On her way home for a brief visit at the close of the summer, which she had spent in the East, Lucy Davison stopped in Denver, to visit Mary Jasper, from whom she had received glowing letters. Mary had not written for several weeks, and Lucy was surprised to find her ill; an illness resulting from the unaccustomed excitement of the Denver life she led under the guidance of Sibyl Dudley and the too sudden transition from the quiet of Paradise Valley. She was not seriously ill, however, and looked very attractive, as she lay propped about with cushions and pillows, her dark hair framing her face and her dark eyes alight with eagerness when Lucy appeared. Lucy was almost envious, as she contemplated Mary’s undeniable beauty.

Sibyl lavished attention and care on her charge, and she greeted Lucy with every evidence of delight and affection.

“My dear, you are tired!” she said. “Let me have some cakes and tea brought up for you at once. A little wine, or some champagne, would be good for you. You wouldn’t care for it? Then we’ll have the tea and cakes. And Mary may sit up in bed a few minutes, just in honor of this visit. It was so good of you to stop off in Denver to see her.”

Sibyl was very beautiful herself, quite as beautiful as Mary, though very much older. Lucy thought she had not aged a day in appearance since she had first met her, in the home of that acquaintance in the little town at the entrance to Paradise Valley. Sibyl was past-master of that wonderful preservative art which defies wrinkles and gray hairs and the noiseless flight of that foe of all beautiful women, Time. She defied Time, as she defied everything, except the small conventionalities of life, and the changing fashions. She made friends with these, and they served her well.

While talking with Lucy, and nibbling at the cake or sipping the tea, she stopped now and then to caress with coaxing tones her canary, which she had brought into the room and hung in its gilded cage at the window to brighten the place for Mary. She possessed naturally, or had cultivated, that soft, low voice which a Great Poet has declared to be an excellent thing in a woman, and she had assiduously cultivated an outward appearance of much kindness; so that altogether she was very charming, even in the eyes of Lucy Davison, and a most agreeable hostess. Mary was delighted with her.

“Do you know,” said Mary, in a burst of confidence, which a favorable opportunity brought, “she is so good! And she is as kind to the poor as she can be. I know of two old women, and one old man, whom she nearly supports. Of course it isn’t really any sacrifice for her to do it, for she is wealthy. It’s the funniest thing, the way she speaks about it. She says she gives things to poor people just because the giving makes her feel good. ‘Give a quarter to a beggar,’ she says, ‘and you will feel warm inside all day. It is a cheap way to purchase comfort.’”

In that same conversation Mary chanced to mention Curtis Clayton.

“I spoke of him to Mrs. Dudley one day, and I asked her if she knew him.”

“‘Oh, yes, I know him,’ she said; ‘he is a fool, a poor fool!’

“‘He looks so comical,’ I said to her, ‘swinging that stiff arm!’

“Then she looked at me—oh, I can’t tell you how funny her eyes were then, just as if coals were shining behind them, and she said, awfully quiet:

“‘I happen to know how he got that—it was by doing a brave and unselfish deed! He was in love with a beautiful but silly girl, whom I knew.’

“Then she told me the story. He was with this girl on his vacation. He was in Yale then, and she was the daughter of a worthless hotel-keeper. He first met her at the hotel while he was spending a summer in the mountains. She knew that he loved her, and she was vain of it, and she wanted to make him show it. There was a flower growing in a cleft of a caÑon, and she asked him to get it for her. He descended. It was dangerous; and she, looking over and pointing out the flower, lost her footing and fell. She was caught by some bushes, but she had a good fall, and landed at a point where she could not get up. The fright that he got by seeing her fall caused him to lose his footing, and he slipped and broke his left arm. To get her up he had to reach down with one hand and hold to an aspen with the other. He could only hold with his right hand, for his left arm was broken; so he dangled his broken left arm over for her to clutch; and she, frightened and selfish, gripped the hand, and after a great effort scrambled up. He held on until she was safe, and then (he had already turned white as death) he fainted. He revived after a time, and they got out of there, forgetting the flower; and though the doctors did what they could, he has had a stiff arm ever since.”

Mary shivered a little, sympathetically.

“I can’t ever think of Doctor Clayton now without seeing him with that girl, dragging her out of that place with his broken arm. I asked Mrs. Dudley if the girl married him after all that; and she said yes, but it would have been better for him if she hadn’t, if she had gone to her death in the caÑon that day, for she wasn’t a girl who could ever make any man happy. And do you know, I think it must have been that girl who caused him to live the life he is living!”

