Jack had drawn Mary aside, around the sunny veranda, and, out of ear-shot of everybody, a curious intentness in his demeanor, he asked her to run up to Mrs. Upton's room and ask her if she wouldn't take a drive with him that morning. Since the Uptons' impoverishment their little stable was, perforce, empty; and it was Jack who ordered the buggy from the village and treated the company in turn to daily drives.

Mary departed on her errand, hearing Jack telephoning to the livery-stable as she went up-stairs.

She had to own to herself that the charm had grown on her, and the fact of her increasing fondness for Imogen's mother made the clearer to her all the new, vague pain in regard to Imogen. Imogen, to Mary's delicate perception of moral atmosphere, was different; she had felt it from the moment of her arrival. No one had as yet enlightened her as to the Potts's catastrophe, but even by its interpretation she would have found the change hard to understand. Perhaps it was merely that she, Mary, was selfish and felt herself to be of less importance to Imogen. Mary was always conscious of relief when she could fix responsibility upon herself, and she was adjusting all sorts of burdens on her conscience as she knocked at Mrs. Upton's door.

The post had just arrived, and Valerie, standing near her dressing-table, was reading her letters as Mary came in. Mary had never so helplessly felt the sense of charm as this morning.

She wore a long white dressing-gown, of frilled lawn, tied with black ribbons at throat and wrists. Her abundant chestnut hair, delicately veined with white, was braided into two broad plaits that hung below her waist, and her face, curiously childlike so seen, was framed in the banded masses. Mary could suddenly see what she had looked like as a little girl. So moved was she by the charm that, Puritan as she was, she found herself involuntarily saying:—"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what beautiful hair you have."

"It is nice, isn't it?" said Valerie, looking more than ever like a child, a pleased child; "I love my hair."

Mary had taken one braid and was crunching it softly, like spun silk, in her hand. She couldn't help laughing out at the happy acceptance of her admiring speech; the charm was about her; she understood; it wasn't vanity, but something flower-like.

"You have heaps, too," said Valerie.

"Oh, but it's sand-colored. And I do it so horribly. It is so heavy and pulls back so."

"I know; that's the difficulty with heaps of hair. But I had a very clever maid, and she taught me how to manage it. Sand-color is a lovely color as a background to the face, you know."

Valerie rarely made personal remarks and rarely paid compliments. She had none of the winning allurements of the siren; Mary had realized that and was now realizing that genuine interest, even if reticent, may be the most fragrant of compliments.

"I wish you would let me show you how to do it," Valerie added.

Mary blushed. There had always been to her, in her ruthless hair-dressing, an element of severe candor, the recognition of charmlessness, a sort of homage paid to wholesome if bitter fact. Mrs. Upton was not, in her flower-like satisfaction, one bit vain; but Mary suspected herself of feeling a real thrill of tempted vanity. The form of the temptation was, however, too sweet to be rejected, and Mrs. Upton's hair was so simply done, too, though, she suspected, done with a guileful simplicity. It wouldn't look vain to do it like that; but, on the other hand, it would probably take three times as long to do; there was always the question of one's right to employ precious moments in personal adornment. "How kind of you," she murmured. "I am so stupid though. Could I really learn? And wouldn't it take up a good deal of my time every morning?"

Valerie smiled. "Well, it's a nice way of spending one's time, don't you think?"

This was, somehow, quite unanswerable, and Mary had never thought of it in that light. She sat down before Valerie's pretty, tipped mirror and looked with some excitement at the rows of glittering toilet utensils set out before her. She was sure that Mrs. Upton found it nice to spend a great deal of time before her mirror.

"It is so kind of you," she repeated. "And it will be so interesting to see how you do it. And, oh, I am forgetting the thing I came for—how stupid, how wrong of me. It's a message from Jack. He wants to know if you will drive with him."

"And what are all the plans for to-day?" Mrs. Upton asked irrelevantly, unpinning the clustered knobs at the back of Mary's head and softly shaking out the stringently twisted locks as she uncoiled them.

"It is so kind of you;—but oughtn't I to take Jack his answer first?"

"The answer will wait. He has his letters to see to now. What are they all doing?"

"Well, let me see; Rose is in the hammock and Eddy is talking to her.
Imogen is going to take Miss Bocock to see her club."

"Oh, it is Imogen's club day, is it? She asked Miss Bocock?"

"Miss Bocock asked her, or, rather, Jack told her that he had been telling Miss Bocock about it; it was Jack who asked. He knew, of course, that she would be interested in it;—a big, fine person like Miss Bocock would be bound to be."

"Um," Valerie seemed vaguely to consider as she passed the comb down the long tresses. "I don't think that I can let Imogen carry off Miss Bocock;—Miss Bocock can go to the club another day; I want to do some gardening with her this morning; she's a very clever gardener, did you know?—So I shall be selfish. Imogen can take Sir Basil; he likes walks."

