BY VINCENT HARPER

CHAPTER I

WITH the smoking pistol still in his hand he stepped over the prostrate man and, grasping Mrs. Fair’s bare shoulder, shook her until she looked up.

“Quick! For God’s sake, Janet, get to your room!” he said, trying to make her comprehend what he meant, but she only stared at him vacantly, her white face filled with terror and her eyes fixed on the form on the floor—that of a man in evening dress, across whose wide shirt front a streak of blood was widening.

“Why did he come here?” she asked, hiding the sickening sight with her hands before her eyes. “He swore he would not. This is horrible!”

“Come, Janet, come,” remonstrated Fair, seizing her again. “It’s past seven, and they will be here presently. My God, can’t you see what this means? He’s dead!”

“Oh, don’t, don’t,” she cried, shuddering as if the truth burned her brain. “Ugh! See!” she gasped as she caught sight of a splash of red on her gown.

“Yes, and you stand here! Are you mad?” muttered Fair, pushing her to the door. “Go, now, and change—and be careful what you do with that dress. Hark! There’s the bell now. Remember, until they go, you must betray no feeling. Are you great enough to do this? You won’t fail me?”

“Anything, Maxwell, for your sake—but you—what will you do with—that?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at the thing as if it fascinated her.

“Leave everything to me,” he answered, pulling her chin around so that she could not see. “I assume all. Remember, girl, it was I, do you understand? Go!”

When he had finally closed the door upon her, he gave way to his agony—but only for a moment. With a quietness and rapidity that seemed to astonish even himself he placed the pistol upon the library-table, locked both of the doors, drew the heavy red velvet curtains across the window and, bending over the fallen man, critically examined him.

Satisfied that life was extinct, he pulled the body over to the fireplace, beside which, at right angles to the side of the room, there stood a large Italian chest with a very high carved back. Into this chest Fair lifted the limp body of the man and thoughtfully placed a number of heavy books and magazines upon it. Then carefully glancing about the room and noticing no evidences of the crime, he sat down, wiped his brow, and closing his eyes, tried to let the stupendous facts of the last five minutes become realities to his mind—to formulate some practical line of action in the future which those five minutes had so fatally revolutionized.

The way that he started at a respectful tap at the library door showed him what a terribly changed man he already was, and it was with a petulant, unnatural voice that he shouted: “Well? That you, Baxter?”

“A man, sir, who insists upon seeing you, sir,” answered Baxter, Fair’s old butler, whom he had inherited with the estates and furniture, felt grateful to as a faithful servant, and tolerated as an incompetent old bore.

“Tell him to go to the devil, with my compliments, and to come to my office if he really has business with me!” thundered Fair, not at all like himself.

Baxter shook his head as he said: “Very good, sir,” and toddled downstairs, putting two and two together as servants will in the best regulated families.

The furniture seemed to be all out of place, so Fair pulled it this way and that, but wherever he placed it, it still seemed, to his mind, to show that a scuffle had taken place. After abandoning the idea of getting it to look right, he devoted his anxious attention to his own appearance, which, although his faultless evening attire was immaculate and his thin, brown hair, with a touch of gray, was smooth and precise, seemed to him to betray the fact that he had passed through a scene of some sort. Giving up the effort to discover just what was wrong, he unlocked the doors, drew his chair to the table and toyed with a pen and some sheets of paper on which he began several times to write.

“Maxwell Fair, old chap,” he said to himself, looking up at the ceiling, “this is pretty well near the end—but it’s all in the day’s work.”

Then he dashed off two telegrams and rang the bell, which Baxter promptly answered, having been standing at the door. “Did you ring, sir?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Fair. “Here, see that these two telegrams are sent immediately—but wait. Baxter, a gentleman called about twenty minutes ago. Did you let him in?”

He watched the old man’s face closely as he replied: “Yes, sir. A dark, foreign-looking gentleman, sir.”

“Yes,” went on Fair, picking up the evening paper carelessly and speaking with great indifference; “he is in my study. Just fetch his coat and hat here, will you? And, by the way, did any of the other servants see him?”

“The gentleman said he was an old friend of my lady’s—and none of the other servants saw him, sir. Aren’t you well, sir? I hope that nothing has occurred, sir,” answered Baxter, with an old servant’s liberty.

“No,” snapped Fair, with irritation, but going on more in his usual way. “Now look sharp and fetch the gentleman’s coat. A very old friend of Mrs. Fair’s. What was the other chap like—the one who wished to see me?”

“Oh, him, sir,” replied Baxter, with a servant’s contempt for callers of his own class in society, “he were a quiet-spoken, ordinary sort of party, sir, as said he come from Scotland Yard.”

Fair was too well in hand by this time to wince as he heard this bit of disturbing coincidence, but he said to himself: “My word, they are prompt—but, damn it, they can’t have known!” Then, happening to look up and seeing the old butler, “What are you waiting for?”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” gently began Baxter, shuffling nearer to Fair, “but, Mr. Fair, sir—Master Maxwell—you’ll forgive an old servant that served your father and grandfather before you, sir. There ain’t no trouble like, or anythink a-hangin’ over us, is there, sir? One of the parlormaids thought that she heard a shot, sir—and——”

“Oh, yes,” quickly responded Fair, with a laugh, “I was cleaning this old pistol and it went off. Get on now. Trouble? Why, look at me, Baxter. I’m the luckiest dog in the world. I have just made another fortune.”

“Thank God for that, sir,” quietly replied old Baxter, moving toward the door, at which he turned and said, “The gentleman will be dining, of course?”

