IN the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.

The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound.

In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come to the colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America,” left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful to say “Our Father who” than “which” in the Lord’s Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative element that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.

Compared with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells, the Halseys or the Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money, almost reckless in their impulses and indecisions. Old John Frederick Ralston, the stout founder of the race, had perceived the difference, and emphasized it to his son, Frederick John, in whom he had scented a faint leaning toward the untried and unprofitable.

“You let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and fly kites. It’s the county-family blood in ’em: we’ve nothing to do with that. Look how they’re petering out already—the men, I mean. Let your boys marry their girls, if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome); though I’d sooner see my grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, or any of our own kind. But don’t let your sons go mooning around after their young fellows, horse-racing, and running down south to those d——d Springs, and gambling at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s how you’ll build up the family, and keep the weather out. The way we’ve always done it.”

Frederick John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively followed in his father’s steps. He belonged to the cautious generation of New York gentlemen who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who longed to lay out New York like Washington, and who laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly looked down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in their windows the wares there was most demand for, keeping their private opinions for the back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually lost substance and colour.

The fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of convictions save an acute sense of honour in private and business matters; on the life of the community and the state they took their daily views from the newspapers, and the newspapers they already despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the destiny of their country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe to do so. They were related to many of the great men who had built the Republic; but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so numerous and so similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People said: “The Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This attribution of authority had gradually convinced the third generation of its collective importance, and the fourth, to which Delia Ralston’s husband belonged, had the ease and simplicity of a ruling class.

Within the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled their obligations as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the boards of all the old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving institutions, had the best cooks in New York, and when they travelled abroad ordered statuary of the American sculptors in Rome whose reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had brought home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the British aristocracy it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent investment.

Two marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these qualities of thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up Ralston character was now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes asked herself whether, were she to turn her own little boy loose in a wilderness, he would not create a small New York there, and be on all its boards of directors.

Delia Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which had taken place in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as was then the custom, in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at what is now the corner of Avenue A and Ninety-first Street, overlooking the Sound. Thence her husband had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovell’s canary-coloured coach with a fringed hammer-cloth) through spreading suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets to one of the new houses in Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were just beginning to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established, the mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of pin-money, and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most popular “young matrons” (as they were called) of her day.

She was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one afternoon in her handsome bedroom in Gramercy Park. She was too near to the primitive Ralstons to have as clear a view of them as, for instance, the son in question might one day command: she lived under them as unthinkingly as one lives under the laws of one’s country. Yet that tremor of the muted key-board, that secret questioning which sometimes beat in her like wings, would now and then so divide her from them that for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their relation to other things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back from it quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her house-keeping, her new dresses and her kindly Jim.

She thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he had told her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was twenty-five, and twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh. The plumpness then thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey silk across her bosom, and caused her heavy gold watch-chain—after it left the anchorage of the brooch of St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened her low-cut Cluny collar—to dangle perilously in the void above a tiny waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But the shoulders above sloped youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as a girl’s.

Mrs. Jim Ralston approvingly examined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s instructions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled marabout—a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her cousin, Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like Delia’s own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverly Place branch, than which nothing could be safer, sounder or more—well, usual. Delia did not know why the word had occurred to her, for it could hardly be postulated, even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually” married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance which a nice girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushingly forecast for herself.

Yes—and afterward?

Well—what? And what did this new question mean? Afterward: why, of course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence.

And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for everything,” and didn’t—though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.

Yes: Charlotte’s fate would be just like hers. Joe Ralston was so like his second cousin Jim (Delia’s James), that Delia could see no reason why life in the squat brick house in Waverly Place should not exactly resemble life in the tall brownstone house in Gramercy Park. Only Charlotte’s bedroom would certainly not be as pretty as hers.

She glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a watered silk, with a “valanced” border, and tassels between the loops. The mahogany bedstead, covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was symmetrically reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe which matched it. Coloured lithographs of the “Four Seasons” by LÉopold Robert surmounted groups of family daguerreotypes in deeply-recessed gilt frames. The ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up, surprised her with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of roses. One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of their hats. This frivolous time-piece had been a wedding-gift from Delia’s aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow who lived in Paris and was received at the Tuileries. It had been entrusted by Mrs. Mingott to young Clement Spender, who had come back from Italy for a short holiday just after Delia’s marriage; the marriage which might never have been, if Clem Spender could have supported a wife, or if he had consented to give up painting and Rome for New York and the law. The young man (who looked, already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had laughingly assured the bride that her aunt’s gift was “the newest thing in the Palais Royal”; and the family, who admired Mrs. Manson Mingott’s taste though they disapproved of her “foreignness,” had criticized Delia’s putting the clock in her bedroom instead of displaying it on the drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she woke in the morning, to see the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.

Charlotte would certainly not have such a pretty clock in her bedroom; but then she had not been used to pretty things. Her father, who had died at thirty of lung-fever, was one of the “poor Lovells.” His widow, burdened with a young family, and living all the year round “up the River,” could not do much for her eldest girl; and Charlotte had entered society in her mother’s turned garments, and shod with satin sandals handed down from a defunct aunt who had “opened a ball” with General Washington. The old-fashioned Ralston furniture, which Delia already saw herself banishing, would seem sumptuous to Chatty; very likely she would think Delia’s gay French time-piece somewhat frivolous, or even not “quite nice.” Poor Charlotte had become so serious, so prudish almost, since she had given up balls and taken to visiting the poor! Delia remembered, with ever-recurring wonder, the abrupt change in her: the precise moment at which it had been privately agreed in the family that, after all, Charlotte Lovell was going to be an old maid.

