqueraz, suddenly looking up from a somber study of the fire. "It is true, Susan, and--and I can't be sorry it is. It's the truest thing in the world!"

"Oh, let's not--let's NOT talk that way!" All that was good and honest in her came to Susan's rescue now, all her clean and honorable heritage. "We've only been fooling, haven't we?" she urged eagerly. "You know we have! Why, you--you--"

"No," said Bocqueraz, "it's too big now to be laughed away, Susan!" He came and knelt beside her chair and put his arm about her, his face so close that Susan could lay an arresting hand upon his shoulder. Her heart beat madly, her senses swam.

"You mustn't!" said Susan, trying to force her voice above a hoarse whisper, and failing.

"Do you think you can deceive me about it?" he asked. "Not any more than I could deceive you! Do you think I'M glad--haven't you seen how I've been fighting it--ignoring it--"

Susan's eyes were fixed upon his with frightened fascination; she could not have spoken if life had depended upon it.

"No," he said, "whatever comes of it, or however we suffer for it, I love you, and you love me, don't you, Susan?"

She had forgotten herself now, forgotten that this was only a sort of play--forgotten her part as a leading lady, bare-armed and bright-haired, whose role it was to charm this handsome man, in the soft lamplight. She suddenly knew that she could not deny what he asked, and with the knowledge that she DID care for him, that this splendid thing had come into her life for her to reject or to keep, every rational thought deserted her. It only seemed important that he should know that she was not going to answer "No."

"Do you care a little, Susan?" he asked again. Susan did not answer or move. Her eyes never left his face.

She was still staring at him, a moment later, ashen-faced and helpless, when they heard Bostwick crossing the hall to admit Ella and her chattering friends. Somehow she stood up, somehow walked to the door.

"After nine!" said Ella, briskly introducing, "but I know you didn't miss us! Get a card-table, Bostwick, please. And, Sue, will you wait, like a love, and see that we get something to eat at twelve--at one? Take these things, Lizzie. NOW. What is it, Stephen? A four-spot? You get it. How's the kid, Sue?"

"I'm going right up to see!" Susan said dizzily, glad to escape. She went up to Emily's room, and was made welcome by the bored invalid, and gladly restored to her place as chief attendant. When Emily was sleepy Susan went downstairs to superintend the arrangements for supper; presently she presided over the chafing-dish. She did not speak to Bocqueraz or meet his look once during the evening. But in every fiber of her being she was conscious of his nearness, and of his eyes.

The long night brought misgivings, and Susan went down to breakfast cold with a sudden revulsion of feeling. Ella kept her guest busy all day, and all through the following day. Susan, half-sick at first with the variety and violence of her emotions, had convinced herself, before forty-eight hours were over, that the whole affair had been no more than a moment of madness, as much regretted by him as by herself.

It was humiliating to remember with what a lack of self-control and reserve she had borne herself, she reflected. "But one more word of this sort," Susan resolved, "and I will simply go back to Auntie within the hour!"

On the third afternoon, a Sunday, Peter Coleman came to suggest an idle stroll with Emily and Susan, and was promptly seized by the gratified Emily for a motor-trip.

"We'll stop for Isabel and John," said Emily, elated. "Unless," her voice became a trifle flat, "unless you'd like to go, Sue," she amended, "and in that case, if Isabel can go, we can--"

"Oh, heavens, no!" Susan said, laughing, pleased at the disgusted face Peter Coleman showed beyond Emily's head. "Ella wants me to go over to the hotel, anyway, to talk about borrowing chairs for the concert, and I'll go this afternoon," she added, lowering her voice so that it should not penetrate the library, where Ella and Bocqueraz and some luncheon guests were talking together.

But when she walked down the drive half an hour later, with the collies leaping about her, the writer quietly fell into step at her side. Susan stopped short, the color rushing into her face. But her companion paid no heed to her confusion.

"I want to talk to you, Susan," said he unsmilingly, and with a tired sigh. "Where shall we walk? Up behind the convent here?"

"You look headachy," Susan said sympathetically, distracted from larger issues by the sight of his drawn, rather colorless face.

"Bad night," he explained briefly. And with no further objection she took the convent road, and they walked through the pale flood of winter sunshine together. There had been heavy rains; to-day the air was fresh-washed and clear, but they could hear the steady droning of the fog-horn on the distant bay.

The convent, washed with clear sunlight, loomed high above its bare, well-kept gardens. The usual Sunday visitors were mounting and descending the great flight of steps to the doorway; a white-robed portress stood talking to one little group at the top, her folded arms lost in her wide sleeves. A three-year-old, in a caped white coat, made every one laugh by her independent investigations of arches and doorway.

"Dear Lord, to be that size again!" thought Susan, heavy-hearted.

"I've been thinking a good deal since Tuesday night, Susan," began Bocqueraz quietly, when they had reached the shelved road that runs past the carriage gates and lodges of beautiful private estates, and circles across the hills, above the town. "And, of course, I've been blaming myself bitterly; but I'm not going to speak of that now. Until Tuesday I hoped that what pain there was to bear, because of my caring for you, would be borne by me alone. If I blame myself, Sue, it's only because I felt that I would rather bear it, any amount of it, than go away from you a moment before I must. But when I realize that you, too--"

He paused, and Susan did not speak, could not speak, even though she knew that her silence was a definite statement.

"No--" he said presently, "we must face the thing honestly. And perhaps it's better so. I want to speak to you about my marriage. I was twenty-five, and Lillian eighteen. I had come to the city, a seventeen-year-old boy, to make my fortune, and it was after the first small success that we met. She was an heiress--a sweet, pretty, spoiled little girl; she is just a little girl now in many ways. It was a very extraordinary marriage for her to wish to make; her mother disapproved; her guardians disapproved. I promised the mother to go away, and I did, but Lillian had an illness a month or two later and they sent for me, and we were married. Her mother has always regarded me as of secondary importance in her daughter's life; she took charge of our house, and of the baby when Julie came, and went right on with her spoiling and watching and exulting in Lillian. They took trips abroad; they decided whether or not to open the town house; they paid all the bills. Lillian has her suite of rooms, and I mine. Julie is very prettily fond of me; they like to give a big tea, two or three times a winter, and have me in evidence, or Lillian likes to have me plan theatricals, or manage amateur grand-opera for her. When Julie was about ten I had my own ideas as to her upbringing, but there was a painful scene, in which the child herself was consulted, and stood with her mother and grandmother--

"So, for several years, Susan, it has been only the decent outer shell of a marriage. We sometimes live in different cities for months at a time, or live in the same house, and see no more of each other than guests in the same hotel. Lillian makes no secret of it; she would be glad to be free. We have never had a day, never an hour, of real companionship! My dear Sue--" his voice, which had been cold and bitter, softened suddenly, and he turned to her the sudden winning smile that she remembered noticing the first evening they had known each other. "My dear Sue," he said, "when I think what I have missed in life I could go mad! When I think what it would be to have beside me a comrade who liked what I like, who would throw a few things into a suit case, and put her hand in mine, and wander over the world with me, laughing and singing through Italy, watching a sudden storm from the doorway of an English inn--"

"Ah, don't!" Susan said wistfully.

"You have never seen the Canadian forests, Sue, on some of the tropical beaches, or the color in a japanese street, or the moon rising over the Irish lakes!" he went on, "and how you would love it all!",

"We oughtn't--oughtn't to talk this way--", Susan said unsteadily.

They were crossing a field, above the town, and came now to a little stile. Susan sat down on the little weather-burned step, and stared down on the town below. Bocqueraz leaned on the rail, and looked at her.

"Always--always--always," he pursued seriously. "I have known that you were somewhere in the world. Just you, a bold and gay and witty and beautiful woman, who would tear my heart out by the roots when I met you, and shake me out of my comfortable indifference to the world and everything in it. And you have come! But, Susan, I never knew, I never dreamed what it would mean to me to go away from you, to leave you in peace, never guessing--"

"No, it's too late for that!" said Susan, clearing her throat. "I'd rather know."

If she had been acting it would have been the correct thing to say. The terrifying thought was that she was not acting; she was in deadly, desperate earnest now, and yet she could not seem to stop short; every instant involved her the deeper.

"We--we must stop this," she said, jumping up, and walking briskly toward the village. "I am so sorry--I am so ashamed! It all seemed--seemed so foolish up to--well, to Tuesday. We must have been mad that night! I never dreamed that things would go so far. I don't blame you, I blame myself. I assure you I haven't slept since, I can't seem to eat or think or do anything naturally any more! Sometimes I think I'm going crazy!"

"My poor little girl!" They were in a sheltered bit of road now, and Bocqueraz put his two hands lightly on her shoulders, and stopped her short. Susan rested her two hands upon his arms, her eyes, raised to his, suddenly brimmed with tears. "My poor little girl!" he said again tenderly, "we'll find a way out! It's come on you too suddenly, Sue--it came upon me like a thunderbolt. But there's just one thing," and Susan remembered long afterward the look in his eyes as he spoke of it, "just one thing you mustn't forget, Susan. You belong to me now, and I'll move heaven and earth--but I'll have you. It's come all wrong, sweetheart, and we can't see our way now. But, my dearest, the wonderful thing is that it has come----

"Think of the lives," he went on, as Susan did not answer, "think of the women, toiling away in dull, dreary lives, to whom a vision like this has never come!"

"Oh, I know!" said Susan, in sudden passionate assent.

"But don't misunderstand me, dear, you're not to be hurried or troubled in this thing. We'll think, and talk things over, and plan. My world is a broader and saner world than yours is, Susan, and when I take you there you will be as honored and as readily accepted as any woman among them all. My wife will set me free---" he fell into a muse, as they walked along the quiet country road, and Susan, her brain a mad whirl of thoughts, did not interrupt him. "I believe she will set me free," he said, "as soon as she knows that my happiness, and all my life, depend upon it. It can be done; it can be arranged, surely. You know that our eastern divorce laws are different from yours here, Susan---"

"I think I must be mad to let you talk so!" burst out Susan, "You must not! Divorce---! Why, my aunt---!"

"We'll not mention it again," he assured her quickly, but although for the rest of their walk they said very little, the girl escaped upstairs to her room before dinner with a baffled sense that the dreadful word, if unpronounced, had been none the less thundering in her brain and his all the way.

She made herself comfortable in wrapper and slippers, rather to the satisfaction of Emily, who had brought Peter back to dinner, barely touched the tray that the sympathetic Lizzie brought upstairs, and lay trying to read a book that she flung aside again and again for the thoughts that would have their way.

She must think this whole thing out, she told herself desperately; view it dispassionately and calmly; decide upon the best and quickest step toward reinstating the old order, toward blotting out this last fortnight of weakness and madness. But, if Susan was fighting for the laws of men, a force far stronger was taking arms against her, the great law of nature held her in its grip. The voice of Stephen Bocqueraz rang across her sanest resolution; the touch of Stephen Bocqueraz's hand burned her like a fire.

Well, it had been sent to her, she thought resentfully, lying back spent and exhausted; she had not invited it. Suppose she accepted it; suppose she sanctioned his efforts to obtain a divorce, suppose she were married to him--And at the thought her resolutions melted away in the sudden delicious and enervating wave of emotion that swept over her. To belong to him!

"Oh, my God, I do not know what to do!" Susan whispered. She slipped to her knees, and buried her face in her hands. If her mind would but be still for a moment, would stop its mad hurry, she might pray.

A knock at the door brought her to her feet; it was Miss Baker, who was sitting with Kenneth to-night, and who wanted company. Susan was glad to go noiselessly up to the little sitting-room next to Kenneth's room, and sit chatting under the lamp. Now and then low groaning and muttering came from the sick man, and the women paused for a pitiful second. Susan presently went in to help Miss Baker persuade him to drink some cooling preparation.

The big room was luxurious enough for a Sultan, yet with hints of Kenneth's earlier athletic interests in evidence too. A wonderful lamp at the bedside diffused a soft light. The sufferer, in embroidered and monogrammed silk night-wear, was under a trimly drawn sheet, with a fluffy satin quilt folded across his feet. He muttered and shook his head, as the drink was presented, and, his bloodshot eyes discovering Susan, he whispered her name, immediately shouting it aloud, hot eyes on her face:

"Susan!"

"Feeling better?" Susan smiled encouragingly, maternally, down upon him.

But his gaze had wandered again. He drained the glass, and immediately seemed quieter.

"He'll sleep now," said Miss Baker, when they were back in the adjoining room. "Doesn't it seem a shame?"

"Couldn't he be cured, Miss Baker?"

"Well," the nurse pursed her lips, shook her head thoughtfully. "No, I don't believe he could now. Doctor thinks the south of France will do wonders, and he says that if Mr. Saunders stayed on a strict diet for, say a year, and then took some German cure--but I don't know! Nobody could make him do it anyway. Why, we can't keep him on a diet for twenty-four hours! Of course he can't keep this up. A few more attacks like this will finish him. He's going to have a nurse in the morning, and Doctor says that in about a month he ought to get away. It's my opinion he'll end in a mad-house," Miss Baker ended, with quiet satisfaction.

