John Hartley, "The Young Queen."

We are—only what we have been!—"The Silver Poppy."

Hartley lost no more time than was necessary before responding to Cordelia's message asking that he come to her at once.

There was a touch of imperativeness in the hurriedly written little note that indefinitely appealed to him. It seemed to show him how much she had grown to lean on him. He assumed, though, that the urgency at the most implied nothing more than some impending problem in connection with her new book, and consequently Cordelia waited three anxious and impatient hours before he finally appeared before her. And greedily she was counting the minutes of that last precious day.

The ordeal through which she had passed the afternoon before had left its traces behind it. It still showed on her face in an unusual look of pensive weariness about the heavy eyelids, and a deepened and almost feverish glow to the eyes themselves. For once, too, her face was the true color of old ivory, with one small touch of the tenderest, shell-like pink burning on each of her cheeks. The languor of her voice, the calm pathos of her glance, and the heavier shadow about her lashes, suggested to Hartley, as it had done before, but never so vividly, the quiet, half-sorrowful beauty of an autumn twilight.

She was dressed in her riding-habit, of dark-green cloth, showing every line of the thin yet buoyant figure. It appeared to him as a figure with something bird-like in the very lightness and nervous quickness of movement beyond all its outward languor. The dark-green of her habit, too, seemed to give to the pale face above it a strangely heightened sense of isolation, like the gloom out of which the solitary figure of a Rembrandt portrait looks down on the world.

"Cordelia, what is it?" he asked anxiously, startled at the change, though unable to determine in just what it consisted.

She looked up quickly at the note of unusual tenderness in his voice.

"I am going away!" she said quietly.

A sudden sense of loss, of deprivation, swept over him, and both his voice and the startled face he turned to her showed his feeling.

"Going away?" he echoed.

"Yes." She shook her head sorrowfully.

"But where, Cordelia?"

"I leave for Quebec to-morrow morning, to join Mrs. Spaulding. From there I think I shall go back home—back to Kentucky!"

"But why are you going?"

"For your sake," she said, giving him her eyes unrestrainedly.

"For my sake, Cordelia?" he repeated, astonished, openly miserable.

"Yes, for you," she said in a lighter tone, smiling. "But that's all you're going to be told at present."

She went to the window and looked out at the falling rain.

"I thought," she said, "that we might have one last little ride together, for the sake of—of the old days!"

"But it couldn't—surely it couldn't be for long?" he asked, still thinking of her departure, scarcely believing the news.

"I don't think I shall ever again come back to New York," she said slowly, with something that was almost a sob.

"But can't you tell me why?"

"No, I can't—not now!"

"My poor child," he said suddenly, taking her pale face between his hands and looking earnestly into her eyes—and what gloriously luminous eyes they were that poignantly happy moment! "My poor child, is it any trouble I could take on my own shoulders? Is it anything I could ever help you with?"

It was his first voluntary caress, his first spontaneous and unlooked-for touch of tenderness. Her heart was beating riotously.

She shook her head.

"But explain to me about Quebec."

"Mrs. Spaulding has written to me and asked me to join her there. Here is the letter; read it."

She handed the letter to him; it had reached her that morning most opportunely. Hartley took it, and read:

ChÂteau Frontenac, Quebec City.

"My Darling Child:

"I am dying of loneliness up here in this dreary old town. Alfred has gone up in the woods to shoot moose or something, and Heaven only knows when he'll be back. I have decided that you and Mr. Hartley had better take a holiday and run up here and join me for the rest of the week; and then we can all come down together. I refuse to take 'no' for an answer."

"That's really all," Cordelia broke in; "the rest is simply orders about the servants and messages to dressmakers and that sort of thing."

He handed the letter back to her, disheartened, depressed.

"Could you come?" she asked him hesitatingly.

He thought over it; he scarcely saw how he could, but a desire to be near her seemed to be shouldering out all other feelings.

"I should like to go, but—well, to be candid, I really can't afford it just now."

"That doesn't count!" she cried happily.

Then a sudden disturbing thought came to him.

"But, Cordelia, how about our book? What would be done with that in the meantime? And what will become of it in the end, if you leave?" He had often confessed to her that he was no business man, that even the thought of approaching an editor or a publisher could take away his appetite for a day.

"Let's not talk about that!" Her hands were on his shoulders now, and she was reading his face hungrily.

"But what shall be done with it?"

"Well, everything is done!" she said, reluctantly, he thought. Then, slipping away from him for a minute or two, she fluttered back to the room with a bit of paper in her hand.

"And as a sign and proof of the same, permit me to present you with something which is entirely your own!"

It was Slater & Slater's check for one thousand dollars, already indorsed and marked accepted. He held it out to her, determined.

"You know I can't accept this," he said. But she was equally determined.

"But you shall, and must!"

Again he refused it, absolutely, proudly, she thought; and again she thrust it back on him. Then she saw that it was useless, and with that discovery a new trouble came to her.

At last she made a suggestion that had fluttered to the ark of her indecision, like a dove with an olive-branch.

"Let's take it and spend it—on our holiday! No, let's spend half of it; we can decide about the other half later on!"

He stopped to consider her proposal, and as she saw him wavering she declared that she, like Mrs. Spaulding, would never take "no" for an answer.

And so it was decided; and drawing on her gloves she reminded him of their ride.

While the horses were being brought round she told him of her interview with her publisher—not all of it, but at least enough to show how she had succeeded in securing the terms she had first asked for.

"What a wonderful little warrior you are!" he cried, taking her hand laughingly, but gratefully. He looked down at the frail little white fingers admiringly. "It ought to guide an empire!" he cried.

