“

Sorrow weeps—sorrow sings.” As Shirley played that night, the old Russian proverb kept running through her mind. When she had pushed the gold harp into its corner she threw herself upon a broad sofa in a feathery drift of chintz cushions and dropped her forehead in her laced fingers. A gilt-framed mirror hung on the opposite wall, out of which her sorrowful brooding eyes looked with an expression of dumb and weary suffering.

Her confused thoughts raced hither and thither. What would be the end? Would Valiant forget after a time? Would he marry—Miss Fargo, perhaps? The thought caused her a stab of anguish. Yet she herself could not marry him. The barrier was impassable!

She was still lying listlessly among the cushions when a step sounded on the porch and she heard Chilly Lusk’s voice in the hall. With heavy hands Shirley put into place her disheveled hair and rose to meet him.

“I’m awfully selfish to come to-night,” he said awkwardly; “no doubt you are tired out.”

She disclaimed the weariness that dragged upon her spirits like leaden weights, and made him welcome with her usual cordiality. She was, in fact, relieved at his coming. At Damory Court, the night of the ball, when she had come from the garden with her lips thrilling from Valiant’s kiss, she had suddenly met his look. It had seemed to hold a startled realization that she had remembered with a remorseful compunction. Since that night he had not been at Rosewood.

Ranston had lighted a pine-knot in the fireplace, and the walls were shuddering with crimson shadows. Her hand was shielding her eyes, and as she strove to fill the gaps in their somewhat spasmodic conversation with the trivial impersonal things that belonged to their old intimacy, the tiny flickering flames seemed to be darting unfriendly fingers plucking at her secret. Leaning from her nest of cushions she thrust the poker into the glowing resinous mass till sparks whizzed up the chimney’s black maw in a torrent.

“How they fly!” she said. “Rickey Snyder calls it raising a blizzard in Hades. I used to think they flew up to the sky and became the littlest stars. What a pity we have to grow up and learn so much! I’d rather have kept on believing that when the red leaves in the woods whirled about in a circle the fairies were dancing, and that it was the gnomes who put the cockle-burs in the hounds’ ears.”

She had been talking at random, gradually becoming shrinkingly conscious of his constrained and stumbling manner. She had, however, but half defined his errand when he came to it all in a burst.

“I—I can’t get to it, somehow, Shirley,” he said with sudden desperation, “but here it is. I’ve come to ask you to marry me. Don’t stop me,” he went on hurriedly, lifting his hand; “whatever you say, I must tell you. I’ve been trying to for months and months!” Now that he had started, it came with a boyish vehemence that both chilled and thrilled her. Even in her own desolation, and shrinking almost unbearably from the avowal, the hope and brightness in his voice touched her with pity. It seemed to her that life was a strange jumble of unescapable and incomprehensible pain. And all the while, in the young voice vibrant with feeling, her cringing ear was catching imagined echoes of that other voice, graver and more self-contained, but shaken by the same passion, in that iteration of “I love you! I love you!”

His answer came to him finally in her silence, and he released her hands which he had caught in his own. They dropped, limp and unresponsive, in her lap. “Shirley,” he said brokenly, “maybe you can’t care for me—yet. But if you will marry me, I—I’ll be content with so little, till—you do.”

She shook her head, her hair making dim flashes in the firelight. “No, Chilly,” she said. “It makes me wretched to give you pain, but I must—I must! Love isn’t like that. It doesn’t come afterward. I know. I could never give you what you want. You would end by despising me, as I—should despise myself.”

“I won’t give up,” he said incoherently. “I can’t give up. Not so long as I know there’s nobody else. At the ball I thought—I thought perhaps you cared for Valiant—but since he told me—”

He stopped suddenly, for she was looking at him from an ashen face. “He told me there was no reason why I should not try my luck,” he said difficultly. “I asked him.”

There was a silence, while he gazed at her, breathing deeply. Then he tried to laugh.

“All right,” he said hoarsely. “It—it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry.”

She stretched out her hand to him in a gesture of wistful pain, and he held it a moment between both of his, then released it and went hurriedly out.

As the door closed, Shirley sat down, her head dropping into her hands like a storm-broken flower. Valiant had accepted the finality of the situation. With a wave of deeper hopelessness than had yet submerged her, she realized that, against her own decision, something deep within her had taken shy and secret comfort in his stubborn masculine refusal. Against all fact, in face of the impossible, her heart had been clinging to this—as though his love might even attain the miraculous and somewhere, somehow, recreate circumstance. But now he, too, had bowed to the decree. A kind of utter apathetic wretchedness seized upon her, to replace the sharp misery that had so long been her companion—an empty numbness in which, in a measure, she ceased to feel.