"Oh, don't!" Susan cried in horror.

"Well, a lot of them do, my dear! He'll never get entirely well, that's positive. And now the problem is," the nurse, who was knitting a delicate rainbow afghan for a baby, smiled placidly over her faint pinks and blues, "now the question is, who's going abroad with him? He can't go alone. Ella declines the honor," Miss Baker's lips curled; she detested Ella "Emily--you know what Emily is! And the poor mother, who would really make the effort, he says gets on his nerves. Anyway, she's not fit. If he had a man friend---! But the only one he'd go with, Mr. Russell, is married."

"A nurse?" suggested Susan.

"Oh, my dear!" Miss Baker gave her a significant look. "There are two classes of nurses," she said, "one sort wouldn't dare take a man who has the delirium tremens anywhere, much less to a strange country, and the other---! They tried that once, before my day it was, but I guess that was enough for them. Of course the best thing that he could do," pursued the nurse lightly, "is get married."

"Well," Susan felt the topic a rather delicate one. "Ought he marry?" she ventured.

"Don't think I'd marry him!" Miss Baker assured her hastily, "but he's no worse than the Gregory boy, married last week. He's really no worse than lots of others!"

"Well, it's a lovely, lovely world!" brooded Susan bitterly. "I wish to GOD," she added passionately, "that there was some way of telling right from wrong! If you want to have a good time and have money enough, you can steal and lie and marry people like Kenneth Saunders; there's no law that you can't break--pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth! That IS society! And yet, if you want to be decent, you can slave away a thousand years, mending and patching and teaching and keeping books, and nothing beautiful or easy ever comes your way!"

"I don't agree with you at all," said Miss Baker, in disapproval. "I hope I'm not bad," she went on brightly, "but I have a lovely time! Everyone here is lovely to me, and once a month I go home to my sister. We're the greatest chums ever, and her baby, Marguerite, is named for me, and she's a perfect darling! And Beek--that's her husband--is the most comical thing I ever saw; he'll go up and get Mrs. Tully--my sister rents one of her rooms,--and we have a little supper, and more cutting-UP! Or else Beek'll sit with the baby, and we girls go to the theater!"

"Yes, that's lovely," Susan said, but Miss Baker accepted the words and not the tone, and went on to innocent narratives of Lily, Beek and the little Marguerite.

"And now, I wonder what a really good, conscientious woman would do," thought Susan in the still watches of the night. Go home to Auntie, of course. He might follow her there, but, even if he did, she would have made the first right step, and could then plan the second. Susan imagined Bocqueraz in Auntie's sitting-room and winced in the dark. Perhaps the most definite stand she took in all these bewildering days was when she decided, with a little impatient resentment, that she was quite equal to meeting the situation with dignity here.

But there must be no hesitation, no compromise. Susan fell asleep resolving upon heroic extremes.

Just before dinner, on the evening following, she was at the grand piano in the big drawing-room, her fingers lazily following the score of "Babes in Toyland," which Ella had left open upon the rack. Susan felt tired and subdued, wearily determined to do her duty, wearily sure that life, for the years to come, would be as gray and sad as to-day seemed. She had been crying earlier in the day and felt the better for the storm. Susan had determined upon one more talk with Bocqueraz,--the last.

And presently he was leaning on the piano, facing her in the dim light. Susan's hands began to tremble, to grow cold. Her heart beat high with nervousness; some primitive terror assailed her even here, in the familiar room, within the hearing of a dozen maids.

"What's the matter?" he asked, as she did not smile.

Susan still watched him seriously. She did not answer.

"My fault?" he asked.

"No-o." Susan's lip trembled. "Or perhaps it is, in a way," she said slowly and softly, still striking almost inaudible chords. "I can't--I can't seem to see things straight, whichever way I look!" she confessed as simply as a troubled child.

"Will you come across the hall into the little library with me and talk about it for two minutes?" he asked.

"No." Susan shook her head.

"Susan! Why not?"

"Because we must stop it all," the girl said steadily, "ALL, every bit of it, before we--before we are sorry! You are a married man, and I knew it, and it is ALL WRONG--"

"No, it's not all wrong, I won't admit that," he said quickly. "There has been no wrong."

It was a great weight lifted from Susan's heart to think that this was true. Ended here, the friendship was merely an episode.

"If we stop here," she said almost pleadingly.

"If we stop here," he agreed, slowly. "If we end it all here. Well. And of course, Sue, chance might, MIGHT set me free, you know, and then--"

Again the serious look, followed by the sweet and irresistible smile. Susan suddenly felt the hot tears running down her cheeks.

"Chance won't," she said in agony. And she began to fumble blindly for a handkerchief.

In an instant he was beside her, and as she stood up he put both arms about her, and she dropped her head on his shoulder, and wept silently and bitterly. Every instant of this nearness stabbed her with new joy and new pain; when at last he gently tipped back her tear-drenched face, she was incapable of resisting the great flood of emotion that was sweeping them both off their feet.

"Sue, you do care! My dearest, you DO care?"

Susan, panting, clung to him.

"Oh, yes--yes!" she whispered. And, at a sound from the hall, she crushed his handkerchief back into his hand, and walked to the deep archway of a distant window. When he joined her there, she was still breathing hard, and had her hand pressed against her heart, but she was no longer crying.

"I am mad I think!" smiled Susan, quite mistress of herself.

"Susan," he said eagerly, "I was only waiting for this! If you knew--if you only knew what an agony I've been in yesterday and to-day--! And I'm not going to distress you now with plans, my dearest. But, Sue, if I were a divorced man now, would you let it be a barrier?"

"No," she said, after a moment's thought. "No, I wouldn't let anything that wasn't a legal barrier stand in the way. Even though divorce has always seemed terrible to me. But--but you're not free, Mr. Bocqueraz."

He was standing close behind her, as she stood staring out into the night, and now put his arm about her, and Susan, looking up over her shoulder, raised childlike blue eyes to his.

"How long are you going to call me that?" he asked.

"I don't know--Stephen," she said. And suddenly she wrenched herself free, and turned to face him.

"I can't seem to keep my senses when I'm within ten feet of you!" Susan declared, half-laughing and half-crying.

"But Sue, if my wife agrees to a divorce," he said, catching both her hands.

"Don't touch me, please," she said, loosening them.

"I will not, of course!" He took firm hold of a chair-back. "If Lillian--" he began again, very gravely.

Susan leaned toward him, her face not twelve inches away from his face, her hand laid lightly for a second on his arm.

"You know that I will go with you to the end of the world, Stephen!" she said, scarcely above a whisper, and was gone.

It became evident, in a day or two, that Kenneth Saunders' illness had taken a rather alarming turn. There was a consultation of doctors; there was a second nurse. Ella went to the extreme point of giving up an engagement to remain with her mother while the worst was feared; Emily and Susan worried and waited, in their rooms. Stephen Bocqueraz was a great deal in the sick-room; "a real big brother," as Mrs. Saunders said tearfully.

The crisis passed; Kenneth was better, was almost normal again. But the great specialist who had entered the house only for an hour or two had left behind him the little seed that was to vitally affect the lives of several of these people.

"Dr. Hudson says he's got to get away," said Ella to Susan, "I wish I could go with him. Kenneth's a lovely traveler."

"I wish I could," Emily supplemented, "but I'm no good."

"And doctor says that he'll come home quite a different person," added his mother. Susan wondered if she fancied that they all looked in a rather marked manner at her. She wondered, if it was not fancy, what the look meant.

They were all in the upstairs sitting-room in the bright morning light when this was said. They had drifted in there one by one, apparently by accident. Susan, made a little curious and uneasy by a subtle sense of something unsaid--something pending, began to wonder, too, if it had really been accident that assembled them there.

But she was still without definite suspicions when Ella, upon the entrance of Chow Yew with Mr. Kenneth's letters and the new magazines, jumped up gaily, and said:

"Here, Sue! Will you run up with these to Ken--and take these violets, too?"

She put the magazines in Susan's hands, and added a great bunch of dewy wet violets that had been lying on the table. Susan, really glad to escape from the over-charged atmosphere of the room, willingly went on her way.

Kenneth was sitting up to-day, very white, very haggard,--clean-shaven and hollow-eyed, and somehow very pitiful. He smiled at Susan, as she came in, and laid a thin hand on a chair by the bed. Susan sat down, and as she did so the watching nurse went out.

"Well, had you ordered a pillow of violets with shaky doves?" he asked, in a hoarse thin echo of his old voice. "No, but I guess you were pretty sick," the girl said soberly. "How goes it to-day?"

"Oh, fine!" he answered hardily, "as soon as I am over the ether I'll feel like a fighting cock! Hudson talked a good deal with his mouth," said Kenneth coughing. "But the rotten thing about me, Susan," he went on, "is that I can't booze,--I really can't do it! Consequently, when some old fellow like that gets a chance at me, he thinks he ought to scare me to death!" He sank back, tired from coughing. "But I'm all right!" he finished, comfortably, "I'll be alright again after a while."

"Well, but now, honestly, from now on---" Susan began, timidly but eagerly, "won't you truly TRY--"

"Oh, sure!" he said simply. "I promised. I'm going to cut it out, ALL of it. I'm done. I don't mean to say that I've ever been a patch on some of the others," said Kenneth. "Lord, you ought to see some of the men who really DRINK! At the same time, I've had enough. It's me to the simple joys of country life--I'm going to try farming. But first they want me to try France for awhile, and then take this German treatment, whatever it is. Hudson wants me to get off by the first of the year."

"Oh, really! France!" Susan's eyes sparkled. "Oh, aren't you wild!"

"I'm not so crazy about it. Not Paris, you know, but some dinky resort."

"Oh, but fancy the ocean trip--and meeting the village people--and New York!" Susan exclaimed. "I think every instant of traveling would be a joy!" And the vision of herself in all these places, with Stephen Bocqueraz as interpreter, wrung her heart with longing.

Kenneth was watching her closely. A dull red color had crept into his face.

"Well, why don't you come?" he laughed awkwardly.

Something in his tone made Susan color uncomfortably too.

"That DID sound as if I were asking myself along!" she smiled.

"Oh, no, it didn't!" he reassured her. "But--but I mean it. Why don't you come?"

They were looking steadily at each other now. Susan tried to laugh.

"A scandal in high life!" she said, in an attempt to make the conversation farcical. "Elopement surprises society!"

"That's what I mean--that's what I mean!" he said eagerly, yet bashfully too. "What's the matter with our--our getting married, Susan? You and I'll get married, d'ye see?"

And as, astonished and frightened and curiously touched she stood up, he caught at her skirt. Susan put her hand over his with a reassuring and soothing gesture.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" he said, beginning to cough again. "You said you would. And I--I am terribly fond of you--you could do just as you like. For instance, if you wanted to take a little trip off anywhere, with friends, you know," said Kenneth with boyish, smiling generosity, "you could ALWAYS do it! I wouldn't want to tie you down to me!" He lay back, after coughing, but his bony hand still clung to hers. "You're the only woman I ever asked to undertake such a bad job," he finished, in a whisper.

"Why--but honestly---" Susan began. She laughed out nervously and unsteadily. "This is so sudden," said she. Kenneth laughed too.

"But, you see, they're hustling me off," he complained. "This weather is so rotten! And El's keen for it," he urged, "and Mother too. If you'll be so awfully, awfully good--I know you aren't crazy about me--and you know some pretty rotten things about me--"

The very awkwardness of his phrasing won her as no other quality could. Susan felt suddenly tender toward him, felt old and sad and wise.

"Mr. Saunders," she said, gently, "you've taken my breath away. I don't know what to say to you. I can't pretend that I'm in love with you--"

"Of course you're not!" he said, very much embarrassed, "but if there's no one else, Sue--"

"There is someone else," said Susan, her eyes suddenly watering. "But--but that's not going--right, and it never can! If you'll give me a few days to think about it, Kenneth--"

"Sure! Take your time!" he agreed eagerly.

"It would be the very quietest and quickest and simplest wedding that ever was, wouldn't it?" she asked.

"Oh, absolutely!" Kenneth seemed immensely relieved. "No riot!"

"And you will let me think it over?" the girl asked, "because--I know other girls say this, but it's true!--I never DREAMED--"

"Sure, you think it over. I'll consider you haven't given me the faintest idea of how you feel," said Kenneth. They clasped hands for good-by. Susan fancied that his smile might have been an invitation for a little more affectionate parting, but if it was she ignored it. She turned at the door to smile back at him before she went downstairs.

CHAPTER V

Susan went straight downstairs, and, with as little self-consciousness as if the house had been on fire, tapped at and opened the door of Stephen Bocqueraz's study. He half rose, with a smile of surprise and pleasure, as she came in, but his own face instantly reflected the concern and distress on hers, and he came to her, and took her hand in his.

