Before Mrs. Hawley-Crowles sought her bed that morning the east was red with the winter sun. “The loss of the pearls is bad enough,” she exclaimed in conclusion, glowering over the young girl who sat before her, “for I paid a good three thousand for the string! But, in addition, to scandalize me before the world––oh, how could you? And this unspeakable Jude––and that awful house––heavens, girl! Who would believe your story if it should get out?” The worried woman’s face was bathed in cold perspiration.

“But––she saved me from––from that place,” protested the harassed Carmen. “She was poor and cold––I could see that. Why should I have things that I don’t need when others are starving?”

Mrs. Hawley-Crowles shook her weary head in despair. Her sister, Mrs. Reed, who had sat fixing the girl with her cold eyes throughout the stormy interview following their return from the ball, now offered a suggestion. “The thing to do is to telephone immediately to all the newspapers, and say that her beads were stolen last night.”

“But they weren’t stolen,” asserted the girl. “I gave them to her––”

“Go to your room!” commanded Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, at the limit of her endurance. “And never, under any circumstances, speak of this affair to any one––never!”

The social crown, which had rested none too securely upon the gilded wig of the dynamic Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, had been given a jolt that set it tottering.

It was very clear to Mrs. J. Wilton Ames after the Charity 143 Ball that she was engaged in a warfare to the death, and with the most relentless of enemies. Nothing short of the miraculous could now dethrone the detested Mrs. Hawley-Crowles and her beautiful, mysterious ward. She dolefully acknowledged to herself and to the sulking Kathleen that she had been asleep, that she had let her foot slip, and that her own husband’s conduct in leading the grand march with Carmen bade fair to give the coup de grÂce to a social prestige which for many weeks had been decidedly on the wane.

“Mamma, we’ll have to think up some new stunts,” said the dejected Kathleen over the teacups the noon following the ball. “Why, they’ve even broken into the front page of the newspapers with a fake jewelry theft! Look, they pretend that the little minx was robbed of her string of pearls last night on leaving the hall. I call that pretty cheap notoriety!”

Mrs. Ames’s lip curled in disdain as she read the news item. “An Inca princess, indeed! Nobody knows who she is, nor what! Why doesn’t somebody take the trouble to investigate her? They’d probably find her an outcast.”

“Couldn’t papa look her up?” suggested Kathleen.

Mrs. Ames did not reply. She had no wish to discuss her husband, after the affair of the previous evening. And, even in disregard of that, she would not have gone to him with the matter. For she and her consort, though living under the same roof, nevertheless saw each other but seldom. At times they met in the household elevator; and for the sake of appearances they managed to dine together with Kathleen in a strained, unnatural way two or three times a week, at which times no mention was ever made of the son who had been driven from the parental roof. There were no exchanges of confidences or affection, and Mrs. Ames knew but little of the working of his mentality. She was wholly under the dominance of her masterful husband, merely an accessory to his mode of existence. He used her, as he did countless others, to buttress a certain side of his very complex life. As for assistance in determining Carmen’s status, there was none to be obtained from him, strongly attracted by the young girl as he had already shown himself to be. Indeed, she might be grateful if the attachment did not lead to far unhappier consequences!

“Larry Beers said yesterday that he had something new,” she replied irrelevantly to Kathleen’s question. “He has in tow a Persian dervish, who sticks knives through his mouth, and drinks melted lead, and bites red-hot pokers, and a lot of such things. Larry says he’s the most wonderful he’s ever seen, and I’m going to have him and a real Hindu swami for next Wednesday evening.”

New York’s conspicuous set indeed would have languished often but for the social buffoonery of the clever Larry Beers, who devised new diversions and stimulating mental condiments for the jaded brains of that gilded cult. His table ballets, his bizarre parlor circuses, his cunningly devised fads in which he set forth his own inimitable antics, won him the motley and the cap and bells of this tinseled court, and forced him well out into the glare of publicity, which was what he so much desired.

And by that much it made him as dangerous as any stupid anarchist who toils by candle-light over his crude bombs. For by it he taught the great mass of citizenship who still retained their simple ideals of reason and respect that there existed a social caste, worshipers of the golden calf, to whom the simple, humdrum virtues were quite unendurable, and who, utterly devoid of conscience, would quaff champagne and dance on the raw, quivering hearts of their fellow-men with glee, if thereby their jaded appetites for novelty and entertainment might be for the moment appeased.

