PART III

CHAPTER XVIII

After the stirring events of the revival, it was only to be expected that this routine, home-made affair should suffer from a reaction. The attendance was larger than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were spiritless and tame. Neither the pastor nor his wife was present at the beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control devolved made but feeble headway against the spell of inertia which the hot night-air laid upon the gathering. Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory praise-offerings and supplications, and the hymns weariedly raised from time to time fell again in languor by the wayside.

Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope that some one would start the Doxology, and bring matters to a close. Her appearance apparently suggested this to the class-leader, for in a few moments the meeting had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their way out, were shaking hands with their minister's wife, and expressing the polite hope that he was better. The worried look in her face, and the obvious stains of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point and fervor to these inquiries, but she replied to all in tones of studied tranquillity that, although not feeling well enough to attend prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was steadily recovering strength, and confidently expected to be in complete health by Sunday. They left her, and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask one another in whispers what on earth she could have been crying about.

Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state by pacing slowly up and down under the elms on the side of the street opposite the Catholic church. There were no houses here for a block and more; the sidewalk was broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it; the overhanging boughs shrouded it all in obscurity; it was preeminently a place to be alone in.

Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before, and after a period of pleasant waiting on the platform, had said good-bye to them as the train moved away. Then he turned to Alice, who had also accompanied them in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain annoyance at her having come. That long familiar talk of the afternoon had given him the feeling that he was entitled to bid farewell to Sister Soulsby--to both the Soulsbys-- by himself.

"I am afraid folks will think it strange--neither of us attending the prayer-meeting," he said, with a suggestion of reproof in his tone, as they left the station-yard.

"If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute," answered Alice, with docility.

"No--no," he broke in. "I'm not equal to walking so fast. You run on ahead, and explain matters, and I will come along slowly."

"The hack we came in is still there in the yard," the wife suggested. "We could drive home in that. I don't believe it would cost more than a quarter-- and if you're feeling badly--"

"But I am NOT feeling badly," Theron replied, with frank impatience. "Only I feel--I feel that being alone with my thoughts would be good for me."

"Oh, certainly--by all means!" Alice had said, and turned sharply on her heel.

Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about, and did not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens. A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a straggling double line of lights, glowing radiantly against the black-green of the trees. This recalled to Theron that he had heard that the town council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized gas when moonshine was due. The idea struck him as droll, and he dwelt upon it in various aspects, smiling at some of its comic possibilities. Looking up in the middle of one of these whimsical conceits, the sportive impulse died suddenly within him. He realized that it was dark, and that the massive black bulk reared against the sky on the other side of the road was the Catholic church. The other fact, that he had been there walking to and fro for some time, was borne in upon him more slowly. He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down with a still more leisurely step, musing upon the curious way in which people's minds all unconsciously follow about where instincts and intuitions lead.

No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about Catholics which had insensibly guided his purposeless stroll in this direction. What a woman that was! Somehow the purport of her talk--striking, and even astonishing as he had found it--did not stand out so clearly in his memory as did the image of the woman herself. She must have been extremely pretty once. For that matter she still was a most attractive-looking woman. It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in the house-- to see her intelligent responsive face at the table-- to have it in one's power to make drafts at will upon the fund of sympathy and appreciation, of facile mirth and ready tenderness in those big eyes of hers. He liked that phrase she had used about herself--"a good fellow." It seemed to fit her to a "t." And Soulsby was a good fellow too. All at once it occurred to him to wonder whether they were married or not.

But really that was no affair of his, he reflected. A citizen of the intellectual world should be above soiling his thoughts with mean curiosities of that sort, and he drove the impertinent query down again under the surface of his mind. He refused to tolerate, as well, sundry vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined. He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,--the kindly, quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart, attractive women like that always about.

The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes' pastorate across the way. Theron paused for a second to consider whether he wanted to go over and call on the priest. He decided that mentally he was too fagged and flat for such an undertaking. He needed another sort of companionship-- some restful, soothing human contact, which should exact nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him, with soft, wise words and pleasant plays of fancy, and jokes and--and--something of the general effect created by Sister Soulsby's eyes. The thought expanded itself, and he saw that he had never realized before--nay, never dreamt before--what a mighty part the comradeship of talented, sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development of genius, the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of great men. To know such women--ah, that would never fall to his hapless lot.

The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees. He remembered that priests were supposed to be even further removed from the possibilities of such contact than he was himself. His memory reverted to that horribly ugly old woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his housekeeper. Life under the same roof with such a hag must be even worse than--worse than--

The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the privacy of his inner soul. He stood instead staring over at the pastorate, in a kind of stupor of arrested thought. The figure of a woman passed in view at the nearest window-- a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some sort, and a broad summer hat--a flitting effect of diaphanous shadow between him and the light which streamed from the casement.

Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate coolness of the changing night-air had got into his blood. The window was open, and his strained hearing thought it caught the sound of faint laughter. He continued to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared, the while a novel and strange perception unfolded itself upon his mind.

He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.

Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing remarkable about it. In truth, it was simplicity itself. He was still a sick man, weak in body and dejected in spirits. The thought of how unhappy and unstrung he was came to him now with an insistent pathos that brought tears to his eyes. He was only obeying the universal law of nature--the law which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato in the cellar to strive feebly toward the light.

From where he stood in the darkness he stretched out his hands in the direction of that open window. The gesture was his confession to the overhanging boughs, to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above--and it bore back to him something of the confessional's vague and wistful solace. He seemed already to have drawn down into his soul a taste of the refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With his tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant prescience, of exquisite expectancy.

Fate walked abroad this summer night. The street door of the pastorate opened, and in the flood of illumination which spread suddenly forth over the steps and sidewalk, Theron saw again the tall form, with the indefinitely light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat. He heard a tuneful woman's voice call out "Good-night, Maggie," and caught no response save the abrupt closing of the door, which turned everything black again with a bang. He listened acutely for another instant, and then with long, noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side of the street. He moderated his pace as he turned to cross the road at the corner, and then, still masked by the trees, halted altogether, in a momentary tumult of apprehension. No--yes--it was all right. The girl sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight of the open corner.

"Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?"

Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the accents of surprise, the identity of the tall, slim man who addressed her from the shadows.

"Good-evening, Mr. Ware," she said, with prompt affability. "I'm so glad to find you out again. We heard you were ill."

"I have been very ill," responded Theron, as they shook hands and walked on together. He added, with a quaver in his voice, "I am still far from strong. I really ought not to be out at all. But--but the longing for--for--well, I COULDN'T stay in any longer. Even if it kills me, I shall be glad I came out tonight."

"Oh, we won't talk of killing," said Celia. "I don't believe in illnesses myself"

"But you believe in collapses of the nerves," put in Theron, with gentle sadness, "in moral and spiritual and mental breakdowns. I remember how I was touched by the way you told me YOU suffered from them. I had to take what you said then for granted. I had had no experience of it myself. But now I know what it is." He drew a long, pathetic sigh. "Oh, DON'T I know what it is!" he repeated gloomily.

"Come, my friend, cheer up," Celia purred at him, in soothing tones. He felt that there was a deliciously feminine and sisterly intuition in her speech, and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew his arm through hers. He leaned upon this support, and was glad of it in every fibre of his being.

"Do you remember? You promised--that last time I saw you-- to play for me," he reminded her. They were passing the little covered postern door at the side and rear of the church as he spoke, and he made a half halt to point the coincidence.

"Oh, there's no one to blow the organ," she said, divining his suggestion. "And I haven't the key-- and, besides, the organ is too heavy and severe for an invalid. It would overwhelm you tonight."

"Not as you would know how to play it for me," urged Theron, pensively. "I feel as if good music to-night would make me well again. I am really very ill and weak-- and unhappy!"

The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice. She invited him by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more directly on her arm.

"Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you," she said, in compassionate friendliness. "He is the real medicine for bruised and wounded nerves. You shall have as much of him as you like."

The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself like some vast and inexpressibly alluring vista before Theron's imagination. The spice of adventure in it fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment the flesh was weak.

"I'm afraid your people would--would think it strange," he faltered--and began also to recall that he had some people of his own who would be even more amazed.

"Nonsense," said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with a reassuring pressure on his arm. "I allow none of my people to question what I do. They never dream of such a preposterous thing. Besides, you will see none of them. Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother have their own part of the house. I shan't listen for a minute to your not coming. Come, I'm your doctor. I'm to make you well again."

There was further conversation, and Theron more or less knew that he was bearing a part in it, but his whole mind seemed concentrated, in a sort of delicious terror, upon the wonderful experience to which every footstep brought him nearer. His magnetized fancy pictured a great spacious parlor, such as a mansion like the Maddens' would of course contain, and there would be a grand piano, and lace curtains, and paintings in gold frames, and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and he would sit in one of these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich, while Celia played to him. There would be servants about, he presumed, and very likely they would recognize him, and of course they would talk about it to Tom, Dick and Harry afterward. But he said to himself defiantly that he didn't care.