"What is it, Susan?" he asked, sharply.

Susan had closed the door behind her. Now she drew him swiftly to the other side of the room, as far from the hall as possible. They stood in the window recess, Susan holding tight to the author's hand; Stephen eyeing her anxiously and eagerly.

"My very dear little girl, what IS it?"

"Kenneth wants me to marry him," Susan said panting. "He's got to go to France, you know. They want me to go with him."

"What?" Bocqueraz asked slowly. He dropped her hands.

"Oh, don't!" Susan said, stung by his look. "Would I have come straight to you, if I had agreed?"

"You said 'no'?" he asked quickly.

"I didn't say anything!" she answered, almost with anger. "I don't know what to do--or what to say!" she finished forlornly.

"You don't know what to do?" echoed Stephen, in his clear, decisive tones. "What do you mean? Of course, it's monstrous! Ella never should have permitted it. There's only one thing for you to do?"

"It's not so easy as that," Susan said.

"How do you mean that it's not easy? You can't care for him?"

"Care for him!" Susan's scornful voice was broken by tears. "Of course I don't care for him!" she said. "But--can't you see? If I displease them, if I refuse to do this, that they've all thought out evidently, and planned, I'll have to go back to my aunt's!"

Stephen Bocqueraz, his hands in his coat-pockets, stood silently watching her.

"And fancy what it would mean to Auntie," Susan said, beginning to pace the floor in agony of spirit. "Comfort for the rest of her life! And everything for the girls! I would do anything else in the world," she said distressfully, "for one tenth the money, for one twentieth of it! And I believe he would be kind to me, and he SAYS he is positively going to stop--and it isn't as if you and I--you and-I---" she stopped short, childishly.

"Of course you would be extremely rich," Stephen said quietly.

"Oh, rich--rich--rich!" Susan pressed her locked hands to her heart with a desperate gesture. "Sometimes I think we are all crazy, to make money so important!" she went on passionately. "What good did it ever bring anyone! Why aren't we taught when we're little that it doesn't count, that it's only a side-issue! I've seen more horrors in the past year-and-a-half than I ever did in my life before;--disease and lying and cruelty, all covered up with a layer of flowers and rich food and handsome presents! Nobody enjoys anything; even wedding-presents are only a little more and a little better than the things a girl has had all her life; even children don't count; one can't get NEAR them! Stephen," Susan laid her hand upon his arm, "I've seen the horribly poor side of life,--the poverty that is worse than want, because it's hopeless,--and now I see the rich side, and I don't wonder any longer that sometimes people take violent means to get away from it!"

She dropped into the chair that faced his, at the desk, and cupped her face in her hands, staring gloomily before her. "If any of my own people knew that I refused to marry Kenneth Saunders," she went on presently, "they would simply think me mad; and perhaps I am! But, although he was his very sweetest and nicest this morning,--and I know how different he can be!--somehow, when I leaned over him, the little odor of ether!--" She broke off short, with a little shudder.

There was a silence. Then Susan looked at her companion uncomfortably.

"Why don't you talk to me?" she asked, with a tremulous smile.

Bocqueraz sat down at the desk opposite her, and stared at her across folded arms.

"Nothing to say," he said quietly. But instantly some sudden violent passion shook him; he pressed both palms to his temples, and Susan could see that the fingers with which he covered his eyes were shaking. "My God! What more can I do?" he said aloud, in a low tone. "What more can I do? You come to me with this, little girl," he said, gripping her hands in his. "You turn to me, as your only friend just now. And I'm going to be worthy of your trust in me!"

He got up and walked to the window, and Susan followed him there.

"Sweetheart," he said to her, and in his voice was the great relief that follows an ended struggle, "I'm only a man, and I love you! You are the dearest and truest and wittiest and best woman I ever knew. You've made all life over for me, Susan, and you've made me believe in what I always thought was only the fancy of writers and poets;--that a man and woman are made for each other by God, and can spend all their lives,--yes, and other lives elsewhere--in glorious companionship, wanting nothing but each other. I've seen a good many women, but I never saw one like you. Will you let me take care of you, dear? Will you trust me? You know what I am, Sue; you know what my work stands for. I couldn't lie to you. You say you know the two extremes of life, dear, but I want to show you a third sort; where money ISN'T paramount, where rich people have souls, and where poor people get all the happiness that there is in life!"

His arm was about her now; her senses on fire; her eyes brimming.

"But do you love me?" whispered Susan.

"Love you!" His face had grown pale. "To have you ask me that," he said under his breath, "is the most heavenly--the most wonderful thing that ever came into my life! I'm not worthy of it. But God knows that I will take care of you, Sue, and, long before I take you to New York, to my own people, these days will be only a troubled dream. You will be my wife then--"

The wonderful word brought the happy color to her face.

"I believe you," she said seriously, giving him both her hands, and looking bravely into his eyes. "You are the best man I ever met--I can't let you go. I believe it would be wrong to let you go." She hesitated, groped for words. "You're the only thing in the world that seems real to me," Susan said. "I knew that the old days at Auntie's were all wrong and twisted somehow, and here--" She indicated the house with a shudder. "I feel stifled here!" she said. "But--but if there is really some place where people are good and simple, whether they're rich or poor, and honest, and hard-working--I want to go there! We'll have books and music, and a garden," she went on hurriedly, and he felt that the hands in his were hot, "and we'll live so far away from all this sort of thing, that we'll forget it and they'll forget us! I would rather," Susan's eyes grew wistful, "I would rather have a garden where my babies could make mud-pies and play, then be married to Kenneth Saunders in the Cathedral with ten brides-maids!"

Perhaps something in the last sentence stirred him to sudden compunction.

"You know that it means going away with me, little girl?" he asked.

"No, it doesn't mean that," she answered honestly. "I could go back to Auntie, I suppose. I could wait!" "I've been thinking of that," he said, seriously. "I want you to listen to me. I have been half planning a trip to Japan, Susan, I want to take you with me. We'll loiter through the Orient--that makes your eyes dance, my little Irishwoman; but wait until you are really there; no books and no pictures do it justice! We'll go to India, and you shall see the Taj Mahal--all lovers ought to see it!"

"And the great desert--" Susan said dreamily.

"And the great desert. We'll come home by Italy and France, and we'll go to London. And while we're there, I will correspond with Lillian, or Lillian's lawyer. There will be no reason then why she should hold me."

"You mean," said Susan, scarlet-cheeked, "that--that just my going with you will be sufficient cause?"

"It is the only ground on which she would," he assented, watching her, "that she could, in fact." Susan stared thoughtfully out of the window. "Then," he took up the narrative, "then we stay a few months in London, are quietly married there,--or, better yet, sail at once for home, and are married in some quiet little Jersey town, say, and then--then I bring home the loveliest bride in the world! No one need know that our trip around the world was not completely chaperoned. No one will ask questions. You shall have your circle--"

"But I thought you were not going to Japan until the serial rights of the novel were sold?" Susan temporized.

For answer he took a letter from his pocket, and with her own eyes she read an editor's acceptance of the new novel for what seemed to her a fabulous sum. No argument could have influenced her as the single typewritten sheet did. Why should she not trust this man, whom all the world admired and trusted? Heart and mind were reconciled now; Susan's eyes, when they were raised to his, were full of shy adoration and confidence.

"That's my girl!" he said, very low. He put his arm about her and she leaned her head on his shoulder, grateful to him that he said no more just now, and did not even claim the kiss of the accepted lover. Together they stood looking down at the leafless avenue, for a long moment.

"Stephen!" called Ella's voice at the door. Susan's heart lost a beat; gave a sick leap of fear; raced madly.

"Just a moment," Bocqueraz said pleasantly. He stepped noiselessly to the door of the porch, noiselessly opened it, and Susan slipped through.

"Don't let me interrupt you, but is Susan here?" called Ella.

"Susan? No," Susan herself heard him say, before she went quietly about the corner of the house and, letting herself in at the side-door, lost the sound of their voices.

She had entered the rear hall, close to a coat-closet; and now, following a sudden impulse, she put on a rough little hat and the long cloak she often wore for tramps, ran down the drive, crossed behind the stables, and was out in the quiet highway, in the space of two or three minutes.

Quick-rising clouds were shutting out the sun; a thick fog was creeping up from the bay, the sunny bright morning was to be followed by a dark and gloomy afternoon. Everything looked dark and gloomy already; gardens everywhere were bare; a chilly breeze shook the ivy leaves on the convent wall. As Susan passed the big stone gateway, in its close-drawn network of bare vines, the Angelus rang suddenly from the tower;--three strokes, a pause, three more, a final three,--dying away in a silence as deep as that of a void. Susan remembered another convent-bell, heard years ago, a delicious assurance of meal-time. A sharp little hungry pang assailed her even now at the memory, and with the memory came just a fleeting glimpse of a little girl, eager, talkative, yellow of braids, leading the chattering rush of girls into the yard.

The girls were pouring out of the big convent-doors now, some of them noticed the passer-by, eyed her respectfully. She knew that they thought of her as a "young lady." She longed for a wistful moment to be one of them, to be among them, to have no troubles but the possible "penance" after school, no concern but for the contents of her lunch-basket!

She presently came to the grave-yard gate, and went in, and sat down on a tilted little filigree iron bench, near one of the graves. She could look down on the roofs of the village below, and the circle of hills beyond, and the marshes, cut by the silver ribbons of streams that went down to the fog-veiled bay. Cocks crowed, far and near, and sometimes there came to her ears the shouts of invisible children, but she was shut out of the world by the soft curtain of the fog.

Not even now did her breath come evenly. Susan began to think that her heart would never beat normally again. She tried to collect her thoughts, tried to analyze her position, only to find herself studying, with amused attention, the interest of a brown bird in the tip of her shoe, or reflecting with distaste upon the fact that somehow she must go back to the house, and settle the matter of her attitude toward Kenneth, once and for all.

Over all her musing poured the warm flood of excitement and delight that the thought of Stephen Bocqueraz invariably brought. Her most heroic effort at self-blame melted away at the memory of his words. What nonsense to treat this affair as a dispassionate statement of the facts might represent it! Whatever the facts, he was Stephen Bocqueraz, and she Susan Brown, and they understood each other, and were not afraid!

Susan smiled as she thought of the romances built upon the histories of girls who were "led astray," girls who were "ruined," men whose promises of marriage did not hold. It was all such nonsense! It did not seem right to her even to think of these words in connection with this particular case; she felt as if it convicted her somehow of coarseness.

She abandoned consecutive thought, and fell to happy musing. She shut her eyes and dreamed of crowded Oriental streets, of a great desert asleep under the moonlight, of New York shining clean and bright, the spring sunlight, and people walking the streets under the fresh green of tall trees. She had seen it so, in many pictures, and in all her dreams, she liked the big city the best. She dreamed of a little dining-table in a flying railway-train--

But when Stephen Bocqueraz entered the picture, so near, so kind, so big and protecting, Susan thought as if her heart would burst, she opened her eyes, the color flooding her face.

The cemetery was empty, dark, silent. The glowing visions faded, and Susan made one more conscientious effort to think of herself, what she was doing, what she planned to do.

"Suppose I go to Auntie's and simply wait--" she began firmly. The thought went no further. Some little memory, drifting across the current, drew her after it. A moment later, and the dreams had come back in full force.

"Well, anyway, I haven't DONE anything yet and, if I don't want to, I can always simply STOP at the last moment," she said to herself, as she began to walk home.

At the great gateway of the Wallace home, two riders overtook her; Isabel, looking exquisitely pretty in her dashing habit and hat, and her big cavalier were galloping home for a late luncheon.

"Come in and have lunch with us!" Isabel called gaily, reining in. But Susan shook her head, and refused their urging resolutely. Isabel's wedding was but a few weeks off now, and Susan knew that she was very busy. But, beside that, her heart was so full of her own trouble, that the sight of the other girl, radiant, adored, surrounded by her father and mother, her brothers, the evidences of a most unusual popularity, would have stabbed Susan to the heart. What had Isabel done, Susan asked herself bitterly, to have every path in life made so lovely and so straight, while to her, Susan, even the most beautiful thing in the world had come in so clouded and distorted a form.

But he loved her! And she loved him, and that was all that mattered, after all, she said to herself, as she reentered the house and went upstairs.

Ella called her into her bed-room as she passed the door, by humming the Wedding-march.

"Tum-TUM-ti-tum! Tum TUM-ti-tum!" sang Ella, and Susan, uneasy but smiling, went to the doorway and looked in.

"Come in, Sue," said Ella, pausing in the act of inserting a large bare arm into a sleeve almost large enough to accommodate Susan's head. "Where've you been all this time? Mama thought that you were upstairs with Ken, but the nurse says that he's been asleep for an hour."

"Oh, that's good!" said Susan, trying to speak naturally, but turning scarlet. "The more he sleeps the better!"

