UN-ANGLO-SAXON

He came in before long, stamping the snow from his boots. In the second or two that passed before he spoke, James saw that though he looked haggard and depressed, there was no trace of weakness of dissipation about his eyes or mouth. Nor did he slink; he blundered in with the impetuosity of a schoolboy for whom the world has no terrors. For which, though he was shocked to see how badly he looked, James was profoundly thankful.

He was aware of Harry's eyes trying to pierce the half-gloom; there was a touch of pathos, to James, in his momentary bewilderment.

"Hullo, Harry," he said gently.

"James!" The immediate, unconscious look of delight that came over Harry's face—even though it faded to something else within the second—pleased James more than anything had pleased him yet. Harry was glad to see him; that mattered much more than his almost instant recovery of his self-possession, his continuing, in the manner of the Harry of two years ago, the Harry of the previous Commencement: "Whatever are you doing here now, James?"

"I've got good news for you, Harry," he replied, rising and taking hold of the other's hand. "The Mowbray woman has withdrawn her suit. It's all right; she's signed things, and you have no more to fear from her." He dropped Harry's hand and moved off a step, as though to give him a chance to take in the news.

There was something rather fine in the simplicity, the humility, even of his manner as he did this, that did not escape Harry. He was deeply moved; self-possession and all it implied fell from him again.

"James, have you done this? What has happened? Tell me all about it! You haven't paid her all that money, James—don't tell me you've done that!"

"No, of course I haven't—there was no need for it. She was married out in Minneapolis last September, and I happened to get onto the fact—that's all. She had no business to be suing at all."

"And you—"

"I came here and told her so, to-day."

James sat down again where he had been sitting, as though to close the incident. Harry stood and gasped; he tried to speak but could not; his eyes filled with tears. Then he dropped at James' feet, clasping his knees in the manner of a suppliant of old. He buried his face in James' lap and gave a few deep sobs of joy and relief.

The Anglo-Saxon race being what it is, a good deal of courage is needed to go on with the relation of what occurred next. However, there is no help for it; history is history, and we can only tell it as it actually occurred, regardless of whether the undemonstrative are outraged or not. After Harry had thrown himself at his feet James took his brother's head gently between his hands, and then, with the greatest simplicity and naturalness in the world, bent forward and kissed it.

"Poor old thing," he said softly; "you have been having sort of a hard time of it, haven't you?"

"I wish you would tell me, James," said Harry somewhat later, as they sat gazing into the fire, James in the armchair and Harry on the floor, leaning back against James' legs, "I wish you would tell me just how you found out about her being married, and all about it. It seems so incredible—both that she should have been married and that you, of all people, should have been on the spot to discover it."

"Well, I just saw her, coming out of the marriage office with a man; that was all there was to it. I thought she probably wouldn't have been there unless she had just been married to him, so I had the register looked up, and there she was. She was under the name of Rosa Montagu—that gave us some trouble at first, because of course I didn't know that was her stage name. I put a fellow called Laffan, a young lawyer, onto the business, and he messed about with the register and the detective bureau and communicated with Raynham till he wormed it all out. Finally he got hold of a photograph of Rosa Montagu and showed it to me, and after that it was easy enough—Of course, it was a most God-given chance that I stumbled on her just at that compromising moment. She really wasn't as foolish as she sounds; she hadn't lived in Minneapolis for years and knew almost nobody there except her young man. It was a long chance, what with using her stage name and all, that any one would ever find her out."

"Yes. But I don't quite see—You say she was married in September?"

"Yes—the third."

"Well, if you knew she was married then, I don't quite see why you didn't make use of your knowledge before. When I was playing round with her, I mean—of course I, like the brazen idiot I was, didn't write you, but you must have heard—"

"Oh, yes. Well, it was a very funny thing. I didn't remember about having seen her in that place till months afterward; not till the night I heard about the breach of promise business. You see, it was only the barest, vaguest glimpse, there in the City Hall; she didn't even see me and I didn't even remember where I had seen her face before, then. I scarcely thought about it at all, at the time; I was in a great hurry to get to a hearing before some commission or other, and the thing went bang out of my mind. Then, when I read of the breach of promise, it all came back, in one flash! Funny!"