A sudden confusion had attacked Lucy Davison, who recalled certain conversations with Justin. They were in the nature of sacred confidences, so could not be mentioned even to Mary Jasper; but she, at least, knew that Sibyl was herself the girl whom Clayton had drawn from the caÑon with that dangling broken arm, and whom he had afterward married. Why had he deserted her, or she him? And why were they now living apart? Believing that the name of Sibyl’s husband had been Dudley, Mary had failed to guess the truth.

Mary told Lucy that it would not be surprising if Mrs. Dudley married again, as there was “just the dearest man” who called on her with much frequency and seemed to be greatly enamored of her.

“He has a funny little bald head,” said Mary, “and he wears glasses, the kind you pinch on your nose; he keeps them dangling against his coat by a black cord. And he is as kind as kind can be, and a perfect gentleman. Mrs. Dudley says he is very rich, and I really believe she will marry him some time, for she seems to like him.”

The name of this amiable gentleman, Lucy learned, was Mr. Plimpton, and he was a Denver stock broker. Neither Mary nor Lucy dreamed of the truth of his relations with Sibyl Dudley.

Having recurred to people and affairs in Paradise Valley, Mary chattered on like a gay little blackbird, and knew she was very bewitching, bolstered among the pillows. Her illness had taken some of the color out of her cheeks, yet they still showed a rosy tint when contrasted with the pillows, and the whiteness of the pillows emphasized the color of her eyes and hair. She asked Lucy to move the little dresser farther along the wall, that she might see herself in the mirror. She desired to get certain stubborn tangles out of her hair, she averred; but she really wanted to contemplate her own loveliness.

“Mrs. Dudley puts the dresser that way for me sometimes, even when I don’t ask her to; and often I lay for hours, looking into the mirror, when she has gone out of the room. It’s like looking into the clouds, you know. You remember how we used to lie on the rocks there by the edge of the Black CaÑon and look up at the clouds? We could see all kinds of things in them—men and horses, and wild animals, and just everything. When I let myself dream into the mirror that way I can see the same things there. And sometimes I try to picture what my future will be. Once I thought I saw a man’s face looking out at me, and it wasn’t Ben’s! Mrs. Dudley said I had been dreaming, and didn’t see anything, but it seemed real. I suppose I shall marry Ben, of course, just as you will marry Justin.”

Lucy’s face flushed.

“I don’t see why that should be a matter of course!”

“So you’ve seen some one in the East who is better looking? You can’t fool me! I know! What’s his name?”

“Truly I haven’t seen any one in the East who is better looking. I wasn’t thinking of anything of the kind.”

“Then he is still the best looking, is he? If you still think so, it’s a sure sign that you’ll marry him. That’s why I think I shall marry Ben. I haven’t seen any one in Denver I like as well as Ben, or who is as good looking; and one has a chance to see a good many men in a city like this.”

“Has Ben been to call on you?”

“Oh, yes; he was here only last week. When I first came up here I couldn’t get him to call, though I was told I might invite him. But when he got started he kept coming and coming, and now he comes almost too often. Mrs. Dudley has been very kind and good to him, and sometimes I’m almost jealous, thinking he likes her almost as much as he does me. I should be truly jealous, I think, if I didn’t know about Mr. Plimpton.”

She studied her mirrored reflection, wondering if it could be possible for Ben to find Mrs. Dudley, who was so much older and had already been married, more charming than herself. It was so unpleasant a thought that she frowned; and then, remembering that frowns will spoil even the smoothest forehead, she drove the frown away, and began to talk again.

Though Lucy Davison would not admit it, she was anxious to hasten on to Paradise Valley; so she remained but a day with Mary Jasper. Yet in that time Sibyl contrived to exhibit to her the carriage, the magnificent horses and the liveried driver, taking her as she did so on a long drive through some of the fashionable streets and avenues.

As the carriage swung them homeward Sibyl made a purchase of fruits and flowers, with which she descended into a shabby dwelling. When she came out she was followed to the door by a slatternly woman, who curtsied and thanked her volubly with a foreign accent.

“She’s an Italian—just a dago, as some people say—but her husband has been sick for a month or more, and I try to brighten her home up a bit. I don’t know what he does when he’s well; works for the railroad, I believe.”

Then the carriage moved on again, away from the cheap tenements, and into the wealthier sections once more, where Sibyl lived.

“You mustn’t tell father that I’m sick,” was Mary’s parting injunction to Lucy. “If he knew he might want me to come home. I will be entirely well by another week. I write to him every Sunday, just as if I was in the best of health; and so long as I don’t tell him he thinks I’m as well as ever. And truly I am as well as ever, or will be in a few days. If you tell him anything, tell him I’ll be down to see him this fall. I thought I should go last winter, but those awful storms came on, and I was so busy besides, that I just didn’t. But I do think of him often, and you may tell him that, too, if you tell him anything.”