AS the winter wore on Ewing fell into doubt and dread. Vague enough they were, but they rested on a sickening effect of emptiness, a time blank of achievement. He still regarded Teevan as quite all of the seven pillars of the house of wisdom. Yet instinct was rebelling. There were tired afternoons when he hungered to eat of the fruit of his own way.

This feeling could not but show in his occasional letters to Mrs. Laithe. She read through all his protestations of cheerfulness to the real dejection beneath them, and was both troubled and mystified, raging at his secretiveness.

When she returned to New York on a day in April and found a note from Mrs. Lowndes asking her to dine that evening, she accepted with a plan in mind. Before she saw Ewing she would try to learn something about him from Sydenham, for Sydenham would also dine with Mrs. Lowndes, and she knew that Ewing had been painting with the old man.

She found Birley the other guest, and that, too, was customary. Birley and Sydenham preserved for their hostess a certain aroma of her youth. Both had wooed her in the long ago; Sydenham in a day when Long Branch was. On its sands in the light of a July moon she had prettily hoped they might always be friends. Birley had heard her intone the same becoming sentiment at Saratoga later in the season. And both rejected ones had been present at St. Paul's on a day in the following June when Kitty Folsom and Jack Lowndes had consented together in holy wedlock.

The girl's hope, perfunctory enough at the time, one may fear, had seen long years of fruition. She liked to have them at her table now. Only, when the three were alone, they remembered too vividly and became, in the silences, too fantastically unlike their aged selves to the misty eyes of one another. The one-time belle found a little of that forgetting and remembering to be salutary, so little as ensued when a fourth guest was present. And Eleanor Laithe had often been that fourth, a saving reminder of the present, to recall them when they had loitered far enough back into the old marrying years.

But she came this night with a reason beyond her wish to please. So eager was she to ask Sydenham about Ewing that she gave scant attention to the searching looks and queries of Birley when she entered the drawing room. The big man rallied her on her pallor and frailness, but with a poor spirit that hardly concealed his real misgiving. She silenced him with impatient denials of illness, but his eyes lingered anxiously on her face.

She sat at table with but half an ear for their old-time gossip, the bantering gallantries of the aged swains, and the outworn coquetries of the one-time beauty. And when they fell silent—oftener now than was their wont, for each was thinking of that other Kitty Lowndes, who had taken matters into her own hands—she forgot to make talk, silent herself for thinking on the son of that Kitty. The dinner lacked the sparkle she had been expected to give it.As they were about to rise, after coffee, she playfully petitioned for a chat with Sydenham.

"Herbert wants to smoke, and I want to sit here with him. We need a little talk together," she explained. And the other two left them, the old lady leaning on the arm of Birley.

Sydenham lighted a cigar, pushed his chair back, and faced the woman who looked eagerly at him across the disordered table, her arms along its edge, her head tilted to a questionable angle. She flew to her point.

"What about Gilbert Ewing—what trouble is he having?"

Sydenham stared vacantly. He seemed to find it necessary to translate the question into some language of his own.

"Trouble? Oh, all sorts—chrome and indigo, yellow ocher, burnt umber, rose madder, Chinese white—composition, light and shade, vanishing points. You'd have to be one of us to understand."

"Other trouble," she insisted sharply—"personal—not about his painting."

Sydenham stared again, clutching his beard in a dazed search for inspiration. He did not consider people apart from painting. It was impossible that anyone should wish to discuss Ewing except in relation to colors and canvas.

"Well, he has trouble with everything—composition, tone-values, everything."

"But something not painting."

He looked up at the ceiling helplessly.

"Well, I fancy Randy Teevan worries him."

"Randall Teevan!" She was amazed and alarmed at once."Sometimes I get the idea that Randy badgers him, though they're thick as thieves. The boy wouldn't breathe if Randy said it was bad for the lungs."

"How long have they been friends?"

By quick, nervous, point-blank queries she drew from him all that he knew of this intimacy. She puzzled over it.

"Can he know?" She had not meant him to hear this, but he caught the words, and betrayed something like human interest.

"Trust Randy for that! I found it out myself. He had Kitty's portrait—Kitty to the life—stunning brush work. Randy has begged the picture of him for a while. I fancy he didn't want it hanging there for others to see. And he found the fellow here one afternoon. Kitty told me. She was nearly taken off her feet by his story but Randy happened in and cooled things down. It's queer, Randy's setting himself to win over the chap. It's a puzzle-mix. I wonder about it sometimes when the light goes."