An hour dragged slowly by and at length she rose and went slowly up the stairs. Her head felt curiously heavy, but it did not ache. Outside her mother’s door, as was her custom, she paused mechanically to listen. A tiny pencil of light struck through the darkness and painted a spot of brightness on her gown. It came through the keyhole; the lamp in her mother’s room was burning. “She has fallen asleep and forgotten it,” she thought, and softly turning the knob, pushed the door noiselessly open and entered.

A moment she stood listening to the low regular breathing of the sleeper. The reading-lamp shed a shaded glow on the pillow with its spread-out silver hair, and on the delicate hands clasped loosely on the coverlet. Shirley came close and looked down on the placid face. It was smooth as a child’s and a smile touched it lightly as if some pleasant sleep-thought had just laid rosy fingers on the dreaming lips. The light caught and sparkled from something bright that lay between her mother’s hands. It was the enamel brooch that held her own baby curl, and she saw suddenly that what she had all her life thought was a solid pendant, was now open locket-wise and that the two halves clasped a miniature. It came to her at once that the picture must be Sassoon’s, and a quick thrill of pity and yearning welled up through her own dejection. Stooping, she looked at it closely. She started as she did so, for the face on the little disk of ivory was that of John Valiant.

An instant she stared unbelievingly. Then recollection of the resemblance of which Valiant had told her rushed to her, and she realized that it must be the picture of his father. The fact shocked and confounded her. Why should her mother carry in secret the miniature of the man who had killed—

Shirley’s breath stopped. She felt her face tinging and a curious weakness came on her limbs. Why indeed, unless—and the thought was like a wild prayer in her mind—she had been mistaken in her surmise? Thoughts came thronging in panic haste: the fourteenth of May and the cape jessamines—these might point no less to Valiant than to Sassoon. But her mother’s fainting at the sight of the son—the eager interest she had displayed in Shirley’s accounts of him, from the episode of the rose and the bulldog to the tournament ball—seemed now to stand out in a new light, throbbing and roseate. Could it be? Had she been stumbling along a blind trail, misled by the cunning dovetailing of circumstance? Her heart was beating stiflingly. If she should be mistaken now! She dashed her hand across her eyes as though to compel their clearness, and looked again.

It was Beauty Valiant’s face that lay in the locket, and that could mean but one thing: it was he, not Sassoon, whom her mother loved!

The lamplight seemed to grow and spread to an unbearable radiance. Shirley thought she cried out with a sudden sweet wildness, but she had not moved or uttered a sound. The illumination was all about her, like a splendid cloud. The impossible had happened. The miracle for which she had hysterically prayed had been wrought!

When she blew out the light, the shining still remained. That glowing knowledge, like a vitalizing and physical presence, passed with her through the hall to her own room. As she stood in the elfish light of her one candle, the poignancy of her joy was as sharp as her past pain. Later was to come the wonder how that tragedy had bent Beauty Valiant’s life to exile and her mother’s to unfulfilment, and in time she was to know these things, too. But now the one great knowledge blotted out all else. She need starve her fancy no longer! The hours with her lover might again sweep across her memory undenied. She felt his arms, his kisses, heard his whispers against her cheek and smelled the perfume of Madonna lilies.

She drew the curtain and opened the window noiselessly to the night. Only a few hours ago she had been singing to her harp in what wretchedness! She laughed softly to herself. The quiet night was full of his voice: “I love you! I want nothing but you!” How her pitiful error had tortured and wrung them both! But to-morrow he, too, would know that all was well.

A clear sound chimed across the distance—the bell of the court-house clock, striking midnight. One!... Two!... How often lately it had rung discordantly across her mood; now it seemed a clamant watcher, tolling joy. Three!... Four!... Five!... Perhaps he was sleepless, listening, too. Was he in the old library, thinking of her? Six!... Seven!... Eight!... Nine!... If she could only send her message to him on the bells! Ten!... It swelled more loudly now, more deliberate. Eleven!... Another day was almost gone. Twelve!... “Joy cometh in the morning”—ran the whisper across her thought. It was morning now.

Thirteen!