He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the well-lighted main street. He passed no one who seemed to know him. Presently they came to the Madden place, and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk, struck obliquely across the lawn. Theron, who had been lagging behind with a certain circumspection, stepped briskly to her side now. Their progress over the soft, close-cropped turf in the dark together, with the scent of lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air, and the majestic bulk of the big silent house rising among the trees before them, gave him a thrilling sense of the glory of individual freedom.

"I feel a new man already," he declared, as they swung along on the grass. He breathed a long sigh of content, and drew nearer, so that their shoulders touched now and again as they walked. In a minute more they were standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant jingle of a bunch of keys which his companion was groping for in her elusive pocket. He was conscious of trembling a little at the sound.

It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did not have their parlor on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in the complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several candles which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the hat-rack. She beckoned him with a gesture of her head, and he followed her up a broad staircase, magnificent in its structural appointments of inlaid woods, and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down. The tiny light which his guide bore before her half revealed, as they passed in their ascent, tall lengths of tapestry, and the dull glint of armor and brazen discs in shadowed niches on the nearer wall. Over the stair-rail lay an open space of such stately dimensions, bounded by terminal lines of decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker, that the young country minister could think of no word but "palatial" to fit it all.

At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide corridor to where it ended. Here, stretched from side to side, and suspended from broad hoops of a copper-like metal, was a thick curtain, of a uniform color which Theron at first thought was green, and then decided must be blue. She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door. He passed under the curtain behind her, and closed the door.

The room into which he had made his way was not at all after the fashion of any parlor he had ever seen. In the obscure light it was difficult to tell what it resembled. He made out what he took to be a painter's easel, standing forth independently in the centre of things. There were rows of books on rude, low shelves. Against one of the two windows was a big, flat writing-table-- or was it a drawing-table?--littered with papers. Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large mound of something at one end covered with a white cloth. On a table behind the easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance, the chief feature of which was a thick upright spiral screw. The floor was of bare wood stained brown. The walls of this queer room had photographs and pictures, taken apparently from illustrated papers, pinned up at random for their only ornament.

Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel. She caught the dumfounded expression with which her guest was surveying his surroundings, and gave a merry little laugh.

"This is my workshop," she explained. "I keep this for the things I do badly--things I fool with. If I want to paint, or model in clay, or bind books, or write, or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some carpentering, here's where I do it. All the things that make a mess which has to be cleaned up--they are kept out here-- because this is as far as the servants are allowed to come."

She unlocked still another door as she spoke--a door which was also concealed behind a curtain.

"Now," she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish flare rounded with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin and throat, and glowed upon her hair in a flame of orange light--"now I will show you what is my very own."

CHAPTER XIX

The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle about as she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had finished, and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque alternating rectangles of blue and yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of lanterns around against the wall, he thought, but the shape of these he could hardly make out.

Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began to see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to shed a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of the chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls. Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive whiteness under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women; the pictures, four or five in number, were all variations of a single theme-- the Virgin Mary and the Child.

A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the scheme of color and line in which these works of art bore their share. The walls of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns, terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in pale amber and straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and there toward suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader panels of stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue. These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he could see of the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the draperies and huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran about three sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself among the scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods, which, like the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain yellows.

The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket, and in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of delicate ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was white, deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to the tints which ruled the rest of the room.

Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement her next proceeding-- which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and, bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him with a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.

"Make yourself comfortable anywhere," she said, with a gesture which comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. "Will you smoke?"

"I have never tried since I was a little boy," said Theron, "but I think I could. If you don't mind, I should like to see."

Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what he felt to be the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown aside her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the heavy strands of hair coiled at the back of her head. His glance instinctively rested upon this wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the sudden fascination its disorder had for his eye.

She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her guest.

"I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was a child," she said. "I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair was brought into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with us since Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued and baited with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I might hide my hair under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've got rather away from that ideal since, I'm afraid," she added, with a droll downward curl of her lip.

"Your hair is very beautiful," said Theron, in the calm tone of a connoisseur.

"I like it myself," Celia admitted, and blew a little smoke-ring toward him. "I've made this whole room to match it. The colors, I mean," she explained, in deference to his uplifted brows. "Between us, we make up what Whistler would call a symphony. That reminds me-- I was going to play for you. Let me finish the cigarette first."

Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact that he had laid his own aside. "I have never seen a room at all like this," he remarked. You are right; it does fit you perfectly."

She nodded her sense of his appreciation. "It is what I like," she said. "It expresses ME. I will not have anything about me--or anybody either--that I don't like. I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it would make him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek. It is as near as an Irishman can get to it."

"I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were a Greek."

Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away. "I'd puzzle you more, I'm afraid, if I tried to explain to you what I really meant by it. I divide people up into two classes, you know--Greeks and Jews. Once you get hold of that principle, all other divisions and classifications, such as by race or language or nationality, seem pure foolishness. It is the only true division there is. It is just as true among negroes or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem, as it is among white folks. That is the beauty of it. It works everywhere, always."

"Try it on me," urged Theron, with a twinkling eye. "Which am I?"

"Both," said the girl, with a merry nod of the head. "But now I'll play. I told you you were to hear Chopin. I prescribe him for you. He is the Greekiest of the Greeks. THERE was a nation where all the people were artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo. Chopin might have written his music for them."

"I am interested in Shopang," put in Theron, suddenly recalling Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes. "He lived with--what's his name--George something. We were speaking about him only this afternoon."

Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first inquiringly, then with a latent grin about her lips. "Yes--George something," she said, in a tone which mystified him.

The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before. After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled himself again in a recumbent posture. It was beyond his strength to follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears took in. He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking charm of it all.

It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him--a simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries of sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With only a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz-- a rich, bold confusion which yet was not confused. Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts free.

From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one, the statues in the corners. No doubt they were beautiful--for this was a department in which he was all humility--and one of them, the figure of a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips downward. The others were not robed at all. Theron stared at them with the erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation meant in these later days. Roving along the wall, his glance rested again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures--a full-length figure in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs. The incongruity between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for the instant. Then his mind went to the piano.

Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant, through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and soothed to repose.

He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic. In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their spell upon him.

"It is all singing!" the player called out to him over her shoulder, in a minute of rest. "That is what Chopin does-- he sings!"

She began, with an effect of thinking of something else, the Sixth Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not playing anything in particular, so deliberately, haltingly, did the chain of charm unwind itself into sequence. Then it came closer to him than the others had done. The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once oppressed and inspired him. He saw Celia's shoulders sway under the impulse of the RUBATO license--the privilege to invest each measure with the stress of the whole, to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the music she made spoke to him as with a human voice. There was the wooing sense of roses and moonlight, of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous eyes, and then--

"You know this part, of course," he heard her say.

On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented, starlit garden, where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral. A sombre and lofty anthem arose, and filled the place with the splendor of such dignified pomp of harmony and such suggestions of measureless choral power and authority that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly to his feet. He stood motionless in the strange room, feeling most of all that one should kneel to hear such music.

"This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second Sonata," she was saying, before he realized that the end of the other had come. He sank upon the divan again, bending forward and clasping his hands tight around his knees. His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird, mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in the bondage of an orderly sadness. There was a propelling motion in the thing--a sense of being borne bodily along--which affected him like dizziness. He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern, vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy morn breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary melody. The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses came to their abrupt end. Theron rose once more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.

"I want to rest a little," he said, with his hand on her shoulder.

"Whew! so do I," exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an exaggerated gesture of weariness. "The sonatas take it out of one! They are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played."

"I didn't know," remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon her shoulder, and he kept it there. "I didn't know anything about music at all. What I do know now is that--that this evening is an event in my life."

She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.

"You are getting on," she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle in the smile with which she continued to regard him. "We are Hellenizing you at a great rate."

A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.

"I will be with you in a moment," he heard her say; and while the words were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through the broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together behind her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.

Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.

"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now."

Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward, on the keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft, like the curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about her neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity of fiery color which made all the other hues of the room pale and vague. A fillet of faint, sky-like blue drew a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples, and from this there rose the gleam of jewels. Her head inclined gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture of that armless woman in marble he had been studying-- and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows, emitted light.

"It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote," she said, as Theron, pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her. "No--you mustn't stand there," she added, sinking into the seat before the instrument; "go back and sit where you were."

The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying abandonment to cooing rhythm, ever and again rising in ripples to the point of insisting on something, one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away once more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head. He leaned back upon the cushions, and watched the white, rounded forearm which the falling folds of this strange, statue-like drapery made bare.

There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade. It seemed to him that there were words going along with it-- incoherent and impulsive yet very earnest words, appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion. Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would swing dancing off again into a mockery of inconsequence.

Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a soft-throated woman singing to her lover.

"It is like Heine--simply a love-poem," said the girl, over her shoulder.

Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried the Ninth Nocturne onward. The stormy passage, which she banged finely forth, was in truth a lover's quarrel; and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon a silence all alive with tender memories of sound-- was that not also a part of love?

They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan, the girl at the piano--and Theron listened for what he felt must be the audible thumping of his heart.

Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began what she had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka. This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed, her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair. He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music-- visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms. As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions-- as if he gazed at them through her eyes.

It could not be helped. He lifted himself noiselessly to his feet, and stole with caution toward her. He would hear the rest of this weird, voluptuous fantasy standing thus, so close behind her that he could look down upon her full, uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that glowing nimbus of hair would touch him.

There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this last piece, which Theron, by some side cerebration, had put down to her not watching what her fingers did. There came another of these pauses now--an odd, unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything. He stared intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and caught his breath as he waited. There fell at last a few faltering ascending notes, making a half-finished strain, and then again there was silence.

Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face above hers. Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had faded from its cheeks.

"That is the end," she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in the air about her for completion.

Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes and brow for an instant. Then, throwing them aside with an expansive downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned Celia's glance. It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes before.

"It CAN'T be the end!" he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged with deep significance. He held her gaze in the grasp of his with implacable tenacity. There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic floor seemed to stir under his feet. He clung defiantly to the one idea of not releasing her eyes.

"How COULD it be the end?" he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the tumultuous fluttering of his heart. "Things don't end that way!"

A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while the brave words were on his lips. He blinked and tottered under it, as it passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a little, and patting his hand on his heart. There was fright written all over his whitened face.

"We--we forgot that I am a sick man," he said feebly, answering Celia's look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile. "I was afraid my heart had gone wrong."

She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance in her air. Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for support, for all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the inner room, and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass. She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic liquid, and gave it him to drink.

"This Benedictine is all I happen to have," she said. "Swallow it down. It will do you good."

Theron obeyed her. It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection, it was grateful and warming. He did feel better almost immediately. A great wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back on the divan. For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was dying. He drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.

Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced him.

"I dare say we forced the pace a little," she remarked, after a pause, looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement playing in the corners of her mouth. "It doesn't do for a man to get to be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually."

He remembered the music. "Oh, if I only knew how to tell you," he murmured ecstatically, "what a revelation your playing has been to me! I had never imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying day."

He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the music ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in his mind. Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure to the broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had disappeared were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning within, out of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled with white marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which shaped themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.

"I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of yours," he said with the abruptness of confusion.

Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. "Oh," she said almost indifferently, "lots of things. Absolute freedom from moral bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only thing in life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life everything that isn't worth while; and so on."

"But," said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her face, "I am going to get you to teach it ALL to me." The memories began crowding in upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka had stopped short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. "I want to be a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you--to your ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not even dreamed existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and now, after tonight--you and the music have decided me. I am going to put the things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help me; you must tell me how to begin."

He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his face. He rose on the instant.

Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery. She laughed gayly in confession of her fault, and held her hand out to let him help her disentangle her foot from her draperies, and get off the divan. It seemed to be her meaning that he should continue holding her hand after she was also standing.

"You forgive me, don't you?" she urged smilingly. "Chopin always first excites me, then sends me to sleep. You see how YOU sleep tonight!"

The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their heavy lids, with a languorous kindliness. Her warm, large palm clasped his in frank liking.

"I don't want to sleep at all," Mr. Ware was impelled to say. "I want to lie awake and think about--about everything all over again."

She smiled drowsily. "And you're sure you feel strong enough to walk home?"

"Yes," he replied, with a lingering dilatory note, which deepened upon reflection into a sigh. "Oh, yes."

He followed her and her candle down the magnificent stairway again. She blew the light out in the hall, and, opening the front door, stood with him for a silent moment on the threshold. Then they shook hands once more, and with a whispered good-night, parted.

Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette and helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which Theron had used. She looked meditatively at this little glass for a moment, turning it about in her fingers with a smile. The smile warmed itself suddenly into a joyous laugh. She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing skirts with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette in front of the gravely beautiful statue of the armless woman.

CHAPTER XX

The change was not premature. He found himself not in the least confused by it, or frightened. Before he had finished shaving, he knew himself to be easily and comfortably at home in his new state, and master of all its requirements.

It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become another man, when he went down and took his chair at the breakfast table. They had exchanged no words since their parting in the depot-yard the previous evening--an event now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's mind. He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive, half-sullen, half-curious glance she stole at him, as she brought the dishes in.

"Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!" he said, with hearty pleasure in his tone. "What a mind-reader you are, to be sure!"

"I'm glad you're feeling so much better," she said briefly, taking her seat.

"Better?" he returned. "I'm a new being!"

She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance. He perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions which the small brain was expressing through those shallow blue eyes of hers. She was turning over this, that, and the other hostile thought and childish grievance-- most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him where he had been till after midnight. He smiled affably in the face of this scattering fire of peevish glances, and did not dream of resenting any phase of them all.

"I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order that piano sent up today," he announced presently, in a casual way.

"Why, Theron, can we afford it?" the wife asked, regarding him with surprise.

"Oh, easily enough," he replied light-heartedly. "You know they've increased my salary."

She shook her head. "No, I didn't. How should I? You don't realize it," she went on, dolefully, "but you're getting so you don't tell me the least thing about your affairs nowadays."

Theron laughed aloud. "You ought to be grateful-- such melancholy affairs as mine have been till now," he declared--"that is, if it weren't absurd to think such a thing." Then, more soberly, he explained: "No, my girl, it is you who don't realize. I am carrying big projects in my mind--big, ambitious thoughts and plans upon which great things depend. They no doubt make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it is a wife's part to understand, and make allowances, and not intrude trifles which may throw everything out of gear. Don't think I'm scolding, my girl. I only speak to reassure you and--and help you to comprehend. Of course I know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my-- my career."

"Of course not," responded Alice, dubiously; "but--but-- "

"But what? Theron felt compelled by civility to say, though on the instant he reproached himself for the weakness of it.

"Well--I hardly know how to say it," she faltered, "but it was nicer in the old days, before you bothered your head about big projects, and your career, as you call it, and were just a good, earnest, simple young servant of the Lord. Oh, Theron!" she broke forth suddenly, with tearful zeal, "I get sometimes lately almost scared lest you should turn out to be a--a BACKSLIDER!"

The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance. But yesterday the word would have had in it all sorts of inherited terrors for him. This morning's dawn of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and stupid epithet.

"These are things not to be said," he admonished her, after a moment's pause, and speaking with carefully measured austerity. "Least of all are they to be said to a clergyman--by his wife."

It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, "Better by his wife than by outsiders!" but she bit her lips, and kept the gibe back. A rebuke of this form and gravity was a novelty in their relations. The fear that it had been merited troubled, even while it did not convince, her mind, and the puzzled apprehension was to be read plainly enough on her face.

Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind. Really, it was amazing how much wiser he had grown all at once. He had been married for years, and it was only this morning that he suddenly discovered how a wife ought to be handled. He continued to look sternly away into space for a little. Then his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible influence of melting considerations. He nodded his head, turned toward her abruptly, and broke the silence with labored amiability.

"Come, come--the day began so pleasantly--it was so good to feel well again--let us talk about the piano instead. That is," he added, with an obvious overture to playfulness, "if the thought of having a piano is not too distasteful to you."

Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood. They went together into the sitting-room, to measure and decide between the two available spaces which were at their disposal, and he insisted with resolute magnanimity on her settling this question entirely by herself. When at last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday, and he would look over some sermon memoranda before he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen in openly cheerful spirits.

Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him on his desk, and took down his scribbling-book as well. But there his application flagged, and he surrendered himself instead, chin on hand, to staring out at the rhododendron in the yard. He recalled how he had seen Soulsby patiently studying this identical bush. The notion of Soulsby, not knowing at all how to sing, yet diligently learning those sixths, brought a smile to his mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling out over her shoulder, "That's what Chopin does--he sings!" The spirit of that wonderful music came back to him, enfolded him in its wings. It seemed to raise itself up-- a palpable barrier between him and all that he had known and felt and done before. That was his new birth-- that marvellous night with the piano. The conceit pleased him-- not the less because there flashed along with it the thought that it was a poet that had been born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave groping about in the dark after silly superstitions, cringing at the scowl of mean Pierces and Winches, was dead. There was an end of him, and good riddance. In his place there had been born a Poet--he spelled the word out now unabashed--a child of light, a lover of beauty and sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and Chopin-- and Celia!

Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical suggestion suddenly took shape. He acted upon it without a moment's delay, getting out his letter-pad, and writing hurriedly--

"Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me if before nightfall I can know that there is a piano under my roof. Even if it remains dumb, it will be some comfort to have it here and look at it, and imagine how a great master might make it speak.

"Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's, say at eleven this forenoon, and give me the inestimable benefit of your judgment in selecting an instrument?

"Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now, but shall call at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.