Mrs. Upton was now brushing, and very dexterously; but Mary, glancing at her with a little anxiety for the avowed selfishness, fancied that she was not thinking much about the hair. Mary could not quite interpret the change she felt in the lovely face. Something hard, something controlled was there.

"But Jack?"—she questioned.

"Well, Jack can take you on the drive. You and he have seen very little of each other since you've come; such old friends as you are, too."

"Yes, we are," said Mary, gazing abstractedly at her own face, now, in the mirror, and forgetting both her own transformation and the face that bent above her. A familiar cloud of pain gathered within her and, suddenly, she found herself bursting out with:—"Oh, Mrs. Upton—I am so unhappy about Jack!"

Valerie, in the mirror, gave her a keen, quick glance. "I am, too, Mary," she said.

Mary, at this, turned in her chair to look up at her:—"You see, you feel it, too!"

"That he is unhappy? Yes, I see and feel it."

"And you care;—I am sure that you care."

"I care very much. I love Jack very much."

Mary seized her hand and tears filled her eyes. "Oh, you are a dear!—One must love him when one really knows him, mustn't one?—Mrs. Upton, I've known Jack all my life and he is simply one of the noblest, deepest, realest people in the whole world."

"I am sure of that."

"Well, then, can't you help him?" Mary cried.

"How can I help him?—In what way?" Valerie asked, her grave smile fading.

"With Imogen. It's that, you see, their alienation, that's breaking his heart.

"Of course you've seen it all more clearly than I have," Mary went on, her hair about her face, her hand clasping Valerie's;—"Of course you understand it, and everything that has happened to them. I love Imogen, too—please don't doubt that;—but, but, I can't but feel that it's her mistake, her blindness that has been the cause. She couldn't accept it, you see, that he should—stand for a new thing, and be loyal to the old thing at the same time."

Valerie, now, had sunken into a chair near Mary's, and one hand was still in Mary's hand, and in the other she still held a tress of Mary's hair. She looked down at this tress while she said:—"But Imogen was right, quite right. He couldn't stand for the new thing and be loyal to the old."

Mary's eyes widened: "You mean,—Mrs. Upton?—"

"Just what you do. That I am the cause."

She raised her eyes to Mary's and the girl became scarlet.

"Oh,—you do see it all," she breathed.

"All, all, Mary. To Imogen I stand, I must stand, for the wrong; to Jack—though he can't think of me very well as 'standing' for anything, I'm not altogether in that category. So that his championship of me judges him in Imogen's eyes. Imogen has had a great deal to bear. Have you heard of the last thing? She has not told you? I have refused my consent to her having a biography of her father written. She had set her heart on it."

"Oh, I hadn't heard anything. You wouldn't consent? Oh, poor Imogen!"

"It is, poor Imogen. In this, too, she has found no sympathy in Jack. All his sympathy is with me. It has been the end, for both of them. And it is inevitable, Mary."

"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what can I say—what can I think?—I don't seem to be able to see who is right and who is wrong!" Mary covered the confusion of her thoughts by burying her face in her hands.

"No; one can't see. That's what one finds out."

"Of course, I have always thought Mr. Upton a very wonderful person," Mary murmured from behind her hands, her Puritan instinct warning her that now, when it gave her such pain, was the time above all others for a "testifying," a "bearing witness."—"But I know that Jack never felt about that as I did. Of course I, too, think that the biography ought to be written."

Valerie was silent, and her silence, Mary felt, was definitive.

She wouldn't explain herself; she wouldn't seek self-exculpation; and while, with all her humility, Mary felt that as a little stinging, she felt it, also, as something of a relief. Mrs. Upton, no doubt, was indifferent as to her opinion of her rightness and her wrongness, and Mrs. Upton—there was the comfort of it,—was a person whom one must put on one side when it came to judgments. She didn't seem to belong to any of the usual categories. One didn't want to judge her. One was thankful for the haze she made about herself and her motives. That Jack understood her was, Mary felt sure, the result of some peculiar perspicacity of Jack's, for she didn't believe that Mrs. Upton had ever explained or exculpated herself to Jack, either. It even dawned on her that his perspicacity perhaps consisted mainly in the sense of trust that she herself was experiencing. She trusted Mrs. Upton, were she right, or were she wrong, and there was an end of it. With that final realization she uncovered her eyes and met her hostess's eyes again, eyes so soft, so clear, but with, in them, a look of suffering. Childlike, her hair folding behind her cheek and neck, she was faded, touched with age; Mary had never seen it so clearly. Somehow it made her even sorrier than the suffering she recognized.

"Oh, but it's been hard for you, too," she exclaimed, shyly but irrepressibly, "everything, all of it. Just let me say that."