“No, he can’t stop. In fact, he wishes to leave the house unobserved by our guests when we are at dinner—so fetch his hat and coat,” said Fair, again settling down to his evening paper.

“I was forgetting, sir,” once more the querulous old voice began, “that Miss Mettleby said that the children are coming to say good night——”

“The children?” exclaimed Fair, caught off his guard. “No—good God, no!—that is, I mean I shall be engaged. Tell Miss Mettleby so. Be off.”

With suspicions now thoroughly aroused and full of misgivings Baxter did as he was bid, and his master jerked the paper open again and slapped at the crease to make the sheet flat. But his eyes wandered aimlessly.

“The children—gad! I had forgotten them,” he muttered as he thought with horror what this all meant to them. Time after time he tried to read the leading article which was about his own brilliant achievement, but with a mad spasm he crumpled the newspaper into a ball and flung it across the great room, exclaiming, “Why didn’t the infernal blackguard know when he was well off?”

“The gentleman’s coat and hat, sir,” said Baxter, coming in annoyingly.

“Very well—now go,” retorted Fair peevishly. “Ask Mr. Travers to come up here the moment he arrives. Here, here—you are forgetting the telegrams. You seem to forget everything lately. You are too careless.”

“So I am, so I am,” quavered the poor old beggar, with tears in his voice. “I shall soon be of very little service, sir.”

“Nonsense,” answered Fair, touched by the old fellow’s feeling. “You have twenty years of good work before you. But, I say, Baxter, I forgot to tell you—we are leaving town tomorrow morning. Discharge all of the servants tonight. Hear me? All of them—tonight.”

“Tonight, sir?” exclaimed Baxter, dropping his little silver card-tray. “They will be expecting a month’s notice, sir.”

“That means a month’s pay, I suppose,” answered Fair sharply. “Give them a year’s pay, if you like—but get them out of the house tomorrow morning before nine o’clock. You see, I have sold the house, and the new owner takes possession at ten. You understand me? We shall, of course, take you and Anita with us—to the continent, you know.”

“I hear, sir,” replied Baxter, adding, after a dazed and groping moment, “some of them have been in our family’s service for twenty years. That is a long time, sir, and they will think it hard to be——”

“By Jove, that’s so!” exclaimed Fair, pacing up and down with a growing sense of disgust and rage at having to cramp his future into the ignominious bondage of a desperate situation. “No, I can’t turn them away. Tell them that I shall instruct my solicitor to provide for them for life—yes, tell them that. Come here, Baxter,” he went on, rapidly losing control of himself and pathetically stretching his hands out as if to grasp the love and sympathy of someone; “I haven’t been a hard master, have I? No. And when the end comes, you won’t turn against me? I—I—I—oh, damn it, clear out of here, won’t you?”

“Why, my dear young master, whatever ails you, sir?” cried the old butler, grasping the hand that Fair waved to him. “If you did but know how we all love you, sir, perhaps you would——”

“Do you? Do you?” broke in Fair feverishly. “That’s right, too. But, Baxter, things have gone wrong, and in a few hours I may need all the love that you or anybody else will give me. Get out of here, can’t you?”

Baxter threw his arms about the young man’s neck. “Come what may, sir, there shall not be found a better friend than your poor old servant.” And then, holding the lapels of Fair’s coat, he added, with much embarrassment and tenderness, “And, sir, if I might make so bold—I have close on a thousand pounds in the funds, and every penny——”

“Every penny is mine, you were going to say?” interrupted Fair, smiling even in his despair at the old man’s estimate of his needs. “Thanks, thanks, old comrade; but no amount of money can stave off the blue devils at times, you know. You knew my fathers, Baxter. They were a race of damned fools who were ready at a moment’s notice to lose everything for an idea! I am their son—I am their heir—and the damnedest fool of the lot.”

As he said this Fair raised his head with a look so defiant, so full of an almost supernatural exaltation, so nearly that which shines in the eye of the victim of a fixed idea or of a fatal hallucination that Baxter, who was not expert at psychological analysis, felt a vague misgiving that his eccentric young master had suddenly gone off his head.

And one more penetrating than old Baxter would have been amazed at the change which had come over the expression of the agitated man. The look of horror and disgust and consternation was gone, and in its place had come the fire of enthusiasm, the sublime uplift of the martyr, the terrifying concentration of some irrational, uncalculating, final idÉe fixe.

“See who that is,” he said to the butler when a knock was heard.

“It is Miss Mettleby, sir,” replied Baxter from the door.

“Oh, come in, come in,” called out Fair with unaccountable eagerness.

CHAPTER II

The girl who entered as he spoke had come into Mrs. Fair’s employ as a governess from a Somersetshire parsonage. She was tall, carried herself with the unconscious ease of one who, with a nature susceptible of the deepest emotion and broadest culture, has grown up in the open and in ignorance of the world, and at eight-and-twenty had settled down to the monotony and hopelessness of a life of thankless dependence.

From the moment of coming into the family of the famous financier Kate Mettleby had felt, as who had not, the subtle charm of his personality; yet with her it was not a natural appreciation of a character at once brilliant and winsome, but rather a sort of terrifying though exquisitely pleasurable sense of oneness with the man. Hers was a mind far too devoid of precedents and mental experience to be capable or even desirous of analyzing the feeling which she was aware she entertained for the calm, strong, self-reliant father of the children whom she was to teach. She knew only that Maxwell Fair was different—oh, so different—from all other men, and that, without the faintest shadow of love for him—which her simple, country mind would have thought sinful and degrading—he, or that mystical something that he stood for in her mind, had made forever impossible all thought of ever loving another.