"Yes. It's the kind of humor that appeals to me, I can tell you."

"The man, Jennings, curiously enough, happened to be in McClellan's for a while, once, in the counting department. He left there to become a clerk in some bank. We worked up his end too, a little....

"Harry, I wish you'd tell me one thing," went on James, after a pause.

"Anything I can, James."

"Why on earth, when you found you were getting in deep with that woman, didn't you call on me to do something? You couldn't be so far gone as to think that I wouldn't—"

"Oh, couldn't I? You have no idea of what depths of idiocy I can descend to, if I want.—I don't know—at the time, the more I wanted help the less I could talk of it to any one, and you least of all. The person that gave me the most comfort was Trotty, and he never once mentioned the subject to me, except when I introduced it myself! Yet even so, all through that time, it was you that I really wanted.—Look here, James, if you don't believe me, see what I've been carrying around with me all this time, as a sort of talisman!"

He took his wallet from his pocket and after a short search produced an old and dirty postal card bearing on its face the blurred but still readable legend "All right. James." He handed it to his brother.

"Gosh," said James, when he had read it, "do you mean to say you've kept that old thing ever since?"

"Ever since the day I got it. There was something about it that was comforting and optimistic and—well, like you; and I used to take it out and look at it occasionally when I got particularly down in the mouth. And I used to persuade myself, after a while, that it all would come out right, in the end; that somehow James would make it all right—you see how the prophecy has come true!... And the extraordinary part of it is that even while I thought that way about you, I simply couldn't break the ice and tell you about it all. I don't know why—I just couldn't!"

"I know," said James; "I know the feeling."

"Isn't it incredible, James, that what seemed perfectly natural and reasonable—inevitable, even—a few weeks, or days, or even an hour ago, should appear so utterly asinine now!... Pride, vainglory and hypocrisy—all of them, and a lot more! Sometimes I can't believe it possible for one person to assemble in himself all the vices that I do."

"Well, you don't, either," said James seriously. "That's one thing I want to clear up. Harry, don't you see that the blame for all this lies with me just as much as with you—more than with you—entirely with me?—"

"No, I don't," began Harry stoutly, but James continued:

"And that the real reason you didn't call on me was because I had steadily shut myself away from you? Oh, Harry, I've behaved like the devil during the last three years! It's just as you say; a course of action you never even question at one time, a little later seems so silly, so criminally silly, that you can't believe you seriously thought of following it!... I know perfectly well that a lot of the things I thought were horribly important a few years ago really aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The perspective changes so, even with these two years—less than two years—out of college! Good Lord, if a man is really the right sort, if he has a good, warm-hearted nature at the bottom of him, thinks good thoughts, does nice things, uses to the best of his judgment what gifts and talents Providence is pleased to give him, what in Heaven's name does it matter whether he manages the crew or goes Bones, in the end?... I've been a fool, Harry. I've set the greatest value on the most worthless things; I've worshiped stone gods; I've let things irritate me that no sane man has any business to be irritated by. Worst of all, I've let these silly, worthless things come between you and me and spoil—well, one of the best things that ever came into my life!... All this estrangement business has been mainly my fault. I'm older, and have had more experience, and, I always thought, more common sense—though I haven't really—and I was the one that ought to have kept things straight. Harry, I'm sorry for it all!"

Harry was more moved than he would have liked to show by this confession. He was still enough of an undergraduate to be much impressed by his brother's casual mention of his senior society—the first time since he had been tapped the name had ever passed James' lips in his presence.

"It's a pleasure to hear you talk, James," he said, "but I hope you won't misunderstand me when I say that there's not one word of truth in all you've said—the last part of it, I mean. It's only convinced me more thoroughly of my own fault. Before, there might have been a shadow of doubt in my mind about my being entirely to blame. Now there is absolutely none.—Funny, that a person you like blaming himself should really be blaming you! It always seems that way, somehow...."