Valerie had blushed her infrequent, vivid blush. She rose and came behind Mary's chair again, gathering up the abandoned tresses. But before she began to comb and coil she said, "Thanks," leaning forward and, very lightly, kissing the girl's forehead.

After that there was silence between them while the work of hair-dressing went on. Valerie did not speak again until, softly forming the contour of the transfigured head, she said, looking at Mary's reflection with an air of quiet triumph;—"Now, is not that charming?"

"Charming; perfectly charming," Mary replied, vaguely; the tears were near her eyes.

"You must come again, to-morrow, and do it under my supervision. It only needs this, now." She thrust two heavy tortoise-shell pins into the coils on either side of Mary's head.

"Those beautiful pins! I am afraid I shall lose them!"

"But they are yours,—mementoes of the new era in hair-dressing. I have several of them. There, you are quite as I would have you,—as far as your head goes."

"Not as far as the rest of me goes, I'm afraid," said Mary, laughing in spite of herself, and lured from sadness.

"I wish you'd let me make the rest of you to match," said Valerie. "I've always loved dressing people up. I loved dressing my dolls when I was a child. That stiff shirt doesn't go with your head."

"No, it doesn't. I really don't see," said Mary tentatively, "why one shouldn't regard dressing as a form of art; I mean, of course, as long as one keeps it in its proper place, as it were."

"To get it in its proper place is to dress well, don't you think. I found such a pretty lawn dress of mine in a trunkful of things put away here; it's a little too juvenile for me, now, and, besides, I'm in mourning. May I put you into it?"

"But I should feel so odd, so frivolous. I'm such a staid, solemn person."

"But the dress is staid, too,—a dear little austerity of a dress;—it's just as much you as that way of doing your hair is. Don't imagine that I would commit such a solecism as to dress you frivolously. Look; will you put this on at once,—to please me?"

She had drawn the delicate thing, all falls and plaitings of palest blue, from a closet, and, shaking it out, looked up with quite serious eyes of supplication. It was impossible not to yield. Laughing, frightened, charmed, Mary allowed Mrs. Upton to dress her, and then surveyed herself in the long mirror with astonishment. She couldn't but own that it was herself, though such a transfigured self. She didn't feel out of place, though she felt new and strange.

"Now, Mary, go down to them and see to it that they all do as I say," Valerie insisted. "Imogen is to take Sir Basil to the club;—Miss Bocock is to garden with me—tell her particularly that I count upon her. Jack is to take you for a drive. And, Mary," she put her hand for a moment on the girl's shoulder, grave for all her recovered lightness;—"you are not to talk of sad things to Jack. You must help me about Jack. You must cheer him;—make him forget. You must talk of all the things you used to talk of before—before either I or Imogen came."

They were all on the veranda when Mary went down; all, that is, but Rose and Eddy. Sir Basil and Miss Bocock were deep in letters. Imogen, seated on a step, the sunlight playing over her fluttering black, endured—it was evident that enjoyment made no part of her feeling—a vivid and emphatic account from Jack of some recent political occurrence. He was even reading, here and there, bits from the newspaper he held, and Mary fancied that there was an unnatural excitement in his voice, an unusual eagerness in his eye, with neither of which had he in the least infected Imogen.

On seeing Mary appear he dropped the newspaper and joined her in the hall, drawing her from there into the little library. "Well?—Well?—" he questioned keenly.

He had no eyes for her transformation, Mary noted that, although Imogen, in the instant of her appearance, had fixed grave and astonished eyes upon her. She repeated her message.

"Well, do you know," said Jack, "we can't obey her. I'm so sorry;—I should have liked the drive with you, Mary, of all things; but it turns out that I can't take anybody this morning, I've some letters, just come, that must be answered by return. But, Mary, see here," his voice dropped and his keenness became more acute;—"help me about it. See that she goes. She needs it."

"Needs it?"

"Don't you see that she's worn out?"

"Jack, only this morning, I've begun to suspect it;—what is the matter?"

"Everything. Everything is the matter. So, she mustn't be allowed to take all the drudgery on her hands. Miss Bocock may go to the club with Imogen; she's just ready to go, she wants to go;—and Mrs. Upton must have the drive with Sir Basil. He'd far rather drive with her than walk with Imogen," said Jack brazenly.

"I suppose so, they are such great friends;—only;—drudgery?—She likes Miss Bocock. She likes gardening,"—Mary's breath was almost taken away by his tense decisiveness.

"She likes Sir Basil better"; Jack said it in the freest manner, a manner that left untouched any deeper knowledge that they might both be in possession of. "Imogen likes him better, too. It's for that, so that Imogen may have the best of it, that she's taking Miss Bocock off Imogen's hands;—you see, I see that you do. So, you just stay here and keep still about your counter-demands, while I manage it."