"I want to tell you something, Susan," said Ella, violently tugging at the hooks of her skirt,--"Damn this thing!--I want to tell you something, Susan. You're a very lucky girl; don't you fool yourself about that! Now it's none of my affair, and I'm not butting in, but, at the same time, Ken's health makes this whole matter a little unusual, and the fact that, as a family--" Ella picked up a hand-mirror, and eyed the fit of her skirt in the glass--"as a family," she resumed, after a moment, "we all think it's the wisest thing that Ken could do, or that you could do, makes this whole thing very different in the eyes of society from what it MIGHT be! I don't say it's a usual marriage; I don't say that we'd all feel as favorably toward it as we do if the circumstances were different," Ella rambled on, snapping the clasp of a long jeweled chain, and pulling it about her neck to a becoming position. "But I do say that it's a very exceptional opportunity for a girl in your position, and one that any sensible girl would jump at. I may be Ken's sister," finished Ella, rapidly assorting rings and slipping a selected few upon her fingers, "but I must say that!"

"I know," said Susan, uncomfortably. Ella, surprised perhaps at the listless tone, gave her a quick glance.

"Mama," said Miss Saunders, with a little color, "Mama is the very mildest of women, but as Mama said, 'I don't see what more any girl could wish!' Ken has got the easiest disposition in the world, if he's let alone, and, as Hudson said, there's nothing really the matter with him, he may live for twenty or thirty years, probably will!"

"Yes, I know," Susan said quickly, wishing that some full and intelligent answer would suggest itself to her.

"And finally," Ella said, quite ready to go downstairs for an informal game of cards, but not quite willing to leave the matter here. "Finally, I must say, Sue, that I think this shilly-shallying is very--very unbecoming. I'm not asking to be in your confidence, _I_ don't care one way or the other, but Mama and the Kid have always been awfully kind to you--"

"You've all been angels," Susan was glad to say eagerly.

"Awfully kind of you," Ella pursued, "and all I say is this, make up your mind! It's unexpected, and it's sudden, and all that,--very well! But you're of age, and you've nobody to please but yourself, and, as I say--as I say--while it's nothing to me, I like you and I hate to have you make a fool of yourself!"

"Did Ken say anything to you?" Susan asked, with flaming cheeks.

"No, he just said something to Mama about it's being a shame to ask a girl your age to marry a man as ill as he. But that's all sheer nonsense," Ella said briskly, "and it only goes to show that Ken is a good deal more decent than people might think! What earthly objection any girl could have I can't imagine myself!" Ella finished pointedly.

"Nobody could!" Susan said loyally.

"Nobody could,--exactly!" Ella said in a satisfied tone. "For a month or two," she admitted reasonably, "you may have to watch his health pretty closely. I don't deny it. But you'll be abroad, you'll have everything in the world that you want. And, as he gets stronger, you can go about more and more. And, whatever Hudson says, I think that the day will come when he can live where he chooses, and do as he likes, just like anyone else! And I think---" Ella, having convinced herself entirely unaided by Susan, was now in a mellowed mood. "I think you're doing much the wisest thing!" she said. "Go up and see him later, there's a nice child! The doctor's coming at three; wait until he goes."

And Ella was gone.

Susan shut the door of Ella's room, and took a deep chair by a window. It was perhaps the only place in the house in which no one would think of looking for her, and she still felt the need of being alone.

She sat back in the chair, and folded her arms across her chest, and fell to deep thinking. She had let Ella leave her under a misunderstanding, not because she did not know how to disabuse Ella's mind of the idea that she would marry Kenneth, and not because she was afraid of the result of such a statement, but because, in her own mind, she could not be sure that Kenneth Saunders, with his millions, was not her best means of escape from a step even more serious in the eyes of the world than this marriage would have been.

If she would be pitied by a few people for marrying Kenneth, she would be envied by a thousand. The law, the church, the society in which they moved could do nothing but approve. On the other hand, if she went away with Stephen Bocqueraz, all the world would rise up to blame her and to denounce her. A third course would be to return to her aunt's house,--with no money, no work, no prospects of either, and to wait, years perhaps----

No, no, she couldn't wait. Rebellion rose in her heart at the mere thought. "I love him!" said Susan to herself, thrilled through and through by the mere words. What would life be without him now--without the tall and splendid figure, the big, clever hands, the rich and well-trained voice, without his poetry, his glowing ideals, his intimate knowledge of that great world in whose existence she had always had a vague and wistful belief?

And how he wanted her---! Susan could feel the nearness of his eagerness, without sharing it.

She herself belonged to that very large class of women for whom passion is only a rather-to-be-avoided word. She was loving, and generous where she loved, but far too ignorant of essential facts regarding herself, and the world about her, to either protect herself from being misunderstood, or to give even her thoughts free range, had she desired to do so. What knowledge she had had come to her,--in Heaven alone knows what distorted shape!--from some hazily remembered passage in a play, from some joke whose meaning had at first entirely escaped her, or from some novel, forbidden by Auntie as "not nice," but read nevertheless, and construed into a hundred vague horrors by the mystified little brain.

Lately all this mass of curiously mixed information had had new light thrown upon it because of the sudden personal element that entered into Susan's view. Love became the great Adventure, marriage was no longer merely a question of gifts and new clothes and a honeymoon trip, and a dear little newly furnished establishment. Nothing sordid, nothing sensual, touched Susan's dreams even now, but she began to think of the constant companionship, the intimacy of married life, the miracle of motherhood, the courage of the woman who can put her hand in any man's hand, and walk with him out from the happy, sheltered pale of girlhood, and into the big world!

She was interrupted in her dreaming by Ella's maid, who put her head into the room with an apologetic:

"Miss Saunders says she's sorry, Miss Brown, but if Mrs. Richardson isn't here, and will you come down to fill the second table?"

Downstairs went Susan, to be hastily pressed into service.

"Heaven bless you, Sue," said Ella, the cards already being dealt. "Kate Richardson simply hasn't come, and if you'll fill in until she does----You say hearts?" Ella interrupted herself to say to her nearest neighbor. "Well, I can't double that. I lead and you're down, Elsa--"

To Susan it seemed a little flat to sit here seriously watching the fall of the cards, deeply concerned in the doubled spade or the dummy for no trump. When she was dummy she sat watching the room dreamily, her thoughts drifting idly to and fro. It was all curiously unreal,--Stephen gone to a club dinner in the city, Kenneth lying upstairs, she, sitting here, playing cards! When she thought of Kenneth a little flutter of excitement seized her; with Stephen's memory a warm flood of unreasoning happiness engulfed her.

"I beg your pardon!" said Susan, suddenly aroused.

"Your lead, Miss Brown---"

"Mine? Oh, surely. You made it---?"

"I bridged it. Mrs. Chauncey made it diamonds."

"Oh, surely!" Susan led at random. "Oh, I didn't mean to lead that!" she exclaimed. She attempted to play the hand, and the following hand, with all her power, and presently found herself the dummy again.

Again serious thought pressed in upon her from all sides. She could not long delay the necessity of letting Kenneth, and Kenneth's family, know that she would not do her share in their most recent arrangement for his comfort. And after that---? Susan had no doubt that it would be the beginning of the end of her stay here. Not that it would be directly given as the reason for her going; they had their own ways of bringing about what suited them, these people.

But what of Stephen? And again warmth and confidence and joy rose in her heart. How big and true and direct he was, how far from everything that flourished in this warm and perfumed atmosphere! "It must be right to trust him," Susan said to herself, and it seemed to her that even to trust him supremely, and to brave the storm that would follow, would be a step in the right direction. Out of the unnatural atmosphere of this house, gone forever from the cold and repressing poverty of her aunt's, she would be out in the open air, free to breathe and think and love and work----

"Oh, that nine is the best, Miss Brown! You trumped it---"

Susan brought her attention to the game again. When the cards were finally laid down, tea followed, and Susan must pour it. After that she ran up to her room to find Emily there, dressing for dinner.

"Oh, Sue, there you are! Listen, Mama wants you to go in and see her a minute before dinner," Emily said.

"I am dead!" Susan began flinging off her things, loosened the masses of her hair, and shook it about her, tore off her tight slippers and flung them away.

"Should think you would be," Emily said sympathetically. She was evidently ready for confidences, but Susan evaded them. At least she owed no explanation to Emily!

"El wants to put you up for the club," called Emily above the rush of hot water into the bathtub.

"Why should she?" Susan called back smiling, but uneasy, but Emily evidently did not hear.

"Don't forget to look in on Mama," she said again, when Susan was dressed. Susan nodded.

"But, Lord, this is a terrible place to try to THINK in!" the girl thought, knocking dutifully on Mrs. Saunders' door.

The old lady, in a luxurious dressing-gown, was lying on the wide couch that Miss Baker had drawn up before the fire.

"There's the girl I thought had forgotten all about me!" said Mrs. Saunders in tremulous, smiling reproach. Susan went over and, although uncomfortably conscious of the daughterliness of the act, knelt down beside her, and squeezed the little shell-like hand. Miss Baker smiled from the other side of the room where she was folding up the day-covers of the bed with windmill sweeps of her arms.

"Well, now, I didn't want to keep you from your dinner," murmured the old lady. "I just wanted to give you a little kiss, and tell you that I've been thinking about you!"

Susan gave the nurse, who was barely out of hearing, a troubled look. If Miss Baker had not been there, she would have had the courage to tell Kenneth's mother the truth. As it was, Mrs. Saunders misinterpreted her glance.

"We won't say ONE WORD!" she whispered with childish pleasure in the secret. The little claw-like hands drew Susan down for a kiss; "Now, you and Doctor Cooper shall just have some little talks about my boy, and in a year he'll be just as well as ever!" whispered the foolish, fond little mother, "and we'll go into town next week and buy all sorts of pretty things, shall we? And we'll forget all about this bad sickness! Now, run along, lovey, it's late!"

Susan, profoundly apprehensive, went slowly out of the room. She turned to the stairway that led to the upper hall to hear Ella's voice from her own room:

"Sue! Going up to see Ken?"

"Yes," Susan said without turning back.

"That's a good child," Ella called gaily. "The kid's gone down to dinner, but don't hurry. I'm dining out."

"I'll be down directly," Susan said, going on. She crossed the dimly lighted, fragrant upper hall, and knocked on Kenneth's door.

It was instantly opened by the gracious and gray-haired Miss Trumbull, the night nurse. Kenneth, in a gorgeous embroidered Mandarin coat, was sitting up and enjoying his supper.

"Come in, woman," he said, smiling composedly. Susan felt warmed and heartened by his manner, and came to take her chair by the bed. Miss Trumbull disappeared, and the two had the big, quiet room to themselves.

"Well," said Kenneth, laying down a wish-bone, and giving her a shrewd smile. "You can't do it, and you're afraid to say so, is that it?"

A millstone seemed lifted from Susan's heart. She smiled, and the tears rushed into her eyes.

"I--honestly, I'd rather not," she said eagerly.

"That other fellow, eh?" he added, glancing at her before he attacked another bone with knife and fork.

Taken unawares, she could not answer. The color rushed into her face. She dropped her eyes.

"Peter Coleman, isn't it?" Kenneth pursued.

"Peter Coleman!" Susan might never have heard the name before, so unaffected was her astonishment.

"Well, isn't it?"

Susan felt in her heart the first stirring of a genuine affection for Kenneth Saunders. He seemed so bright, so well to-night, he was so kind and brotherly.

"It's Stephen," said she, moved by a sudden impulse to confide. He eyed her in blank astonishment, and Susan saw in it a sort of respect. But he only answered by a long whistle.

"Gosh, that is tough," he said, after a few moments of silence. "That is the limit, you poor kid! Of course his wife is particularly well and husky?"

"Particularly!" echoed Susan with a shaky laugh. For the first time in their lives she and Kenneth talked together with entire naturalness and with pleasure. Susan's heart felt lighter than it had for many a day.

"Stephen can't shake his wife, I suppose?" he asked presently.

"Not--not according to the New York law, I believe," Susan said.

"Well--that's a case where virtue is its own reward,--NOT," said Kenneth. "And he--he cares, does he?" he asked, with shy interest.

A rush of burning color, and the light in Susan's eyes, were her only answer.

"Shucks, what a rotten shame!" Kenneth said regretfully. "So he goes away to Japan, does he? Lord, what a shame---"

Susan really thought he was thinking more of her heart-affair than his own, when she finally left him. Kenneth was heartily interested in the ill-starred romance. He bade her good-night with real affection and sympathy.

Susan stood bewildered for a moment, outside the door, listening to the subdued murmurs that came up from the house, blinking, after the bright glow of Kenneth's lamps, in the darkness of the hall. Presently she crossed to a wide window that faced across the village, toward the hills. It was closed; the heavy glass gave back only a dim reflection of herself, bare-armed, bare-throated, with spangles winking dully on her scarf.