Had she been asked to name the reason for so abnormal and morbid a fancy, she would have been utterly powerless to do so. Maxwell Fair was as much of a puzzle to her as he was to everybody, both in society and in the city. This man, whose name was now in everybody’s mouth as the most daring and successful operator on ’Change, had come to London less than five years before with nothing, so far as was known, but the entailed and heavily burdened estates in Norfolk which he had inherited from his father, who, old men declared, had been little short of a madman.

By a series of dashing ventures in mining stocks Fair had attracted attention, and, what was more to the purpose, accumulated enough ready cash to enable him to avail himself of the situation then confronting the speculative world. At the very top of the Kaffir and other South African securities boom, when men were buying with an eagerness and recklessness amounting to frenzy, Fair was quietly selling, so that when the crash came and the breaking out of the Boer War knocked the bottom out of values, he had the satisfaction of buying back at panic prices the very shares which he had prudently disposed of at absurdly exaggerated prices some time before.

Establishing his family in the mansion which he had bought in the princely Carlton House Terrace, Fair rapidly became as fascinating and puzzling in society as he had proved Napoleonic and baffling in Throgmorton street, where was his office. Women found him quaintly and refreshingly chivalrous and almost annoyingly happy as a conversationalist, while men who sought his acquaintance with an eye to business connections—and were disappointed—discovered that the chap from whom they had hoped to learn the secrets of success was a fellow of infinite jest, a capital raconteur and a frank, generous, genial companion withal.

Such was Maxwell Fair when once more the newspapers announced that he had disposed of the celebrated Empire Mines stock which he had picked up—after a personal inspection of the property in Mexico—when nobody else would touch it, at the staggering figure of over ten times what he had paid for the shares, netting by the transaction close upon two hundred thousand pounds.

At innumerable dinner-tables at that moment he was being discussed, envied and lauded to the skies—and he himself sat with flushed, nervous face awaiting guests, and now bidding the strangest woman whom he had ever met enter with some message from the nursery.

“The children are ready for bed, Mr. Fair,” said Miss Mettleby, standing in that humble posture which he had begged her never to assume, because it somehow irritated him very much. “Are they to come down to say good night? Or shall you come up?”

“That will do, Baxter,” said Fair, noticing that the old butler still puttered about the room as if intending to remain. Baxter reluctantly went out and closed the door, which, one is disposed to fear, meant that the interested old servant did not go far on its other side.

“I am engaged,” continued Fair, looking up at Miss Mettleby. “I will go up and kiss them afterward. Sit down—no, not on that chest, please.”

“Why not?” asked Miss Mettleby, surprised. “It’s my favorite seat—it is so comfortable.”

“It makes me uncomfortable to see you sit there—at any time,” answered Fair, endeavoring to appear whimsical and indifferent, as usual. “So—thank you. That’s better. Well, Kate, the three months are over—to the very day, I believe. Coincidences are strange sometimes, are they not? The time is up. Have you decided?”

“I have,” returned Kate so quickly that he started.

“Well?” he asked, after waiting in vain for her to go on.

“I leave Mrs. Fair’s service on the first of next month,” quietly replied the governess, evidently with a quietness which cost her much, and as if bracing herself for the crisis of her life. “I have secured another position—with Lord Linklater’s family. I have advised Mrs. Fair already.”

“I’m glad of it—why, you look hurt. Fie!” taunted Fair. “Such virtue should be pleased, not hurt. The eternal feminine will out, though, always.”

“Pardon me,” retorted Kate stiffly, “I am heartily glad that you are glad. May I ask what has moved you to so commendable a frame of mind? If you had a conscience, I would say that it had at last awakened. Ah, I see—it was pride. What a mercy it is that when nature left conscience out of the aristocracy it supplied them with pride! Were it not for good form, how many gentlemen would there be? I congratulate you.”

“Go on,” urged Fair, settling back into his chair with the smile of amused superiority which he very often indulged in, contrary to his real feeling, to draw her out. “By Jove, you have enough cant to stock a whole meeting of dissenting old ladies. What a mercy it is, as you would put it, that when heaven forgot to endow young females with common sense, it gave them such a superabundance of pharisaical tommy-rot! If it were not for maiden aunts and governesses, how much talk of virtue—talk, I say—would there be in this naughty world?”

“It is well that there are some who, even by talking, remind men that there is, in theory at least, such a thing as honor,” replied Kate, with a sneaking notion that she was talking very platitudinous platitudes.

“Oh, entirely so,” drawled Fair sneeringly. “But isn’t it a pity that the milk of human kindness should be soured by the vinegar of puritanical self-righteousness? I promised you that I would not speak to you for three months. I have kept my promise. Now I am going to have my say—now, now, don’t fidget, I beg of you! A very different man is going to speak to you now from the one who said what I said to you on the deck of the sinking yacht that night. Do you remember, Miss Mettleby?”

“I wish that I could hope some day to forget it,” answered the girl, flaming scarlet.

Fair rose as if trying to control emotions that were shaking his foundations. “Don’t you see?” he burst out, confronting her; “don’t you see that your hopelessness in that connection is the result of only one possible cause? You love me.”

“Mr. Fair!” screamed the governess, springing to her feet with a gesture of protest that died in the making, for the clutch of the truth of his words was about her throat. “Truly, sir, you forget your own dignity and my dependent and defenseless position. I cannot hear this from you, sir.”

