PART IV

CHAPTER XXV

Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course. All along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore him sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss to another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort of sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took his appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening, apparently to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.

When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified the clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could have groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the light, and bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time. In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest and soulful thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure, tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost in his mind. Some formless resignation restrained him from the act itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad luminous face of the satellite. "You are our God," he murmured. "Hers and mine! You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of the angels on earth. I am speechless with reverence for you both."

It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of sylvan mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers and water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen before--a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal skies. His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of the fairy that possessed his soul. The place, though he never found it, became real to him. As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave forth light.

With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account of realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds of nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to all these facts.

What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait. He waited for a week--then for another week. The conclusion that the initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From this it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.

Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting this to be true.

And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time reined up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a creature of whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all things.

And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist to it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and foul innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen to him if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up in the Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a charge, it would be one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there was nothing to prove. At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow bigots confused slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to convict him, then it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry, in advance of his condemnation. His relation to the church would be the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer world it would be different. And supposing he did withdraw from the ministry?

Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious, unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question. The thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave him a sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing for books or insurance policies, writing for newspapers-- and remained frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms and forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword of a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course. It was absurd not to have thought of that before.

He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods, when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that, if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she had been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got into hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen with her. He had walked into the woods with her--"the further the better" had been her own words--out of pure kindliness, and the desire to lead her away from the scene of her brother's and her own humiliation. But why amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell her, on the instant, how he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would bring her, eager and devoted, to his succor.

That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene triumph of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth could command, and the most exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the question answered itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning heaven of a future until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him, "Come!" he must not be in the position to reply, "I should like to, but unfortunately I am tied by the leg." He should have to leave Octavius, leave the ministry, leave everything. He could not begin too soon to face these contingencies.

Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her, it was a mere vague "sometime I may." But the harder masculine sense, Theron felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point to these loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to clear away the obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.

One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast, complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in front came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.

Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped-- as so many people almost daily stopped--to admire the garden of the parsonage. One of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other--

"My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden, and it doesn't begin to compare with this."

"It seems like a sinful waste to me," said her companion.

"No-o," the other hesitated. "No, I don't think quite that-- if you can afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just LOOK at that cactus!"

The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the parlor to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the two women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently came from homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they turned a corner.

He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped out into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it heretofore--not altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined somewhere in the recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and examined the flowers with great attentiveness. The season was advancing, and he saw that many plants had gone out of bloom. But what a magnificent plenitude of blossoms still remained!

Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias--that was what the stranger had said. Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the same it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge, imbricated, flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must be unusual. He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of just one lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and there had been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly distinct in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of course these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here all about him.

As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded at him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems, fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. "Yes, Levi Gorringe paid for us!" He almost heard their mocking declaration.

Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they had spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon upon the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures over. For that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took obvious pains to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the better, he felt himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that offish and unwifely fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its results.

She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom in hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and began as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened, as she caught his look.

"Shall you be home for supper?" she asked, in her iciest tone.

He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. "I may or I may not," he replied. "It is quite impossible for me to say." He turned on his heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the street.

It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and the grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return from the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia to meet him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the Catholic church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The organ inside was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence on the curtains of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was no one visible at the home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little sadly. It was weary work waiting for the signal that never came.

But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers in his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for his wife's garden? It was time--high time--to face this question. And his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did, and marching down to the rail to kneel beside her--that was a thing to be thought of, too.

Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It was incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even shape a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives, or of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them, their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether. But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not himself know just what these grounds were, it was certain enough that THEY knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what happened.

It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare, well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away, in the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands were in his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth. He looked the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.

Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given a great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe did not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any formal greeting.

"I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius," Theron remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the photographs.

"They ought to; they charge New York prices," observed the lawyer, sententiously.

Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his trustee.

"Speaking of the price of things," he said, with an effort of arrogance in his measured tone, "I have never had an opportunity before of mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for my--for MY garden."

"Why mention it now?" queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.

"Because--" began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated--"because--well, it raises a question of my being under obligation, which I--"

"Oh, no, sir," said the lawyer; "put that out of your mind. You are no more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy about that. Neither of us owes the other anything."

"Not even good-will--I take that to be your meaning," retorted Theron, with some heat.

"The words are yours, sir," responded Gorringe, coolly. "I do not object to them."

"As you like," put in the other. "If it be so, why, then all the more reason why I should, under the circumstances--"

"Under what circumstances?" interposed the lawyer. "Let us be clear about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?"

He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the black mustache.

"The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on."

"And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general--and you in particular--were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out of date?"

"I understand your sneer well enough," retorted Theron, "but that can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these plants--or to smuggle them in-- but never once deigned to hint to me that you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not have known to this day where they came from."

Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim amusement about the corner of his mouth. "I should have thought," he said with dry deliberation, "that possibly this fact might have raised in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be intended for you at all."

"That is precisely it, sir," said Theron. There were people passing, and he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he felt, to shout. "That is it-- they were not intended for me."

"Well, then, what are you talking about?" The lawyer's speech had become abrupt almost to incivility.

"I think my remarks have been perfectly clear," said the minister, with dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion. It occurred to him to add, "Please remember that I am not in the witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional."

Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching scrutiny. "You may thank your stars you're not!" he said, with significance.

What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting away.

"I do not see," he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to take on an injured and plaintive inflection--"I do not see why you should adopt this tone toward me-- Brother Gorringe."

The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.

"If I have unconsciously offended you in any way," Theron went on, "I beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between a pastor and a probationer who--"

"No," Gorringe broke in; "quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any quarrel, Mr. Ware." He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, "It wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a creature as you are."

Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.

"I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply," he remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a "poor creature" grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his brain.

"No, I suppose not," snapped Gorringe. "You're not the sort to stand up to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody weaker than yourself-- a defenceless woman, for instance."

"Oh--ho!" said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves in order, he began to understand. "Oh--ho!" he said again, and nodded his head in token of comprehension.

The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him. "What do you mean?" he demanded peremptorily.

"Mean?" said the minister. "Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to explain to you."

It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his temper, Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in show of a bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's dusky face, and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. "It is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety-- at this stage," he added.

"Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?"

"Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular," returned Theron, "not even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer seems to prefer."

"Go and strike my name off the list!" said Gorringe, with rising passion. "I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a probationer of yours--my God!"

"That will be a pity--from one point of view," remarked Theron, still with the ironical smile on his lips. "You seemed to enter upon the new life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar, and shared your enthusiasm at the time." He had spoken throughout with studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.

"You had better go away!" broke forth Gorringe. "If you don't, I shall forget myself."

"For the first time?" asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.

Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and, drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth, his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was merged in the crowd.

"Well, I'm damned!" he said aloud to himself.

The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night. He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.

"I've just been talking to a man," said the lawyer, "who's so much meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away. He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about her-- something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole footstool. I almost wish, by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!"

"Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens," remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.

CHAPTER XXVI

He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be on his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of the charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed to have cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness to his heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his continuing to sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded and coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no longer be any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to wash his hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics which they called their spiritual life.

And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where he wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no further. Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be of conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his to say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact, which could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested to have explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's obvious disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself had been magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out of his way to call the man "brother," and to give him an opportunity of behaving like a gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted. Gorringe was not the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise to their level. He had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew how. It was more important and satisfactory to recall that he had also shown a complete comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The fact that he had recognized it was enough--was, in fact, everything.

In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone to his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind of character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the single thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he might even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly unpleasant.

The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It was still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone at the table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.

Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation to sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly displayed his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair opposite his host.

"It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before," he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side, and the housekeeper came in to lay another place. "Yet it might have been years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the lapse of time has wrought in me."

"I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware," remarked Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the dishes in the centre of the table. "May I send you a bit of this boiled mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself."