And so Larry Beers brought his swami and dervish to the Ames mansion, and caused his hostess to be well advertised in the newspapers the following day. And he caused the eyes of Carmen to bulge, and her thought to swell with wonder, as she gazed. And he caused the bepowdered nose of Mrs. Hawley-Crowles to stand a bit closer to the perpendicular, while she sat devising schemes to cast a shade over this clumsy entertainment.

The chief result was that, a week later, Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, still running true to form, retorted with a superb imitation of the French Bal de l’OpÉra, once so notable under the Empire. The Beaubien had furnished the inspiring idea––and the hard cash.

“I wonder why I do it?” that woman had meditated. “Why do I continue to lend her money and take her notes? I wanted to ruin her, at first. I don’t––I don’t seem to feel that way now. Is it because of Carmen? Or is it because I hate that Ames woman so? I wonder if I do still hate her? At any rate I’m glad to see Carmen oust the proud hussy from her place. It’s worth all I’ve spent, even if I burn the notes I hold against Jim Crowles’s widow.”

And often after that, when at night the Beaubien had sought her bed, she would lie for hours in the dim light meditating, wondering. “It’s Carmen!” she would always conclude. “It’s Carmen. She’s making me over again. I’m not the same woman I was when she came into my life. Oh, God bless her––if there is a God!”

The mock Bal de l’OpÉra was a magnificent fÊte. All the members of the smart set were present, and many appeared in costumes representing flowers, birds, and vegetables. Carmen went as a white rose; and her great natural beauty, set off by an exquisite costume, made her the fairest flower of the whole garden. The Duke of Altern, costumed as a long carrot, fawned in her wake throughout the evening. The tubbily girthy Gannette, dressed to represent a cabbage, opposed her every step as he bobbed before her, showering his viscous compliments upon the graceful creature. Kathleen Ames appeared as a bluebird; and she would have picked the fair white rose to pieces if she could, so wildly jealous did she become at the sight of Carmen’s further triumph.

About midnight, when the revelry was at its height, a door at the end of the hall swung open, and a strong searchlight was turned full upon it. The orchestra burst into the wailing dead march from Saul, and out through the glare of light stalked the giant form of J. Wilton Ames, gowned in dead black to represent a King Vulture, and with a blood-red fez surmounting his cruel mask. As he stepped out upon the platform which had been constructed to represent the famous bridge in “Sumurun,” and strode toward the main floor, a murmur involuntarily rose from the assemblage. It was a murmur of awe, of horror, of fear. The “monstrum horrendum” of Poe was descending upon them in the garb which alone could fully typify the character of the man! When he reached the end of the bridge the huge creature stopped and distended his enormous sable wings.

“Good God!” cried Gannette, as he thought of his tremendous financial obligations to Ames.

Carmen shuddered and turned away from the awful spectacle. “I want to go,” she said to the petrified Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, who had known nothing of this feature of the program.

Straight to the trembling, white-clad girl the great, black vulture stalked. The revelers fell away from him on either side as he approached. Carmen turned again and watched him come. Her face was ashen. “God is everywhere,” she murmured.

Then her anxious look faded. A light came into her eyes, and a smile wreathed her mouth. And when Ames reached her and extended his huge, black wings again, she walked straight into them with a look of joy upon her beautiful face. Then the wings closed and completely hid the fair, white form from the gaping crowd.

For a few moments dead silence reigned throughout the 146 hall. Then the orchestra crashed, the vulture’s wings slowly opened, and the girl, who would have gone to the stake with the same incomprehensible smile, stepped out. The black monster turned and strode silently, ominously, back to the end of the hall, crossed the bridge, and disappeared through the door which opened at his approach.

“I’m going home!” said the shaken Gannette to his perspiring wife. “That looks bad to me! That girl’s done for; and Ames has taken this way to publicly announce the fact! My God!”

There was another astonished watcher in the audience that evening. It was the eminent Monsignor Lafelle, recently back from Europe by way of the West Indies. And after the episode just related, he approached Carmen and Mrs. Hawley-Crowles.

“A very clever, if startling, performance,” he commented; “and with two superb actors, Mr. Ames and our little friend here,” bowing over Carmen’s hand.