“But you must hear me—you shall hear me,” he flung back at her. Then with a tenderness that was harder to resist: “And, Miss Mettleby—Kate, you really need not fear or try to shun me now. God knows, I shall be helpless and harmless enough. Yes, Kate, the rich and powerful Maxwell Fair will in a day or two be buried under the contempt and scorn of all good men. But, by the right of dying men, I claim that I may speak to you. I am glad that you are leaving us. I wish to God that you had never come. Among your many virtues you include courage. May I confide in you? Ask your advice? Lean on you?”

Had he struck her, had he pressed on her a suit that bore dishonor on its face, she could have met him, young and untutored in the arts of life though she was. But when the great, calm, finished man to whom she had looked up in an unspoken worship laid his hand pleadingly upon her now, and those dear, merry lips of his quivered and almost failed to shape his piteous cry that she should help him, it was with a tremendous effort that she conquered the impulse to throw her arms about his neck, and said calmly:

“Mr. Fair, this is scarcely kind of you. My God, how ill you look! Forgive me, sir, if I am the unhappy cause of any of your present suffering.”

“Kate,” he said at length, looking wistfully at her.

“Yes, Mr. Fair,” she replied, hushed and unable to protest further.

“Kate, you have been with us for two years,” he began, speaking very low. “Little by little you grew into my life. The hungry yearning for I knew not what, the restless madness, the sense of emptiness and of despair, all that had turned my life into the aimless thing it was, seemed to give place within me to a strange, new spirit of hope and faith and comfort. And you, you, little woman, were the cause of that wondrous change. As I saw you moving about the house so sweetly, as I heard you singing the children to sleep, as I noted the difference between you and the women who had made my world, I came slowly to realize that you were all to me. Did I tell you this? Did I show it in any way?”

“You were a gentleman,” replied Miss Mettleby, regaining control of herself sufficiently to speak as she thought she should and no longer as she wished. “And, anyhow, had you forgot your honor and my position so far as to have spoken, you know that I would have left your roof at once. Please, may I not go now?”

Her manner galled him as all that was not genuine did always, and he was about to sneer at the phrase, “leave your roof,” but he at once recognized that to her mind, in which truths were broad, general, axiomatic propositions, and not complex and subtle many-sided phases of propositions, there would be no halting ground between her present attitude and actual dishonor. So he went on.

“No; please do not go yet. Good heavens! when I am done you will regret your wish to leave me. Well then, I did not speak to you. I quite ignored you, treated you like a servant. But it was from no sense of honor, mark you; for I deny that honor, yours or mine, would have been lost by speaking. Nor was it from a squeamish fear of the proprieties and the conventionalities that I refrained, for I would brush the world aside as so much stubble if it should stand between me and my right to truth. No, Kate, it was not from the lofty principles which you imagine to be God’s, nor from my foolish pride as an aristocrat—how could you, even for a moment, think me so base? I remained silent because, whether for good or ill, I have devoted all I am to an idea, a cause, a purpose.”

As he spoke these last few words a number of conflicting thoughts passed through Kate’s mind. With only the vaguest notion of his meaning, jealousy shot a stinging, momentary, utterly illogical shaft through her heart, which was followed by a profoundly feminine feeling of injury in being thus coolly told that she would have been addressed had not some paramount other interest absorbed his mind.

“Indeed?” she remarked, with what she thought was biting sarcasm, but which a much less penetrating mind than Maxwell Fair’s would have at once taken as an indication of jealousy and love. “And so you plume yourself, do you, on considering your wife and children an idea, a cause, a purpose, to which, for good or ill, you have made up your mind to give all that you are? Heroic, I must say, and so unusual.”

“Governess! Sunday-school moralizer!” he jeered at her. “No, nor was I deterred by that still more arrant humbug about ‘penniless and dependent females’ that you learned from our past masters of humbug and lachrymose moral biliousness, the great novelists. No, it was not because you were a poor orphan girl in my employ, and, consequently, incapable of defending yourself, that I refrained from speaking to you. Rubbish! The cant of moral snobs! As if the virtue of poor girls was made of weaker stuff than that of rich ones! My God, did I want victims, I swear I would pursue them in drawing-rooms with more success than in the servants’ hall.”

“I really cannot see what all this has to do with you and me,” coldly remarked Miss Mettleby when he paused.

“You will see presently,” Fair answered, ignoring her freezing manner and with rapidly growing intensity and feeling. “I remained silent. I crucified my heart, denied my soul. But that night, Kate, when you and I alone were clinging to the yacht and neither of us hoped to see the sun again, I told you. It was my right. It was your right as well.”

“And, half dead as I was, I shamed you, sir, and called you what you were by every law of God and man and honor,” she flung back at him with a flush of remembered nobility very comforting in the light of more recent less lofty thoughts.

“Yes,” replied Fair, with his old-time elevation and calmness, which were a mainspring of his influence over her; “yes, the habits of a lifetime cling to us, Kate, making us dare to lie upon the very edge of death and coming judgment. I loved you, and I told you. You loved me, and denied it. And we were both about to face eternity! Which of us would have faced it with the cleaner heart?”

“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried, shrinking from him. “You know I cannot argue with you. But I am sure that I was right, that I am right now. Please let me go.”

“In a moment, in a moment,” he answered, grasping her two hands. “I probably will never see you again, Kate—so let me now speak out. I asked you to take three months to think it over, and promised you that I would then give you the reasons for my strange conduct and beg of you to face the world with me for our great love’s sake.”