She had listened in consternation, a rage for battle rising in her. She was sure Teevan must have some end in view hurtful to Ewing. Yet this was cunningly hidden. She was still puzzling over this when Sydenham recalled her. He had forgotten Ewing, and studied the red light that fell across the table through a shade of silk.

"What fools we are to think of painting shadows! If heaven's the place it's said to be they'll have real shadows put in up tubes, and then—well, think of it!"

She laughed at him, her brief laugh, with a sigh to follow.

"We must go to the others. But, Herbert, you'll watch him as well as you can, won't you? I feel responsible for him in a way."

He hesitated, but the light came. "Oh, you mean Ewing? Of course I'll watch him. I dare say he'll paint some day, after a fashion." He fumbled for the knob and awkwardly opened the door for her.

When the men went Mrs. Laithe asked if she might not linger a moment.

"Dear Aunt Kitty!" she said, going to the other's chair. "Old Kitty!" she repeated meaningly. The elder woman glanced quickly at her in faint alarm, half questioning, half defiant.

"Oh, Aunt Kitty! I know—I know! and I must talk of him. I suspected something almost from the first, and then I made sure. But I thought that perhaps no one else would find it out. And he was worth it—he is worth it. I couldn't have left him there, even if I'd been sure that everyone would know. He was a man—he had the right to live."

"My child, my child! Oh, you didn't know what you were doing! It was a monstrous thing, an impossible thing!"

"He's Kitty's son. You must feel for him."

"Feel? What haven't I felt since that day he came here?" There had been a break in her voice, but she went quietly on. "I can't make you know, dear. You've torn me—it will hurt to the end. Can you understand that in a terrible, an unspeakable way, my Kitty is still alive, is near me, and yet is not to be known? But you can't understand it. You've never had a child."

"Ah! but I've been one. I know what he would feel."

"Please, dear!" She put up a hand in protest. "As if I don't feel his hurt and Kitty's as well as mine. I shall be ground between the two every day of my life. Do you think my old arms didn't cry out to be around the mother in him? But think if I had yielded! Picture his own suffering—his own shame. Can you see us meeting, our eyes falling? Even for his own sake, he must never know."

"Isn't there a way, Aunt Kitty? Some way? He's worth finding a way for." She leaned over to stroke the other's hand.

"No way, my girl. Be the world a moment, be cool. He's a nameless thing. You might know him, but nothing more. Could he make a life? Could a woman—come, face it without prejudice—could you see your own sister marry him?" Mrs. Laithe looked blank.

"You see how impossible it is. You, yourself, could you stand before the world with him? Could you face the shame?"

The younger woman dropped the hand she held and turned away. The elder regarded her shrewdly.

"There—you see how impossible——"

But the other faced her suddenly, clear-eyed and defiant, her head back.

"Eleanor!" It was a cry of consternation that was yet softened by tenderness, an amazed but comprehending tenderness, for the face of the younger woman was incarnadined, flagrantly, splendidly.

A moment they held each other. But there was no mistaking the thing, for, though the blush had quickly faded, an after glow lingered.

The older woman rose quickly to throw her arms about the other.

"My mad, mad child!" She stood off to search her face incredulously."He's alone, Aunt Kitty, and he's so defenseless. He believes in everyone more than in himself. He'll be cured of that some time, but just now I'm his only defender. Others are against him or stand neutral with talk of the 'world.' I can't blame you, dear, I think you must be right for yourself. But when he does awaken"—she narrowed her eyes on the other a moment in calculation—"then I shan't be ashamed to have him know it was always safe to believe in me—whether he was boy or man or no one at all—or less than no one. I'd never bother about names, dear—I'd never bother about names."

She smiled and drew the other close with little reassuring caresses. "You see names aren't much—the directory is full of them, and dreary enough reading they'd make. No, I'd not care for that. I'd only ask that he believe in himself as much as I believe in him, and care as little for names. And I warn you I mean to help him to that if I can."

The eyes of the other sparkled now. There was in her glance the excited admiration of a timid child who watches a reckless playmate dare some dark passage of evil repute for goblins.

"You mad—dear mad girl!" she said.