They had not thought so when she came out. Though her mother could not afford to give her more than one new tarlatan dress, and though nearly everything in her appearance was regrettable, from the too bright red of her hair to the too pale brown of her eyes—not to mention the rounds of brick-rose on her cheek-bones, which almost (preposterous thought!) made her look as if she painted—yet these defects were redeemed by a slim waist, a light foot and a gay laugh; and when her hair was well oiled and brushed for an evening party, so that it looked almost brown, and lay smoothly along her delicate cheeks under a wreath of red and white camellias, several eligible young men (Joe Ralston among them) were known to have called her pretty.

Then came her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight sleighing-party, the brick-rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There was a report that she was “going like her father,” and she was hurried off to a remote village in Georgia, where she lived alone for a year with an old family governess. When she came back everyone felt at once that there was a change in her. She was pale, and thinner than ever, but with an exquisitely transparent cheek, darker eyes and redder hair; and the oddness of her appearance was increased by plain dresses of Quakerish cut. She had left off trinkets and watch-chains, always wore the same grey cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a sudden zeal for visiting the indigent. The family explained that during her year in the south she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made it impossible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her young friends. Everyone agreed, with significant glances, that this unnatural state of mind would “pass off in time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell, Chatty’s grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others, gave her a little money for her paupers, and lent her a room in the Lovell stables (at the back of the old lady’s Mercer Street house) where she gathered about her, in what would afterward have been called a “day-nursery,” some of the destitute children of the neighbourhood. There was even, among them, the baby girl whose origin had excited such intense curiosity two or three years earlier, when a veiled lady in a handsome cloak had brought it to the hovel of Cyrus Washington, the negro handy-man whose wife Jessamine took in Dr. Lanskell’s washing. Dr. Lanskell, the chief medical practitioner of the day, was presumably versed in the secret history of every household from the Battery to Union Square; but, though beset by inquisitive patients, he had invariably declared himself unable to identify Jessamine’s “veiled lady,” or to hazard a guess as to the origin of the hundred dollar bill pinned to the baby’s bib.

The hundred dollars were never renewed, the lady never reappeared, but the baby lived healthily and happily with Jessamine’s piccaninnies, and as soon as it could toddle was brought to Chatty Lovell’s day-nursery, where it appeared (like its fellow paupers) in little garments cut down from her old dresses, and socks knitted by her untiring hands. Delia, absorbed in her own babies, had nevertheless dropped in once or twice at the nursery, and had come away wishing that Chatty’s maternal instinct might find its normal outlet in marriage. The married cousin confusedly felt that her own affection for her handsome children was a mild and measured sentiment compared with Chatty’s fierce passion for the waifs in Grandmamma Lovell’s stable.

And then, to the general surprise, Charlotte Lovell engaged herself to Joe Ralston. It was known that Joe had “admired her” the year she came out. She was a graceful dancer, and Joe, who was tall and nimble, had footed it with her through many a reel and schottische. By the end of the winter all the match-makers were predicting that something would come of it; but when Delia sounded her cousin, the girl’s evasive answer and burning brow seemed to imply that her suitor had changed his mind, and no further questions could be asked. Now it was clear that there had, in fact, been an old romance between them, probably followed by that exciting incident, a “misunderstanding”; but at last all was well, and the bells of St. Mark’s were preparing to ring in happier days for Charlotte. “Ah, when she has her first baby,” the Ralston mothers chorused....

“Chatty!” Delia exclaimed, pushing back her chair as she saw her cousin’s image reflected in the glass over her shoulder.

Charlotte Lovell had paused in the doorway. “They told me you were here—so I ran up.”

“Of course, darling. How handsome you do look in your poplin! I always said you needed rich materials. I’m so thankful to see you out of grey cashmere.” Delia, lifting her hands, removed the white bonnet from her dark polished head, and shook it gently to make the crystals glitter.

“I hope you like it? It’s for your wedding,” she laughed.

Charlotte Lovell stood motionless. In her mother’s old dove-coloured poplin, freshly banded with narrow rows of crimson velvet ribbon, an ermine tippet crossed on her bosom, and a new beaver bonnet with a falling feather, she had already something of the assurance and majesty of a married woman.

“And you know your hair certainly is darker, darling,” Delia added, still hopefully surveying her.

“Darker? It’s grey,” Charlotte suddenly broke out in her deep voice. She pushed back one of the pommaded bands that framed her face, and showed a white lock on her temple. “You needn’t save up your bonnet; I’m not going to be married,” she added, with a smile that showed her small white teeth in a fleeting glare.

Delia had just enough presence of mind to lay down the bonnet, marabout-up, before she flung herself on her cousin.

“Not going to be married? Charlotte, are you perfectly crazy?”

“Why is it crazy to do what I think right?”

“But people said you were going to marry him the year you came out. And no one understood what happened then. And now—how can it possibly be right? You simply can’t!” Delia incoherently cried.

“Oh—people!” said Charlotte Lovell wearily.

Her married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her voice that Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice, before. Its echo seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the Axminster carpet actually heaved under Delia’s shrinking slippers.

Charlotte Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the pale brown of her eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there when she was angry or excited.

“Charlotte—where on earth have you come from?” she questioned, drawing the girl down to the sofa.

“Come from?”

“Yes. You look as if you had seen a ghost—an army of ghosts.”

The same snarling smile drew up Charlotte’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she said.

“Well?—Oh, Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t mean to say that you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past—? Not that I’ve ever heard the least hint; never. But even if there were....” She drew a deep breath, and bravely proceeded to extremities. “Even if you’ve heard that he’s been ... that he’s had a child—of course he would have provided for it before....”

The girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’; but it’s not that.”

“Tell me what it is.”