"Thanking you in anticipation,

"I am--"

Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt. There were adverbs enough and to spare on the point of his pen, but the right one was not easy to come at. "Gratefully," "faithfully," "sincerely," "truly"--each in turn struck a false note. He felt himself not quite any of these things. At last he decided to write just the simple word "yours," and then wavered between satisfaction at his boldness, dread lest he had been over-bold, and, worst of the lot, fear that she would not notice it one way or the other-- all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.

There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen of his departure. The interests of domestic discipline seemed to point the other way. He walked softly through the hall, and let himself out by the front door without a sound.

Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind-- a lad whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence as a messenger, combined with large impartiality in sectarian matters. He was to have ten cents on his return; and he might report himself to his patron at the bookstore yonder.

Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining at his desk in the rear. There was a tacit compliment in the suggestion that he was not a mere customer, demanding instant attention. Besides, there was no keeping "Thurston's" out of conversations in this place.

Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye suddenly found itself arrested by a name on a cover. There were a dozen narrow volumes in uniform binding, huddled together under a cardboard label of "Eminent Women Series." Oddly enough, one of these bore the title "George Sand." Theron saw there must be some mistake, as he took the book down, and opened it. His glance hit by accident upon the name of Chopin. Then he read attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.

"We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts of queer phases of life," he explained in self-defence to the old bookseller, then counting out the money for the book from his lean purse. He smiled as he added, "There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage of the clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand."

"I don't know," answered the other, pleasantly. "Guess she wasn't so much different from the rest of 'em--except that she didn't mind appearances. We know about her. We don't know about the others."

"I must hurry," said Theron, turning on his heel. The haste with which he strode out of the store, crossed the street, and made his way toward Thurston's, did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing things he had encountered in this book. Their relation to Celia forced itself more and more upon his mind. He could recall the twinkle in her eye, the sub-mockery in her tone, as she commented with that half-contemptuous "Yes--George something!" upon his blundering ignorance. His mortification at having thus exposed his dull rusticity was swallowed up in conjectures as to just what her tolerant familiarity with such things involved. He had never before met a young unmarried woman who would have confessed to him any such knowledge. But then, of course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia in any other way. He recognized vaguely that he must provide himself with an entire new set of standards by which to measure and comprehend her. But it was for the moment more interesting to wonder what her standards were. Did she object to George Sand's behavior? Or did she sympathize with that sort of thing? Did those statues, and the loose-flowing diaphonous toga and unbound hair, the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately sensuous music--was he to believe that they signified--?

"Good-morning, Mr. Ware. You have managed by a miracle to hit on one of my punctual days," said Celia.

She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the musical department of Thurston's. He had not noticed before the fact that the sun was shining. The full glare of its strong light, enveloping her figure as she stood, and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy silk and lace, was what struck him now first of all. It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her.

Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception, that his own hand trembled. He put boldly into words the thought that came to him.

"It was generous of you," he said, "to wait for me out here, where all might delight in the sight of you, instead of squandering the privilege on a handful of clerks inside."

Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.

"Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment," she remarked. They went in together at this, and Theron made a note of the name.

During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed about even more humbly than the clerks in Celia's commanding wake. There were a good many pianos in the big show-room overhead, and Theron found himself almost awed by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought of the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether. Not so with the organist. She ordered them rolled around this way or that, as if they had been so many checkers on a draught-board. She threw back their covers with the scant ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers' mouths. She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands, not deigning to seat herself, but just slightly bending forward, and sweeping her fingers up and down their keyboards--able, domineering fingers which pounded, tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in a flash, and amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly discordant hubbub.

Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol in his arms, and watching her. The exaggerated deference which the clerks and salesmen showed to her as the rich Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a certain assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score of her being a musician. There undoubtedly was a sense of freemasonry between them. They alluded continually in technical terms to matters of which he knew nothing, and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried no meaning whatever. It was evident that the young men liked her, and that their liking pleased her. It thrilled him to think that she knew he liked her, too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given that here, also, she had pleasure in the fact. He clung insistently to the memory of these evidences. They helped him to resist a disagreeable tendency to feel himself an intruder, an outsider, among these pianoforte experts.

When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside, and talked with Theron. "I suppose you want me to tell you the truth," she said. "There's nothing here really good. It is always much better to buy of the makers direct."

"Do they sell on the instalment plan?" he asked. There was a wistful effect in his voice which caught her attention.

She looked away--out through the window on the street below-- for a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.

"Oh, you want it at once--I see," she remarked softly. "Well, this Adelberger is the best value for the money."

Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed toward the largest instrument in the room-- a veritable leviathan among pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage to shake his head.

"It would be too large--much too large--for the room," he explained. "And, besides, it is more than I like to pay-- or CAN pay, for that matter." It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there was no help for it.

They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair quality. "Now leave all the bargaining to me," she adjured him. "These prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house-- you wanted it today, you said?"

"Yes--in memory of yesterday," he murmured.

She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people, now all salesmen again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings made salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of payment.

"I am ever so much obliged to you," he said fervently, in the comparative solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at something in the book-department.

"Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it," she replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.

He held up instead the volume he had purchased. "Guess what that is! You never would guess in this wide world!" His manner was surcharged with a sense of the surreptitious.

"Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?" commented Celia, her glance roving again toward the shelves.

"It is a life of George Sand," whispered Theron. "I've been reading it this morning--all the Chopin part-- while I was waiting for you."

To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of admonition.

"Naughty! naughty!" she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.

He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol. The situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing but a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would countermand the order. He would-- but she was speaking again.

They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of pianos. Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of her words.

"I suppose you will be going the other way," she was saying. "I shall have to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from Vienna, and I'm head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes to myself today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and can't come out of his cave, thank Heaven!"

And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal inclinations. Some of the passers-by bowed to him, and one or two paused as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER XXI

Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation, entered the small temperance restaurant before which, as by intuition, he had paused. The elderly woman who placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure, yet none the less she smiled at him, and spoke almost familiarly--"I suppose Mrs. Ware is at the seaside, and you are keeping bachelor's hall?"

"Not quite that," he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.

There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside. Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative and invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay much greater attention to Alice's happiness and well-being in the future than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.

His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind's eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot to meet her on her return.

For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside. It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm, alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books, and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the priest's and the doctor's libraries; the thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.

He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house. His walk had brought him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground, stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west, nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the race-course on the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.

Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been secretly leading him ever since Celia's parting remark about the rheumatism, was of that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad, low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.

Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's inner room and rested heavily upon his opening speech.

"I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill," he said, laying aside his hat.

"It's nothing at all," replied Ledsmar. "Merely a stiff shoulder that I wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That's it-- throw those things on the floor."

Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.

"I must thank you, first of all, doctor," he began, "for your kindness in coming when I was ill. 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'"

"You mustn't think of it that way," said Ledsmar; "your friend came for me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man, that friend of yours. And his wife, too--both quite out of the common. I don't know when I've seen two such really genuine people. I should like to have known more of them. Are they still here?"

"They went yesterday," Theron replied. His earlier shyness had worn off, and he felt comfortably at his ease. "I don't know," he went on, "that the word 'genuine' is just what would have occurred to me to describe the Soulsbys. The, are very interesting people, as you say-- MOST interesting--and there was a time, l dare say, when I should have believed in their sincerity. But of course I saw them and their performance from the inside-- like one on the stage of a theatre, you know, instead of in the audience, and--well, I understand things better than I used to."

The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued: "I had several long talks with her; she told me very frankly the whole story of her life--and and it was decidedly queer, I can assure you! I may say to you-- you will understand what I mean--that since my talk with you, and the books you lent me, I see many things differently. Indeed, when I think upon it sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me. I can use no word for my new state short of illumination."

Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory scrutiny of his. He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of illumination. "I suppose," he said after a little, "no woman can come in contact with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him the 'story of her life,' as you call it. They all do it. The thing amounts to a law."

The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the use of the word "priest" in obvious allusion to himself. "Perhaps in fairness I ought to explain," he said, "that in her case it was only done in the course of a long talk about myself. I might say that it was by way of kindly warning to me. She saw how I had become unsettled in many--many of my former views-- and she was nervous lest this should lead me to--to--"

"To throw up the priesthood," the doctor interposed upon his hesitation. "Yes, I know the tribe. Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn't been for women. It is a very curious subject. Lots of thinkers have dipped into it, but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the whole thing. Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all the stages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows-- all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones, marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him-- so completely that the grown man feels himself more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and hangs around in her vicinity."

Theron smiled. "We priests," he said, and paused again to enjoy the words--"I suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong in the procession."

"We are considering the question impersonally," said the doctor. "First of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds. They make the constituency to which an institution based on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest."

"Yes," assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.

"Women are not a metaphysical people. They do not easily follow abstractions. They want their dogmas and religious sentiments embodied in a man, just as they do their romantic fancies. Of course you Protestants, with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal in it. Why, the very institution of celibacy itself was forced upon the early Christian Church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You should read your Jerome."