She opened the window and the sweet cold night air came in with a rush, and touched her hot cheeks and aching head with an infinite coolness. Susan knelt down and drank deep of it, raised her eyes to the silent circle of the hills, the starry arch of the sky.

There was no moon, but Tamalpais' great shoulder was dimly outlined against darker blackness, and moving, twinkling dots showed where ferryboats were crossing and recrossing the distant bay. San Francisco's lights glittered like a chain of gems, but San Rafael, except for a half-concealed household light, here and there under the trees, was in darkness. Faint echoes of dance-music came from the hotel, the insistent, throbbing bass of a waltz; Susan shuddered at the thought of it; the crowd and the heat, the laughing and flirting, the eating and drinking. Her eyes searched the blackness between the stars;--oh, to plunge into those infinite deeps, to breathe the untainted air of those limitless great spaces!

Garden odors, wet and sweet, came up to her; she got the exquisite breath of drenched violets, of pinetrees. Susan thought of her mother's little garden, years ago, of the sunken stone ale-bottles that framed the beds, of alyssum and marigolds and wall-flowers and hollyhocks growing all together. She remembered her little self, teasing for heart-shaped cookies, or gravely attentive to the bargain driven between her mother and the old Chinese vegetable-vendor, with his loaded, swinging baskets. It went dimly through Susan's mind that she had grown too far away from the good warm earth. It was years since she had had the smell of it and the touch of it, or had lain down in its long grasses. At her aunt's house, in the office, and here, it seemed so far away! Susan had a hazy vision of some sensible linen gardening dresses--of herself out in the spring sunshine, digging, watering, getting happier and dirtier and hotter every minute----

Somebody was playing Walther's song from "Die Meistersinger" far downstairs, and the plaintive passionate notes drew Susan as if they had been the cry of her name. She went down to find Emily and Peter Coleman laughing and flirting over a box of chocolates, at the inglenook seat in the hall, and Stephen Bocqueraz alone in the drawing-room, at the piano. He stopped playing as she came in, and they walked to the fire and took opposite chairs beside the still brightly burning logs.

"Anything new?" he asked.

"Oh, lots!" Susan said wearily. "I've seen Kenneth. But they don't know that I can't--can't do it. And they're rather taking it for granted that I am going to!"

"Going to marry him!" he asked aghast. "Surely you haven't equivocated about it, Susan?" he asked sharply.

"Not with him!" she answered in quick self-defense, with a thrill for the authoritative tone. "I went up there, tired as I am, and told him the absolute truth," said Susan. "But they may not know it!"

"I confess I don't see why," Bocqueraz said, in disapproval. "It would seem to me simple enough to---"

"Oh, perhaps it does seem simple, to you!" Susan defended herself wearily, "but it isn't so easy! Ella is dreadful when she's angry,--I don't know quite what I will do, if this ends my being here---"

"Why should it?" he asked quickly.

"Because it's that sort of a position. I'm here as long as I'm wanted," Susan said bitterly, "and when I'm not, there'll be a hundred ways to end it all. Ella will resent this, and Mrs. Saunders will resent it, and even if I was legally entitled to stay, it wouldn't be very pleasant under those circumstances!" She rested her head against the curved back of her chair, and he saw tears slip between her lashes.

"Why, my darling! My dearest little girl, you mustn't cry!" he said, in distress. "Come to the window and let's get a breath of fresh air!"

He crossed to a French window, and held back the heavy curtain to let her step out to the wide side porch. Susan's hand held his tightly in the darkness, and he knew by the sound of her breathing that she was crying.

"I don't know what made me go to pieces this way," she said, after a moment. "But it has been such a day!" And she composedly dried her eyes, and restored his handkerchief to him.

"You poor little girl!" he said tenderly. "---Is it going to be too cold out here for you, Sue?"

"No-o!" said Susan, smiling, "it's heavenly!"

"Then we'll talk. And we must make the most of this too, for they may not give us another chance! Cheer up, sweetheart, it's only a short time now! As you say, they're going to resent the fact that my girl doesn't jump at the chance to ally herself with all this splendor, and to-morrow may change things all about for every one of us. Now, Sue, I told Ella to-day that I sail for Japan on Sunday---"

"Oh, my God!" Susan said, taken entirely unawares.

He was near enough to put his arm about her shoulders.

"My little girl," he said, gravely, "did you think that I was going to leave you behind?"

"I couldn't bear it," Susan said simply.

"You could bear it better than I could," he assured her. "But we'll never be separated again in this life, I hope! And every hour of my life I'm going to spend in trying to show you what it means to me to have you--with your beauty and your wit and your charm--trust me to straighten out all this tangle! You know you are the most remarkable woman I ever knew, Susan," he interrupted himself to say, seriously. "Oh, you can shake your head, but wait until other people agree with me! Wait until you catch the faintest glimpse of what our life is going to be! And how you'll love the sea! And that reminds me," he was all business-like again, "the Nippon Maru sails on Sunday. You and I sail with her."

He paused, and in the gradually brightening gloom Susan's eyes met his, but she did not speak nor stir.

"It's the ONLY way, dear!" he said urgently. "You see that? I can't leave you here and things cannot go on this way. It will be hard for a little while, but we'll make it a wonderful year, Susan, and when it's over, I'll take my wife home with me to New York."

"It seems incredible," said Susan slowly, "that it is ever RIGHT to do a thing like this. You--you think I'm a strong woman, Stephen," she went on, groping for the right words, "but I'm not--in this way. I think I COULD be strong," Susan's eyes were wistful, "I could be strong if my husband were a pioneer, or if I had an invalid husband, or if I had to--to work at anything," she elucidated. "I could even keep a store or plow, or go out and shoot game! But my life hasn't run that way, I can't seem to find what I want to do, I'm always bound by conditions I didn't make---"

"Exactly, dear! And now you are going to make conditions for yourself," he added eagerly, as she hesitated. Susan sighed.

"Not so soon as Sunday," she said, after a pause.

"Sunday too soon? Very well, little girl. If you want to go Sunday, we'll go. And, if you say not, I'll await your plans," he agreed.

"But, Stephen--what about tickets?"

"The tickets are upstairs," he told her. "I reserved the prettiest suite on board for Miss Susan Bocqueraz, my niece, who is going with me to meet her father in India, and a near-by stateroom for myself. But, of course, I'll forfeit these reservations rather than hurry or distress you now. When I saw the big liner, Susan, the cleanness and brightness and airiness of it all; and when I thought of the deliciousness of getting away from the streets and smells and sounds of the city, out on the great Pacific, I thought I would be mad to prolong this existence here an unnecessary day. But that's for you to say."

"I see," she said dreamily. And through her veins, like a soothing draught, ran the premonition of surrender. Delicious to let herself go, to trust him, to get away from all the familiar sights and faces! She turned in the darkness and laid both hands on his shoulders. "I'll be ready on Sunday," said she gravely. "I suppose, as a younger girl, I would have thought myself mad to think of this. But I have been wrong about so many of those old ideas; I don't feel sure of anything any more. Life in this house isn't right, Stephen, and certainly the old life at Auntie's,--all debts and pretense and shiftlessness,--isn't right either."

"You'll not be sorry, dear," he told her, holding her hands.

An instant later they were warned, by a sudden flood of light on the porch, that Mr. Coleman had come to the open French window.

"Come in, you idiots!" said Peter. "We're hunting for something to eat!"

"You come out, it's a heavenly night!" Stephen said readily.

"Nothing stirring," Mr. Coleman said, sauntering toward them nevertheless. "Don't you believe a word she says, Mr. Bocqueraz, she's an absolute liar!"

"Peter, go back, we're talking books," said Susan, unruffled.

"Well, I read a book once, Susan," he assured her proudly. "Say, let's go over to the hotel and have a dance, what?"

"Madman!" the writer said, in indulgent amusement, as Peter went back. "We'll be in directly, Coleman!" he called. Then he said quickly, and in a low tone to Susan. "Shall you stay here until Sunday, or would you rather be with your own people?"

"It just depends upon what Ella and Emily do," Susan answered. "Kenneth may not tell them. If he does, it might be better to go. This is Tuesday. Of course I don't know, Stephen, they may be very generous about it, they may make it as pleasant as they can. But certainly Emily isn't sorry to find some reason for terminating my stay here. We've--perhaps it's my fault, but we've been rather grating on each other lately. So I think it's pretty safe to say that I will go home on Wednesday or Thursday."

"Good," he said. "I can see you there!"

"Oh, will you?" said Susan, pleased.

"Oh, will I! And another thing, dear, you'll need some things. A big coat for the steamer, and some light gowns--but we can get those. We'll do some shopping in Paris---"

He had touched a wrong chord, and Susan winced.

"I have some money," she assured him, hastily, "and I'd rather--rather get those things myself!"

"You shall do as you like," he said gravely. Silently and thoughtfully they went back to the house.

CHAPTER VI

Susan lay awake almost all night, quiet and wide-eyed in the darkness, thinking, thinking, thinking. She arraigned herself mentally before a jury of her peers, and pleaded her own case. She did not think of Stephen Bocqueraz to-night,--thought of him indeed did not lead to rational argument!--but she confined her random reflections to the conduct of other women. There was a moral code of course, there were Commandments. But by whose decree might some of these be set aside, and ignored, while others must still be observed in the letter and the spirit? Susan knew that Ella would discharge a maid for stealing perfumery or butter, and within the hour be entertaining a group of her friends with the famous story of her having taken paste jewels abroad, to be replaced in London by real stones and brought triumphantly home under the very eyes of the custom-house inspectors. She had heard Mrs. Porter Pitts, whose second marriage followed her divorce by only a few hours, addressing her respectful classes in the Correction Home for Wayward Girls. She had heard Mrs. Leonard Orvis congratulated upon her lineage and family connections on the very same occasion when Mrs. Orvis had entertained a group of intimates with a history of her successful plan for keeping the Orvis nursery empty.

It was to the Ellas, the Pitts, the Orvises, that Susan addressed her arguments. They had broken laws. She was only temporarily following their example. She heard the clock strike four, before she went to sleep, and was awakened by Emily at nine o'clock the next morning.

It was a rainy, gusty morning, with showers slapping against the windows. The air in the house was too warm, radiators were purring everywhere, logs crackled in the fireplaces of the dining-room and hall. Susan, looking into the smaller library, saw Ella in a wadded silk robe, comfortably ensconced beside the fire, with the newspapers.

"Good-morning, Sue," said Ella politely. Susan's heart sank. "Come in," said Ella. "Had your breakfast?"

"Not yet," said Susan, coming in.

"Well, I just want to speak to you a moment," said Ella, and Susan knew, from the tone, that she was in for an unpleasant half-hour. Emily, following Susan, entered the library, too, and seated herself on the window-seat. Susan did not sit down.

"I've got something on my mind, Susan," Ella said, frowning as she tossed aside her papers, "and,--you know me. I'm like all the Roberts, when I want to say a thing, I say it!" Ella eyed her groomed fingers a moment, bit at one before she went on. "Now, there's only one important person in this house, Sue, as I always tell everyone, and that's Mamma! 'Em and I don't matter,' I say, 'but Mamma's old, and she hasn't very much longer to live, and she DOES count!' I--you may not always see it," Ella went on with dignity, "but I ALWAYS arrange my engagements so that Mamma shall be the first consideration, she likes to have me go places, and I like to go, but many and many a night when you and Em think that I am out somewhere I'm in there with Mamma---"

Susan knew that they were in the realm of pure fiction now, but she could only listen. She glanced at Emily, but Emily only looked impressed and edified.

"So--" Ella, unchallenged, went on. "So when I see anyone inclined to be rude to Mamma, Sue---"

"As you certainly were---" Emily began.

"Keep out of this, Baby," Ella said. Susan asked in astonishment;

"But, good gracious, Ella! When was I ever rude to your mother?"

"Just--one--moment, Sue," Ella said, politely declining to be hurried. "Well! So when I realize that you deceived Mamma, Sue, it--I've always liked you, and I've always said that there was a great deal of allowance to be made for you," Ella interrupted herself to say kindly, "but, you know, that is the one thing I can't forgive!--In just a moment---" she added, as Susan was about to speak again. "Well, about a week ago, as you know, Ken's doctor said that he must positively travel. Mamma isn't well enough to go, the kid can't go, and I can't get away just now, even," Ella was deriving some enjoyment from her new role of protectress, "even if I would leave Mamma. What Ken suggested, you know, seemed a suitable enough arrangement at the time, although I think, and I know Mamma thinks, that it was just one of the poor boy's ideas which might have worked very well, and might not! One never can tell about such things. Be that as it may, however---"

"Oh, Ella, what on earth are you GETTING at!" asked Susan, in sudden impatience.

"Really, Sue!" Emily said, shocked at this irreverence, but Ella, flushing a little, proceeded with a little more directness.