“I am so glad you could accept our invitation, Monsignor. But, dear me! I haven’t got my breath yet,” panted the steaming Mrs. Hawley-Crowles. “Do take us, Monsignor, to the refectory. I feel faint.”

A few moments later, over their iced drinks, Lafelle was relating vivid incidents of his recent travels, and odd bits of news from Cartagena. “No, Miss Carmen,” he said, in reply to her anxious inquiries, “I did not meet the persons you have mentioned. And as for getting up the Magdalena river, it would have been quite impossible. Dismiss from your mind all thought of going down there now. Cartagena is tense with apprehension. The inland country is seething. And the little town of SimitÍ which you mention, I doubt not it is quite shut off from the world by the war.”

Carmen turned aside that he might not see the tears which welled into her eyes.

“Your entertainment, Madam,” continued Lafelle, addressing the now recovered Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, “is superb, as have been all of your social projects this winter, I learn. The thought which you expressed to me some months ago regarding Catholic activity in social matters certainly was well founded. I perceive that our Protestant rivals have all but retired from the field.”

Mrs. Hawley-Crowles swelled with pride. Carmen regarded the churchman with wonder.

“And have you not found a sense of peace, of satisfaction and comfort, since you united with the true Church?” Lafelle went on. “Are you not at last at rest?”

“Quite so,” sighed the lady, though the sigh was scarcely one of unalloyed relief.

Lafelle turned to Carmen. “And our little friend here––can she still remain an alien, now that she has some knowledge of her indebtedness to the Church?”

Carmen looked blank. “My indebtedness to the Church!” she repeated. “Why––”

It was now Lafelle’s turn to sigh, as he directed himself again to Mrs. Hawley-Crowles. “She does not see, Madam, that it was by the ladder of Holy Church that she mounted to her present enviable social height.”

“But––what––what do you mean?” stammered the bewildered girl.

“May I not come and explain it to her?” said Lafelle. Then he suddenly thought of his last conversation with the Beaubien. But he shrugged his shoulders, and a defiant look sat upon his features.

Mrs. Hawley-Crowles dared not refuse the request. She knew she was now too deeply enmeshed for resistance, and that Lafelle’s control over her was complete––unless she dared to face social and financial ruin. And under that thought she paled and grew faint, for it raised the curtain upon chaos and black night.

“Would it be convenient for me to call to-morrow afternoon?” continued the churchman.

“Certainly,” murmured Mrs. Hawley-Crowles in a scarcely audible voice.

“By the way,” Lafelle said, suddenly turning the conversation, “how, may I ask, is our friend, Madam Beaubien?”

Mrs. Hawley-Crowles again trembled slightly. “I––I have not seen her much of late, Monsignor,” she said feebly.

“A strong and very liberal-minded woman,” returned Lafelle with emphasis. “I trust, as your spiritual adviser, Madam, I may express the hope that you are in no way influenced by her.”

“Sir!” cried Carmen, who had bounded to her feet, her eyes ablaze, “Madam Beaubien is a noble woman!”

“My dear child!” Lafelle grasped her hand and drew her back into her chair. “You misunderstand me, quite. Madam Beaubien is a very dear friend of ours, and we greatly admire her strength of character. She certainly does not require your defense! Dear! dear! you quite startled me.”

A few moments later he rose and offered his arms to his companions to lead them back to the hall. Delivering Carmen into the charge of the eagerly waiting Duke of Altern, Lafelle remarked, as he took leave of Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, “I trust you will permit me to talk with your beautiful ward to-morrow afternoon––alone.” And when the lady interpreted the significance 148 of his look, her heart beat rapidly, as she bowed her acknowledgment of abject submission.

“Bah Jove!” ejaculated the young Duke, clutching Carmen. “Ye know, I was deucedly afraid you had gone home, or that Uncle Wilton had you. Ye know, I think I’m jealous of him!”

Carmen laughed merrily at the fellow. His grotesque costume made him appear still more ridiculous.

“It’s nothing to laugh at, Miss Carmen! It’s a bally bore to have a regular mountain like him always getting in the way; and to-night I just made up my mind I wouldn’t stand it any longer, bah Jove! I say, come on!”