"I was saying," Theron observed, after some moments had passed in silence, "that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my beliefs, my whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you, my first coming here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous change that has come over me; and I owe it all to you."

"I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature," said the priest, politely smiling.

"Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!" said Theron, with fervor. "I look back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible that, such a little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant and unimaginative clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and actually proud of my limitations."

"And you have larger ambitions now?" asked the other. "Pray let me help you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily we jog along between the rails, the better it is for us."

"Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry," declared Theron. The statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as his companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: "That is, as I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much longer. With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things to interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies, so that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in our church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have its support, the rest is intolerable, hideous."

Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. "It is a pretty serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it for granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit yourself." He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather chilled his listener's enthusiasm.

"Oh, yes,", Theron made answer; "I shall do nothing rash. But I have a good many plans for the future."

Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of silence fell upon the table.

"I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic," Theron ventured, at last. "I have not seen any of you since then."

The priest shook his head and sighed. "No," he said. "It is a bad business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past fortnight. That young man who was rude to you--of course it was mere drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part--has got himself into a serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family, and we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly upset his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard to bear as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You remember Michael, the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick consumption. He will hardly last till snow flies."

"Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!" Theron spoke with tremulous earnestness. It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to him.

"It is very hard upon them all," the priest went on. "Michael is as sweet and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He is the apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do you know the father, Mr. Madden?"

Theron shook his head. "I think I have seen him," he said. "A small man, with gray whiskers."

"A peasant," said Father Forbes, "but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live in. The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole families go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children in the cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year, there would have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth. These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens, you know."

"I didn't know," said Theron. "It is very strange-- and very sad." His startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.

"The sister--Miss Madden--seems extremely strong," he remarked tentatively.

"Celia may escape the general doom," said the priest. His guest noted that he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and that his gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its tone. "THAT would be too dreadful to think of," he added.

Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the thought.

"She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart," the priest proceeded, "and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that is always a bad thing."

"I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless spells," said Theron. "She said that then she banged on her piano at all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman. A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?"

Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. "What, our Celia?" he said. "Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the world. She is as unique as-- what shall I say?--as the Irish are among races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she-- she might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it; their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else. The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them all."

Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. "I love to hear you talk," he said simply.

An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and unique effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest as with an atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves before it. Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down upon these worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's attitude really was. The enigma fascinated him.

Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating. He pushed aside his cheese-plate. "I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race sometimes," he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. "But I make up for it other times--most of the time--by scolding them. If it were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous."

"Ah," said Theron, deprecatingly, "who would not be enthusiastic in talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you spoke, I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the privilege of knowing her--we who do know her well--although of course your friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine-- than mine could ever hope to be."

The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: "I hardly know how to describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same. We had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the picnic, after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about it?"

Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to negative the suggestion.

"Her talk," continued Theron, "gave me quite new ideas of the range and capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character. In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of attention--the pride of the place."

"I think she has as much praise as is good for her," remarked the priest, quietly.

"And here's a thing that puzzles me," pursued Mr. Ware. "I was immensely surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart--or at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too, so that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great ability."

The priest smiled in a dubious way. "Don't borrow unnecessary alarm about that, Mr. Ware," he said, with studied smoothness of modulated tones. "These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of the idea that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable character. It has grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well, and they pursue it with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual diversions open to us here, and they make the most of this one. It amuses them, and it is not without its charms for me, in my capacity as an interested observer. It is a part of the game that they should pretend to themselves that they detest each other. In reality I fancy that they like each other very much. At any rate, there is nothing to be disturbed about."

His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron that he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if this purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider he really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.

"Of course," he said, "our warm mutual friendship makes the observation of these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole. I should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the doctor's either, outside our own little group."

Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black three-cornered cap with the tassel. "Unfortunately I have a sick call waiting me," he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.

"Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall," remarked Theron, getting to his feet.

"I would ask you to go upstairs and wait," the priest went on, "but my return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get back--"

The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.

When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man. "You have come about those frames," he said. "If you will come upstairs, I will show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can be done with them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old English, if you can manage it."

After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an old loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to the reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him, and he touched the house-bell at his elbow.

"Maggie," he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, "I will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble. And--oh, Maggie--I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless visit of the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless wear and tear of conscience. I think that--hereafter--you understand?-- I am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to call."

CHAPTER XXVII

At breakfast he smiled again--a mirthless and calculated smile. "I see that Brother Gorringe's flowers have come to grief over night," he remarked.

Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his face a confirmation of the hostile hint in his voice. She nodded in a constrained way, and said nothing.

"Or rather, I should say, "Theron went on, with deliberate words, "the late Brother Gorringe's flowers."

"How do you mean--LATE" asked his wife, swiftly.

"Oh, calm yourself!" replied the husband. He is not dead. He has only intimated to me his desire to sever his connection. I may add that he did so in a highly offensive manner."

"I am very sorry," said Alice, in a low tone, and with her eyes on her plate.

"I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding," remarked Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could. "He was such a promising probationer, and you took such a keen interest in his spiritual awakening. But the frost has nipped his zeal--along with the hundred or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified his faith. I find something interesting in their having been blasted simultaneously."

Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast. With a flushed face and lips tightly compressed, she made a movement as if to rise from her chair. Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced her husband.

"I think we had better have this out right now," she said, in a voice which Theron hardly recognized. "You have been hinting round the subject long enough--too long. There are some things nobody is obliged to put up with, and this is one of them. You will oblige me by saying out in so many words what it is you are driving at."

The outburst astounded Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and gazed at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late, to a demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her eyes and the lines of resolution about her mouth and chin for a moment daunted him. Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist that she was trembling.

"I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,' as you put it," he replied, forcing his voice into cool, impassive tones. "I merely commented upon a coincidence, that was all. If, for any reason under the sun, the subject chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly desire to pursue it."

"But I insist upon having it pursued!" returned Alice. "I've had just all I can stand of your insinuations and innuendoes, and it's high time we had some plain talk. Ever since the revival, you have been dropping sly, underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and--and me. Now I ask you what you mean by it."

Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see how her bosom heaved in a tremor of nervousness. It was easy for him to be very calm.

"It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions, not I," he replied coldly. "It is you who couple your name with his--somewhat to my surprise, I admit-- but let me suggest that we drop the subject. You are excited just now, and you might say things that you would prefer to leave unsaid. It would surely be better for all concerned to say no more about it."

Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows, emitted a sharp little snort of indignation. "Well, I never! Theron, I wouldn't have thought it of you!"

"There are so many things you wouldn't have thought, on such a variety of subjects," he observed, with a show of resuming his breakfast. "But why continue? We are only angering each other."

"Never mind that," she replied, with more control over her speech. "I guess things have come to a pass where a little anger won't do any harm. I have a right to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations."

Theron sighed. "Why will you keep harping on the thing?" he asked wearily. "I have displayed no curiosity. I don't ask for any explanations. I think I mentioned that the man had behaved insultingly to me--but that doesn't matter. I don't bring it up as a grievance. I am very well able to take care of myself I have no wish to recur to the incident in any way. So far as I am concerned, the topic is dismissed."

"Listen to me!" broke in Alice, with eager gravity. She hesitated, as he looked up with a nod of attention, and reflected as well as she was able among her thoughts for a minute or two. "This is what I want to say to you. Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius, you and I have been drifting apart--or no, that doesn't express it--simply rushing away from each other. It only began last spring, and now the space between us is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers. For strangers at least don't hate each other, and I've had a good many occasions lately to see that you positively do hate me--"

"What grotesque absurdity" interposed Theron, impatiently.

"No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth," retorted Alice. "And--don't interrupt me--there have been times, too, when I have had to ask myself if I wasn't getting almost to hate you in return. I tell you this frankly."

"Yes, you are undoubtedly frank," commented the husband, toying with his teaspoon. "A hypercritical person might consider, almost too frank."

Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her breath as if in expectant suspense. Her countenance clouded once more. "You don't realize, Theron," she said gravely; "your voice when you speak to me, your look, your manner, they have all changed. You are like another man-- some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me, much less like me. I want to know what the end of it is to be. Up to the time of your sickness last summer, until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't let myself get downright discouraged. It seemed too monstrous for belief that you should go away out of my life like that. It didn't seem possible that God could allow such a thing. It came to me that I had been lax in my Christian life, especially in my position as a minister's wife, and that this was my punishment. I went to the altar, to intercede with Him, and to try to loose my burden at His feet. But nothing has come of it. I got no help from you."

"Really, Alice," broke in Theron, "I explained over and over again to you how preoccupied I was--with the book-- and affairs generally."

"I got no assistance from Heaven either," she went on, declining the diversion he offered. "I don't want to talk impiously, but if there is a God, he has forgotten me, his poor heart-broken hand-maiden."

"You are talking impiously, Alice," observed her husband. "And you are doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain."

"I only wish I were!" she replied; "I only wish to God I were!"

"Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE-- that your whole conception of me, and of what you are pleased to describe as my change toward you, is an entire and utter mistake. Of course, the married state is no more exempt from the universal law of growth, development, alteration, than any other human institution. On its spiritual side, of course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--"

"Don't let us go into that," interposed Alice, abruptly. "In fact, there is no good in talking any more at all. It is as if we didn't speak the same language. You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression upon your mind."

"Quite to the contrary," he assured her; "I have been deeply interested and concerned in all you have said. I think you are laboring under a great delusion, and I have tried my best to convince you of it; but I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or, I might say, effectively."

A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face. "If you only gave me a little more credit for intelligence," she said, "you would find that I am not such a blockhead as you think I am."

"Come, come!" he said, with a smiling show of impatience. "You really mustn't impute things to me wholesale, like that."

She was glad to answer the smile in kind. "No; but truly," she pleaded, "you don't realize it, but you have grown into a way of treating me as if I had absolutely no mind at all."

"You have a very admirable mind," he responded, and took up his teaspoon again. She reached for his cup, and poured out hot coffee for him. An almost cheerful spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.

"And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say for months," she began in less burdened voice.

He lifted his brows. "Haven't things been discussed pretty fully already?" he asked.

The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face at his words, and she paused. "No," she said resolutely, after an instant's reflection; "it is my duty to discuss this, too. It is a misunderstanding all round. You remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe had given me some plants, which he got from some garden or other?"

"If you really wish to go on with the subject--yes I have a recollection of that particular falsehood of his."

"He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in the world!" protested Alice. "He saw how down-in-the-mouth and moping I was here, among these strangers-- and I really was getting quite peaked and run-down-- and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me all sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would send me some plants. The next I knew, here they were, with a book about mixing soils and planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for nothing. When I found out the truth-- I got it out of that boy, Harvey Semple--he admitted it quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me."

"This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose," put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.

"Well," answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, "I have told you now, and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length, and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if--"

"And if he hadn't lied." Theron, as he finished her sentence for her, rose from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there seemed the magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier word. Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed the door behind him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone, passed the knuckle of her thumb over one swimming eye and then the other, and bit her lips and swallowed down the sob that rose in her throat.

CHAPTER XXVIII

All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had let it slip. These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and there was nothing more to be said.

He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them, but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness. There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt sure.

A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the outset he had been conscious of something queer--yes, from that very first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and out of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each other--these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister conjecture.

He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a mouse would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week after week, with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and the woman herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been as good as offered to him--a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and spiritual exaltation and love-- and he, like a weak fool, had waited for it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced upon his acceptance! "That is my failing," he reflected; "these miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side. The meanest of Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous spirit and a bolder nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and resolution, everything will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow." Then he remembered that she was now always at home. "Not another hour of foolish indecision!" he whispered to himself. "I will put my destiny to the test. I will see her today!

A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell of the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little ajar.

Theron had got out one of his cards. "I wish to make inquiry about young Mr. Madden--Mr. Michael Madden," he said, holding the card forth tentatively. "I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a great grief to me."

"He is no better," answered the woman, briefly.

"I am the Rev. Mr. Ware," he went on, "and you may say that, if he is well enough, I should be glad to see him."

The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then shook her head. "I don't think he would be wishing to see YOU," she replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor's intentions.

Theron smiled in spite of himself. "I have not come as a clergyman," he explained, "but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won't bother him. If you will kindly hand my card to his sister."

When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman's churlish sectarian prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on the doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of his dream when he came into her presence.

"Will you please to walk this way?" The woman had returned. She closed the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall, past several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end. She pushed aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through ground-glass. The air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of verdure and wet earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at their base, reared itself directly in front of him. The floor was of mosaic, and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there were chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only half a greenhouse, for the lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with floral paintings on them, like a room.

Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in a huge easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely intent eyes. His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy pictured. It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the picnic. The hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and thin, though, and the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which disturbed him.

Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on his own warm palm the very damp of the grave.

"I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your-- your ill-health," he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench beneath the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. "I hope very sincerely that you will soon be all right again."

"My sister is lying down in her room," answered Michael. He had not once taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other's face. The voice in which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold and impassive. It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden meaning. He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again. They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there was no shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an unnatural prescience.

"I hope she is feeling better," Theron found himself saying. "Father Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with him last night."

"I am glad that you came," said Michael, after a little pause. His earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of their own. "I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to speak of to you, now that you are here."

Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried the experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back again irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man's gaze, and clung there.

"I am next door to a dead man," he went on, paying no heed to the other's deprecatory gesture. "It is not years or months with me, but weeks. Then I go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so you will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a change for the good."

Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his glance.

"I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's good time, or not," continued Michael. "I find there are different opinions among the clergy about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds--they will never be saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire."

"I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden," said Theron, with surface suavity.

"Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!"

The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles. This was really too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing, and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching inspection bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes. What did Michael suspect? What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this strange talk of his?

"I saw you often on the street when first you came here," continued Michael. "I knew the man who was here before you-- that is, by sight--and he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of mine--and, for that matter, others all over the country must lose their souls because they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole night long, for thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps in his own house, that very day, would be taken when he died, and his mother too, when she died, and thrown into the flames of hell for all eternity. It made me so unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any Protestant boy's house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me cake and apples--and me thinking all the while that they were bound to be damned, no matter how good they were to me."

The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a personal application of the monologue had been hinted at.

"But then later, as I grew up," the sick man went on, "I learned that it was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and as I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and I talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how could we?"

"Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?" it occurred suddenly to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in doing so, and he fancied that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at his words.

"My sister is no theologian," he answered briefly. "Women have no call to meddle with such matters. But I was saying--it was in the middle of these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed you on the streets, and once in the evening--I made no secret of it to my people--I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I said to myself: "Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for himself, or a great name, but he is content to live humbly on the salary of a book-keeper, and devote all his time to prayer and the meditation of his religion, and preaching, and visiting the sick and the poor, and comforting them. His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in suffering and trouble to look at. The very sight of it makes one believe in pure thoughts and merciful deeds. I will not credit it that God intends damning such a man as that, or any like him!"

Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner, and deep, not wholly complacent, attention on his face. Evidently all this was by way of preparation for something unpleasant.

"That was only last spring," said Michael. His tired voice sank for a sentence or two into a meditative half-whisper. "And it was MY last spring of all. I shall not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard breaths, when the first warm weather comes. It will be one season to me hereafter, always the same." He lifted his voice with perceptible effort. "I am talking too much. The rest I can say in a word. Only half a year has gone by, and you have another face on you entirely. I had noticed the small changes before, one by one. I saw the great change, all of a sudden, the day of the picnic. I see it a hundred times more now, as you sit there. If it seemed to me like the face of a saint before, it is more like the face of a bar-keeper now!"