But, strangely enough, she could not find it in her heart to share in his delight. Even the mention of the book, during all that day, in some manner distressed and worried her.

"Those are far-off things and battles long ago," she said, as they started out, shrugging her little shoulders, as though to lift from them some burden of useless care.

"This is the beginning of our holiday. You remember what you said: the fulness and color of life! So let's turn vagabond. Do you know," she continued, taking a tighter rein on her little chestnut mare, who was champing restively at her bit, "do you know, I don't believe you've enough of the rogue in you ever to make a poet!"

"Try me!" he laughed, yet not altogether pleased.

"You haven't enough of the dare-devil in your make-up. You are always too staid and English and respectable and self-contained. You ought to have more of the vagabond, the swashbuckler, more of the Villon!"

"Is that," he asked, "your ideal of man?"

"By no means!"

"Then what is?"

"My ideal"—she looked at him as she spoke—"my ideal is a man who, for a woman's sake, can stand up alone against the whole wide world!"

"Try me!" he said again. As they turned into the Park she brooded joyously, hungrily, over that simple challenge, which might mean so little or so much. Try him! She wondered if he guessed how soon and how severely he might be tried. And she wondered, even more, just what would be the outcome of that test.

The driving rain had ceased, but it was still a humid, gray afternoon with a fine mist hanging in the air. The Park was practically deserted, and the bridle-paths empty.

"What a day for a ride!" cried Cordelia, waving her whip toward the tree-tops that billowed through the silvery fog, "and our last ride together!" Then she repeated aloud as they rode:

"I feel that way now," she said. "I feel as though I should like to fly, as though I could ride out everything that life holds, in one crazy, delicious, rushing gallop!"

They let out their spirited animals as they turned up into the longer stretch of the Eastern path. The air and movement had brought a deeper pink to Cordelia's cheeks, and, as was usual in her moments of excitement, her expanded pupils made her eyes look dark.

"Isn't it glorious!" she cried abandonedly. "I think I'm going to make myself drunk, dead drunk, with this ride to-day!"

She put the whip recklessly to her distracted mare, and, shooting out ahead of Hartley, raced exultantly down the level stretch before her.

A Park attendant caught sight of her careering wildly down the path. He pushed his way through the bushes as she swept past and called after her warningly to lessen her speed. The little chestnut mare swerved at the sudden appearance and call of the man, and for a moment, as her mount bounded forward, Cordelia lost the reins.

The mare's speed did not yield one stride to her frantic pull at the bit. At a glance Hartley realized that it was a runaway.

He remembered, to his sudden horror, that Cordelia was not the best of horsewomen. But still, he felt, with the open stretch that lay before them there might be no immediate danger. The danger lay ahead, in the winding roadway, the brushwood and trees, the all too many overhead bridges.

Hartley did not hesitate when he realized what these might mean. A dozen times before that day he had shown his powerful roan to be the fleeter animal. As Cordelia's mare bolted through a hedge of bare lilac-bushes at the first turn of the path, and went dashing across the open greensward of the Park, he was racing down on her, not a hundred yards behind.

As they raced he could see that he was slowly gaining. It awoke in him his dormant passion for struggle, his delight in action, and he almost gloried in that strange chase, with a barbaric, a rudimentary gladness in his sense of mastery over the quivering beast beneath him.

He came bounding alongside when they were not more than twenty yards from a row of green-painted benches lining one of the walks.

"Shake off your stirrup!" he called to her. He was almost near enough to reach out his arm and touch her, but at first she did not understand him. She had, indeed, lost all control of herself and her horse. Before he could make her understand, the row of benches were under their noses. They had to take them together. Cordelia's mare struck the top board of a bench-back and splintered it as she went over.

Then Hartley, in desperation, rode straight down on her, for already they were getting in among the thick of the trees. He caught her under the shoulders with one arm, as he swung in on her, and as her mare was shouldered over and went suddenly sprawling and tumbling to the grass, he held tight with his knees and clung to the trailing figure in green.

He clung to her and carried her out at his side in that way until his own frightened roan could be pulled up, panting and bewildered, with the blood staining the foam from its bruised mouth. He slipped to the ground, in some way, still holding her. Her face was colorless, but she looked up at him with the old luminous and wonderful eyes. He was breathing heavily, but he still held her.

"My darling!" she said, locking her arms about his neck, as a torrent of happy tears came to her eyes. "My darling!"

He still held her there close to him, but in silence, until two gardeners and a Park policeman came to their assistance. Ten minutes later a mounted policeman rode up with the recaptured mare. A passing hansom was stopped, and Cordelia was handed up into it. The mounted policeman wrote down his notes, and rode away tucking Hartley's bill into his pocket. It all seemed over and past with kaleidoscopic rapidity.

"Will you be able to manage them?" Cordelia cried, concerned, as she saw Hartley mounting again, with her mare held short by the bridle-rein.

"Quite easily. But you must get back at once!"

Nothing, at that moment, could have made her happier than that commonplace half-command from his lips.

She waved her gauntleted hand back at him; her face still stood out pale and wistful against the darkness of the hansom-box.

"And you?" she asked.

"I'll be right after you."

"Then I'll have dinner ready for you!" she cried, as the hansom turned and disappeared down through the darkening mist, smiling to herself at the incongruousness of what she had said. It was only in fiction, she felt, that the opportune moment and the adequate word coincided.

But driving home through the gray evening air with the tears still wet on her lashes, she pondered over a new and perturbing and yet not altogether painful problem: Could it be that she had played her part with him too, too earnestly? Must she lose him now, when he meant so much to her?