“Yes,” she said, freeing her hands; “you said you would be able to convince me that there was no dishonor in your love, no wrong in what you would propose that we should do. Three months you gave me—three months. Why, Mr. Fair, three minutes would be enough for me to reach the only possible decision which you, an English gentleman, can ask a young and unprotected English girl like me to make. But I was grateful for your three months’ silence. If you could trust yourself, I am compelled to own that I could not so trust myself. I love you—may God forgive me, but I cannot help it! But your chivalrous respite of three months has given me a grip upon myself. I do not fear myself. I do not fear even you. I am to leave your house, never to see you again. And some day you will thank me.”

There had been a wondrous new development of strength and beauty in her as she spoke, and Fair had watched her with profoundest feeling.

“Kate, Kate, you wrong me, upon my honor!” he cried when she ceased. “The promise that I made you was one that I could keep. There is a mystery, an awful something in my life, that has through all these years kept me so falsely true, that, being true to one great object fixed on me by my fate, I’ve been compelled to seem what I am not to all the world. To get you, Kate, to rest at last my broken heart upon your love, I was this very night to break the self-imposed conditions of my weird life-purpose. God! how I counted them, these long, slow days, waiting for this one! An hour ago I still supposed that I could fold you on my heart tonight and tell you everything! I thought that I could say the word that would dispel your doubts and make you—you only in the world see me as God does. But now I cannot. Be brave and hear me, Kate,” he added, holding her arm, which was trembling under the influence of his own great passion. “I am a criminal. I have done that which must make you despise me, must drive me from the society of men, and bring me to the gibbet.”

Forgetting all her previous moods, Miss Mettleby allowed the choking man to lean against her as she cried. “You are ill. Take my arm—so. And oh, believe me, that nothing that you imagine you have done, nothing that you could do, can rob you of one poor and weak, but brave and true girl’s friendship. Do let me call your wife. Yes, I will call her—let me. And you must tell her. Tell her—her, not me.”

“Stop! Stop!” cried Fair, frantically holding the struggling girl, who was making for the door; “and be quiet. Hear me. It’s all that I can say, but it will show you, Kate, that, if I am a criminal, I mean you no dishonor. You want to call my wife. I have no wife! She is not——”

He was cut short by Baxter, who stood at the door at that moment and announced, “Mr. Travers.” Travers entered smiling, and Fair, with a completeness of mastery over his feelings which Kate could not believe true, sang out: “Travers, old chap, glad to see you! What’s the good word?”

Miss Mettleby slipped out of the library and ran up to her little room. She knew that now it would be impossible to see him again that night, as it would be late when the last guest had gone. Throwing herself on her bed, she tried to make it all out. His crime—his saying that he had no wife—the awful something in his life which, for her sake, he was to have broken from that very night—what did it all mean?

She could grasp no idea out of the chaos long enough for it to take shape in her mind. She drifted helplessly down the torrent of tumultuous fears and hopes and hungers, knowing only one thing—that she loved him, she loved him.

CHAPTER III

The man who now came in was that lovable, unlucky, wonderfully clever Dick Travers, who was forty and a failure when a manager, miraculously experiencing a lucid interval, brought out his five hundredth play, “The Idiot,” since which time five hundred managers coquet with him for each new play. But all this was after the time now reached. Dick Travers was still a failure whom Fair had met before his own ascent to opulence, and to whom he was drawn by several ties, among which was their common taste for etchings in dry-point and the more tangible common interest in yachting and hatred for most things foreign.

“Pretty well right, thanks,” replied Travers to Fair’s welcome, adding immediately with much excitement, “and by Jove, old man, have you seen the evening papers? You’ve got a lot of those Empire shares, haven’t you? Well, the blooming things went up to two hundred and eighty today.”

“Not really?” exclaimed Fair, enjoying the innocent’s naÏve idea that all this was news to the man who had put up the shares to that altitude. “Baxter, some brandy and soda. Look sharp.”

“Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” answered Baxter with spirit as he trotted out after the brandy and soda, pathetically clutching the hope that his young master’s case could not be so desperate after all, since he was meeting his friend’s high spirits with equally high ones.

“You picked up these shares, didn’t you,” asked Travers, sitting on the end of the table, “when they were being kicked about the Street at about twenty? Lord, what a lucky devil you are. I, on the contrary, bought those beastly Australian King shares, and they went up also—in smoke.”

“I am lucky, am I not?” acquiesced Fair, glancing over at the chest. “In fact, I wanted to talk to you tonight about myself. Do you see this pistol? Do you recognize it?” he went on, with so abrupt a change of subject and expression that Travers stood up with an uncomfortable look.

“Perfectly,” he answered, after taking up the pistol and looking at it; “it is the one poor Ponsonby gave you—but what’s the game, old man?”

“Examine it. Is it loaded?” asked Fair with tormenting mystery.

“Yes. All the chambers are full. Translate, please,” said Travers after carefully inspecting the revolver, with growing annoyance.

“Oh, come, now, look at it carefully,” cried Fair, with what seemed absurd warmth to Travers. “Isn’t one of the chambers empty? Have another look.”

“Right you are—one cartridge has been discharged,” answered Travers.

“Recently, wouldn’t you say?” continued Fair.

“Yes, perhaps,” replied Travers, becoming seriously disturbed by this most unwonted development of character in the hard-headed and practical Fair. “But what the deuce is the game, you know?”