"I'm getting at THIS--please shut up, Baby! You gave Mamma to understand that it was all right between you and Ken, and Mamma told me so before I went to the Grahams' dinner, and I gave Eva Graham a pretty strong hint! Now Ken tells Mamma that that isn't so at all,--I must say Ken, for a sick boy, acted very well! And really, Sue, to have you willing to add anything to Mamma's natural distress and worry now it,--well, I don't like it, and I say so frankly!"

Susan, angered past the power of reasonable speech, remained silent for half-a-minute, holding the back of a chair with both hands, and looking gravely into Ella's face.

"Is that all?" she asked mildly.

"Except that I'm surprised at you," Ella said a little nettled.

"I'm not going to answer you," Susan said, "because you know very well that I have always loved your Mother, and that I deceived nobody! And you can't make me think SHE has anything to do with this! It isn't my fault that I don't want to marry your brother, and Emily knows how utterly unfair this is!"

"Really, I don't know anything about it!" Emily said airily.

"Oh, very well," Susan said, at white heat. She turned and went quietly from the room.

She went upstairs, and sat down crosswise on a small chair, and stared gloomily out of the window. She hated this house, she said to herself, and everyone in it! A maid, sympathetically fluttering about, asked Miss Brown if she would like her breakfast brought up.

"Oh, I would!" said Susan gratefully. Lizzie presently brought in a tray, and arranged an appetizing little meal.

"They're something awful, that's what I say," said Lizzie presently in a cautious undertone. "But I've been here twelve years, and I say there's worse places! Miss Ella may be a little raspy now, Miss Brown, but don't you take it to heart!" Susan, the better for hot coffee and human sympathy, laughed out in cheerful revulsion of feeling.

"Things are all mixed up, Lizzie, but it's not my fault," she said gaily.

"Well, it don't matter," said the literal Lizzie, referring to the tray. "I pile 'em up anyhow to carry 'em downstairs!"

Breakfast over, Susan still loitered in her own apartments. She wanted to see Stephen, but not enough to risk encountering someone else in the halls. At about eleven o'clock, Ella knocked at the door, and came in.

"I'm in a horrible rush," said Ella, sitting down on the bed and interesting herself immediately in a silk workbag of Emily's that hung there. "I only want to say this, Sue," she began. "It has nothing to do with what we were talking of this morning, but--I've just been discussing it with Mamma!--but we all feel, and I'm sure you do, too, that this is an upset sort of time. Emily, now," said Ella, reaching her sister's name with obvious relief, "Em's not at all well, and she feels that she needs a nurse,--I'm going to try to get that nurse Betty Brock had,--Em may have to go back to the hospital, in fact, and Mamma is so nervous about Ken, and I---" Ella cleared her throat, "I feel this way about it," she said. "When you came here it was just an experiment, wasn't it?"

"Certainly," Susan agreed, very red in the face.

"Certainly, and a most successful one, too," Ella conceded relievedly. "But, of course, if Mamma takes Baby abroad in the spring,--you see how it is? And of course, even in case of a change now, we'd want you to take your time. Or,--I'll tell you, suppose you go home for a visit with your aunt, now. Monday is Christmas, and then, after New Year's, we can write about it, if you haven't found anything else you want to do, and I'll let you know---"

"I understand perfectly," Susan said quietly, but with a betraying color. "Certainly, I think that would be wisest."

"Well, I think so," said Ella with a long breath. "Now, don't be in a hurry, even if Miss Polk comes, because you could sleep upstairs---"

"Oh, I'd rather go at once-to-day," Susan said.

"Indeed not, in this rain," Ella said with her pleasant, half-humorous air of concern. "Mamma and Baby would think I'd scared you away. Tomorrow, Sue, if you're in such a hurry. But this afternoon some people are coming in to meet Stephen--he's really going on Sunday, he says,--stay and pour!"

It would have been a satisfaction to Susan's pride to refuse. She knew that Ella really needed her this afternoon, and would have liked to punish that lady to that extent. But hurry was undignified and cowardly, and Stephen's name was a charm, and so it happened that Susan found herself in the drawing-room at five o'clock, in the center of a chattering group, and stirred, as she was always stirred, by Stephen's effect on the people he met. He found time to say to her only a few words, "You are more adorable than ever!" but they kept Susan's heart singing all evening, and she and Emily spent the hours after dinner in great harmony; greater indeed than they had enjoyed for months.

The next day she said her good-byes, agitated beyond the capacity to feel any regret, for Stephen Bocqueraz had casually announced his intention to take the same train that she did for the city. Ella gave her her check; not for the sixty dollars that would have been Susan's had she remained to finish out her month, but for ten dollars less.

Emily chattered of Miss Polk, "she seemed to think I was so funny and so odd, when we met her at Betty's," said Emily, "isn't she crazy? Do YOU think I'm funny and odd, Sue?"

Stephen put her in a carriage at the ferry and they went shopping together. He told her that he wanted to get some things "for a small friend," and Susan, radiant in the joy of being with him, in the delicious bright winter sunshine, could not stay his hand when he bought the "small friend" a delightful big rough coat, which Susan obligingly tried on, and a green and blue plaid, for steamer use, a trunk, and a parasol "because it looked so pretty and silly," and in Shreve's, as they loitered about, a silver scissors and a gold thimble, a silver stamp-box and a traveler's inkwell, a little silver watch no larger than a twenty-five-cent piece, a little crystal clock, and, finally, a ring, with three emeralds set straight across it, the loveliest great bright stones that Susan had ever seen, "green for an Irish gir-rl," said Stephen.

Then they went to tea, and Susan laughed at him because he remembered that Orange Pekoe was her greatest weakness, and he laughed at Susan because she was so often distracted from what she was saying by the flash of her new ring.

"What makes my girl suddenly look so sober?"

Susan smiled, colored.

"I was thinking of what people will say."

"I think you over-estimate the interest that the world is going to take in our plans, Susan," he said, gravely, after a thoughtful moment. "We take our place in New York, in a year or two, as married people. 'Mrs. Bocqueraz'"--the title thrilled Susan unexpectedly,--"'Mrs. Bocqueraz is his second wife,' people will say. 'They met while they were both traveling about the world, I believe.' And that's the end of it!"

"But the newspapers may get it," Susan said, fearfully.

"I don't see how," he reassured her. "Ella naturally can't give it to them, for she will think you are at your aunt's. Your aunt---"

"Oh, I shall write the truth to Auntie," Susan said, soberly. "Write her from Honolulu, probably. And wild horses wouldn't get it out of HER. But if the slightest thing should go wrong---"

"Nothing will, dear. We'll drift about the world awhile, and the first thing you know you'll find yourself married hard and tight, and being invited to dinners and lunches and things in New York!"

Susan's dimples came into view.

"I forget what a very big person you are," she smiled. "I begin to think you can do anything you want to do!"

She had a reminder of his greatness even before they left the tea-room, for while they were walking up the wide passage toward the arcade, a young woman, an older woman, and a middle-aged man, suddenly addressed the writer.

"Oh, do forgive me!" said the young woman, "but AREN'T you Stephen Graham Bocqueraz? We've been watching you--I just couldn't HELP--"

"My daughter is a great admirer---" the man began, but the elder woman interrupted him.

"We're ALL great admirers of your books, Mr. Bocqueraz," said she, "but it was Helen, my daughter here!--who was sure she recognized you. We went to your lecture at our club, in Los Angeles---"

Stephen shook hands, smiled and was very gracious, and Susan, shyly smiling, too, felt her heart swell with pride. When they went on together the little episode had subtly changed her attitude toward him; Susan was back for the moment in her old mood, wondering gratefully what the great man saw in HER to attract him!

A familiar chord was touched when an hour later, upon getting out of a carriage at her aunt's door, she found the right of way disputed by a garbage cart, and Mary Lou, clad in a wrapper, holding the driver in spirited conversation through a crack in the door. Susan promptly settled a small bill, kissed Mary Lou, and went upstairs in harmonious and happy conversation.

"I was just taking a bath!" said Mary Lou, indignantly. Mary Lou never took baths easily, or as a matter of course. She always made an event of them, choosing an inconvenient hour, assembling soap, clothing and towels with maddening deliberation, running about in slippered feet for a full hour before she locked herself into, and everybody else out of, the bathroom. An hour later she would emerge from the hot and steam-clouded apartment, to spend another hour in her room in leisurely dressing. She was at this latter stage now, and regaled Susan with all the family news, as she ran her hand into stocking after stocking in search of a whole heel, and forced her silver cuff-links into the starched cuffs of her shirtwaist.

Ferd Eastman's wife had succumbed, some weeks before, to a second paralytic stroke, and Mary Lou wept unaffectedly at the thought of poor Ferd's grief. She said she couldn't help hoping that some sweet and lovely girl,--"Ferd knows so many!" said Lou, sighing,--would fill the empty place. Susan, with an unfavorable recollection of Ferd's fussy, important manner and red face, said nothing. Georgie, Mary Lou reported, was a very sick woman, in Ma's and Mary Lou's opinion. Ma had asked the young O'Connors to her home for Christmas dinner; "perhaps they expected us to ask the old lady," said Mary Lou, resentfully, "anyway, they aren't coming!" Georgie's baby, it appeared, was an angel, but Joe disciplined the poor little thing until it would make anyone's heart sick.

Of Alfie the report was equally discouraging: "Alfie's wife is perfectly awful," his sister said, "and their friends, Sue,--barbers and butchers! However, Ma's asked 'em here for Christmas dinner, and then you'll see them!" Virginia was still at the institution, but of late some hope of eventual restoration of her sight had been given her. "It would break your heart to see her in that place, it seems like a poorhouse!" said Mary Lou, with trembling lips, "but Jinny's an angel. She gets the children about her, and tells them stories; they say she's wonderful with them!"

There was really good news of the Lord sisters, Susan was rejoiced to hear. They had finally paid for their lot in Piedmont Hills, and a new trolley-car line, passing within one block of it, had trebled its value. This was Lydia's chance to sell, in Mary Lou's opinion, but Lydia intended instead to mortgage the now valuable property, and build a little two-family house upon it with the money thus raised. She had passed the school-examinations, and had applied for a Berkeley school. "But better than all," Mary Lou announced, "that great German muscle doctor has been twice to see Mary,--isn't that amazing? And not a cent charged---"

"Oh, God bless him!" said Susan, her eyes flashing through sudden mist. "And will she be cured?"

"Not ever to really be like other people, Sue. But he told her, last time, that by the time that Piedmont garden was ready for her, she'd be ready to go out and sit in it every day! Lydia fainted away when he said it,--yes, indeed she did!"

"Well, that's the best news I've heard for many a day!" Susan rejoiced. She could not have explained why, but some queer little reasoning quality in her brain made her own happiness seem the surer when she heard of the happiness of other people.

The old odors in the halls, the old curtains and chairs and dishes, the old, old conversation; Mrs. Parker reading a clean, neatly lined, temperate little letter from Loretta, signed "Sister Mary Gregory"; Major Watts anxious to explain to Susan just the method of building an army bridge that he had so successfully introduced during the Civil War,--"S'ee, 'Who is this boy, Cutter?' 'Why, sir, I don't know,' says Captain Cutter, 'but he says his name is Watts!' 'Watts?' says the General, 'Well,' s'ee, 'If I had a few more of your kind, Watts, we'd get the Yanks on the run, and we'd keep 'em on the run.'"

Lydia Lord came down to get Mary's dinner, and again Susan helped the watery vegetable into a pyramid of saucers, and passed the green glass dish of pickles, and the pink china sugar-bowl. But she was happy to-night, and it seemed good to be home, where she could be her natural self, and put her elbows on the table, and be listened to and laughed at, instead of playing a role.

"Gosh, we need you in this family, Susie!" said William Oliver, won from fatigue and depression to a sudden appreciation of her gaiety.

"Do you, Willie darling?"

"Don't you call me Willie!" he looked up to say scowlingly.

"Well, don't you call me Susie, then!" retorted Susan. Mrs. Lancaster patted her hand, and said affectionately, "Don't it seem good to have the children scolding away at each other again!"

Susan and William had one of their long talks, after dinner, while they cracked and ate pine-nuts, and while Mary Lou, at the other end of the dining-room table, painstakingly wrote a letter to a friend of her girlhood. Billy was frankly afraid that his men were reaching the point when a strike would be the natural step, and as president of their new-formed union, and spokesman for them whenever the powers had to be approached, he was anxious to delay extreme measures as long as he could. Susan was inclined to regard the troubles of the workingman as very largely of his own making. "You'll simply lose your job," said Susan, "and that'll be the end of it. If you made friends with the Carpenters, on the other hand, you'd be fixed for life. And the Carpenters are perfectly lovely people. Mrs. Carpenter is on the hospital board, and a great friend of Ella's. And she says that it's ridiculous to think of paying those men better wages when their homes are so dirty and shiftless, and they spend their money as they do! You know very well there will always be rich people and poor people, and that if all the money in the world was divided on Monday morning---"

"Don't get that old chestnut off!" William entreated.