"James," he went on, a little later; "it makes you feel as if you were getting on, doesn't it?"

"How? In years?"

"Yes! I don't know about you, but I feel as old as Methusaleh to-night, and a whole lot wiser! And I must say I rather enjoy it!"

"Yes," said James reflectively, "it does seem a good deal that way."

"There are lots of questions you haven't asked me yet, James," continued Harry, after another interval.

"Are there? Well, tell me what they are and I'll ask them, if you're so crazy to answer them."

"The first is, What on earth could you ever have seen in That Woman?"

"There was no need to ask that question," replied James, laughing; "not after I saw her to-day, at any rate."

"She was so damned refined," sighed Harry. James laughed again at the coincidence of Harry's hitting on the very words of his own mental description of her. "I was most horribly depressed, and she looked so kind and sympathetic, and was, too, when I got to telling her my woes.... And she never used a particle of rouge, or anything of that kind.... Once I kissed her, and after that she managed, in that diabolical refined manner of hers, to convince me that she wouldn't have any more of that sort of thing without marriage. That made me respect her all the more, of course, as she knew it would. At one time, for a whole week, I should say, I was perfectly willing to marry her, whenever she wanted, and I didn't care whom I said it to, either.... Do you know, James, she would have been in for the devil of a time if I had gone on and pressed her to? I wonder what little plans she had for making me cease to care for her and back out at the right time.... There was no need for that, though; one day she called me 'kid,' and things like that before people, and I began to see."

"That was part of her little plan, of course," said James.

"Well, well—I shouldn't wonder if it was! You always were a clever child, James!..."

"What are some more of the things I've got to ask?" inquired the clever child after a brief silence.

"What? Oh—yes! Why don't you ask me to cut out the lick?" (He meant, abstain from alcoholic beverages.)

"Well, do you want me to?"

"Well, yes, I think I do, rather!"

"Well, will you?"

"Well—yes!"

Both laughed, and then Harry went on: "It strikes me that we are both talking a prodigious lot of nonsense, James. We've been making a regular scene, in fact—"

"I rather like scenes, myself," interrupted James, just for the pleasure of their being how he had expressed exactly the opposite opinion to some one else a few hours before.

"And no doubt we shall be heartily ashamed when we look back on it all in the cold gray light of to-morrow morning. One always is."

"I don't know," objected James, serious again, "I don't think that I shall be sorry for anything I've said or done."

"Well, as a matter of strict truth, I don't know that I shall either. I suppose one needn't necessarily be making a fool of oneself just because it's twelve o'clock at night; that is—oh, you know what I mean—!"

So they sat and talked on far into the night, loath to break up the enjoyment of the rediscovery of each other. They both seemed to bask in a sort of wonderful clarity and peace—do you know these rare times when life loses its complexity and uncertainty and becomes for the moment wholly sane and enjoyable and inspiring? When a person is actually able to live, if only for a little time, entirely in his better self, without being troubled by even a recollection of his worser? That was, substantially, the condition of those two boys as they sat there, at first talking, then thinking, and at last, as drowsiness slowly asserted itself over them, simply sitting.

"Well," said James at last; "unless you intend taking permanent possession of my legs, I suppose we'd better go to bed. Am I sleeping here, somewhere?"

"Yes," said Harry; "in my bed; I shall sleep on the sofa," and he forthwith embarked on a search for extra sheets and blankets.

They both slept uninterruptedly till nearly ten, at which hour they sallied forth in search of breakfast. During the night the snow had changed to rain, which still fell out of a leaden sky, turning the earth's white covering to dirty gray and clogging the gutters with slush. Everything looked sordid, prosaic, ugly, especially Chapel Street, which they crossed on their way to the nearest "dog"; especially the "dog" itself as they approached it, with its yellow electric lights still shining out of its windows. It was an unattractive world.

"Well, how does it look this morning?" James asked, studying his brother's face.

Harry shuffled along several steps through the slush before he answered:

"Just the same, James, and I for one, don't mind saying so." Then they looked at each other and smiled slightly.