“Nothing,” answered Fair, putting down the pistol and turning from the table as if about to turn from the gruesome subject as well. “I had a fancy that I wanted you to notice these little details. I may ask you to remember them some day. By the way, you are going to Drayton Hall tomorrow?”

“Yes,” quickly replied Travers, only too glad to follow some new lead. “Sir Nelson asked me at the club last night. Who is to be there? Drayton is no end of a bore, you know, when Lady Poynter has what she calls ‘the literary set’ down. The men are a lot of insufferable prigs, and the women—oh, hang it, you know what they are.”

“Yes,” drawled Fair, himself again; “if one could ever meet the women who write! But one can’t, you know—it is the women who think they write that one meets. But we are safe tomorrow. Poynter assured me that nobody with brains would be down—so we count upon a comfortable time. Anyhow, I shall be running back to town in the evening, and, before I forget it, I want you and Allyne to give me the night—here at the house. I have a bit of rather serious work on my hands.”

“I’m yours, of course,” answered Travers. “But, I say, old chap, let up on this melodrama, can’t you? Be a man and try to bear up bravely under your increased income of sixty thousand more a year. Now I have a jolly good right to chronic blue devils, for I never succeeded at anything in my life, as you know. But you—gad! it’s treason for you to do a blessed thing but chant pÆans of victory—and pour libations on yourself.”

“Never fear,” laughed Fair, “I’m the happiest man alive. You have no idea of what I possess. Why, hang it, man,” he went on with an unpleasant ring in his voice that puzzled and alarmed Travers, “I tell you, I have things that would surprise you—in this very room. Ah, here’s the brandy and soda.”

Baxter entered and deposited the tray on the table, but, although he took an unconscionable long time to arrange the decanters and glasses, he could get no hint of the drift of the conversation, as neither of the gentlemen spoke until the absorbing process of “mixing” was over and Baxter gone.

“I forgot to tell you,” began Travers, with his glass in his hand, “that I saw that Cuban chap, Lopez, this morning, and he wants me to dine with him to meet another yellow gent from the land of cigars, who says that he knows you, or rather, Mrs. Fair. Can you imagine who he may be?”

“It is probably a man named Mendes, a very rich planter,” answered Fair, after a few moments, during which he was critically studying the rich amber color of his drink as he held his glass between his eye and the light. “I fancy it must be Mendes, for he was in London today—but he left very suddenly this afternoon. Have another drink.”

“Left, eh?” asked Travers, filling his glass. “Thank heaven, for then I sha’n’t have to meet him. I hate those Cubans. Always seem to have something up their sleeve—and to have forgot tubbing that morning.”

“But you would like Mendes, I’m sure,” returned Fair, smiling. “Plays chess better than any man on earth, I believe. He was good enough to call to say good-bye, although he was in a beastly hurry. If you had kept your promise and dropped in for a go at billiards, you would have met him. I was able to do him a trifling service at one time ages ago, and the fellow seems never to forget it. I’m sorry he’s gone; I am, really.”

“Not returning, then?” inquired Travers, with no very great interest.

“I’m afraid not,” replied Fair, with a slight uneasiness. “I’d give a good deal to see him walk in that door this minute, though. You see——”

“Mr. Allyne is in the billiard-room, sir,” announced Baxter at the door.

“Run in and tell Allyne that I’ll join you presently, will you, Dick, that’s a good chap?” said Fair, with more of command than suggestion in his tone, so that Travers obeyed and followed Baxter down to the billiard-room.

In an instant Fair’s whole bearing changed. Closing the door, he picked up the hat and coat that Baxter had brought from the passage and thrust them into the large chest, carefully averting his face as he did so. Dropping into his chair he wiped the cold sweat from his face and signaled to the crack in the side door that whoever it was that had been gently opening it for some little time might now come in. As he knew, it was Mrs. Fair, who then entered, attired in another dinner gown.

Motioning to her that she must speak softly, Fair said: “Allyne and Travers are in the billiard-room. The rest will be coming presently. How are you, poor little Janet?”

She came and sat on the arm of his chair and put her face down upon his shoulder. “Am I awake?” she moaned after a few seconds. “Oh, Maxwell, for God’s sake, wake me and tell me that I have been dreaming. My God, what can we do? Where is—it?”

“Hush!” replied Fair, holding his arm about her. “Try not to think of him, dear. Be brave, sweet, for a couple of hours. Don’t be afraid. Have I ever failed you?”

“No, no—never, Maxwell—God bless you, never,” she sobbed. “But, oh—look, look—quick, hide that pistol!”

“I left it there on purpose,” he answered quietly and reassuringly. “Now don’t in any way try to alter my plans. I have thought more in the last half-hour than I ever did in all the rest of my life. Everything is provided for. At this time tomorrow night you and the children will be safe on the continent. What did you do with that other dress?”

“Ugh,” she shuddered; “while I was taking it off baby came running into the room and wanted to touch the horrible spots. I wrapped the accursed thing up in stout paper and gave it to Miss Mettleby. Why, you are not afraid that she—but no. Well, I told her it was a surprise for you, and she will hide it somewhere while we are at dinner, and tell me after.”

“That was a wise move,” said Fair. “And now, Janet, a brave heart, old girl, and this beastly dinner will be over. What a trump you are!”

“Trust me,” she replied, looking with infinite loyalty at the man who had stood for so much so strangely much in her torn and beaten life. “Trust me. But, Maxwell, when the end comes, as it most surely will, you will explain how it came to be done—you will tell them how his crimes deserved this. For the children’s sake you won’t be foolish and sacrifice yourself to protect others? Oh, promise me, promise me.”