"Well, I don't care!" Susan said, a little more warmly for the interruption. "Why don't they keep their houses clean, and bring their kids up decently, instead of giving them dancing lessons and white stockings!"

"Because they've had no decent training themselves, Sue---"

"Oh, decent training! What about the schools?"

"Schools don't teach anything! But if they had fair play, and decent hours, and time to go home and play with the kids, and do a little gardening, they'd learn fast enough!"

"The poor you have always with you," said Mary Lou, reverently. Susan laughed outright, and went around the table to kiss her cousin.

"You're an old darling, Mary Lou!" said she. Mary Lou accepted the tribute as just.

"No, but I don't think we ought to forget the IMMENSE good that rich people do, Billy," she said mildly. "Mrs. Holly's daughters gave a Christmas-tree party for eighty children yesterday, and the Saturday Morning Club will have a tree for two hundred on the twenty-eighth!"

"Holly made his money by running about a hundred little druggists out of the business," said Billy, darkly.

"Bought and paid for their businesses, you mean," Susan amended sharply.

"Yes, paid about two years' profits," Billy agreed, "and would have run them out of business if they hadn't sold. If you call that honest!"

"It's legally honest," Susan said lazily, shuffling a pack for solitaire. "It's no worse than a thousand other things that people do!"

"No, I agree with you there!" Billy said heartily, and he smiled as if he had had the best of the argument.

Susan followed her game for awhile in silence. Her thoughts were glad to escape to more absorbing topics, she reviewed the happy afternoon, and thrilled to a hundred little memories. The quiet, stupid evening carried her back, in spirit, to the Susan of a few years ago, the shabby little ill-dressed clerk of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter, who had been such a limited and suppressed little person. The Susan of to-day was an erect, well-corseted, well-manicured woman of the world; a person of noticeable nicety of speech, accustomed to move in the very highest society. No, she could never come back to this, to the old shiftless, penniless ways. Any alternative rather!

"And, besides, I haven't really done anything yet," Susan said to herself, uneasily, when she was brushing her hair that night, and Mary Lou was congratulating her upon her improved appearance and manner.

On Saturday she introduced her delighted aunt and cousin to Mr. Bocqueraz, who came to take her for a little stroll.

"I've always thought you were quite an unusual girl, Sue," said her aunt later in the afternoon, "and I do think it's a real compliment for a man like that to talk to a girl like you! I shouldn't know what to say to him, myself, and I was real proud of the way you spoke up; so easy and yet so ladylike!"

Susan gave her aunt only an ecstatic kiss for answer. Bread was needed for dinner, and she flashed out to the bakery for it, and came flying back, the bread, wrapped in paper and tied with pink string, under her arm. She proposed a stroll along Filmore Street to Mary Lou, in the evening, and they wrapped up for their walk under the clear stars. There was a holiday tang to the very air; even the sound of a premature horn, now and then; the shops were full of shoppers.

Mary Lou had some cards to buy, at five cents apiece, or two for five cents, and they joined the gently pushing groups in the little stationery stores. Insignificant little shoppers were busily making selections from the open trays of cards; school-teachers, stenographers, bookkeepers and clerks kept up a constant little murmur among themselves.

"How much are these? Thank you!" "She says these are five, Lizzie; do you like them better than the little holly books?" "I'll take these two, please, and will you give me two envelopes?--Wait just a moment, I didn't see these!" "This one was in the ten-cent box, but it's marked five, and that lady says that there were some just like it for five. If it's five, I want it!" "Aren't these cunnin', Lou?" "Yes, I noticed those, did you see these, darling?" "I want this one--I want these, please,--will you give me this one?"

"Are you going to be open at all to-morrow?" Mary Lou asked, unwilling to be hurried into a rash choice. "Isn't this little one with a baby's face sweet?" said a tall, gaunt woman, gently, to Susan.

"Darling!" said Susan.

"But I want it for an unmarried lady, who isn't very fond of children," said the woman delicately. "So perhaps I had better take these two funny little pussies in a hat!"

They went out into the cold street again, and into a toy-shop where a lamb was to be selected for Georgie's baby. And here was a roughly dressed young man holding up a three-year-old boy to see the elephants and horses. Little Three, a noisy little fellow, with cold red little hands, and a worn, soiled plush coat, selected a particularly charming shaggy horse, and shouted with joy as his father gave it to him.

"Do you like that, son? Well, I guess you'll have to have it; there's nothing too good for you!" said the father, and he signaled a saleswoman. The girl looked blankly at the change in her hand.

"That's two dollars, sir," she said, pleasantly, displaying the tag.

"What?" the man stammered, turning red. "Why--why, sure--that's right! But I thought---" he appealed to Susan. "Don't that look like twenty cents?" he asked.

Mary Lou tugged discreetly at Susan's arm, but Susan would not desert the baby in the plush coat.

"It IS!" she agreed warmly.

"Oh, no, ma'am! These are the best German toys," said the salesman firmly.

"Well, then, I guess---" the man tried gently to disengage the horse from the jealous grip of its owner, "I guess we'd better leave this horse here for some other little feller, Georgie," said he, "and we'll go see Santa Claus."

"I thess want my horse that Dad GAVE me!" said Georgie, happily.

"Shall I ask Santa Claus to send it?" asked the saleswoman, tactfully.

"No-o-o!" said Georgie, uneasily. "Doncher letter have it, Dad!"

"Give the lady the horse, old man," said the father, "and we'll go find something pretty for Mamma and the baby!" The little fellow's lips quivered, but even at three some of the lessons of poverty had been learned. He surrendered the horse obediently, but Susan saw the little rough head go down tight against the man's collar, and saw the clutch of the grimy little hand.

Two minutes later she ran after them, and found them seated upon the lowest step of an out-of-the-way stairway; the haggard, worried young father vainly attempting to console the sobbing mite upon his knee.

"Here, darling," said Susan. And what no words could do, the touch of the rough-coated pony did for her; up came the little face, radiant through tears; Georgie clasped his horse again.

"No, ma'am, you mustn't--I thank you very kindly, ma'am, but----" was all that Susan heard before she ran away.

She would do things like that every day of her life, she thought, lying awake in the darkness that night. Wasn't it better to do that sort of thing with money than to be a Mary Lou, say, without? She was going to take a reckless and unwise step now. Admitted. But it would be the only one. And after busy and blameless years everyone must come to see that it had been for the best.

Every detail was arranged now. She and Stephen had visited the big liner that afternoon; Susan had had her first intoxicating glimpse of the joy of sea-travel, had peeped into the lovely little cabin that was to be her own, had been respectfully treated by the steward as the coming occupant of that cabin. She had seen her new plaid folded on a couch, her new trunk in place, a great jar of lovely freesia lilies already perfuming the fresh orderliness of the place.

Nothing to do now but to go down to the boat in the morning. Stephen had both tickets in his pocket-book. A careful scrutiny of the first-cabin list had assured Susan that no acquaintances of hers were sailing. If, in the leave-taking crowd, she met someone that she knew, what more natural than that Miss Brown had been delegated by the Saunders family to say good-bye to their charming cousin? Friends had promised to see Stephen off, but, if Ella appeared at all, it would be but for a moment, and Susan could easily avoid her. She was not afraid of any mishap.

But three days of the pure, simple old atmosphere had somewhat affected Susan, in spite of herself. She could much more easily have gone away with Stephen Bocqueraz without this interval. Life in the Saunders home stimulated whatever she had of recklessness and independence, frivolity and irreverence of law. She would be admired for this step by the people she had left; she could not think without a heartache of her aunt's shame and distress.

However there seemed nothing to do now but to go to sleep. Susan's last thought was that she had not taken the step YET,--in so much, at least, she was different from the girls who moved upon blind and passionate impulses. She could withdraw even now.

The morning broke like many another morning; sunshine and fog battling out-of-doors, laziness and lack of system making it generally characteristic of a Sunday morning within. Susan went to Church at seven o'clock, because Mary Lou seemed to expect it of her, and because it seemed a good thing to do, and was loitering over her breakfast at half-past-eight, when Mrs. Lancaster came downstairs.

"Any plan for to-day, Sue?" asked her aunt. Susan jumped nervously.

"Goodness, Auntie! I didn't see you there! Yes, you know I have to go and see Mr. Bocqueraz off at eleven."

"Oh, so you do! But you won't go back with the others, dear? Tell them we want you for Christmas!"

"With the others?"

"Miss Ella and Emily," her aunt supplied, mildly surprised.

"Oh! Oh, yes! Yes, I suppose so. I don't know," Susan said in great confusion.

"You'll probably see Lydia Lord there," pursued Mrs. Lancaster, presently. "She's seeing Mrs. Lawrence's cousins off."

"On the Nippon Maru?" Susan asked nervously.

"How you do remember names, Sue! Yes, Lydia's going down."

"I'd go with you, Sue, if it wasn't for those turkeys to stuff," said Mary Lou. "I do love a big ship!"

"Oh, I wish you could!" Susan said.

She went upstairs with a fast-beating heart. Her heart was throbbing so violently, indeed, that, like any near loud noise, it made thought very difficult. Mary Lou came in upon her packing her suitcase.

"I suppose they may want you to go right back," said Mary Lou regretfully, in reference to the Saunders, "but why don't you leave that here in case they don't?"

"Oh, I'd rather take it," said Susan.

She kissed her cousin good-bye, gave her aunt a particularly fervent hug, and went out into the doubtful morning. The fog-horn was booming on the bay, and when Susan joined the little stream of persons filing toward the dock of the great Nippon Maru, fog was already shutting out all the world, and the eaves of the pier dripped with mist. Between the slow-moving motor-cars and trucks on the dock, well-dressed men and women were picking their way through the mud.

Susan went unchallenged up the gang-plank, with girls in big coats, carrying candy-boxes and violets, men with cameras, elderly persons who watched their steps nervously. The big ship was filled with chattering groups, young people raced through cabins and passageways, eager to investigate.

Stevedores were slinging trunks and boxes on board; everywhere were stir and shouting and movement. Children shrieked and romped in the fitful sunlight; there were tears and farewells, on all sides; postal-writers were already busy about the tables in the writing-room, stewards were captured on their swift comings and goings, and interrogated and importuned. Fog lay heavy and silent over San Francisco; and the horn still boomed down the bay.

Susan, standing at the rail looking gravely on at the vivid and exciting picture, felt an uneasy and chilling little thought clutch at her heart. She had always said that she could withdraw, at this particular minute she could withdraw. But in a few moments more the dock would be moving steadily away from her; the clock in the ferry-tower, with gulls wheeling about it, the ferry-boats churning long wakes in the smooth surface of the bay, the stir of little craft about the piers, the screaming of a hundred whistles, in a hundred keys, would all be gone. Alcatraz would be passed, Black Point and the Golden Gate; they would be out beyond the rolling head-waters of the harbor. No withdrawing then.

Her attention was attracted by the sudden appearance of guards at the gang-plank, no more visitors would be allowed on board. Susan smiled at the helpless disgust of some late-comers, who must send their candy and books up by the steward. Twenty-five minutes of twelve, said the ferry clock.

"Are you going as far as Japan, my dear?" asked a gentle little lady at Susan's shoulder.

"Yes, we're going even further!" said friendly Susan.

"I'm going all alone," said the little lady, "and old as I am, I so dread it! I tell Captain Wolseley---"

"I'm making my first trip, too," said Susan, "so we'll stand by each other!"

A touch on her arm made her turn suddenly about; her heart thundering. But it was only Lydia Lord.

"Isn't this thrilling, Sue?" asked Lydia, excited and nervous. "What WOULDN'T you give to be going? Did you go down and see the cabins; aren't they dear? Have you found the Saunders party?"

"Are the Saunders here?" asked Susan.

"Miss Ella was, I know. But she's probably gone now. I didn't see the younger sister. I must get back to the Jeromes," said Lydia; "they began to take pictures, and I'd thought I run away for a little peep at everything, all to myself! They say that we shore people will have to leave the ship at quarter of twelve."

She fluttered away, and a second later Susan found her hand covered by the big glove of Stephen Bocqueraz.

"Here you are, Susan," he said, with business-like satisfaction. "I was kept by Ella and some others, but they've gone now. Everything seems to be quite all right."

Susan turned a rather white and strained face toward him, but even now his bracing bigness and coolness were acting upon her as a tonic.

"We're at the Captain's table," he told her, "which you'll appreciate if you're not ill. If you are ill, you've got a splendid stewardess,--Mrs. O'Connor. She happens to be an old acquaintance of mine; she used to be on a Cunarder, and she's very much interested in my niece, and will look out for you very well." He looked down upon the crowded piers. "Wonderful sight, isn't it?" he asked. Susan leaned beside him at the rail, her color was coming back, but she saw nothing and heard nothing of what went on about her.

"What's he doing that for?" she asked suddenly. For a blue-clad coolie was working his way through the crowded docks, banging violently on a gong. The sound disturbed Susan's overstrained nerves.