"I will--certainly," said the listener, resolving to remember the name and refer it to the old bookseller.

"Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's attitude toward the priest survives. She desires to see him surrounded by flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! It makes one sick!"

Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with a dry little laugh. "Come, let me show you round a bit," he said. "My shoulder is easier walking than sitting."

"Have you never written a book yourself?" asked Theron, getting to his feet.

"I have a thing on serpent-worship," the scientist replied--"written years ago."

"I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it," urged the other.

The doctor laughed again. "You'll have to learn German, then, I 'm afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you my laboratory."

They moved out of the room, and through a passage, Ledsmar talking as he led the way. "I took up that subject, when I was at college, by a curious chance. I kept a young monkey in my rooms, which had been born in captivity. I brought home from a beer hall--it was in Germany-- some pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey. He jumped toward it, then screamed and ran back shuddering with fright. I couldn't understand it at first. Then I saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor, was very like a little coiled-up snake. The monkey had never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid of one. That incident changed my whole life for me. Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer."

Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point of the anecdote. He looked now, without much interest, at some dark little tanks containing thick water, a row of small glass cases with adders and other lesser reptiles inside, and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits. Further on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace, and shelves bearing bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.

It was pleasanter in the conservatory--a low, spacious structure with broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of the roof. The plants were mostly orchids, he learned. He had read of them, but never seen any before. No doubt they were curious; but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them. The heat grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden. He paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief. Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.

Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul. "You must be extremely fond of flowers," he remarked.

Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder. "They have their points," he said briefly. "These are all dioecious here. Over beyond are monoecious species. My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin's theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these earlier forms."

"And is his theory right?" asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of interest.

"We may know in the course of three or four hundred years," replied Ledsmar. He looked up into his guest's face with a quizzical half-smile. "That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated question as sex is involved," he added. "We have been studying the female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions."

They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which were beginning to show bloom. "Here another task will begin next month," the doctor observed. "These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums, or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose. Humble-bees bore holes through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of the flowers, and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and utilize these holes at once, while others never do. It may be merely the old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it."

These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother his head about. Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a casual, "My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she never got around to it. They say it pays very well, though."

"The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are greedy for it, WOULD pay," commented the doctor. "Not like a blue rhododendron, in mere money, but in recognition. Lots of men have achieved a half-column in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' on a smaller basis than that."

They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small, dilapidated summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him, Theron saw a strange recumbent figure stretched at full length, apparently sound asleep, or it might be dead. Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman. He turned toward his guide in the expectation of a scene.

The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil, and was drawing his watch from his pocket. He stepped into the summer-house, and, lifting the Oriental's limp arm, took account of his pulse. Then, with head bowed low, side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally, he somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids, and made a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed. Returning to the light, he inscribed some notes in his book, put it back in his pocket, and came out. In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath the sleeper.

"This is one of my regular afternoon duties," he explained, again with the whimsical half-smile. "I am increasing his dose monthly by regular stages, and the results promise to be rather remarkable. Heretofore, observations have been made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated subjects. This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished, and watched over intelligently. He can assimilate opium enough to kill you and me and every other vertebrate creature on the premises, without turning a hair, and he hasn't got even fairly under way yet."

The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away. They walked together up the path toward the house. His mind was full now of the hostile things which Celia had said about the doctor. He had vaguely sympathized with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own. Now he felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord with hers. The doctor WAS a beast.

And yet--as they moved slowly along through the garden the thought took sudden shape in his mind--it would be only justice for him to get also the doctor's opinion of Celia. Even while they offended and repelled him, he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's experiments and occupations were those of a patient and exact man of science--a philosopher. And what he had said about women--there was certainly a great deal of acumen and shrewd observation in that. If he would only say what he really thought about Celia, and about her relations with the priest! Yes, Theron recognized now there was nothing else that he so much needed light upon as those puzzling ties between Celia and Father Forbes.

He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of the flower-beds. "Speaking of women and religion"-- he began, in as casual a tone as he could command-- "I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I develop in what you may call the--the other direction, my wife, who formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly attracted by the most unthinking and hysterical side of-- of our church system."

The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip some buds from a stalk in the bed.

"And another case," Theron went on--"of course it was all so new and strange to me--but the position which Miss Madden seems to occupy about the Catholic Church here-- I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke."

Ledsmar stood up. "My mind has better things to busy itself with than mad asses of that description," he replied. "She is not worth talking about--a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness. If she were even a type, she might be worth considering; but she is simply an abnormal sport, with a little brain addled by notions that she is like Hypatia, and a large impudence rendered intolerable by the fact that she has money. Her father is a decent man. He ought to have her whipped."

Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these outrageous words. It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow such comments upon an absent friend to pass unrebuked. Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to be considered. His mind, fluttering between these two extremes, alighted abruptly upon a compromise. He would speak so as to show his disapproval, yet not so as to prevent his finding out what he wanted to know. The desire to hear Ledsmar talk about Celia and the priest seemed now to have possessed him for a long time, to have dictated his unpremeditated visit out here, to have been growing in intensity all the while he pretended to be interested in orchids and bees and the drugged Chinaman. It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke.

"I cannot in the least assent to your characterization of the lady," he began with rhetorical dignity.

"Bless me!" interposed the doctor, with deceptive cheerfulness, "that is not required of you at all. It is a strictly personal opinion, offered merely as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses."

"But," Theron went on, feeling his way, "of course, I gathered that evening that you had prejudices in the matter; but these are rather apart from the point I had in view. We were speaking, you will remember, of the traditional attitude of women toward priests--wanting to curl their hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested to me some individual illustrations, and it occurred to me to wonder just what were the relations between Miss Madden and--and Father Forbes. She said this morning, for instance--I happened to meet her, quite by accident-- that she was going to the church to practise a new piece, and that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day. Now that would be quite an impossible remark in our--that is, in any Protestant circles--and purely as a matter of comparison, I was curious to ask you just how much there was in it. I ask you, because going there so much you have had exceptional opportunities for--"

A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted the clergyman's hesitating monologue. It began like a high-pitched, violent word, but dwindled suddenly into a groan of pain. The doctor's face, too, which had on the flash of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger, took on an expression of bodily suffering instead.

"My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful," he said hastily. "I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Ware."

Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution, he led the way without ado round the house to the front gate on the road. He had put his left hand under his coat to press it against his aching shoulder, and his right hung palpably helpless. This rendered it impossible for him to shake hands with his guest in parting.

"You're sure there's nothing I can do," said Theron, lingering on the outer side of the gate. "I used to rub my father's shoulders and back; I'd gladly--"

"Oh, not for worlds!" groaned the doctor. His anguish was so impressive that Theron, as he walked down the road, quite missed the fact that there had been no invitation to come again.

Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively following the retreating figure. Then he went in, opening the front door with his right hand, and carrying himself once more as if there were no such thing as rheumatism in the world. He wandered on through the hall into the laboratory, and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of water.

Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be, for he looked from one tank to another with a pondering, dilatory gaze. At last he plunged his hand into the opaque fluid and drew forth a long, slim, yellowish-green lizard, with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil head. The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around his wrist, darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny forked tongue.

The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it through his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval. A grim smile curled in his beard.

"Yes, you are the type," he murmured to it, with evident enjoyment in the conceit. "Your name isn't Johnny any more. It's the Rev. Theron Ware."

CHAPTER XXII

The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth looking at. A spacious, irregularly defined clearing in the forest lay level as a tennis-court, under the soft haze of autumn sunlight. In the centre was a large, roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint, but stained and weather-beaten with time. Behind it were some lines of horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction, where the trees began, the eye caught fragmentary glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages, withdrawn from full view among the saplings and underbrush. At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly white in their newness. The more remote of these tents fell into an orderly arrangement of semi-circular form, facing that part of the engirdling woods where the trees were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage was lifted highest from the ground. Inside this half-ring of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheatre cut in two. In the centre, just under the edge of the roof of boughs, rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air stand for musicians. In front of this, and leading from it on the level of its floor, there projected a platform, railed round with aggressively rustic woodwork. The nearest benches came close about this platform.

At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough signs of life about this encampment. The four or five hundred people who were in constant residence were eating their dinners in the big boarding-house, or the cottages or the tents. It was not the time of day for strangers. Even when services were in progress by daylight, the regular attendants did not make much of a show, huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the auditorium, by comparison with the great green and blue expanses of nature about them.

The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the shadows gathered, big clusters of kerosene torches, hung on the trees facing the audience were lighted. The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights, and the size and importance of what they illumined. The preacher, bending forward over the rails of the platform, and fastening his eyes upon the abashed faces of those on the "anxious seat" beneath him, borrowed an effect of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him, from the flickering reflections on the branches far above, from the cool night air which stirred across the clearing. The change was in the blood of those who saw and heard him, too. The decorum and half-heartedness of their devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches into a fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began. And if there was in the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers or exhortations could stir their pulses, they sang and groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.