Charlotte Lovell looked about the sunny prosperous room as if it were the image of her world, and that world were a prison she must break out of. She lowered her head. “I want—to get away,” she panted.

“Get away? From Joe?”

“From his ideas—the Ralston ideas.”

Delia bridled—after all, she was a Ralston! “The Ralston ideas? I haven’t found them—so unbearably unpleasant to live with,” she smiled a little tartly.

“No. But it was different with you: they didn’t ask you to give up things.”

“What things?” What in the world (Delia wondered) had poor Charlotte that any one could want her to give up? She had always been in the position of taking rather than of having to surrender. “Can’t you explain to me, dear?” Delia urged.

“My poor children—he says I’m to give them up,” cried the girl in a stricken whisper.

“Give them up? Give up helping them?”

“Seeing them—looking after them. Give them up altogether. He got his mother to explain to me. After—after we have children ... he’s afraid ... afraid our children might catch things.... He’ll give me money, of course, to pay some one ... a hired person, to look after them. He thought that handsome,” Charlotte broke out with a sob. She flung off her bonnet and smothered her prostrate weeping in the cushions.

Delia sat perplexed. Of all unforeseen complications this was surely the least imaginable. And with all the acquired Ralston that was in her she could not help seeing the force of Joe’s objection, could almost find herself agreeing with him. No one in New York had forgotten the death of the poor Henry van der Luydens’ only child, who had caught small-pox at the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him. After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution against contagion. And poor people were so ignorant and careless, and their children, of course, so perpetually exposed to everything catching. No, Joe Ralston was certainly right, and Charlotte almost insanely unreasonable. But it would be useless to tell her so now. Instinctively, Delia temporized.

“After all,” she whispered to the prone ear, “if it’s only after you have children—you may not have any—for some time.”

“Oh, yes, I shall!” came back in anguish from the cushions.

Delia smiled with matronly superiority. “Really, Chatty, I don’t quite see how you can know. You don’t understand.”

Charlotte Lovell lifted herself up. Her collar of Brussels lace had come undone and hung in a wisp on her crumpled bodice, and through the disorder of her hair the white lock glimmered haggardly. In her pale brown eyes the little green specks floated like leaves in a trout-pool.

“Poor girl,” Delia thought, “how old and ugly she looks! More than ever like an old maid; and she doesn’t seem to realize in the least that she’ll never have another chance.”

“You must try to be sensible, Chatty dear. After all, one’s own babies have the first claim.”

“That’s just it.” The girl seized her fiercely by the wrists. “How can I give up my own baby?”

“Your—your—?” Delia’s world again began to waver under her. “Which of the poor little waifs, dearest, do you call your own baby?” she questioned patiently.

Charlotte looked her straight in the eyes. “I call my own baby my own baby.”

“Your own—? Take care—you’re hurting my wrists, Chatty!” Delia freed herself, forcing a smile. “Your own—?”

“My own little girl. The one that Jessamine and Cyrus—”

“Oh—” Delia Ralston gasped.

The two cousins sat silent, facing each other; but Delia looked away. It came over her with a shudder of repugnance that such things, even if they had to be said, should not have been spoken in her bedroom, so near the spotless nursery across the passage. Mechanically she smoothed the organ-like folds of her silk skirt, which her cousin’s embrace had tumbled. Then she looked again at Charlotte’s eyes, and her own melted.

“Oh, poor Chatty—my poor Chatty!” She held out her arms to her cousin.

II

THE shepherd continued to steal his kiss from the shepherdess, and the clock in the fallen trunk continued to tick out the minutes.

Delia, petrified, sat unconscious of their passing, her cousin clasped to her. She was dumb with the horror and amazement of learning that her own blood ran in the veins of the anonymous foundling, the “hundred dollar baby” about whom New York had so long furtively jested and conjectured. It was her first contact with the nether side of the smooth social surface, and she sickened at the thought that such things were, and that she, Delia Ralston, should be hearing of them in her own house, and from the lips of the victim! For Chatty of course was a victim—but whose? She had spoken no name, and Delia could put no question: the horror of it sealed her lips. Her mind had instantly raced back over Chatty’s past; but she saw no masculine figure in it but Joe Ralston’s. And to connect Joe with the episode was obviously unthinkable. Some one in the south, then—? But no: Charlotte had been ill when she left—and in a flash Delia understood the real nature of that illness, and of the girl’s disappearance. But from such speculations too her mind recoiled, and instinctively she fastened on something she could still grasp: Joe Ralston’s attitude about Chatty’s paupers. Of course Joe could not let his wife risk bringing contagion into their home—that was safe ground to dwell on. Her own Jim would have felt in the same way; and she would certainly have agreed with him.

Her eyes travelled back to the clock. She always thought of Clem Spender when she looked at the clock, and suddenly she wondered—if things had been different—what he would have said if she had made such an appeal to him as Charlotte had made to Joe. The thing was hard to imagine; yet in a flash of mental readjustment Delia saw herself as Clem’s wife, she saw her children as his, she pictured herself asking him to let her go on caring for the poor waifs in the Mercer Street stable, and she distinctly heard his laugh and his light answer: “Why on earth did you ask, you little goose? Do you take me for such a Pharisee as that?”

Yes, that was Clem Spender all over—tolerant, reckless, indifferent to consequences, always doing the kind thing at the moment, and too often leaving others to pay the score. “There’s something cheap about Clem,” Jim had once said in his heavy way. Delia Ralston roused herself and pressed her cousin closer. “Chatty, tell me,” she whispered.

“There’s nothing more.”

“I mean, about yourself ... this thing ... this....” Clem Spender’s voice was still in her ears. “You loved some one,” she breathed.