“Poor little woman!” he answered, with great tenderness. “Yes, yes, all shall be told. Hush! I hear them on the stairs. Yes, they are coming.”

When Baxter with much ceremony threw open the door of the library, Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell Fair stood there radiantly cordial and unruffled to welcome the three or four intimate friends who were dining with them.

“Sir Nelson and Lady Poynter, Mrs. March, Mr. Travers, Mr. Allyne,” solemnly announced Baxter at the door, and these several ladies and gentlemen, all chatting and beaming, hurried forward to pay their respects to the most talked of man in London and his gracious and handsome wife.

CHAPTER IV

“My dear Lady Poynter, it was so good of you and Sir Nelson to honor us—Mrs. March, so glad,” said Mrs. Fair, advancing to greet them.

“Good evening, good evening, everybody,” blustered old Sir Nelson, with a red face and a warm heart. “And, Fair, my lad, I see that those shares that you put me into behaved rather well today. You must have made a rather neat turn in them. Come, now, how was it?”

“Pretty well, Sir Nelson,” answered Fair. “I sold out just before the close at two hundred and seventy-five.”

“Then you must have cleared a hundred thousand net?” said Sir Nelson.

“A bit over double that amount, I think my brokers said,” replied Fair, with no more feeling than he would have shown in announcing a change in the weather.

“Hear that, now,” pouted Mrs. March. “Why can’t you gentlemen ever think of the widow and the fatherless when you, as you say, ‘put in’ your friends on such occasions?”

This little lady was by general consent the most charming widow in the world, her brilliant mind, plump person and winsome manner having beguiled no end of confirmed bachelors into forgetting their resolutions—but without success, for Mrs. March remained Mrs. March season after season.

“Ah, my dear Mrs. March,” protested Allyne the incomprehensible, “what heresy! Just fancy what a pity it would be if widows and younger sons and all other picturesque people were to be made commonplace by money. A widow’s charm lies in her delicious appeal to the protection of all men. With a million in the funds, a widow would find no end of chaps asking her to protect them—and so the charm would be gone. And as for us younger sons—well, just contrast that solemn ass, my brother the viscount, and the penniless, the clever, the dashing, the—how shall I do justice to a thing so lovely as I? No, Sir Nelson, if you ever put me into any of your vulgar good things, I’ll cut you, by Jove—and society will owe you a grudge for having robbed it of its chief ornament—a younger son who is a very younger son indeed.”

“I am afraid that Mr. Allyne’s philosophy is too deep for me,” laughed Mrs. Fair, and Travers remarked sweetly, “Allyne, you’re an idiot.”

“But such a blissful idiot,” smilingly went on the very younger son. “Awfully funny, but nobody can ever deny what I say. We pity Mrs. March, the widow, and envy Mrs. Fair, the wife—but, you know, by Jove, I’d turn it the other way about, don’t you know? No offense, Fair—nothing personal. No, my friends, appearances are deceitful. I’ll lay you a thousand guineas that Fair can’t get what he wants with all his Empire shares and the rest of it, whereas I have everything I want, besides several elder brothers that I do not want. I have everything I want, I tell you.”

“Yes,” retorted Mrs. March, “of course you have, since all that you care to have is an absurd idea of your own importance.”

“A hit, a palpable hit!” roared Sir Nelson as they all laughed.

“Cruel,” protested Allyne. “And to punish you, Mrs. March, I shall ask Mrs. Fair to allow me to take you down to dinner.”

“I protest,” shouted Sir Nelson with fine gallantry; “I claim her.”

“Jealous,” sneered Allyne. “Shame! Why, Poynter, your bald spot is as big as your brain area—and Lady Poynter here, too. Fie on you!”

“But Mrs. Fair can’t give Mrs. March any such sentence as placing her at your mercy, Allyne,” said Travers; “for it is a principle of law that it is unlawful to inflict any unusual and cruel punishments.”

“Well, since you men can’t talk of anything except Mrs. March, I for one am jealous,” cheerily put in Lady Poynter, with her cap bobbing about prettily, “and I hope that Mrs. Fair will punish her by making her listen to Mr. Allyne for two hours.”

“But, I say, you know,” broke in Sir Poynter, while all the men added their protests to such a disposition of the widow.

“Just hear them all, will you?” cried Mrs. Fair, lifting her hands. “I fear, my dear Lady Poynter, that to have a husband is fatal to success. Every blessed one of them wants to sit by Mrs. March.”

“Of course we do,” exclaimed Allyne. “You see, my dear Mrs. Fair, that, while we all love you and dear Lady Poynter, we can’t quite go those ridiculous appendages of yours, to wit., Mr. Fair and Sir Nelson. If you could get rid of them, you know—and there are several ways—then you would give even the peerless Mrs. March a close run.”

“Why have you never married?” asked Mrs. March.

“Can’t, you know—regularly can’t,” replied Allyne, with a woebegone expression. “I could never think of marrying anyone but a widow, and, as I consider widows the only desirable women, it would be against my principles to reduce their number by marrying one of them, you know.”

“But you might increase their number,” returned Mrs. March spiritedly, “by marrying a girl and then atoning for the wrong you had done her in so marrying her by dying at once.”

“By Jove, do you know, I had never thought of that,” Allyne replied, adding after a moment of serious consideration, “but, suppose I didn’t die, you know? Deucedly uncertain thing, dying. Suicide, of course, is out of the question in my case, as I am far too unselfish to seek my own happiness at the frightful cost of depriving the world of my presence. And English women are so fastidious that I might find it difficult to persuade my wife to shoot—Look, look, Fair—Mrs. Fair is ill.”