This was quite too much. Theron rose, flushed to the temples, and scowled down at the helpless man in the chair. He swallowed the sharp words which came uppermost, and bit and moistened his lips as he forced himself to remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother, to whom she was devoted, and whom he himself felt he wanted to be very fond of. He got the shadow of a smile on to his countenance.

"I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly," he said, in as non-contentious a tone as he could manage. He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh. I am afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius. It agrees with me so wonderfully--I am getting as fat as a seal. But I do hope I am not paying for it by such a wholesale deterioration inside. If my own opinion could be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself an infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I was when I came here."

Michael shook his head dogmatically. "That is the greatest pity of all," he said, with renewed earnestness. "You are entirely deceived about yourself. You do not at all realize how you have altered your direction, or where you are going. It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that you did not keep among your own people. That poor half-brother of mine, though the drink was in him when he said that same to you, never spoke a truer word. Keep among your own people, Mr. Ware! When you go among others--you know what I mean-- you have no proper understanding of what their sayings and doings really mean. You do not realize that they are held up by the power of the true Church, as a little child learning to walk is held up with a belt by its nurse. They can say and do things, and no harm at all come to them, which would mean destruction to you, because they have help, and you are walking alone. And so be said by me, Mr. Ware! Go back to the way you were brought up in, and leave alone the people whose ways are different from yours. You are a married man, and you are the preacher of a religion, such as it is. There can be nothing better for you than to go and strive to be a good husband, and to set a good example to the people of your Church, who look up to you--and mix yourself up no more with outside people and outside notions that only do you mischief. And that is what I wanted to say to you."

Theron took up his hat. "I take in all kindness what you have felt it your duty to say to me, Mr. Madden," he said. "I am not sure that I have altogether followed you, but I am very sure you mean it well."

"I mean well by you," replied Michael, wearily moving his head on the pillow, and speaking in an undertone of languor and pain, "and I mean well by others, that are nearer to me, and that I have a right to care more about. When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does not be meaning ill to any human soul."

"Yes--thanks--quite so!" faltered Theron. He dallied for an instant with the temptation to seek some further explanation, but the sight of Michael's half-closed eyes and worn-out expression decided him against it. It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should shake hands, and with a few perfunctory words of hope for the invalid's recovery, which fell with a jarring note of falsehood upon his own ears, he turned and left the room. As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the table beside him.

Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain fell behind him. It was an immense relief to escape from the oppressive humidity and heat of the flower-room, and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.

The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell, stood waiting to conduct him to the door.

"I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden," he said to her. "She must be quite worn out. Perhaps later in the day--"

"She will not be seeing anybody today," returned the woman. "She is going to New York this evening, and she is taking some rest against the journey."

"Will she be away long?" he asked mechanically. The servant's answer, "I have no idea," hardly penetrated his consciousness at all.

He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street, in a maze of mental confusion. When he reached the sidewalk, under the familiar elms, he paused, and made a definite effort to pull his thoughts together, and take stock of what had happened, of what was going to happen; but the thing baffled him. It was as if some drug had stupefied his faculties.

He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was thinking about was the fact of Celia's departure for New York that evening. He stared at this fact, at first in its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring suggestions that this was no doubt a trip she very often made. There was a blind sense of comfort in this idea, and he rested himself upon it. Yes, of course, she travelled a great deal. New York must be as familiar to her as Octavius was to him. Her going there now was quite a matter of course--the most natural thing in the world.

Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the other fact--that Father Forbes was also going to New York that evening. The two things spindled upward, side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision; then they twisted and twined themselves together. He followed their convolutions miserably, walking as if his eyes were shut.

In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves before him. The process of tracing their sequence was all torture, but there was no possibility, no notion, of shirking any detail of the pain. The priest had spoken of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days, for rest and change of air and scene. He must have known only too well that she was going, but of that he had been careful to drop no hint. The possibility of accident was too slight to be worth considering. People on such intimate terms as Celia and the priest--people with such facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired-- did not find themselves on the same train of cars, with the same long journey in view, by mere chance.

Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the autumn day. It grew colder, as he turned his face homeward. He wondered if it would freeze again over-night, and then remembered the shrivelled flowers in his wife's garden. For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before his mind's eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied, drooping stalks, and wilted blooms, and as he looked, they restored themselves to the vigor and grace and richness of color of summer-time, as vividly as if they had been painted on a canvas. Or no, the picture he stared at was not on canvas, but on the glossy, varnished panel of a luxurious sleeping-car. He shook his head angrily and blinked his eyes again and again, to prevent their seeing, seated together in the open window above this panel, the two people he knew were there, gloved and habited for the night's journey, waiting for the train to start.

"Very much to my surprise," he found himself saying to Alice, watching her nervously as she laid the supper-table, "I find I must go to Albany tonight. That is, it isn't absolutely necessary, for that matter, but I think it may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go. Something has arisen--I can't speak about it as yet-- but the sooner I see the Bishop about it the better. Things like that occur in a man's life, where boldly striking out a line of action, and following it up without an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world to him. Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can be home the sooner again."

Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion. She spoke with studied amiability during the meal, and deferred with such unexpected tact to his implied desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious motives of the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and warmed toward her, as they finished supper.

He smiled a little. "I do hope I shan't have to go on tomorrow to New York; but these Bishops of ours are such gad-abouts one never knows where to catch them. As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York, on Book-Concern business or something; and if he is, I shall have to chase him up. But, after all, perhaps the trip will do me good--the change of air and scene, you know."

"I'm sure I hope so," said Alice, honestly enough. "If you do go on to New York, I suppose you'll go by the river-boat. Everybody talks so much of that beautiful sail down the Hudson."

"That's an idea!" exclaimed Theron, welcoming it with enthusiasm. "It hadn't occurred to me. If I do have to go, and it is as lovely as they make out, the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl. I HAVE been rather out of sorts lately," he continued. "When I come back, I daresay I shall be feeling better, more like my old self. Then I'm going to try, Alice, to be nicer to you than I have been of late. I'm afraid there was only too much truth in what you said this morning."

"Never mind what I said this morning--or any other time," broke in Alice, softly. "Don't ever remember it again, Theron, if only--only--"

He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where she sat, and, bending over her, stopped the faltering sentence with a kiss. When was it, he wondered, that he had last kissed her? It seemed years, ages, ago.

An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise in his hand, he stood on the doorstep of the parsonage, and kissed her once more before he turned and descended into the darkness. He felt like whistling as his feet sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate. It seemed as if he had never been in such capital good spirits before in his life.

CHAPTER XXIX

Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window with his thumb, and looked out. There was nothing to be seen but a broad stretch of tracks, and beyond this the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard, with a background of factory buildings.

The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief. He thought of opening the window, but feared that the peremptory-looking man with the paper, who had wakened him and made him sit up, might object. They were the only people in the car who were sitting up. Backwards and forwards, on either side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed recumbent forms, curled uncomfortably into corners, or sprawling at difficult angles which involved the least interference with one another. Here and there an upturned face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled play of the gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless noise of snoring was in the air.

He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end of the aisle, and took a drink from the most inaccessible portion of the common tin-cup's rim. The happy idea of going out on the platform struck him, and he acted upon it. The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh by contrast, and he filled his lungs with it again and again. Standing here, he could discern beyond the buildings to the right the faint purplish outlines of great rounded hills. Some workmen, one of them bearing a torch, were crouching along under the side of the train, pounding upon the resonant wheels with small hammers. He recalled having heard the same sound in the watches of the night, during a prolonged halt. Some one had said it was Albany. He smiled in spite of himself at the thought that Bishop Sanderson would never know about the visit he had missed.

Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked forward down the long train. There were five, six, perhaps more, sleeping-cars on in front. Which one of them, he wondered--and then there came the sharp "All aboard!" from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again, and entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.

He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease. He took his seat, and diverted himself by winking gravely at a little child facing him on the next seat but one. There were four other children in the family party, encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back was turned to Theron. He recalled now having noticed this poor woman last night, in the first stage of his journey-- how she fed her brood from one of the numerous baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face of the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her, Theron had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense, it was scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens, or a cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there anything more human?