“Yes. That’s over—. Now it’s only the child.... And I could love Joe—in another way.” Chatty Lovell straightened herself, wan and frowning.

“I need the money—I must have it for my baby. Or else they’ll send it to an Institution.” She paused. “But that’s not all. I want to marry—to be a wife, like all of you. I should have loved Joe’s children—our children. Life doesn’t stop....”

“No; I suppose not. But you speak as if ... as if ... the person who took advantage of you....”

“No one took advantage of me. I was lonely and unhappy. I met some one who was lonely and unhappy. People don’t all have your luck. We were both too poor to marry each other ... and mother would never have consented. And so one day ... one day before he said goodbye....”

“He said goodbye?”

“Yes. He was going to leave the country.”

“He left the country—knowing?”

“How was he to know? He doesn’t live here. He’d just come back—come back to see his family—for a few weeks....”

She broke off, her thin lips pressed together upon her secret.

There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.

“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.

“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off, in the very words her married cousin had compassionately addressed to her virginity.

A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek: she felt oddly humiliated by the rebuke conveyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy, ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes upon her cousin’s.

“You won’t tell me who it was?”

“What’s the use? I haven’t told anybody.”

“Then why have you come to me?”

Charlotte’s stony face broke up in weeping. “It’s for my baby ... my baby....”

Delia did not heed her. “How can I help you if I don’t know?” she insisted in a harsh dry voice: her heart-beats were so violent that they seemed to send up throttling hands to her throat.

Charlotte made no answer.

“Come back from where?” Delia doggedly repeated; and at that, with a long wail, the girl flung her hands up, screening her eyes. “He always thought you’d wait for him,” she sobbed out, “and then, when he found you hadn’t ... and that you were marrying Jim.... He heard it just as he was sailing.... He didn’t know it till Mrs. Mingott asked him to bring the clock back for your wedding....”

“Stop—stop,” Delia cried, springing to her feet. She had provoked the avowal, and now that it had come she felt that it had been gratuitously and indecently thrust upon her. Was this New York, her New York, her safe friendly hypocritical New York, was this James Ralston’s house, and this his wife listening to such revelations of dishonour?

Charlotte Lovell stood up in her turn. “I knew it—I knew it! You think worse of my baby now, instead of better.... Oh, why did you make me tell you? I knew you’d never understand. I’d always cared for him, ever since I came out; that was why I wouldn’t marry any one else. But I knew there was no hope for me ... he never looked at anybody but you. And then, when he came back four years ago, and there was no you for him any more, he began to notice me, to be kind, to talk to me about his life and his painting....” She drew a deep breath, and her voice cleared. “That’s over—all over. It’s as if I couldn’t either hate him or love him. There’s only the child now—my child. He doesn’t even know of it—why should he? It’s none of his business; it’s nobody’s business but mine. But surely you must see that I can’t give up my baby.”

Delia Ralston stood speechless, looking away from her cousin in a growing horror. She had lost all sense of reality, all feeling of safety and self-reliance. Her impulse was to close her ears to the other’s appeal as a child buries its head from midnight terrors. At last she drew herself up, and spoke with dry lips.

“But what do you mean to do? Why have you come to me? Why have you told me all this?”

“Because he loved you!” Charlotte Lovell stammered out; and the two women stood and faced each other.

Slowly the tears rose to Delia’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, moistening her parched lips. Through the tears she saw her cousin’s haggard countenance waver and droop like a drowning face under water. Things half-guessed, obscurely felt, surged up from unsuspected depths in her. It was almost as if, for a moment, this other woman were telling her of her own secret past, putting into crude words all the trembling silences of her own heart.

The worst of it was, as Charlotte said, that they must act now; there was not a day to lose. Chatty was right—it was impossible that she should marry Joe if to do so meant giving up the child. But, in any case, how could she marry him without telling him the truth? And was it conceivable that, after hearing it, he should not repudiate her? All these questions spun agonizingly through Delia’s brain, and through them glimmered the persistent vision of the child—Clem Spender’s child—growing up on charity in a negro hovel, or herded in one of the plague-houses they called Asylums. No: the child came first—she felt it in every fibre of her body. But what should she do, of whom take counsel, how advise the wretched creature who had come to her in Clement’s name? Delia glanced about her desperately, and then turned back to her cousin.

“You must give me time. I must think. You ought not to marry him—and yet all the arrangements are made; and the wedding-presents.... There would be a scandal ... it would kill Granny Lovell....”

Charlotte answered in a low voice: “There is no time. I must decide now.”

Delia pressed her hands against her breast. “I tell you I must think. I wish you would go home.—Or, no: stay here: your mother mustn’t see your eyes. Jim’s not coming home till late; you can wait in this room till I come back.” She had opened the wardrobe and was reaching up for a plain bonnet and heavy veil.

“Stay here? But where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I want to walk—to get the air. I think I want to be alone.” Feverishly, Delia unfolded her Paisley shawl, tied on bonnet and veil, thrust her mittened hands into her muff. Charlotte, without moving, stared at her dumbly from the sofa.

“You’ll wait,” Delia insisted, on the threshold.

“Yes: I’ll wait.”

Delia shut the door and hurried down the stairs.

III

SHE had spoken the truth in saying that she did not know where she was going. She simply wanted to get away from Charlotte’s unbearable face, and from the immediate atmosphere of her tragedy. Outside, in the open, perhaps it would be easier to think.

As she skirted the park-rails she saw her rosy children playing, under their nurse’s eye, with the pampered progeny of other square-dwellers. The little girl had on her new plaid velvet bonnet and white tippet, and the boy his Highland cap and broad-cloth spencer. How happy and jolly they looked! The nurse spied her, but she shook her head, waved at the group and hurried on.