But in the evening not all were worshippers. For a dozen miles round on the country-side, young farm-workers and their girls regarded the camp-meeting as perhaps the chief event of the year--no more to be missed than the country fair or the circus, and offering, from many points of view, more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either. Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less so because all the rules established by the Presiding Elders for the regulation of strangers took it for granted that they would act as viciously as they knew how. These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches where the light was dim. More often they stood outside, in the circular space between the tents and the benches, and mingled cat-calls, drovers' yelps, and all sorts of mocking cries and noises with the "Amens" of the earnest congregation. Their rough horse-play on the fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough; everybody knew that much worse things went on further out in the surrounding darkness. Indeed, popular report gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house.

Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation for this scandal in the large income they derived from their unruly visitors' gate-money. This was unfair. No doubt the money played its part, but there was something else far more important. The pious dwellers in the camp, intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character and environment of the heroic early days, felt the need of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to bring out the spirit they sought. Theirs was pre-eminently a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful fair weather, but flamed high in the storm. The throng of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both sexes, with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct, brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil, with whom the chosen could do battle face to face. The daylight services became more and more perfunctory, as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason that THEN came the fierce wrestle with a Beelzebub of flesh and blood. And it was not so one-sided a contest, either!

No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit. Careless or mischievous young people who were pushed into the foremost ranks of the mockers, and stood grinning and grimacing under the lights, would of a sudden feel a spell clamped upon them. They would hear a strange, quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense of a piercing, soul-commanding gleam in his eye-- not at all to be resisted. These occult forces would take control of them, drag them forward as in a dream to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like worms in the dust. And then the preacher would descend, and the elders advance, and the torch-fires would sway and dip before the wind of the mighty roar that went up in triumph from the brethren.

These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they made the week-day evenings exciting, reacted with an effect of crushing dulness upon the Sunday services. The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from Saturday night to Monday morning. Every year attempts were made to rescind or modify this rule, and this season at least three-fourths of the laymen in attendance had signed a petition in favor of opening the gates. The two Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers, resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius. The controversy reached a point where Theron's Presiding Elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization. Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath, which ended all discussion. Sometimes its arguments seemed to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always they were clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery, and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money. When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. The two factions found that the difference between them had melted out of existence. They sat entranced by the charm of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions. The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first time. He was the veritable hero of the week.

The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get away by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power had a right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow. He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the Message next day might be clearer and more luminous still.

Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp. Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally of this piece of woodland-- a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields-- but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he knew where he wanted to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.

Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more rounded in its outlines, and with a glow of health on its whole surface. Under the chin were the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy mind. His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin, dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed at the breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure. He wore a shining tall hat, and, in haste though he was, took pains not to knock it against low-hanging branches.

All had gone well--more than well--with him. The second Quarterly Conference had passed without a ripple. Both the attendance and the collections at his church were larger than ever before, and the tone of the congregation toward him was altered distinctly for the better. As for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress he had made in his own estimation. He had taken Sister Soulsby's advice, and the results were already wonderful. He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand foolish trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had racked his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength. He borrowed all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius public library, and could swim with a calm mastery and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him. He dallied pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen aspects of the case against revealed religion, ranging from the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers. They amused him; they were all before him to choose; and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act of selection. There was a sense of the luxurious in this position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres. He ceased to grow indignant at things below or outside his standards, and he bought a small book which treated of the care of the hand and finger nails.

Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that shapely hands played so important a part in pulpit oratory. For that matter, she now accepted whatever he said or did with admirable docility. It was months since he could remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward him.

She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any other resort, during the summer, but had worked outside in her garden more than usual. This was inexpensive, and it seemed to do her as much good as a holiday could have done. Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing; it had not slackened at all from the revival pitch. At the outset she had tried several times to talk with her husband upon this subject. He had discouraged conversation about her soul and its welfare, at first obliquely, then, under compulsion, with some directness. His thoughts were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast, abstract schemes of creation and the government of the universe, and it only diverted and embarrassed his mind to try to fasten it upon the details of personal salvation. Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.

She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano. The knack of a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned to her after a few weeks, and she made music which Theron supposed was very good--for her. It pleased him, at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had a far greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon the memories of the yellow and blue room which the sounds always brought up. Although three months had passed, Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the piano, or even sent in a bill. This impressed him as being peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized its delicacy by not going near Thurston's at all.

An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short cuts across open pastures, but for the most part on forest paths, brought Theron to the brow of a small knoll, free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the powdered remains of last year's foliage; the leaves above him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn. A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air, and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.

Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes! there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low, rhythmic throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.

He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook much of what he had come to see.

The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the crowds were--one massed about an enclosure in which young men were playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where the shade of overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs bared to the thighs, were paddling about, under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors scattered here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven, monkish figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers, the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.

And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius. He gazed in mingled amazement and exhilaration upon the spectacle. There seemed to be literally thousands of people on the open fields before him, and apparently there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods round about. The noises which arose from this multitude-- the shouts of the lads in the water, the playful squeals of the girls in the swings, the fused uproar of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent, ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from some invisible distance in the greenwood--charmed his ears with their suggestion of universal merriment. He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful regret-- as he remembered that other gathering in the forest which he had left behind.

At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the morrow might bring! Evidently he was on the wrong side of the circle for the headquarters of the festivities. He turned and walked to the right through the beeches, making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at play. At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing, and found himself at the very edge of that largest throng of all, which had been too far away for comprehension at the beginning. There was no mystery now. A rough, narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd, dividing it into two compact halves. Inside this shed, protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards, on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep abreast of the crowd's thirst for beer. The actions of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron. They moved like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take money and give change, and with the other incessantly sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward in their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time. Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out, on both sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar, and through the babel of eager cries rose without pause the racket of mallets tapping new kegs.

Theron had never seen any considerable number of his fellow-citizens engaged in drinking lager beer before. His surprise at the facility of those behind the bar began to yield, upon observation, to a profound amazement at the thirst of those before it. The same people seemed to be always in front, emptying the glasses faster than the busy men inside could replenish them, and clamoring tirelessly for more. Newcomers had to force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once there they stayed until pushed bodily aside. There were actually women to be seen here and there in the throng, elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the front. Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward, from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls standing on the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.

Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed. Once a sharp fight broke out, just at the end of the bar nearest Theron, and one young man was knocked down. A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved combatant up on his legs again, consenting under the kindly pressure of the crowd to shake hands with his antagonist, and join him in more beer. The incident caught his fancy. There was something very pleasingly human, he thought, in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs, and this frank and genial reconciliation.

Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale display of thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious of a notion that he should like to try a glass of beer. He recalled having heard that lager was really a most harmless beverage. Of course it was out of the question that he should show himself at the bar. Perhaps some one would bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl. He looked about for a possible messenger. Turning, he found himself face to face with two smiling people, into whose eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded blankness. Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both hands in greeting. It was Father Forbes and Celia.

"We stole down upon you unawares," said the priest, in his cheeriest manner. He wore a brown straw hat, and loose clothes hardly at all clerical in form, and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own. "We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you whom we saw, here among the sinners!"

"I am in love with your sinners," responded Theron, as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. "I've had five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they've bored the head off me."

CHAPTER XXIII

When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them. Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls, some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia's; and there was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.

"That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white stockings of hers," remarked Celia; "some friend ought to tell her to dye them."

"Or pad them," suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. "I daresay the question of swings and ladies' stockings hardly arises with you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?"

Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. "I should say not!" he replied.

"I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!" said Celia. "You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them."

"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. "Don't let's even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting. Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn't a single person who will mention the subject of his soul to any other person all day long."

"I should think the assumption was a safe one," said the priest, smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought, "it be by way of a genial profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my soul!' when they missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time. I daresay they're all dead."

"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first," remarked Theron, musingly. "I date from that experience a whole new life. I have been greatly struck lately, in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate' to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them. The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures of hell-fire surrounding the sinner's death-bed than anything else. You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were there."

"There isn't so much difference as you think," said Father Forbes, dispassionately. "Your people keep examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They have always been like that."

"What nonsense!" cried Celia. "I have no patience with such gloomy rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament, and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones."

"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, "we will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer. What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr. Ware," he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, "that what we are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa. The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been forced to play second fiddle to other races--because he lacked the right sort of a drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call 'porther,' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best. He will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church--with the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown-- will be the Church of America."

"Let us have some more lager at once," put in Celia. "This revolution can't be hurried forward too rapidly."

Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse was in jest, how much in earnest. "It seems to me," he said, "that as things are going, it doesn't look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must surely come to see in time."

Father Forbes laughed outright this time. "My dear Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, "of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage's natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples' superstitions alone. That is always the ultimate view of the crowd."

"But I don't see," observed Theron, "granting that all this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise."