"But Jack,—you bewilder me!—I ought to give my message. I hate managing."

"I'll see that your message is given."

"But how can you?—Jack—what are you planning?"

He was going and, with almost an impatience of her Puritan scruples, he paused at the door to reply:—"Don't bother. I'm all right. I won't manage it. I'll simply have it so."

Half an hour later Valerie came down-stairs wearing her white hat with its black ribbons and drawing on her gardening gloves. And in the large, cool hall, holding his serviceable letters, Jack awaited her.

"I hope you won't mind," he announced, but in the easiest tones; "we can't obey you this morning. Miss Bocock's gone off to the club with Imogen, and Sir Basil is going to take you for a drive."

Valerie, standing on the last step of the stair, a little above him, paused in the act of adjusting her glove, to stare at him. Easy as his tone was he couldn't hide from her that he wore a mask.

"Was Mary too late to give my message?"

"Yes;—that is, no, not exactly; but the club had been arranged and Miss
Bocock was eager about it and knew you wouldn't mind, especially as Sir
Basil set his heart on the drive with you, when he heard that I couldn't
go."

"That you couldn't go?—but you sent Mary to ask me."

"I had to waive my claim,—I've just had these letters"; he held them up. "Very important; they must be answered at once; it will take all my morning, and, of course, when Sir Basil heard that, he jumped at his chance."

Valerie was still on the step above him, fully illuminated, and, as, with that careful ease, he urged Sir Basil's eagerness upon her, he saw—with what a throb of the heart, for her, for himself—that her deep flush rose.

Oh, she loved him. She couldn't conceal it, not from the eyes that watched her now. And was she glad of an unasked-for help, or did her pride suspect help and resent it? Above all did she know how in need of help she was?

He hadn't been able to prevent his eyes from turning from the blush; they avowed, he feared, the consciousness that he would hide; but, after a little moment, in the same voice of determined, though cautious penetration, Valerie questioned: "Is Imogen just gone?"

"She has been gone these fifteen minutes," said Jack, striving to conceal triumph.

"And Mary?"

"Mary?"

"Yes; where is Mary? Is she left out of all your combinations?"

She did probe, then, though her voice was so mild, the voice, only, of the slightly severe, slightly displeased hostess who finds her looms entangled.

"Mary always has a lot to do."

"Sir Basil shall take Mary," said Valerie cheerfully, as though she picked up the thread and found a way out of the silly chaos of his making.

And at this crisis, this check from the goddess who wouldn't be served, Jack's new skill rose to an almost sinister height. Without a flaw in their apparent candor, his eyes met hers while he said:—"Please don't upset my little personal combination. It's very selfish of me, I know;—but I wanted to keep Mary for myself this morning. I've seen so little of her of late; and I need her to talk over my letters with; they're about things we are both interested in."

Valerie looked fixedly at him while he made this statement, and he couldn't tell what her look meant. But, evidently, she yielded to his counter-stratagem, feeling it, no doubt, unavoidable, for the buggy just then drew up before the door, and the figure of Sir Basil appeared above.

"I am in luck!" said Sir Basil. Excitement as well as eagerness was visible in him. Valerie did not look up at him, though she smiled vaguely, coming down from her step and selecting a parasol on her way to the door. Jack was beside her, and he saw that the flush still stayed. He seemed to see, too, that she was excited and eager, but, more than all, that she was frightened. Yet she kept, for him, her quiet voice.

Before Sir Basil joined them she had time to say:—"You are rather mysterious, Jack. If you have deep-laid plans, I would rather you paid me the compliment of showing me the deepest one at once. I am not being nasty to you," she smiled faintly. "Find Mary at once, you must have wasted a lot of time already in getting to those letters."

Jack stood in the doorway while they drove off. Valerie, though now very pale, in the shadow of her hat, showed all her gay tranquillity, and she was very lovely. Sir Basil must see that. He must see that, and all the other things, that, perhaps, he had forgotten for a foolish moment.

Jack felt himself, this morning, in a category where he had never thought it possible that he should find himself. It was difficult to avoid the conviction that he had, simply, lied two or three times in order to send Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil off together in their long, swaying, sunny solitude. Jack had never imagined it possible that he should lie. But, observing, as he was forced to, the blot on his neat, clean conscience, he found himself considering it without a qualm. His only qualm was for its success. The drive would justify him. He almost swore it to himself, as Valerie's parasol disappeared among the trees. The drive would justify him, and reinstate Sir Basil. Unless Sir Basil were a fool, what he had done was well done.

Yet, when they had disappeared, it was with the saddest drop to anxious, to gnawing uncertainty, that Jack turned back into the house. An echo of the fear that he had felt in Valerie seemed to float back to him. It was as if, in some strange way, he had handed her over to pain rather than to joy, to sacrifice rather than to attainment.