She walked and walked through the familiar streets decked with bright winter sunshine. It was early afternoon, an hour when the gentlemen had just returned to their offices, and there were few pedestrians in Irving Place and Union Square. Delia crossed the Square to Broadway.

The Lovell house in Mercer Street was a sturdy old-fashioned brick dwelling. A large stable adjoined it, opening on an alley such as Delia, on her honey-moon trip to England, had heard called a “mews.” She turned into the alley, entered the stable court, and pushed open a door. In a shabby white-washed room a dozen children, gathered about a stove, were playing with broken toys. The Irishwoman who had charge of them was cutting out small garments on a broken-legged deal table. She raised a friendly face, recognizing Delia as the lady who had once or twice been to see the children with Miss Charlotte.

Delia paused, embarrassed.

“I—I came to ask if you need any new toys,” she stammered.

“That we do, ma’am. And many another thing too, though Miss Charlotte tells me I’m not to beg of the ladies that comes to see our poor darlin’s.”

“Oh, you may beg of me, Bridget,” Mrs. Ralston answered, smiling. “Let me see your babies—it’s so long since I’ve been here.”

The children had stopped playing and, huddled against their nurse, gazed up open-mouthed at the rich rustling lady. One little girl with pale brown eyes and scarlet cheeks was dressed in a plaid alpaca frock trimmed with imitation coral buttons that Delia remembered. Those buttons had been on Charlotte’s “best dress” the year she came out. Delia stopped and took up the child. Its curly hair was brown, the exact colour of the eyes—thank heaven! But the eyes had the same little green spangles floating in their transparency. Delia sat down, and the little girl, standing on her knee, gravely fingered her watch-chain.

“Oh, ma’am—maybe her shoes’ll soil your skirt. The floor here ain’t none too clean.”

Delia shook her head, and pressed the child against her. She had forgotten the other gazing babies and their wardress. The little creature on her knee was made of different stuff—it had not needed the plaid alpaca and coral buttons to single her out. Her brown curls grew in points on her high forehead, exactly as Clement Spender’s did. Delia laid a burning cheek against the forehead.

“Baby want my lovely yellow chain?”

Baby did.

Delia unfastened the gold chain and hung it about the child’s neck. The other babies clapped and crowed, but the little girl, gravely dimpling, continued to finger the links in silence.

“Oh, ma’am, you can’t leave that fine chain on little Teeny. When she has to go back to those blacks....”

“What is her name?”

“Teena they call her, I believe. It don’t seem a Christian name, har’ly.”

Delia was silent.

“What I say is, her cheeks is too red. And she coughs too easy. Always one cold and another. Here, Teeny, leave the lady go.”

Delia stood up, loosening the tender arms.

“She doesn’t want to leave go of you, ma’am. Miss Chatty ain’t been in today, and the little thing’s kinder lonesome without her. She don’t play like the other children, somehow.... Teeny, you look at that lovely chain you’ve got ... there, there now....”

“Goodbye, Clementina,” Delia whispered below her breath. She kissed the pale brown eyes, the curly crown, and dropped her veil on rushing tears. In the stable-yard she dried them on her large embroidered handkerchief, and stood hesitating. Then with a decided step she turned toward home.

The house was as she had left it, except that the children had come in; she heard them romping in the nursery as she went down the passage to her bedroom. Charlotte Lovell was seated on the sofa, upright and rigid, as Delia had left her.

“Chatty—Chatty, I’ve thought it out. Listen. Whatever happens, the baby shan’t stay with those people. I mean to keep her.”

Charlotte stood up, tall and white. The eyes in her thin face had grown so dark that they seemed like spectral hollows in a skull. She opened her lips to speak, and then, snatching at her handkerchief, pressed it to her mouth, and sank down again. A red trickle dripped through the handkerchief onto her poplin skirt.

“Charlotte—Charlotte,” Delia screamed, on her knees beside her cousin. Charlotte’s head slid back against the cushions and the trickle ceased. She closed her eyes, and Delia, seizing a vinaigrette from the dressing-table, held it to her pinched nostrils. The room was filled with an acrid aromatic scent.

Charlotte’s lids lifted. “Don’t be frightened. I still spit blood sometimes—not often. My lung is nearly healed. But it’s the terror—”

“No, no: there’s to be no more terror. I tell you I’ve thought it all out. Jim is going to let me take the baby.”

The girl raised herself haggardly. “Jim? Have you told him? Is that where you’ve been?”

“No, darling. I’ve only been to see the baby.”

“Oh,” Charlotte moaned, leaning back again. Delia took her own handkerchief, and wiped away the tears that were raining down her cousin’s cheeks.

“You mustn’t cry, Chatty; you must be brave. Your little girl and his—how could you think? But you must give me time: I must manage it in my own way.... Only trust me....”

Charlotte’s lips stirred faintly.

“The tears ... don’t dry them, Delia.... I like to feel them....”

The two cousins continued to lean against each other without speaking. The ormolu clock ticked out the measure of their mute communion in minutes, quarters, a half-hour, then an hour: the day declined and darkened, the shadows lengthened across the garlands of the Axminster and the broad white bed. There was a knock.

“The children’s waiting to say their grace before supper, ma’am.”

“Yes, Eliza. Let them say it to you. I’ll come later.” As the nurse’s steps receded Charlotte Lovell disengaged herself from Delia’s embrace.

“Now I can go,” she said.

“You’re not too weak, dear? I can send for a coach to take you home.”

“No, no; it would frighten mother. And I shall like walking now, in the darkness. Sometimes the world used to seem all one awful glare to me. There were days when I thought the sun would never set. And then there was the moon at night.” She laid her hands on her cousin’s shoulders. “Now it’s different. By and bye I shan’t hate the light.”