The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him with placidity, declining to be amused by his winkings, but exhibiting no other emotion. She had been playing by herself with a couple of buttons tied on a string, and after giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's grimaces, she turned again to the superior attractions of this toy. Her self-possession, her capacity for self-entertainment, the care she took not to arouse the others, all impressed him very much. He felt in his pocket for a small coin, and, reaching forward, offered it to her. She took it calmly, bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment, and went back to the buttons. Her indifference produced an unpleasant sensation upon him somehow, and he rubbed the steaming window clear again, and stared out of it.

The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall of cliffs which he knew instantly must be the Palisades. There was an advertisement painted on them which he tried in vain to read. He was surprised to find they interested him so slightly. He had heard all his life of the Hudson, and especially of it just at this point. The reality seemed to him almost commonplace. His failure to be thrilled depressed him for the moment.

"I suppose those ARE the Palisades?" he asked his neighbor.

The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made as if to resume his reading. But his eye had caught something in the prospect through the window which arrested his attention. "By George!" he exclaimed, and lifted himself to get a clearer view.

"What is it?" asked Theron, peering forth as well.

"Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there. There's been a hitch of some sort. They were to have left yesterday."

"Is that it--that long black thing?" queried Theron. "That can't be a yacht, can it?"

"What do you think it is?" answered the other. They were looking at a slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor, silent and motionless on the drab expanse of water. "If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building any yet. They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise, you know--around India and Japan for the winter, and home by the South Sea islands. Friend o' mine's in the party. Wouldn't mind the trip myself."

"But do you mean to say," asked Theron, "that that little shell of a thing can sail across the ocean? Why, how many people would she hold?"

The man laughed. "Well," he said, "there's room for two sets of quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep their legs well up on the sofas. But there's only ten or a dozen in the party this time. More than that rather get in one another's way, especially with so many ladies on board."

Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing behind her, and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves, and glistening through the splash of spray in the air, and weaving a halo of glowing gold about her fair head. Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him! Eternal summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy-- summer sought now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits, now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific. He dwelt upon these new imaginings with the fervent longing of an inland-born boy. Every vague yearning he had ever felt toward salt-water stirred again in his blood at the thought of the sea--with Celia.

Why not? She had never visited any foreign land. "Sometime," she had said, "sometime, no doubt I will." He could hear again the wistful, musing tone of her voice. The thought had fascinations for her, it was clear. How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with the added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on the high seas, free to speed in her snow-winged chariot wherever she willed over the deep, loitering in this place, or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more care or weight of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air in her wake!

Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there would not be "ten or a dozen in the party" on that yacht. Without defining anything in his mind, he breathed in fancy the same bold ocean breeze which filled the sails, and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past, the same vast dome of cloud and ether that were mirrored in her brown eyes, and there was no one else anywhere near them. Even the men in sailors' clothes, who would be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders, kept themselves considerately outside the picture. Only Celia sat there, and at her feet, gazing up again into her face as in the forest, the man whose whole being had been consecrated to her service, her worship, by the kiss.

"You've passed it now. I was trying to point out the Jumel house to you--where Aaron Burr lived, you know."

Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with a confused smile at his neighbor. "Thanks," he faltered; "I didn't hear you. The train makes such a noise, and I must have been dozing."

He looked about him. The night aspect, as of a tramps' lodging-house, had quite disappeared from the car. Everybody was sitting up; and the more impatient were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags from the racks and floor. An expressman came through, jangling a huge bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs over his arm, and held parley with passengers along the aisle. Outside, citified streets, with stores and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields; and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered as a boy. Then was a long tunnel, its darkness broken at stated intervals by brief bursts of daylight from overhead, and out of this all at once the train drew up its full length in some vast, vaguely lighted enclosure, and stopped.

"Yes, this is New York," said the man, folding up his paper, and springing to his feet. The narrow aisle was filled with many others who had been prompter still; and Theron stood, bag in hand, waiting till this energetic throng should have pushed itself bodily past him forth from the car. Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense of helplessness in their resolute wake. There rose in his mind the sudden conviction that he would be too late. All the passengers in the forward sleepers would be gone before he could get there. Yet even this terror gave him no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly packed throng.

Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly; they all seemed to know just where they wanted to go, and to feel that no instant of time was to be lost in getting there. Theron himself caught some of this urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng with reckless haste, knocking his bag against peoples' legs, but never pausing for apology or comment until he found himself abreast of the locomotive at the head of the train. He drew aside from the main current here, and began searching the platform, far and near, for those he had travelled so far to find.

The platform emptied itself. Theron lingered on in puzzled hesitation, and looked about him. In the whole immense station, with its acres of tracks and footways, and its incessantly shifting processions of people, there was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt, or who appeared capable of sympathizing with indecision in any form. Another train came in, some way over to the right, and before it had fairly stopped, swarms of eager men began boiling out of each end of each car, literally precipitating themselves over one another, it seemed to Theron, in their excited dash down the steps. As they caught their footing below, they started racing pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw them, looking more than ever like clustered bees in the distance, struggling vehemently in a dense mass up a staircase in the remote corner of the building.

"What are those folks running for? Is there a fire?" he asked an amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform of the sleeping-car service, who passed him with some light hand-bags.

"No; they's Harlem people, I guess--jes' catchin' the Elevated-- that's all, sir," he answered obligingly.

At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one of the sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.

"Why, are there people still in these cars?" he asked eagerly. "Haven't they all gone?"

"Some has; some ain't," the porter replied. "They most generally take their time about it. They ain't no hurry, so long's they get out 'fore we're drawn round to the drill-yard."

There was still hope, then. Theron took up his bag and walked forward, intent upon finding some place from which he could watch unobserved the belated stragglers issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back all at once, confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips and badges, who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous outburst of shouts and yells. They made furious gestures at him with their whips and fists, to enforce the incoherent babel of their voices; and in these gestures, as in their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal of menace and very little invitation. There was a big policeman sauntering near by, and Theron got the idea that it was his presence alone which protected him from open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen. He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back on them and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand where he was. But the policeman came lounging slowly toward him, with such authority in his swaying gait, and such urban omniscience written all over his broad, sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat off to the right, where there were a number of doorways, near which other people had ventured to put down baggage on the floor.

Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood for a long time, watching at odd moments the ceaselessly varying phases of the strange scene about him, but always keeping an eye on the train he had himself arrived in. It was slow and dispiriting work. A dozen times his heart failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he had had his journey for nothing. Then some new figure would appear, alighting from the steps of a sleeper, and hope revived in his breast.

At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been marked off by the big clock overhead, his suspense came to an end. He saw Father Forbes' erect and substantial form, standing on the car platform nearest of all, balancing himself with his white hands on the rails, waiting for something. Then after a little he came down, followed by a black porter, whose arms were burdened by numerous bags and parcels. The two stood a minute or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps. Then Celia descended, and the three advanced.

The importance of not being discovered was uppermost in Theron's mind, now that he saw them actually coming toward him. He had avoided this the previous evening, in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered himself. It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs, almost a detective, to be confronted by the necessity now of baffling observation once again. He was still rather without plans for keeping them in view, once they left the station. He had supposed that he would be able to hear what hotel they directed their driver to take them to, and, failing that, he had fostered a notion, based upon a story he had read when a boy, of throwing himself into another carriage, and bidding his driver to pursue them in hot haste, and on his life not fail to track them down. These devices seemed somewhat empty, now that the urgent moment was at hand; and as he drew back behind some other loiterers, out of view, he sharply racked his wits for some way of coping with this most pressing problem.