He fixed his monocle savagely in his eye and strode rapidly toward the refreshment hall. Carmen went in silence. She heard his murmur of gratification when his gaze lighted upon the chairs and table which he had evidently arranged previously in anticipation of this tÊte-À-tÊte.

“Ye know,” he finally began, after they were seated and he had sat some minutes staring at the girl, “ye know, you’re deucedly clevah, Miss Carmen! I told mother so to-day, and this time she had to agree. And that about your being an Inca princess––ye know, I could see that from the very first day I met you. Mighty romantic, and all that, don’t ye know!”

“Indeed, yes!” replied the girl, her thought drifting back to distant SimitÍ.

“And all about that mine you own in South America––and Mrs. Hawley-Crowles making you her heiress––and all that––bah Jove! It’s––it’s romantic, I tell you!” His head continued to nod emphasis to his thought long after he finished speaking.

“Ye know,” he finally resumed, drawing a gold-crested case from a pocket and lighting a monogrammed cigarette, “a fellow can always tell another who is––well, who belongs to the aristocracy. Mrs. Ames, ye know, said she had some suspicions about you. But I could see right off that it was because she was jealous. Mother and I knew what you were the minute we clapped eyes on you. That’s because we belong to the nobility, ye know.”

He smoked in silence for some moments. Carmen was far, far away.

“Bah Jove, Miss Carmen, I’m going to say it!” he suddenly blurted. “Mother wanted me to marry Lord Cragmont’s filly; but, bah Jove, I say, I’m going to marry you!”

Carmen now heard, and she quickly sat up, her eyes wide and staring. “Marry me!” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” he went on. “Oh, it’s all right. You’re a princess, ye know, and so you’re in our class. I’m not one of the kind that hands out a title to the red-nosed daughter of any American 149 pork packer just to get her money. Not me! The girl I marry has got to be my equal.”

“Oh!” murmured the astonished Carmen.

“It’s all right for you to have money, of course. I won’t marry a pauper, even if she’s a duchess. But you and I, Miss Carmen, are just suited to each other––wealth and nobility on each side. I’ve got thirty thousand good British acres in my own right, bah Jove!”

By now Carmen had fully recovered from her surprise. She reflected a moment, then determined to meet the absurd youth with the spirit of levity which his audacity merited. “But, Reginald,” she said in mock seriousness, “though your father was a duke, how about your mother? Was she not just an ordinary American girl, a sister of plain Mrs. J. Wilton Ames? Where’s the aristocracy there? Now on my side––”

“Now, Miss Carmen,” cried the boy petulantly, “can’t you see that, by marrying my father, my mother became ennobled? Bah Jove, you don’t understand! Were your parents both noble?”

“Indeed they were!” said Carmen. “They were both children of a king.”

“You don’t say!” he whispered, leaning far over the table toward her. “Then we’ve simply got to marry!”

“But,” protested the girl, “in my country people love those whom they marry. I haven’t heard a word of that from you.”

“Now, I say!” he exclaimed. “I was just getting round to that. It was love that made me offer you my name and title!”

“Yes? Love of what?”

“Why––you––of course!”

She laughed musically. “My dear Reginald, you don’t love me. It is yourself that you love. You are madly in love, it is true; but it is with the young Duke of Altern.”

“See here, you can’t talk to me that way, ye know!” he flared out. “Bah Jove, I’m offering to make you a duchess––and I love you, too, though you may not think it!”

“Of course you love me, Reginald,” said Carmen in gentle reply, now relinquishing her spirit of badinage; “and I love you. But I do not wish to marry you.”

The young man started under the shock and stared at her in utter lack of comprehension. Was it possible that this unknown girl was refusing him, a duke? She must be mad!

“A––a––I don’t get you, Miss Carmen,” he stammered.

“Come,” she said, rising and holding out a hand. “Let’s not talk about this any more. We must go back to the hall. I do love you, Reginald, but not in the way that perhaps you would like. I love the real you; not the vain, foolish, self-adoring 150 human concept, called the Duke of Altern. And the love I feel for you will help you, oh, far more than if I married you! Come.”

“But––Miss Carmen!” He stood before her with mouth open.

“Yes, Reginald.”