The two women kissed each other, and Delia whispered: “Tomorrow.”

IV

THE Ralstons gave up old customs reluctantly, but once they had adopted a new one they found it impossible to understand why everyone else did not immediately do likewise.

When Delia, who came of the laxer Lovells, and was naturally inclined to novelty, had first proposed to her husband to dine at six o’clock instead of two, his malleable young face had become as relentless as that of the old original Ralston in his grim Colonial portrait. But after a two days’ resistance he had come round to his wife’s view, and now smiled contemptuously at the obstinacy of those who clung to a heavy mid-day meal and high tea.

“There’s nothing I hate like narrow-mindedness. Let people eat when they like, for all I care: it’s their narrow-mindedness that I can’t stand.”

Delia was thinking of this as she sat in the drawing-room (her mother would have called it the parlour) waiting for her husband’s return. She had just had time to smooth her glossy braids, and slip on the black-and-white striped moire with cherry pipings which was his favourite dress. The drawing-room, with its Nottingham lace curtains looped back under florid gilt cornices, its marble centre-table on a carved rosewood foot, and its old-fashioned mahogany armchairs covered with one of the new French silk damasks in a tart shade of apple-green, was one for any young wife to be proud of. The rosewood what-nots on each side of the folding doors that led into the dining-room were adorned with tropical shells, feld-spar vases, an alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of porphyry and serpentine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum, a bust of Clytie in chalk-white biscuit de SÈvres, and four old-fashioned figures of the Seasons in Chelsea ware, that had to be left among the newer ornaments because they had belonged to great-grandmamma Ralston. On the walls hung large dark steel-engravings of Cole’s “Voyage of Life,” and between the windows stood the life-size statue of “A Captive Maiden” executed for Jim Ralston’s father by the celebrated Harriet Hosmer, immortalized in Hawthorne’s novel of the Marble Faun. On the table lay handsomely tooled copies of Turner’s Rivers of France, Drake’s Culprit Fay, Crabbe’s Tales, and the Book of Beauty containing portraits of the British peeresses who had participated in the Earl of Eglinton’s tournament.

As Delia sat there, before the hard-coal fire in its arched opening of black marble, her citron-wood work-table at her side, and one of the new French lamps shedding a pleasant light on the centre-table from under a crystal-fringed shade, she asked herself how she could have passed, in such a short time, so completely out of her usual circle of impressions and convictions—so much farther than ever before beyond the Ralston horizon. Here it was, closing in on her again, as if the very plaster ornaments of the ceiling, the forms of the furniture, the cut of her dress, had been built out of Ralston prejudices, and turned to adamant by the touch of Ralston hands.

She must have been mad, she thought, to have committed herself so far to Charlotte; yet, turn about as she would in the ever-tightening circle of the problem, she could still find no other issue. Somehow, it lay with her to save Clem Spender’s baby.

She heard the sound of the latch-key (her heart had never beat so high at it), and the putting down of a tall hat on the hall console—or of two tall hats, was it? The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in: two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike; it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.

She would not have been young and tender, and a happy wife, if she had not thought Joe but an indifferent copy of her Jim; yet, allowing for defects in the reproduction, there remained a striking likeness between the two tall athletic figures, the short sanguine faces with straight noses, straight whiskers, straight brows, candid blue eyes and sweet selfish smiles. Only, at the present moment, Joe looked like Jim with a tooth-ache.

“Look here, my dear: here’s a young man who’s asked to take pot-luck with us,” Jim smiled, with the confidence of a well-nourished husband who knows that he can always bring a friend home.

“How nice of you, Joe!—Do you suppose he can put up with oyster soup and a stuffed goose?” Delia beamed upon her husband.

“I knew it! I told you so, my dear chap! He said you wouldn’t like it—that you’d be fussed about the dinner. Wait till you’re married, Joseph Ralston—.” Jim brought down a genial paw on his cousin’s bottle-green shoulder, and Joe grimaced as if the tooth had stabbed him.

“It’s excessively kind of you, cousin Delia, to take me in this evening. The fact is—”

“Dinner first, my boy, if you don’t mind! A bottle of Burgundy will brush away the blue devils. Your arm to your cousin, please; I’ll just go and see that the wine is brought up.”

Oyster soup, broiled bass, stuffed goose, apple fritters and green peppers, followed by one of Grandmamma Ralston’s famous caramel custards: through all her mental anguish, Delia was faintly aware of a secret pride in her achievement. Certainly it would serve to confirm the rumour that Jim Ralston could always bring a friend home to dine without notice. The Ralston and Lovell wines rounded off the effect, and even Joe’s drawn face had mellowed by the time the Lovell Madeira started westward. Delia marked the change when the two young men rejoined her in the drawing-room.

“And now, my dear fellow, you’d better tell her the whole story,” Jim counselled, pushing an armchair toward his cousin.

The young woman, bent above her wool-work, listened with lowered lids and flushed cheeks. As a married woman—as a mother—Joe hoped she would think him justified in speaking to her frankly: he had her husband’s authority to do so.

“Oh, go ahead, go ahead,” chafed the exuberant after-dinner Jim from the hearth-rug.

Delia listened, considered, let the bridegroom flounder on through his embarrassed exposition. Her needle hung like a sword of Damocles above the canvas; she saw at once that Joe depended on her trying to win Charlotte over to his way of thinking. But he was very much in love: at a word from Delia, she understood that he would yield, and Charlotte gain her point, save the child, and marry him....

How easy it was, after all! A friendly welcome, a good dinner, a ripe wine, and the memory of Charlotte’s eyes—so much the more expressive for all that they had looked upon. A secret envy stabbed the wife who had lacked this last enlightenment.