It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty at all. Father Forbes and Celia seemed to have no use for the hackmen, but moved straight forward toward the street, through the doorway next to that in which Theron cowered. He stole round, and followed them at a safe distance, making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on the shoulder of the porter behind her, his guides. To his surprise, they still kept on their course when they had reached the sidewalk, and went over the pavement across an open square which spread itself directly in front of the station. Hanging as far behind as he dared, he saw them pass to the other sidewalk diagonally opposite, proceed for a block or so along this, and then separate at a corner. Celia and the negro lad went down a side street, and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick building which occupied the whole block. The priest, turning on his heel, came back again and went boldly up the broad steps of the front entrance to this same structure, which Theron now discovered to be the Murray Hill Hotel.

Fortune had indeed favored him. He not only knew where they were, but he had been himself a witness to the furtive way in which they entered the house by different doors. Nothing in his own limited experience of hotels helped him to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance for ladies and their luggage. He did not feel quite sure about the significance of what he had observed, in his own mind. But it was apparent to him that there was something underhanded about it.

After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel, and satisfying himself by peeps through the glass doors that the coast was clear, he ventured inside. The great corridor contained many people, coming, going, or standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him. At last he made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy to him from a group gathered in the shadows of the big central staircase. Explaining that he did not at that moment wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the boy took him to a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing. With this in his pocket he felt himself more at his ease, and turned to walk away. Then suddenly he wheeled, and, bending his body over the counter of the cloak-room, astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with which he scrutinized the piled rows of portmanteaus, trunks, overcoats, and bundles in the little enclosure.

"What is it you want? Here's your bag, if you're looking for that," this man said to him.

"No, thanks; it's nothing," replied Theron, straightening himself again. He had had a narrow escape. Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by side, had come down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed him so closely that he had felt her dress brush against him. Fortunately he had seen them in time, and by throwing himself half into the cloak-room, had rendered recognition impossible.

He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came to the polite colored man at an open door on the left, who was bowing people into the breakfast room. Standing in the doorway, he looked about him till his eye lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table by a distant window, with a black waiter, card in hand, bending over in consultation with them.

Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march up to the desk and examine the register. The priest's name was not there. He found only the brief entry, "Miss Madden, Octavius," written, not by her, but by Father Forbes. On the line were two numbers in pencil, with an "and" between them. An indirect question to one of the clerks helped him to an explanation of this. When there were two numbers, it meant that the guest in question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.

Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away. The first half of his quest stood completed--and that much more fully and easily than he had dared to hope. He could not but feel a certain new respect for himself as a man of resource and energy. He had demonstrated that people could not fool with him with impunity.

It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery, now that it had been so satisfactorily made. As yet, he had given this hardly a thought. Even now, it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding instant attention. It was much more important, first of all, to get a good breakfast. He had learned that there was another and less formal eating-place, downstairs in the basement by the bar, with an entrance from the street. He walked down by the inner stairway instead, feeling himself already at home in the big hotel. He ordered an ample breakfast, and came out while it was being served to wash and have his boots blacked, and he gave the man a quarter of a dollar. His pockets were filled with silver quarters, half-dollars, and dollars almost to a burdensome point, and in his valise was a bag full of smaller change, including many rolls of copper cents which Alice always counted and packed up on Mondays. In the hurry of leaving he had brought with him the church collections for the past two weeks. It occurred to him that he must keep a strict account of his expenditure. Meanwhile he gave ten cents to another man in a silk-sleeved cardigan jacket, who had merely stood by and looked at him while his boots were being polished. There was a sense of metropolitan affluence in the very atmosphere.

The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron found his meal in waiting for him, seemed a vision of delicate napery and refined appointments in his eyes. He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he looked upon gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he was very happy as well. The servant in attendance had an extremely white apron and a kindly black face. He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the air of a lifelong admirer and humble friend.

"I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?" he remarked, as if it were a matter of course.

"Why, certainly," answered Theron, stretching his legs contentedly under the table, and tucking the corner of his napkin in his neckband.--"Certainly, my good man."

CHAPTER XXX

This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility, and he retired to a corner sofa and sat down. The detective side of him being off duty, so to speak, there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other aspects of his mission. Yes; it was high time for him to consider what he should do next.

It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act upon it. His mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding this task of serious thought which he sought to impose upon it. It seemed so much pleasanter not to think at all-- but just to drift. He found himself watching with envy the men who, as they came out from their breakfast, walked over to the bookstall, and bought cigars from the row of boxes nestling there among the newspaper piles. They had such evident delight in the work of selection; they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully, and lighted them with such meditative attention,-- he could see that he was wofully handicapped by not knowing how to smoke. He had had the most wonderful breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness of comfortable repletion which pervaded his being, there was an obstinate sense of something lacking. No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed to round out the perfection of such a breakfast. He half rose once, fired by a sudden resolution to go over and get one. But of course that was nonsense; it would only make him sick. He sat down, and determinedly set himself to thinking.

The effort finally brought fruit--and of a kind which gave him a very unhappy quarter of an hour. The lover part of him was uppermost now, insistently exposing all its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of jealousy. Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct question of how he and the priest relatively stood in Celia's estimation. It forced itself remorselessly upon him now; and his thoughts, so far from shirking the subject, seemed to rise up to meet it. It was extremely unpleasant, all this.

But then a calmer view asserted itself. Why go out of his way to invent anguish for himself? The relations between Celia and the priest, whatever they might be, were certainly of old standing. They had begun before his time. His own romance was a more recent affair, and must take its place, of course, subject to existing conditions.

It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy his legitimate curiosity as to the exact character and scope of these conditions. But it was foolish to pretend to be amazed or dismayed at the discovery of their existence. They were a part of the situation which he, with his eyes wide open, had accepted. It was his function to triumph over them, to supplant them, to rear the edifice of his own victorious passion upon their ruins. It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him. It was for this that he had come to New York. To let his purpose be hampered or thwarted now by childish doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.

He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured deliberation across the corridor and up the broad staircase. There was an elevator near at hand, he had noticed, but he preferred the stairs. One or two of the colored boys clustered about the foot of the stairs looked at him, and he had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they should stop his progress. Nothing was said, and he went on. The numbers on the first floor were not what he wanted, and after some wandering about he ascended to the next, and then to the third. Every now and then he encountered attendants, but intuitively he bore himself with an air of knowing what he was about which protected him from inquiry.

Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought. Passing along, he found the doors bearing the numbers he had memorized so well. They were quite close together, and there was nothing to help him guess which belonged to the parlor. He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other. In the instant of indecision, even while his alert ear caught the sound of feet coming along toward the passage in which he stood, a thought came to quicken his resolve. It became apparent to him that his discovery gave him a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of right to take things more for granted than heretofore. He chose a door at random, and rapped distinctly on the panel.

"Come!"

The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however, recalled the usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted more than once at the pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.

He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed open the door. It WAS the parlor--a room of sofas, pianos, big easy-chairs, and luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall woman was walking up and down in it, with bowed head. Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her, saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams, the enchantress of the kiss, the woman who loved him-- but somehow it did not seem to his senses to be Celia.

She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before she mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing in her doorway. She stopped short, and regarded him. Her face was in the shadow, and he could make out nothing of its expression, save that there was a general effect of gravity about it.

"I cannot receive you," she said. "You must go away. You have no business to come like this without sending up your card."

Theron smiled at her. The notion of taking in earnest her inhospitable words did not at all occur to him. He could see now that her face had vexed and saddened lines upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained in his ears. But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.

"I ought to have sent up my name, I know," he said, "but I couldn't bear to wait. I just saw your name on the register and--you WILL forgive me, won't you?-- I ran to you at once. I know you won't have the heart to send me away!"

She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to falter under her inspection.

"Must I really go down again?" he pleaded. "It's a crushing penalty to suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were here--I never stopped to think. Don't send me away; please don't!"

Celia raised her head. "Well, shut the door, then," she said, "since you are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very much better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away."

"Will you shake hands with me, Celia?" he asked softly, as he came near her.

"Sit there, please!" she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle of the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating herself as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor again. After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him full in the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now, and its revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never seen before who confronted him.