"I don't know," said Stephen. "Lunch perhaps. Would you like to have a look downstairs before we go to lunch?"

"That's a warning for visitors to go ashore," volunteered a bright-faced girl near them, who was leaning on the rail, staring down at the pier. "But they'll give a second warning," she added, "for we're going to be a few minutes late getting away. Aren't you glad you don't have to go?" she asked Susan gaily.

"Rather!" said Susan huskily.

Visitors were beginning now to go reluctantly down the gang-plank, and mass themselves on the deck, staring up at the big liner, their faces showing the strained bright smile that becomes so fixed during the long slow process of casting off. Handkerchiefs began to wave, and to wipe wet eyes; empty last promises were exchanged between decks and pier. A woman near Susan began to cry,--a homely little woman, but the big handsome man who kissed her was crying, too.

Suddenly the city whistles, that blow even on Sunday in San Francisco, shrilled twelve. Susan thought of the old lunch-room at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's, of Thorny and the stewed tomatoes, and felt the bitter tears rise in her throat.

Various passengers now began to turn their interest to the life of the ship. There was talk of luncheon, of steamer chairs, of asking the stewardess for jars to hold flowers. Susan had drawn back from the rail, no one on the ship knew her, but somebody on the pier might.

"Now let us go find Mrs. O'Connor," Stephen said, in a matter-of-fact tone. "Then you can take off your hat and freshen up a bit, and we can look over the ship." He led her cleverly through the now wildly churning crowds, into the comparative quiet of the saloon.

Here they found Mrs. O'Connor, surrounded by an anxious group of travelers. Stephen put Susan into her charge, and the two women studied each other with interest.

Susan saw a big-boned, gray-haired, capable-looking Irishwoman, in a dress of dark-blue duck, with a white collar and white cuffs, heard a warming, big voice, and caught a ready and infectious smile. In all the surrounding confusion Mrs. O'Connor was calm and alert; so normal in manner and speech indeed that merely watching her had the effect of suddenly cooling Susan's blood, of reducing her whirling thoughts to something like their old, sane basis. Travel was nothing to Mrs. O'Connor; farewells were the chief of her diet; and her manner with Stephen Bocqueraz was crisp and quiet. She fixed upon him shrewd, wise eyes that had seen some curious things in their day, but she gave Susan a motherly smile.

"This is my niece, Mrs. O'Connor," said Stephen, introducing Susan. "She's never made the trip before, and I want you to help me turn her over to her Daddy in Manila, in first-class shape."

"I will that," agreed the stewardess, heartily.

"Well, then I'll have a look at my own diggings, and Mrs. O'Connor will take you off to yours. I'll be waiting for you in the library, Sue," Stephen said, walking off, and Susan followed Mrs. O'Connor to her own cabin.

"The very best on the ship, as you might know Mr. Bocqueraz would get for anyone belonging to him," said the stewardess, shaking pillows and straightening curtains with great satisfaction, when they reached the luxurious little suite. "He's your father's brother, he tells me. Was that it?"

She was only making talk, with the kindliest motives, for a nervous passenger, but the blood rushed into Susan's face. Somehow it cut her to the heart to have to remember her father just at this instant; to make him, however distantly, a party to this troubled affair.

"And you've lost your dear mother," Mrs. O'Connor said, misunderstanding the girl's evident distress. "Well, my dear, the trip will do you a world of good, and you're blessed in this--you've a good father left, and an uncle that would lay down and die for you. I leave my own two girls, every time I go," she pursued, comfortably. "Angela's married,--she has a baby, poor child, and she's not very strong,--and Regina is still in boarding-school, in San Rafael. It's hard to leave them---"

Simple, kindly talk, such as Susan had heard from her babyhood. And the homely honest face was not strange, nor the blue, faded eyes, with their heartening assurance of good-fellowship.

But suddenly it seemed to Susan that, with a hideous roaring and rocking, the world was crashing to pieces about her. Her soul sickened and shrank within her. She knew nothing of this good woman, who was straightening blankets and talking--talking--talking, three feet from her, but she felt she could not bear--she could not BEAR this kindly trust and sympathy--she could not bear the fear that some day she would be known to this woman for what she was!

A gulf yawned before her. She had not foreseen this. She had known that there were women in the world, plenty of them, Stephen said, who would understand what she was doing and like her in spite of it, even admire her.

But what these blue eyes would look when they knew it, she very well knew. Whatever glories and heights awaited Susan Brown in the days to come, she could never talk as an equal with Ann O'Connor or her like again, never exchange homely, happy details of babies and boarding-school and mothers and fathers again!

Plenty of women in the world who would understand and excuse her,--but Susan had a mad desire to get among these sheltering women somehow, never to come in contact with these stupid, narrow-visioned others---!

"Leo--that's my son-in-law, is an angel to her," Mrs. O'Connor was saying, "and it's not everyone would be, as you know, for poor Angela was sick all the time before Raymond came, and she's hardly able to stir, even yet. But Leo gets his own breakfasts----"

Susan was at the washstand busy with brush and comb. She paused.

Life stretched before her vision a darkened and wearisome place. She had a sudden picture of Mrs. O'Connor's daughter,--of Georgie--of all helpless women upon whom physical weakness lays its heavy load. Pale, dispirited women, hanging over the little cradles, starting up at little cries in the night, comforted by the boyish, sympathetic husbands, and murmuring tired thanks and appreciations----

She, Susan, would be old some day, might be sick and weak any day; there might be a suffering child. What then? What consolation for a woman who set her feet deliberately in the path of wrong? Not even a right to the consolation these others had, to the strong arm and the heartening voice at the day's end. And the child--what could she teach a child of its mother?

"But I might not have one," said Susan to herself. And instantly tears of self-pity bowed her head over the little towel-rack, and turned her heart to water. "I love children so--and I couldn't have children!" came the agonized thought, and she wept bitterly, pressing her eyes against the smooth folds of the towel.

"Come now, come now," said Ann O'Connor, sympathetic but not surprised. "You mustn't feel that way. Dry your eyes, dear, and come up on deck. We'll be casting off any moment now. Think of meeting your good father---"

"Oh, Daddy!---" The words were a long wail. Then Susan straightened up resolutely.

"I mustn't do this," she said sensibly. "I must find Mr. Bocqueraz."

Suddenly it seemed to her that she must have just the sight and touch of Stephen or she would lose all self-control. "How do I get to the library?" she asked, white lipped and breathing hard.

Sympathetic Mrs. O'Connor willingly directed her, and Susan went quickly and unseeingly through the unfamiliar passageway and up the curving staircase. Stephen--said her thoughts over and over again--just to get to him,--to put herself in his charge, to awaken from the nightmare of her own fears. Stephen would understand--would make everything right. People noticed her, for even in that self-absorbed crowd, she was a curious figure,--a tall, breathless girl, whose eyes burned feverishly blue in her white face. But Susan saw nobody, noticed nothing. Obstructions she put gently aside; voices and laughter she did not hear; and when suddenly a hand was laid upon her arm, she jumped in nervous fright.

It was Lydia Lord who clutched her eagerly by the wrist, homely, excited, shabbily dressed Lydia who clung to her, beaming with relief and satisfaction.

"Oh, Sue,--what a piece of good fortune to find you!" gasped the little governess. "Oh, my dear, I've twisted my ankle on one of those awful deck stairways!" she panted. "I wonder a dozen people a day don't get killed on them! And, Sue, did you know, the second gong has been rung? I didn't hear it, but they say it has! We haven't a second to lose--seems so dreadful--and everyone so polite and yet in such a hurry--this way, dear, he says this way--My! but that is painful!"

Dashed in an instant from absolute security to this terrible danger of discovery, Susan experienced something like vertigo. Her senses seemed actually to fail her. She could do only the obvious thing. Dazed, she gave Lydia her arm, and automatically guided the older woman toward the upper deck. But that this astounding enterprise of hers should be thwarted by Lydia Lord! Not an earthquake, not a convulsed conspiracy of earth and sea, but this little teacher, in her faded little best, with her sprained ankle!

That Lydia Lord, smiling in awkward deprecation, and giving apologetic glances to interested bystanders who watched their limping progress, should consider herself the central interest of this terrible hour!---It was one more utterly irreconcilable note in this time of utter confusion and bewilderment. Terror of discovery, mingled in the mad whirl of Susan's thoughts with schemes of escape; and under all ran the agonizing pressure for time--minutes were precious now--every second was priceless!

Lydia Lord was the least manageable woman in the world. Susan had chafed often enough at her blunt, stupid obstinacy to be sure of that! If she once suspected what was Susan's business on the Nippon Maru--less, if she so much as suspected that Susan was keeping something, anything, from her, she would not be daunted by a hundred captains, by a thousand onlookers. She would have the truth, and until she got it, Susan would not be allowed out of her arm's reach. Lydia would cheerfully be bullied by the ship's authorities, laughed at, insulted, even arrested in happy martyrdom, if it once entered into her head that Mrs. Lancaster's niece, the bright-headed little charge of the whole boarding-house, was facing what Miss Lord, in virtuous ignorance, was satisfied to term "worse than death." Lydia would be loyal to Mrs. Lancaster, and true to the simple rules of morality by which she had been guided every moment of her life. She had sometimes had occasion to discipline Susan in Susan's naughty and fascinating childhood; she would unsparingly discipline Susan now.

Mary Lou might have been evaded; the Saunders could easily have been silenced, as ladies are easily silenced; but Lydia was neither as unsuspecting as Mary Lou, nor was she a lady. Had Susan been rude and cold to this humble friend throughout her childhood, she might have successfully defied and escaped Lydia now. But Susan had always been gracious and sympathetic with Lydia, interested in her problems, polite and sweet and kind. She could not change her manner now; as easily change her eyes or hair as to say, "I'm sorry you've hurt your foot, you'll have to excuse me,--I'm busy!" Lydia would have stopped short in horrified amazement, and, when Susan sailed on the Nippon Maru, Lydia would have sailed, too.

Guided by various voices, breathless and unseeing, they limped on. Past staring men and women, through white-painted narrow doorways, in a general hush of shocked doubt, they made their way.

"We aren't going to make it!" gasped Lydia. Susan felt a sick throb at her heart. What then?

"Oh, yes we are!" she murmured as they came out on the deck near the gang-plank. Embarrassment overwhelmed her; everyone was watching them--suppose Stephen was watching--suppose he called her----

Susan's one prayer now was that she and Lydia might reach the gang-plank, and cross it, and be lost from sight among the crowd on the dock. If there was a hitch now!----

"The shore gong rang ten minutes ago, ladies!" said a petty officer at the gang-plank severely.

"Thank God we're in time!" Lydia answered amiably, with her honest, homely smile.

"You've got to hurry; we're waiting!" added the man less disapprovingly.

Susan, desperate now, was only praying for oblivion. That Lydia and Stephen might not meet--that she might be spared only that--that somehow they might escape this hideous publicity--this noise and blare, was all she asked. She did not dare raise her eyes; her face burned.

"She's hurt her foot!" said pitying voices, as the two women went slowly down the slanting bridge to the dock.

Down, down, down they went! And every step carried Susan nearer to the world of her childhood, with its rigid conventions, its distrust of herself, its timidity of officials, and in crowded places! The influence of the Saunders' arrogance and pride failed her suddenly; the memory of Stephen's bracing belief in the power to make anything possible forsook her. She was only little Susan Brown, not rich and not bold and not independent, unequal to the pressure of circumstances.

She tried, with desperate effort, to rally her courage. Men were waiting even now to take up the gang-plank when she and Lydia left it; in another second it would be too late.

"Is either of you ladies sailing?" asked the guard at its foot.

"No, indeed!" said Lydia, cheerfully. Susan's eye met his miserably--but she could not speak.

They went slowly along the pier, Susan watching Lydia's steps, and watching nothing else. Her face burned, her heart pounded, her hands and feet were icy cold. She merely wished to get away from this scene without a disgraceful exposition of some sort, to creep somewhere into darkness, and to die. She answered Lydia's cheerful comments briefly; with a dry throat.

Suddenly beside one of the steamer's great red stacks there leaped a plume of white steam, and the prolonged deep blast of her whistle drowned all other sounds.

"There she goes!" said Lydia pausing.

She turned to watch the Nippon Maru move against the pier like a moving wall, swing free, push slowly out into the bay. Susan did not look.

"It makes me sick," she said, when Lydia, astonished, noticed she was not watching.

"Why, I should think it did!" Lydia exclaimed, for Susan's face was ashen, and she was biting her lips hard to keep back the deadly rush of faintness that threatened to engulf her.

"I'm afraid--air--Lyd---" whispered Susan. Lydia forgot her own injured ankle.

"Here, sit on these boxes, darling," she said. "Well, you poor little girl you! There, that's better. Don't worry about anyone watching you, just sit there and rest as long as you feel like it! I guess you need your lunch!"