How easy it was—and yet it must not be! Whatever happened, she could not let Charlotte Lovell marry Joe Ralston. All the traditions of honour and probity in which she had been brought up forbade her to connive at such a plan. She could conceive—had already conceived—of high-handed measures, swift and adroit defiances of precedent, subtle revolts against the heartlessness of the social routine. But a lie she could never connive at. The idea of Charlotte’s marrying Joe Ralston—her own Jim’s cousin—without revealing her past to him, seemed to Delia as dishonourable as it would have seemed to any Ralston. And to tell him the truth would at once put an end to the marriage; of that even Chatty was aware. Social tolerance was not dealt in the same measure to men and to women, and neither Delia nor Charlotte had ever wondered why: like all the young women of their class they simply bowed to the ineluctable.

No; there was no escape from the dilemma. As clearly as it was Delia’s duty to save Clem Spender’s child, so clearly, also, she seemed destined to sacrifice his mistress. As the thought pressed on her she remembered Charlotte’s wistful cry: “I want to be married, like all of you,” and her heart tightened. But yet it must not be.

“I make every allowance” (Joe was droning on) “for my sweet girl’s ignorance and inexperience—for her lovely purity. How could a man wish his future wife to be—to be otherwise? You’re with me, Jim? And Delia? I’ve told her, you understand, that she shall always have a special sum set apart for her poor children—in addition to her pin-money; on that she may absolutely count. God! I’m willing to draw up a deed, a settlement, before a lawyer, if she says so. I admire, I appreciate her generosity. But I ask you, Delia, as a mother—mind you, now, I want your frank opinion. If you think I can stretch a point—can let her go on giving her personal care to these children until ... until....” A flush of pride suffused the potential father’s brow ... “till nearer duties claim her, why, I’m more than ready ... if you’ll tell her so. I undertake,” Joe proclaimed, suddenly tingling with the memory of his last glass, “to make it right with my mother, whose prejudices, of course, while I respect them, I can never allow to—to come between me and my own convictions.” He sprang to his feet, and beamed on his dauntless double in the chimney-mirror. “My convictions,” he flung back at it.

“Hear, hear!” cried Jim emotionally.

Delia’s needle gave the canvas a sharp prick, and she pushed her work aside.

“I think I understand you both, Joe. Certainly, in Charlotte’s place, I could never give up those children.”

“There you are, my dear fellow!” Jim triumphed, as proud of this vicarious courage as of the perfection of the dinner.

“Never,” said Delia. “Especially, I mean, the foundlings—there are two, I think. Those children always die if they are sent to asylums. That is what is haunting Chatty.”

“Poor innocents! How I love her for loving them! That there should be such scoundrels upon this earth unpunished—. Delia, will you tell her that I’ll do whatever—”

“Gently, old man, gently,” Jim admonished him, with a flash of Ralston caution.

“Well, that is to say, whatever—in reason—”

Delia lifted an arresting hand. “I’ll tell her, Joe: she will be grateful. But it’s of no use—”

“No use? What more—?”

“Nothing more: except this. Charlotte has had a return of her old illness. She coughed blood here today. You must not marry her.”

There: it was done. She stood up, trembling in every bone, and feeling herself pale to the lips. Had she done right? Had she done wrong? And would she ever know?

Poor Joe turned on her a face as wan as hers: he clutched the back of his armchair, his head drooping forward like an old man’s. His lips moved, but made no sound.

“My God!” Jim stammered. “But you know you’ve got to buck up, old boy.”

“I’m—I’m so sorry for you, Joe. She’ll tell you herself tomorrow,” Delia faltered, while her husband continued to proffer heavy consolations.

“Take it like a man, old chap. Think of yourself—your future. Can’t be, you know. Delia’s right; she always is. Better get it over—better face the music now than later.”

“Now than later,” Joe echoed with a tortured grin; and it occurred to Delia that never before in the course of his easy good-natured life had he had—any more than her Jim—to give up anything his heart was set on. Even the vocabulary of renunciation, and its conventional gestures, were unfamiliar to him.

“But I don’t understand. I can’t give her up,” he declared, blinking away a boyish tear.

“Think of the children, my dear fellow; it’s your duty,” Jim insisted, checking a glance of pride at Delia’s wholesome comeliness.

In the long conversation that followed between the cousins—argument, counter-argument, sage counsel and hopeless protest—Delia took but an occasional part. She knew well enough what the end would be. The bridegroom who had feared that his bride might bring home contagion from her visits to the poor would not knowingly implant disease in his race. Nor was that all. Too many sad instances of mothers prematurely fading, and leaving their husbands alone with a young flock to rear, must be pressing upon Joe’s memory. Ralstons, Lovells, Lannings, Archers, van der Luydens—which one of them had not some grave to care for in a distant cemetery: graves of young relatives “in a decline,” sent abroad to be cured by balmy Italy? The Protestant grave-yards of Rome and Pisa were full of New York names; the vision of that familiar pilgrimage with a dying wife was one to turn the most ardent Ralston cold. And all the while, as she listened with bent head, Delia kept repeating to herself: “This is easy; but how am I going to tell Charlotte?”

When poor Joe, late that evening, wrung her hand with a stammered farewell, she called him back abruptly from the threshold.

“You must let me see her first, please; you must wait till she sends for you—” and she winced a little at the alacrity of his acceptance. But no amount of rhetorical bolstering-up could make it easy for a young man to face what lay ahead of Joe; and her final glance at him was one of compassion....

The front door closed upon Joe, and she was roused by her husband’s touch on her shoulder.