"The Church is always compromising," explained the priest, "only it does it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music"--he made a little mock bow here to Celia--"the music at least is divine. There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said, an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish civilize themselves--you observe them diligently engaged in the process down below there-- and the social roughness of their church becomes softened and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted toward it. In the end, it will embrace them all, and be modified by them, and in turn influence their development, till you will have a new nation and a new national church, each representative of the other."

"And all this is to be done by lager beer!" Theron ventured to comment, jokingly. He was conscious of a novel perspiration around the bridge of his nose, which was obviously another effect of the drink.

The priest passed the pleasantry by. "No," he said seriously; "what you must see is that there must always be a church. If one did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. It is needed, first and foremost, as a police force. It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance. It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere for the growth of young children. It furnishes the best obtainable social machinery for marrying off one's daughters, getting to know the right people, patching up quarrels, and so on. The priesthood earn their salaries as the agents for these valuable social arrangements. Their theology is thrown in as a sort of intellectual diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent organization. There are some who get excited about this part of it, just as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun rises and sets to exemplify their ceremonies. Others take their duties more quietly, and, understanding just what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you and me."

Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment by a grave bow. "Yes, that is the idea--to make the best of it," he said, and fastened his regard boldly this time upon the swings.

"We were both ordained by our bishops," continued the priest, "at an age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have trusted our combined wisdom to buy a horse for them."

"And I was married," broke in Theron, with an eagerness almost vehement, "when I had only just been ordained! At the worst, YOU had only the Church fastened upon your back, before you were old enough to know what you wanted. It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is different with me."

A marked silence followed this outburst. The Rev. Mr. Ware had never spoken of his marriage to either of these friends before; and something in their manner seemed to suggest that they did not find the subject inviting, now that it had been broached. He himself was filled with a desire to say more about it. He had never clearly realized before what a genuine grievance it was. The moisture at the top of his nose merged itself into tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity of the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him. His whole life had been fettered and darkened by it. He turned his gaze from the swings toward Celia, to claim the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.

But Celia was otherwise engaged. A young man had come up to her--a tall and extremely thin young man, soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt, hollow-eyed face, the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale. He had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman; but he was speaking to Miss Madden in the confidential tones of an equal.

"I can do nothing at all with him," this newcomer said to her. "He'll not be said by me. Perhaps he'd listen to you!"

"It's likely I'll go down there!" said Celia. "He may do what he likes for all me! Take my advice, Michael, and just go your way, and leave him to himself. There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away. After the warnings he's had, if he WILL bring trouble on himself, let's make it no affair of ours."

Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry with this young man. "Mr. Ware," said Celia, here, "let me introduce you to my brother Michael--my full brother."

Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the other's formal bow, to say something about their having met in the dark, inside the church. But Celia held up her hand. "I'm afraid, Mr. Ware," she said hurriedly, "that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton. I will apologize for the infliction in advance."

Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another young man who had come up the path from the crowd below, and was close upon them. The minister recognized in him a figure which had seemed to be the centre of almost every group about the bar that he had studied in detail. He was a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair, and the handsome, regularly carved face of an actor. He advanced with a smiling countenance and unsteady step-- his silk hat thrust back upon his head, his frock-coat and vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and saluted the company with amiability.

"I saw you up here, Father Forbes," he said, with a thickened and erratic utterance. "Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in the last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they know it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't nobody can stop me. The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address a few words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!"

The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch which the speaker had laid upon it, and shook his head in gentle deprecation. "No, no; you must excuse me, Theodore," he said. "We mustn't meddle in politics, you know."

"Politics be damned!" urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's other arm, and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down the path. "I say, boys" he shouted to those below, "here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come down and address the meeting. Come on, Father! Come down, and have a drink with the boys!"

It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the priest's arm this time. "Go away with you!" she snapped in low, angry tones at the intruder. "You should be ashamed of yourself! If you can't keep sober yourself, you can at least keep your hands off the priest. I should think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state as this, than to come where I am. If you've no respect for yourself, you might have that much respect for me! And before strangers, too!

"Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?" remarked the peccant Theodore, straightening himself with an elaborate effort. "You've bought these woods, have you? I've got a hundred friends here, all the same, for every one you'll ever have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget it."

"Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come insulting decent people," said Celia.

"Before strangers, too!" the young man called out, with beery sarcasm. "Oh, we'll take care of the strangers all right." He had not seemed to be aware of Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he turned to him now with a knowing grin. "I'm running for the Assembly, Mr. Ware," he said, speaking loudly and with deliberate effort to avoid the drunken elisions and comminglings to which his speech tended, "and I want you to fix up the Methodists solid for me. I'm going to drive over to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some of the boys in a barouche, and I'll put a twenty-dollar bill on their plate. Here it is now, if you want to see it."

As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron gathered his wits together.

"You'd better not go this evening," he said, as convincingly as he knew how; "because the gates will be closed very early, and the Saturday-evening services are of a particularly special nature, quite reserved for those living on the grounds."

"Rats!" said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning the search for the bill. "Why don't you speak out like a man, and say you think I'm too drunk?"

"I don't think that is a question which need arise between us, Mr. Madden," murmured Theron, confusedly.

"Oh, don't you make any mistake! A hell of a lot of questions arise between us, Mr. Ware," cried Theodore, with a sudden accession of vigor in tone and mien. "And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of 'em is, I say, why don't you leave our girls alone? They've got their own priests to make fools of themselves over, without any sneak of a Protestant parson coming meddling round them. You're a married man into the bargain; and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my sister bought and paid for. Oh, I've seen the entry in Thurston's books! You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk--why--"

These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes here clapped a hand abruptly over the offending mouth, and flung his free arm in a tight grip around the young man's waist. "Come with me, Michael!" he said, and the two men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a sharp pace off into the woods.

Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth. "It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him," he heard her say, as if between clenched teeth.

The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again, were still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a Medusa mask. The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck as white, it seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her form, as visible as the quivering track of a gust of wind across a pond, awed and frightened him.

Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost. He drew her arm into his, and turned their backs upon the picnic scene.

"Let us walk a little up the path into the woods," he said, "and get away from all this."

"The further away the better," she answered bitterly, and he felt the shiver run through her again as she spoke.

The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing platform rose again above all other sounds. They moved up the woodland path, their steps insensibly falling into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from sight among the trees.

CHAPTER XXIV

As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees, then threw herself face forward upon the soft green bark which had formed itself above the roots of the ancient mother-tree. Her companion looked down in pained amazement at what he saw. Her body shook with the violence of recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands, with stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss and tangle of tiny vines, and tore them by the roots. The half-stifled sounds of weeping that arose from where her face grovelled in the leaves were terrible to his ears. He knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless suspense at the strange figure she made. It seemed a cruelly long time that she lay there, almost at his feet, struggling fiercely with the fury that was in her.

All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild weeping ceased. Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief wiped the tears and leafy fragments from her face. She rearranged her hat and the braids of her hair with swift, instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris from her front, and sprang to her feet.

"I'm all right now," she said briskly. There was palpable effort in her light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile which she forced upon her blotched and perturbed countenance, but they were only too welcome to Theron's anxious mood.

"Thank God!" he blurted out, all radiant with relief. "I feared you were going to have a fit--or something."

Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a genuine surrender to the comic side of his visible fright. The mirth came back into the brown depths of her eyes again, and her face cleared itself of tear-stains and the marks of agitation. "I AM a nice quiet party for a Methodist minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?" she cried, shaking her skirts and smiling at him.

"I am not a Methodist minister--please!" answered Theron--"at least not today--and here--with you! I am just a man-- nothing more--a man who has escaped from lifelong imprisonment, and feels for the first time what it is to be free!"

"Ah, my friend," Celia said, shaking her head slowly, "I'm afraid you deceive yourself. You are not by any means free. You are only looking out of the window of your prison, as you call it. The doors are locked, just the same."

"I will smash them!" he declared, with confidence. "Or for that matter, I HAVE smashed them--battered them to pieces. You don't realize what progress I have made, what changes there have been in me since that night, you remember that wonderful night! I am quite another being, I assure you! And really it dates from way beyond that-- why, from the very first evening, when I came to you in the church. The window in Father Forbes' room was open, and I stood by it listening to the music next door, and I could just faintly see on the dark window across the alley-way a stained-glass picture of a woman. I suppose it was the Virgin Mary. She had hair like yours, and your face, too; and that is why I went into the church and found you. Yes, that is why."

Celia regarded him with gravity. "You will get yourself into great trouble, my friend," she said.

"That's where you're wrong," put in Theron. "Not that I'd mind any trouble in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but I'm not going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that. I've learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used to, and I can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the right side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I was too green before. I took the thing seriously, and I let every mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins and needles. I don't do that any more. I've taken a new measure of life. I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going to have my share of it. Why should I deliberately deny myself all possible happiness for the rest of my days, simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in my teens? Other men are not eternally punished like that, for what they did as boys, and I won't submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy myself as--as Father Forbes."

Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again. "Poor man, to call HIM free!" she said: "why, he is bound hand and foot. You don't in the least realize how he is hedged about, the work he has to do, the thousand suspicious eyes that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop down upon him. And then think of his sacrifice-- the great sacrifice of all--to never know what love means, to forswear his manhood, to live a forlorn, celibate life-- you have no idea how sadly that appeals to a woman."

"Let us sit down here for a little," said Theron; "we seem at the end of the path." She seated herself on the root-based mound, and he reclined at her side, with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.

"I can see what you mean," he went on, after a pause. "But to me, do you know, there is an enormous fascination in celibacy. You forget that I know the reverse of the medal. I know how the mind can be cramped, the nerves harassed, the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence darkened and belittled, by--by the other thing. I have never talked to you before about my marriage."

"I don't think we'd better talk about it now," observed Celia. "There must be many more amusing topics."

He missed the spirit of her remark. "You are right," he said slowly. "It is too sad a thing to talk about. But there! it is my load, and I bear it, and there's nothing more to be said."

Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy abstractedly with a ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's penumbra of apparel.

"No," she said. "We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things, but it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better. I don't know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red hair?"

"I think it's a kind of light brown," answered Theron, with an effect of exerting his memory.

"It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-glass windows," was Celia's comment.

"Oh-h!" he murmured reproachfully, "as if--as if-- but I won't say what I was going to."

"That's not fair!" she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. "You have me at such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my head, exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart in candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your mind, like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle and mysterious in your reserves."

Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate chaff. "No, it is you who are secretive," he said. "You never told me about--about the piano."

The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that he should ever have the courage to utter it-- but here it was. He laid firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and drew himself a trifle nearer to her. "I could never have consented to take it, I'm afraid," he went on in a low voice, if I had known. And even as it is, I fear it won't be possible."

"What are you afraid of?" asked Celia. "Why shouldn't you take it? People in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to them, do they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often read of donation parties-- that's what they're called, isn't it?--where everybody is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well, then, I've simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless you mean that my being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you were quite free from that kind of prejudice."

"So I am! Believe me, I am!" urged Theron. "When I'm with you, it seems impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted in their natures as to take account of such things. It is another atmosphere that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a thought-- about our difference of creed--would enter my head? In fact," he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, "there isn't any such difference. Whatever your religion is, it's mine too. You remember--you adopted me as a Greek."

"Did I?" she rejoined. "Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without a leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek made any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But seriously-- while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject: I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had no such intention, when I picked the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to Thurston's people about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as a possibly pleasant thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it. It is the only way that a person with means, with plenty of money, can preserve any freshness of character. If they stop to think what it would be prudent to do, they get crusted over immediately. That is the curse of rich people-- they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every impulse toward unusual actions. They get to feel that it is more necessary for them to be cautious and conventional than it is for others. I would rather work at a wash-tub than occupy that attitude toward my bank account. I fight against any sign of it that I detect rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for the piano; and I don't see that you've anything to say about it at all."

It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought of Miss Madden's riches had never before assumed prominence in Theron's mind. Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred to him that the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a personal fortune. He knew so little of rich people and their ways!

He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or being near her at all.

What surprises me," he heard himself saying, "is that you are contented to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel--go abroad--see the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with the luxuries of big cities--and that sort of thing."

Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with a pensive gaze. "Sometime--no doubt I will sometime," she said abstractedly.

"One reads so much nowadays," he went on, "of American heiresses going to Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen. I suppose you will do that too. Princes would fight one another for you."

The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impassivity of her countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy distance. "That is the old-fashioned idea," she said, in a musing tone, "that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues, or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man. The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the slightest property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous, as--what shall I say?--as the notion of your being taken out with a chain on your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal bridge. I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other thought were possible to me."

"That is not the generally accepted view, I should think," faltered Theron.

"No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast as we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live like real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl about on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not related to them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any rules for me. If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them, why, so much the worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it is no reason why I should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand erect on my legs."

Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips, at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at her--"mad ass, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness." The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to breathe the same air, and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to touch the ribbon of her dress-- and all the while to hold these poisoned darts of abuse levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous. He could have killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove the foul things from his mind-- scattered them back into the darkness. He felt that he had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the groan imaginary?

Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy. Theron's eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness that she had astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be thinking of him at all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and noble ideals. Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had been saying was great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran through his veins at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to the sensation he used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader bawled forth that opening clause: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary," etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration of Independence he had been listening to.

He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her, nearer than before. "Apparently, then, you will never marry." His voice trembled a little.

"Most certainly not!" said Celia.

"You spoke so feelingly a little while ago," he ventured along, with hesitation, "about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing himself--never knowing what love meant-- appealed to a woman. I should think that the idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder still."

"I don't remember that we mentioned THAT," she replied. "How do you mean--sacrificing herself?"

Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and boldly patted and caressed them. "You, so beautiful and so free, with such fine talents and abilities," he murmured; "you, who could have the whole world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know what love means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that my imagination can conceive."

Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears traced elements of tenderness. "You must regulate that imagination of yours," she said playfully. "It conceives the thing that is not. Pray, when"--and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of arch mock-seriousness--"pray, when did I describe myself in these terms? When did I say that I should never know what love meant?"

For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his eyes, and held his face against the draperies encircling her. "I cannot think!" he groaned.

The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts. The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread, wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism, his nature contained.

"We were speaking of our respective religions," he heard Celia say, as imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.

"Yes," he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin as well, was very strong upon him. "Yes?" he repeated.

"I cannot talk to you like that," she said; and he sat up again shamefacedly.

"Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago," he faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might be annoyed began to oppress him.

"Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That entitles you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a Catholic."

Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible--was there coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? "Yes--I know," he murmured.

"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said--you cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is in. Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things I like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews threw them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life. The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and dirt and the thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes one almost forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. It is that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world. It was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without sex in it."

"I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room," said Theron, feeling more himself again. "I wondered if they quite went with the statues."

The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.

"They get along together better than you suppose," she answered. "Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all these were similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its Immaculate Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that man turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the deepest of all our instincts--love of woman, who is at once daughter and wife and mother. It is that that makes the world go round."

Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a confident yet wistful smile on his face.

"lt is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute," he said, in steady, low tone. "Then you would realize the tremendous truth of what you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached out and grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover that your heart was bursting with it as well."

Celia turned and looked at him.

"I myself," he went on, "would not have known, half an hour ago, what you meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than you. I am a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes--because the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little child, and you were the mother that I idolized."

Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. "I find myself liking you better at this moment," she said, with gravity, "than I have ever liked you before."

Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. "Come!" she cried, her voice and manner all vivacity once more, "we have been here long enough."

Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.

A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels tied by the tails slung across his shoulder, stood at the entrance to the glade, some dozen paces away, regarding them with undisguised interest. Upon the discovery that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted progress through the woods, whistling softly as he went, and vanished among the trees.

"Heavens above!" groaned Theron, shudderingly.

"Know him?" he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on his companion's face. "I should think I did! He spades my-- my wife's garden for her. He used to bring our milk. He works in the law office of one of my trustees-- the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very friendly indeed with my--with Mrs. Ware. Oh, what shall I do? It may easily mean my ruin!"

Celia looked at him attentively. The color had gone out of his face, and with it the effect of earnestness and mental elevation which, a minute before, had caught her fancy. "Somehow, I fear that I do not like you quite so much just now, my friend," she remarked.

"In God's name, don't say that!" urged Theron. He raised his voice in agitated entreaty. "You don't know what these people are--how they would leap at the barest hint of a scandal about me. In my position I am a thousand times more defenceless than any woman. Just a single whisper, and I am done for!"

"Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware," said Celia, slowly, "that to be seen sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts it may raise as to a gentleman's intellectual condition, need not necessarily blast his social reputation beyond all hope whatever."

Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning. Then he winced visibly under it, and put out his hands to implore her. "Forgive me! Forgive me!" he pleaded. "I was beside myself for the moment with the fright of the thing. Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!" He made haste to support this daring use of her name. "I have been so happy today--so deeply, so vastly happy-- like the little child I spoke of--and that is so new in my lonely life--that--the suddenness of the thing--it just for the instant unstrung me. Don't be too hard on me for it! And I had hoped, too--I had had such genuine heartfelt pleasure in the thought--that, an hour or two ago, when you were unhappy, perhaps it had been some sort of consolation to you that I was with you."

Celia was looking away. When he took her hand she did not withdraw it, but turned and nodded in musing general assent to what he had said. "Yes, we have both been unstrung, as you call it, today," she said, decidedly out of pitch. "Let each forgive the other, and say no more about it."

She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again in silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to meet them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.

"I go back to my slavery--my double bondage," said Theron, letting his voice sink to a sigh. "But even if I am put on the rack for it, I shall have had one day of glory."

"I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day-- or of a few minutes in that day," said Celia.

Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.

Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her "good-bye" beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning waltz-music.