“I––I expected we’d be engaged––I told mother––”

“Very well, Reginald, we are engaged. Engaged in handling this little problem that has presented itself to you. Do you see? And I will help you to solve it in the right way. For you need help. Reginald dear, I didn’t mean to treat your proposal so lightly. I am sorry. There, give me your hand. We’re just awfully good friends, aren’t we? And I do love you, more than you think.”

Leaving the bewildered youth in the hall, Carmen fell afoul of the very conservative Mrs. Gannette, whose husband, suffering from a sense of nausea since the appearance of Ames as a King Vulture, had some moments before summoned his car and driven to his favorite club to flood his apprehensions with Scotch high-balls.

“Ah, little sly-boots!” piped Mrs. Gannette, shaking a finger at Carmen. “I saw you with Reginald just now. I’m awfully wise about such things. Tell me, dear, when shall we be able to call you the Duchess of Altern? You lucky girl!”

Carmen’s spirits sank, as, without reply, she submitted to the banal boredom of this blustering dame’s society gabble. Mrs. Gannette hooked her arm into the girl’s and led her to a divan. “It’s a great affair, isn’t it?” she panted, settling her round, unshapely form out over the seat. “Dear me! I did intend to come in costume. Was coming as a tomato. Ha! ha! Thought that was better adapted to my shape. But when I got the cloth form around me, do you know, I couldn’t get through the door! And my unlovely pig of a husband said if I came looking like that he’d get a divorce.” The corpulent dame shook and wheezed with the expression of her abundant merriment.

“Well,” she continued, “it wasn’t his threat that hindered me, goodness knows! A divorce would be a relief, after living forty years with him! Say, there goes young Doctor Worley. Speaking of divorce, he’s just got one. It all came round through a joke. Billy Patterson dared him to exchange wives with him one evening when they were having a little too much gaiety at the Worley home, and the doctor took the dare. Ha! ha! The men swapped wives for two days. What do you think of that! And this divorce was the result. But Billy took his wife back. He thought it was just a good joke. Kate Worley 151 gets an alimony of fifty thousand per. But the doctor can stand it. Why, he has a practice of not less than two hundred and fifty thousand a year!”

“I supposed,” murmured Carmen, “that amount of money is a measure of his ability, a proof of his great usefulness.”

“Nothing of the kind,” replied Mrs. Gannette. “He’s simply in with the wealthy, that’s all. Dear! dear! Do look at that fright over there! It’s Lizzie Wall. Now isn’t she simply hideous! Those diamonds are nothing but paste! The hussy!”

Carmen glanced at the pale, slender woman across the hall, seated alone, and wearing a look of utter weariness.

“I’d like to meet her,” she said, suddenly drawn by the woman’s mute appeal for sympathy.

“Don’t do it!” hastily interposed Mrs. Gannette. “She’s going to be dropped. Name’s already on the black list. I don’t know what Mrs. Hawley-Crowles was thinking of to invite her to-night! Her estate is being handled by Ames and Company, and J. Wilton says there won’t be much left when it’s settled––

“My goodness!” she exclaimed, abruptly flitting to another topic. “There goes Miss Tottle. Look at her skirt––flounced at the knees, and full in the back so’s to give a bustle effect. My! I wish I could wear togs cut that way––

“They say, my dear,” the garrulous old worldling prattled on, “that next season’s styles will be very ultra. Butterfly idea, I hear. Hats small and round, like the heads of butterflies. Waists and jackets very full and quite loose in the back and shoulders, so’s to give the appearance of wings. Belts, but no drawing in at the waist. Skirts plaited, plaits opening wide at the knees and coming close together again at the ankle, so’s to look like the body of a butterfly. Then butterfly bows sprinkled all over.”

She paused for breath. Then she drew a long sigh. “Oh dear,” she lamented, “I’d give anything if I had a decent shape! I’d like to wear those shimmering, flowing, transparent summer things over silk tights. But, mercy me! I’d look like a potato busted wide open. Now you can wear those X-ray dresses all right––

“Say, Kathleen Ames has a new French gown to wear to the Dog Show. Skirt slit clear to the knee, with diamond garter around the leg just below. How I’d look! I have a leg like a ham!”

Carmen heard little of this vapid talk, as she sat studying the pale woman across the hall. She had resolved to meet her just as soon as the loquacious Mrs. Gannette should seek another victim. But that genial old gossip gave no present evidence of a desire to change.