“I never admired you more, darling. My wise Delia!”

Her head bent back, she took his kiss, and then drew apart. The sparkle in his eyes she understood to be as much an invitation to her bloom as a tribute to her sagacity.

She held him at arms’ length. “What should you have done, Jim, if I’d had to tell you about myself what I’ve just told Joe about Chatty?”

A slight frown showed that he thought the question negligible, and hardly in her usual taste. “Come,” his strong arm entreated her.

She continued to stand away from him, with grave eyes. “Poor Chatty! Nothing left now—”

His own eyes grew grave, in instant sympathy. At such moments he was still the sentimental boy whom she could manage.

“Ah, poor Chatty, indeed!” He groped for the readiest panacea. “Lucky, now, after all, that she has those paupers, isn’t it? I suppose a woman must have children to love—somebody else’s if not her own.” It was evident that the thought of the remedy had already relieved his pain.

“Yes,” Delia agreed, “I see no other comfort for her. I’m sure Joe will feel that too. Between us, darling—” and now she let him have her hands—“between us, you and I must see to it that she keeps her babies.”

“Her babies?” He smiled at the possessive pronoun. “Of course, poor girl! Unless indeed she’s sent to Italy?”

“Oh, she won’t be that—where’s the money to come from? And, besides, she’d never leave Aunt Lovell. But I thought, dear, if I might tell her tomorrow—you see, I’m not exactly looking forward to my talk with her—if I might tell her that you would let me look after the baby she’s most worried about, the poor little foundling girl who has no name and no home—if I might put aside a fixed sum from my pin-money....”

Their hands flowed together, she lifted her flushing face to his. Manly tears were in his eyes; ah, how he triumphed in her health, her wisdom, her generosity!

“Not a penny from your pin-money—never!”

She feigned discouragement and wonder. “Think, dear—if I’d had to give you up!”

“Not a penny from your pin-money, I say—but as much more as you need, to help poor Chatty’s pauper. There—will that content you?”

“Dearest! When I think of our own, upstairs!” They held each other, awed by that evocation.

CHARLOTTE LOVELL, at the sound of her cousin’s step, lifted a fevered face from the pillow.

The bedroom, dim and close, smelt of eau de Cologne and fresh linen. Delia, blinking in from the bright winter sun, had to feel her way through a twilight obstructed by dark mahogany.

“I want to see your face, Chatty: unless your head aches too much?”

Charlotte signed “No,” and Delia drew back the heavy window curtains and let in a ray of light. In it she saw the girl’s head, livid against the bed-linen, the brick-rose circles again visible under darkly shadowed lids. Just so, she remembered, poor cousin So-and-so had looked the week before she sailed for Italy!

“Delia!” Charlotte breathed.

Delia drew near the bed, and stood looking down at her cousin with new eyes. Yes: it had been easy enough, the night before, to dispose of Chatty’s future as if it were her own. But now?

“Darling—”

“Oh, begin, please,” the girl interrupted, “or I shall know that what’s coming is too dreadful!”

“Chatty, dearest, if I promised you too much—”

“Jim won’t let you take my child? I knew it! Shall I always go on dreaming things that can never be?”

Delia, her tears running down, knelt by the bed and gave her fresh hand into the other’s burning clutch.

“Don’t think that, dear: think only of what you’d like best....”

“Like best?” The girl sat up sharply against her pillows, alive to the hot fingertips.

“You can’t marry Joe, dear—can you—and keep little Tina?” Delia continued.

“Not keep her with me, no: but somewhere where I could slip off to see her—oh, I had hoped such follies!”

“Give up follies, Charlotte. Keep her where? See your own child in secret? Always in dread of disgrace? Of wrong to your other children? Have you ever thought of that?”

“Oh, my poor head won’t think! You’re trying to tell me that I must give her up?”

“No, dear; but that you must not marry Joe.”

Charlotte sank back on the pillow, her eyes half-closed. “I tell you I must make my child a home. Delia, you’re too blest to understand!”

“Think yourself blest too, Chatty. You shan’t give up your baby. She shall live with you: you shall take care of her—for me.”

“For you?”

“I promised you I’d take her, didn’t I? But not that you should marry Joe. Only that I would make a home for your baby. Well, that’s done; you two shall be always together.”

Charlotte clung to her and sobbed. “But Joe—I can’t tell him, I can’t!” She put back Delia suddenly. “You haven’t told him of my—of my baby? I couldn’t bear to hurt him as much as that.”

“I told him that you coughed blood yesterday. He’ll see you presently: he’s dreadfully unhappy. He has been given to understand that, in view of your bad health, the engagement is broken by your wish—and he accepts your decision; but if he weakens, or if you weaken, I can do nothing for you or for little Tina. For heaven’s sake remember that!”

Delia released her hold, and Charlotte leaned back silent, with closed eyes and narrowed lips. Almost like a corpse she lay there. On a chair near the bed hung the poplin with red velvet ribbons which had been made over in honour of her betrothal. A pair of new slippers of bronze kid peeped from beneath it. Poor Chatty! She had hardly had time to be pretty....

Delia sat by the bed motionless, her eyes on her cousin’s closed face. They followed the course of a tear that forced a way between Charlotte’s tight lids, hung on the lashes, glittered slowly down the cheeks. As the tear reached the narrowed lips they spoke.

“Shall I live with her somewhere, do you mean? Just she and I together?”

“Just you and she.”

“In a little house?”

“In a little house....”

“You’re sure, Delia?”

“Sure, my dearest.”

Charlotte once more raised herself on her elbow and sent a hand groping under the pillow. She drew out a narrow ribbon on which hung a diamond ring.

“I had taken it off already,” she said simply, and handed it to Delia.