She caught a sharp breath. Her ear had not deceived her—the vibration still palpitated on the air like a heart of sound. It had struck thirteen! A little eery touch crept along her nerves and a cool dampness broke on her skin, for she seemed to hear, quavering through the wondering silence, the voice of Mad Anthony, as it had quavered to her ear on the door-step of the negro cabin, with the well-sweep throwing its long curved shadow across the group of laughing faces:

“Ah sees yo’ gwine ter him. Ah heahs de co’ot-house clock a-strikin’ in de night—en yo’ gwine.... Don’ wait, don’ wait, li’l mistis, er de trouble-cloud gwine kyah him erway f’om yo’.... When de clock strike thuhteen—when de clock strike thuhteen—”

She dropped the flowered curtain and drew back. A weird fancy had begun to press on her brain. Had not Mad Anthony foretold truly what had gone before? What if there were some cryptic meaning in this, too? To go to him, at midnight, by a lonely country road—she, a girl? Incredible! Yet her mind had opened to a vague growing fear that was swiftly mounting to a thriving anxiety. That innate superstition, secretly cherished while derided, which is the heritage of the Southron-born bred from centuries of contact with a mystical race, had her in its grip. Yet all the while her sober actual common-sense was crying out upon her—and crying in vain. Unknown appetences that had lain darkling in her blood, come down to her from long generations, were suddenly compelling her. The curtain began to wave in a little wind that whispered in the silk, and somewhere in the yard below she could hear Selim nipping the clover.

She was to go or the “trouble-cloud” would carry him away!

A strange expression of mingled fright and resolve grew on her face. She ran on tiptoe to her wardrobe and with frantic haste dragged out a rough cloak that fell over her soft house-gown, covering it to the feet. It had a peaked hood falling from its collar and into this she thrust the resentful masses of her hair. Every few seconds she caught her breath in a short gasp, and once she paused with an apprehensive glance over her shoulder and shivered. She scarcely knew what she did, nor did she ask herself what might be the outcome of such an absurd adventure. She neither knew nor cared. She was swept off her feet and whirled away into some outlandish limbo of shadowy fear and crying dread.

Slipping off her shoes, she went swiftly and noiselessly down the stair. She let herself out of the door and, shoes on again, ran across the clover. A hound clambered about her, whining, but she silenced him with a whispered word. Selim lifted his head and she patted the snuffling inquiring muzzle an instant before, with her hand on his mane, she led him through the hedge to the stable. It was but the work of a moment to throw on a side-saddle and buckle the girth. Then, mounting, she turned him into the lane.

He was thoroughbred, and her tense excitement seemed to communicate itself to him. He blew the breath through his delicate flaring nostrils and flung up his head at her restraining hand on the bridle. Once on the Red Road, she let him have his will. The long vacant highway reeled out behind her to the fierce and lonely hoof-tattoo. She was scarcely conscious of consecutive thought—all was a vague jumble of chaotic impressions threaded by that necessity that called her like an insistent voice.

Copse and hedge flew by, streaks of distemper on the shifting gloom; swarthy farmhouse roofs huddled like giant Indians on the trail, and ponds in pastures glinted back the pale glimmering of stars. The faint mist, tangled in the branches of the trees, made them look like ghosts gathered to see her pass. Was this real or was she dreaming? Was she, Shirley Dandridge, really galloping down an open road at midnight—because of the hare-brained maunderings of a half-mad old negro?

The great iron gate of Damory Court hung open, and scarcely slackening her pace, she rode through and up the long drive. The glooming house-front was blank and silent and its huge porch columns looked like lonely gray monoliths in the wan light. Not a twinkle showed at chink or cranny; the ponderous shutters were closed. There was a sense of desertion, of emptiness about the place that brought her heart into her throat with a sickly horrible feeling of certainty.

She jumped down from the blowing horse and hurried around the house. The door of the kitchens was open and a ladder of dim reddish light fell from it across the grass. She ran swiftly and looked in. A huddled figure sat there, rocking to and fro in the lamplight.

“Aunt Daph,” she called, “what is the matter?”

The turbaned head turned sharply toward her. “Dat yo’, Miss Shirley?” the old woman said huskily. “Is yo’ come ter see Mars’ John ’fo’ he gwine away? Yo’ too late, honey, too late! He done gone ter de deepo fo’ ter ketch de thoo train. En, oh, honey, Ah knows in mah ole ha’at dat Mars’ John ain’ nevah gwine come back ter Dam’ry Co’ot no mo’!”