“I’m so glad you’re going to marry young Altern,” she said, again swerving the course of her conversation. “He’s got a fine old ruined castle somewhere in England, and seems to have wads of money, though I hear that everything is mortgaged to Ames. I wouldn’t be surprised. Still, his bare title is worth something to an American girl. Besides, you’ve got money. And you’ll do a lot for his family. You know––but don’t breathe a word of this!––his mother never was recognized socially in England, and she finally had to give up the fight. For a while Ames backed her, but it wouldn’t do. His millions couldn’t buy her the court entrÉe, and she just had to quit. That’s why she’s over here now. The old Duke––he was lots older than she––died a couple of years ago. Ran through everything and drank himself to death. Before and since that happy event the Duchess did everything under the heavens to get a bid to court. She gave millions to charity and to entertainments. She sacrificed everything. But, no sir! It wouldn’t do. She had no royal blood. But with you it will be different. You’re a princess, royal Inca, and such like. You qualify right from the jump. So you see what you’re expected to do for the Altern crowd––

“Dear! dear!” catching her breath and switching quickly to another theme, “have you heard about the Hairton scandal? It’s simply rich! You see, young Sidney Ames––”

Carmen’s patience had touched its limit. “Don’t, please don’t!” she begged, holding out a hand. “I do not wish to hear it!”

Mrs. Gannette raised her lorgnette and looked at the girl. “Why, my dear! what’s the matter? The scandal’s about Ames’s son, you know. The reason he doesn’t go in society. Just come to light. You see––”

“My dear Mrs. Gannette,” Carmen looked up at her with a beseeching smile. “You wouldn’t deliberately give me poison to drink, would you?”

“Why, certainly not!” blustered that garrulous lady in astonishment.

“Then why do you poison my mind with such conversation?”

“What!”

“You sit there pouring into my mentality thought after thought that is deadly poisonous, don’t you know it?”

“Why––!”

“You don’t mean to harm me, I know,” pleaded the girl. “But if you only understood mental laws you would know that every thought entering one’s mind tends to become manifested in some way. Thoughts of disease, disaster, death, scandal––all 153 tend to become externalized in discordant ways, either on the body, or in the environment. You don’t want any such things manifested to me, do you? But you might just as well hand me poison to drink as to sit there and pour such deadly conversation into me.”

Mrs. Gannette slowly drew herself up with the hauteur of a grandee. Carmen seized her hand. “I do not want to listen to these unreal things which concern only the human mind,” she said earnestly. “Nor should you, if you are truly aristocratic, for aristocracy is of the thought. I am not going to marry Reginald. A human title means nothing to me. But one’s thought––that alone is one’s claim to real aristocracy. I know I have offended you, but only because I refuse to let you poison me. Now I will go.”

She left the divan and the petrified dame, and hurriedly mingled with the crowd on the floor.

“The little cat!” exploded Mrs. Gannette, when she again found herself. “She has mortally insulted me!”

Carmen went directly to the pale woman, still sitting alone, who had been one of the objects of Mrs. Gannette’s slighting remarks. The woman glanced up as she saw the girl approaching, and a look of wonder came into her eyes. Carmen held out a hand.

“I am Carmen Ariza,” she said simply. “You are Miss Wall. I want you to be my friend.”

The woman roused up and tried to appear composed.

“Will you ride with me to-morrow?” continued Carmen. “Then we can talk all we want to, with nobody to overhear. Aren’t you happy?” she abruptly added, unable longer to withstand the appeal which issued mutely from the lusterless eyes before her.

The woman smiled wanly. “Not so very,” she replied slowly.

“Well!” exclaimed Carmen; “what’s wrong?”

“I am poverty-stricken,” returned the woman sadly.

“But I will give you money,” Carmen quickly replied.

“My dear child,” said the woman, “I haven’t anything but money. That is why I am poverty-stricken.”

“Oh!” the girl exclaimed, sinking into a chair at her side. “Well,” she added, brightening, “now you have me! And will you call me up, first thing in the morning, and arrange to ride with me? I want you to, so much!”

The woman’s eyes grew moist. “Yes,” she murmured, “I will––gladly.”

In the small hours of the morning there were several heads tossing in stubborn wakefulness on their pillows in various New York mansions. But Carmen’s was not one of them.