While he was rattling along with his stream of nonsense Mrs. Fair, who was standing a little behind the rest, swayed forward and would have fallen had not Allyne’s exclamation called attention to her.

“Quick, she is faint!” cried Lady Poynter sympathetically.

But Mrs. Fair almost at once recovered herself, and said: “Pray, don’t mind. I have these foolish turns at times. They amount to nothing. You were saying, Mr. Allyne, that——”

“Allyne was saying, my dear,” hastily put in Fair to head off Allyne, “Allyne was saying that English women are so narrow in their views that they hesitate to make the idiots of themselves that Englishmen are ever so ready to do.”

“I was saying nothing of the sort,” retorted Allyne, in spite of a kick surreptitiously administered to him by Travers. “On the contrary, I——”

“My lady is served,” gravely announced Baxter, pulling aside the portiÈres and awaiting the forming procession which, to judge from his solemn bearing, might have been the funeral cortÈge of a great personage.

“Come, friends,” smiled Mrs. Fair. “Mrs. March, I will be merciful and ask Mr. Travers to take you down. Sir Nelson, your arm.”

Fair led the way with Lady Poynter, Sir Nelson with his hostess brought up the rear, while Allyne walked in solitary, philosophical mood, much as he chose.

“It’s too bad, Mr. Allyne,” said Mrs. Fair, looking over her shoulder at him, “but if you will be good, you may have some sweets. Come along.”

“I appreciate your fine discrimination,” he replied as he executed a flank movement and placed himself beside her.

So they went downstairs chatting and laughing, leaving that gruesome chest to silence and forgetfulness, and none of them saw the thin, sly man who smiled as they passed within three feet of his hiding-place in the little closet beneath the stairs.

CHAPTER V

While this banter had been passing among the company in the great oak library below, Miss Mettleby lay on her little white bed where she had flung herself in a deeper and sterner mood than had ever been hers before. One after another possible explanation of her great knight’s terrible words presented itself to her mind, only to be rejected.

For one quivering moment the thought that if the woman who passed for Mrs. Fair were not, as he had said, his wife, he was free to—but, no, for that meant that Maxwell Fair was a scoundrel who could not only place a woman in such a nameless position but also desert her when she had borne children to him. It was a frightful view from any point—and yet, at the bottom of her heart she felt that the man who had obtained such a mastery over her soul was not, could not be, so base.

Racked by this futile effort to see light through the darkness Miss Mettleby started as she heard a tap at her door and the quiet, earnest voice of Mrs. Fair asking if she might come in. Her first impulse was to take this strong, sweet woman, so terribly her fellow-sufferer, into her confidence, but before she had called out to her to enter all such mad ideas had flown. Trying to banish all evidence of her recent tempest of feeling, the governess respectfully begged her mistress to come in.

It was nothing, Mrs. Fair said, with a great show of forced pleasantry, but a little surprise for Mr. Fair—a parcel. Would Miss Mettleby hide it while they were at dinner, and tell her where she had put it after? Both women assured each other that they had not been crying—just a headache. And, yes, Miss Mettleby would find a hiding-place for the surprise.

So Mrs. Fair went down to greet her guests, and when she had heard the company go from the library to dinner, Miss Mettleby ran down to that deserted room with the big, brown-paper parcel in her hands. She had at once thought of the old Italian chest as the very place in which to hide Mr. Fair’s surprise. She peeped into the library to make sure that her ears had not deceived her. The room was empty, and the girl crept in.

Fearing that some of the footmen or other servants might enter, she took the precaution to draw the portiÈres across the door into the passage and then hurriedly removed the books and other things that Mr. Fair had placed upon the chest. This done, she was just going to lift the lid, when she heard a peculiar hissing noise which would have startled her at any time and which, with her nerves keyed up, now filled her with genuine terror. She turned from the chest and listened.

(To be continued in the April number.)

A Trust-Buster

COBWIGGER—By the way, my dear, I haven’t seen anything of the gas bill this month.

Mrs. Cobwigger—Oh, Henry, it came over a week ago, but it was so much I didn’t dare show it to you for fear you would blame me for being extravagant. Here it is.

Cobwigger (looking at bill)—Hoppity-hornets! What a bill for a small family! I don’t blame you at all, my dear. It isn’t your fault; it’s this grasping corporation. But I’ll get ahead of them all right.

Mrs. Cobwigger—How can you?

Cobwigger—Pshaw! It’s just like a woman to ask such a foolish question. How am I going to get ahead of this monopoly? Why, tell the old gas company to take out its meter.

Mrs. Cobwigger—And then what will you do?

Cobwigger—Why, put in lamps and patronize the Standard Oil Company.

Kernels

MANY a politician who talks about an honest dollar never earned an honest penny.

If there wasn’t a sucker born every minute a lot of people in this world would have to work for a living.

The cost of keeping up appearances is usually defrayed with other people’s money.

The man whose mind moves like clockwork isn’t the fellow who has wheels in his head.

Many a politician would be a statesman if there were more money in it.

The thought of work makes some people more tired than if they had really done the work.

The man who thinks that his money will do almost everything for him is the one who did almost everything for his money.

Marriage is the only union that doesn’t make a man keep regular hours.

A Positive Proof

“ARE you sure that Percy really loves you?”

“Positive. Why, at the dinner last night he offered to divide his last dyspepsia tablet with me.”