"I am much occupied by other matters," she said, speaking with cold impassivity, "but still I find myself curious to know just what limits you set to your dishonesty."

Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them. If this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a heart-aching point.

"I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening," she went on. "You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I saw you following me from the Grand Central this morning."

"Yes, I did both these things," said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. "Yes, I did them," he repeated defiantly. "That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part, of what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools-- what are they? Life itself--what does it amount to? Nothing at all--with you in the balance!"

"Yes--but I am not in the balance," observed Celia, quietly. "That is where you have made your mistake."

Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected. Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty, as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.

"Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?" he murmured with a wooing note. "Have you forgotten the kiss?"

She shook her head calmly. "I have forgotten nothing."

"Then why play with me so cruelly now?" he went on, in a voice of tender deprecation. "I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!"

"I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in," she replied. "I told you to go away. That was pure kindness-- more kindness than you deserved."

Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He felt tears coming into his eyes. "You tell me that you remember," he said, in depressed tones, "and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come down here at all."

Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.

"But I swear that I was helpless in the matter," he burst forth. "I HAD to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--"

"Go on!" said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his sentence and left it unfinished. "What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?"

"Knowing--" he took up the word hesitatingly--"knowing that life would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you."

She curled her lip at him. "You skated over the thin spot very well," she commented. "It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact that Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through, Mr. Ware."

In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.

"Then if you do read me," he protested, "you must know how utterly my heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you, I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can you blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me!'"

Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him. Something like despair seized upon him.

"Surely," he urged with passion, "surely I have a right to remind you of the kiss!"

She turned. "The kiss," she said meditatively. "Yes, you have a right to remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right too--the right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye order. It signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one little moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all."

He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was incapable of taking it in. "You mean--" he started to say, and then stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was too much to try to think what she meant.

A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. "I know so little about kisses," he said; "I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing. You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand of kiss it was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to distinguish, but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm. They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there."

She bowed her head slightly. "Yes, you are entitled to say that," she assented. "I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell me so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of yours, to which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I first saw you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I see now that it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side."

Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily support. He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he dared not look away from her. "Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?" he asked her piteously.

It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust forth other pleas. "I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York. I see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith. Think of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day-- that day in the woods. I have waited--and waited-- with no sign from you, no chance of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in the world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new being, plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until saw you again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life was for good or for bad-- whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or a curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I learned that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and followed you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. But are you justified in punishing me so terribly-- in going on after I have confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little strips, putting me to death by torture?"

"Sit down," said Celia, with a softened weariness in her voice. She seated herself in front of him as he sank into his chair again. "I don't want to give you unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing yourself into a position where there isn't anything else but pain. I warned you to go away, but you wouldn't. No matter how gently I may try to explain things to you, you are bound to get nothing but suffering out of the explanation. Now shall I still go on?"

He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not lift it again, but raised toward her a disconsolate gaze from a pallid, drooping face.

"It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware," she proceeded, in low tones. "I speak for others as well as myself, mind you--we find that you are a bore."

Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable. He continued to stare unblinkingly up into her eyes.

"We were disposed to like you very much when we first knew you," Celia went on. "You impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature, your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you were going to be a real acquisition."

"Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?" He asked the question calmly enough, but in a voice with an effect of distance in it.

"It may not be necessary to enter into that," she replied. "Let me go on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what you hadn't the sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the friendships which had been mistakenly extended to you. Do you want instances? You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I had been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and tried to inveigle him into talking scandal about me. You came to me with tales about him. You went to Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about us both. Neither of those men will ever ask you inside his house again. But that is only one part of it. Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate. You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn't dare let them know you didn't believe in. You talked to us slightingly about your wife. What were you thinking of, not to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once--do you remember?--a life of George Sand that you had just bought,--bought because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her life. You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older people had learned not to notice. These are merely random incidents. They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake. I can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were expanding, growing, in all directions. What you took to be improvement was degeneration. When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog. And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!"

She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap, and her eyes sinking to the floor. A silence ensued. Then Theron reached a groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless, automatic step to the door.

He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him. He slammed the door to, and turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind. He came toward her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements, and in the wild look upon his white, set face. Halting before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers, with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.

"This is what you have done to me, then!"

His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears-- hoarse and broken, but with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage. The horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light-- red and abnormally evil. It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of which the first-fruit was Cain. Why should he not kill her? In all ages, women had been slain for less. Yes--and men had been hanged. Something rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down, the sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into darkness. The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without form and void. He was alone on it-- alone among awful, planetary solitudes which crushed him.

The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was plain enough to his eyes. It was an illusion. She was really a star, many millions of miles away. These things were hard to understand; but they were true, none the less. People seemed to be about him, but in fact he was alone. He recalled that even the little child in the car, playing with those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do with him. Take his money, yes; take all he would give her--but not smile at him, not come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their houses against him. The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.

He was standing with one knee upon a sofa. Unconsciously he had moved round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now in profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his brain--pictures of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of death, declaiming the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano, under the pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and gazing meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in; of her lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of his fancy--that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly and bewitchingly real to him, and now--now--!

He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face among its cushions, wept and groaned aloud. His collapse was absolute. He sobbed with the abandonment of one who, in the veritable presence of death, lets go all sense of relation to life.

Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder-- an incisive, pointed touch--and he checked himself, and lifted his face.

"You will have to get up, and present some sort of an appearance, and go away at once," Celia said to him in low, rapid tones. "Some gentlemen are at the door, whom I have been waiting for."

As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties, Celia had opened the door and admitted two visitors. The foremost was Father Forbes; and he, with some whispered, smiling words, presented to her his companion, a tall, robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat and a gray mustache, sharply waxed. The three spoke for a moment together. Then the priest's wandering eye suddenly lighted upon the figure on the sofa. He stared, knitted his brows, and then lifted them in inquiry as he turned to Celia.

"Poor man!" she said readily, in tones loud enough to reach Theron. "It is our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware. He hit upon my name in the register quite unexpectedly, and I had him come up. He is in sore distress-- a great and sudden bereavement. He is going now. Won't you speak to him in the hall--a few words, Father? It would please him. He is terribly depressed."

The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some mechanical process. He took up his hat and moved dumbly to the door. It seemed to him that Celia intended offering to shake hands; but he went past her with only some confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two. The tall stranger, who drew aside to let him pass, had acted as if he expected to be introduced. Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall and looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.

"I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware," Father Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones. "Miss Madden is also in trouble. I mentioned to you that her brother had got into a serious scrape. I have brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with her about the matter. He knows all the parties concerned, and he can set things right if anybody can."

"It's a mistake about me--I 'm not in any trouble at all," said Theron. "I just dropped in to make a friendly call."

The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift, informed scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his eyes and loosened lips expressed.

"Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting to positive genius," said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.

"Tell me this, Father Forbes," the other demanded, with impulsive suddenness, "is it true that you don't want me in your house again? Is that the truth or not?"

"The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware," replied the priest, turning away, and closing the door of the parlor behind him with a decisive sound.

Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs. He found his legs wavering under him and making zigzag movements of their own in a bewildering fashion. He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh despair, to the effects of his great grief. Then, as he held tight to the banister and governed his descent step by step, it occurred to him that it must be the wine he had had for breakfast. Upon examination, he was not so unhappy, after all.

CHAPTER XXXI

"Who the deuce can that be?" he mused aloud, in querulous resentment at the interruption.

"Put your head out of the window, and ask," suggested his wife, drowsily.

The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket, and a third outburst of shrill reverberations clamored through the silent house.

"Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole thing to pieces," added the wife, with more decision.

Brother Soulsby was wide awake now. He sprang to the floor, and, groping about in the obscurity, began drawing on some of his clothes. He rapped on the window during the process, to show that the house was astir, and a minute afterward made his way out of the room and down the stairs, the boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.

Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned. Sister Soulsby, lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague sounds of voices at the front door, and did not feel interested enough to lift her head and listen. A noise of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding from the door, then turning toward it, this second time marking the presence of more than one person. There seemed in this the implication of a guest, and she shook off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties, and waited to hear more. There came up, after further muttering of male voices, the undeniable chink of coins striking against one another. Then more footsteps, the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street, the grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road, and the racket of a vehicle and horses going off at a smart pace into the night. Somebody had come, then. She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake, tracing idly in her mind, as various slight sounds rose from the lower floor, the different things Soulsby was probably doing. Their spare room was down there, directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed to enter it. The faint murmur of conversation which from time to time reached her came from the parlor instead. At last she heard her husband's soft tread coming up the staircase, and still there had been no hint of employing the guest-chamber. What could he be about? she wondered.

Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in his hand, the reddish light of which, flaring upward, revealed an unlooked-for display of amusement on his thin, beardless face. He advanced to the bedside, shading the glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.

"A thousand guesses, old lady," he said, with a dry chuckle, "and you wouldn't have a ghost of a chance. You might guess till Hades froze over seven feet thick, and still you wouldn't hit it."

She sat up in turn. "Good gracious, man," she began, "you don't mean--" Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes reassured her, and she sighed relief, then smiled confusedly. "I half thought, just for the minute," she explained, "it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and blackmail me. But no, who is it--and what on earth have you done with him?"

Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment. "It's Brother Ware of Octavius, out on a little bat, all by himself. He says he's been on the loose only two days; but it looks more like a fortnight."

"OUR Brother Ware?" she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.

"Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware--some," returned Soulsby, genially. "He seems to think so, anyway."

"But tell me about it!" she urged eagerly. "What's the matter with him? How does he explain it?"

"Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me," said Soulsby, with a droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice. He seated himself on the side of the bed, facing her, and still considerately shielding her from the light of the lamp he held. "But don't think I suggested any explanations. I've been a mother myself. He's merely filled himself up to the neck with rum, in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way. That's all. What is there to explain about that?"

She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head. "No, Soulsby," she said gravely, at last. "This isn't any laughing matter. You may be sure something bad has happened, to set him off like that. I'm going to get up and dress right now. What time is it?"

"Now don't you do anything of the sort," he urged persuasively. "It isn't five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet. Just you turn over, and have another nap. He's all right. I put him on the sofa, with the buffalo robe round him. You'll find him there, safe and sound, when it's time for white folks to get up. You know how it breaks you up all day, not to get your full sleep."

"I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills," she said. "Can't you understand, Soulsby? The thing worries me--gets on my nerves. I couldn't close an eye, if I tried. I took a great fancy to that young man. I told you so at the time."

Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp a trifle. "Yes, I know you did," he remarked in placidly non-contentious tones. "I can't say I saw much in him myself, but I daresay you're right." There followed a moment's silence, during which he experimented in turning the wick up again. "But, anyway," he went on, "there isn't anything you can do. He'll sleep it off, and the longer he's left alone the better. It isn't as if we had a hired girl, who'd come down and find him there, and give the whole thing away. He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable; and when he's had his sleep out, and wakes up on his own account, he'll be feeling a heap better."

The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant the sound of footsteps came to them from the room below. The subdued noise rose regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.

"No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out. I'm going downstairs. It's no good talking; I'm going."

Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by talk or demeanor, but returned contentedly to bed, pulling the comforter over his ears, and falling into the slow, measured respiration of tranquil slumber before his wife was ready to leave the room.

The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through the lace curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby, lamp in hand, entered the parlor. She confronted a figure she would have hardly recognized. The man seemed to have been submerged in a bath of disgrace. From the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, everything about him was altered, distorted, smeared with an intangible effect of shame. In the vague gloom of the middle distance, between lamp and window, she noticed that his shoulders were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp. The frowsy shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw and throat. His clothes were crumpled and hung awry; his boots were stained with mud. The silk hat on the piano told its battered story with dumb eloquence.

Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its light upon his face. A little groan sounded involuntarily upon her lips. Out of a mask of unpleasant features, swollen with drink and weighted by the physical craving for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes, shining with the wild light of hysteria. The effect of dishevelled hair, relaxed muscles, and rough, half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes, as she caught their first glance, an unnatural glare. The lamp shook in her hand for an instant. Then, ashamed of herself, she held out her other hand fearlessly to him.

"Tell me all about it, Theron," she said calmly, and with a soothing, motherly intonation in her voice.

He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly, with a wailing moan, cast himself on his knees at her feet. He was so tall a man that the movement could have no grace. He abased his head awkwardly, to bury it among the folds of the skirts at her ankles. She stood still for a moment, looking down upon him. Then, blowing out the light, she reached over and set the smoking lamp on the piano near by. The daylight made things distinguishable in a wan, uncertain way, throughout the room.

"I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some human being speak to me like that!"

The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from where his face grovelled against her dress. Its despairing accents appealed to her, but even more was she touched by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on the carpet.

"Well, since you are out, stay out," she answered, as reassuringly as she could. "But get up and take a seat here beside me, like a sensible man, and tell me all about it. Come! I insist!"

In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder with which she emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet, and listlessly seated himself on the sofa to which she pointed. He hung his head, and began catching his breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.

"First of all," she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner, "don't you want to lie down there again, and have me tuck you up snug with the buffalo robe, and go to sleep? That would be the best thing you could do."

He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side. "I can't!" he groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the sob-like convulsions. "I'm dying for sleep, but I'm too-- too frightened!"

"Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off," she said, with masterful decision. He suffered himself to be pushed into recumbency on the couch, and put his head with docility on the pillow she brought from the spare room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close to the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at his demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness and fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before. Nothing essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous overlaying of shame and cowardice to be removed. The face underneath was still all right.

With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from his forehead into order. Then she seated herself, and, when he got his hand out from under the robe and thrust it forth timidly, she took it in hers and held it in a warm, sympathetic grasp. He closed his eyes at this, and gradually the paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed. The daylight strengthened, until at last tiny flecks of sunshine twinkled in the meshes of the further curtains at the window. She fancied him asleep, and gently sought to disengage her hand, but his fingers clutched at it with vehemence, and his eyes were wide open.

"I can't sleep at all," he murmured. "I want to talk."

"There 's nothing in the world to hinder you," she commented smilingly.

"I tell you the solemn truth," he said, lifting his voice in dogged assertion: "the best sermon I ever preached in my life, I preached only three weeks ago, at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be far and away my finest effort! They will tell you the same!"

"It's quite likely," assented Sister Soulsby. "I quite believe it."

"Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've become a fool?" he demanded.

"I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing," she answered quietly.

"No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!" he cried. "I heard them, though!" Then, forcing himself to a sitting posture, against the restraint of her hand, he flung back the covering. "I'm burning hot already! Yes, those were the identical words: I haven't improved; I've degenerated. People hate me; they won't have me in their houses. They say I'm a nuisance and a bore. I'm like a little nasty boy. That's what they say. Even a young man who was dying--lying right on the edge of his open grave--told me solemnly that I reminded him of a saint once, but I was only fit for a barkeeper now. They say I really don't know anything at all. And I'm not only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into the bargain!"

"But who says such twaddle as that?" she returned consolingly. The violence of his emotion disturbed her. "You mustn't imagine such things. You are among friends here. Other people are your friends, too. They have the very highest opinion of you."

"I haven't a friend on earth but you!" he declared solemnly. His eyes glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave intensity of tone. "I was going to kill myself. I went on to the big bridge to throw myself off, and a policeman saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he grabbed me and marched me away. Then he threw me out at the entrance, and said he would club my head off if I came there again. And then I went and stood and let the cable-cars pass close by me, and twenty times I thought I had the nerve to throw myself under the next one, and then I waited for the next-- and I was afraid! And then I was in a crowd somewhere, and the warning came to me that I was going to die. The fool needn't go kill himself: God would take care of that. It was my heart, you know. I've had that terrible fluttering once before. It seized me this time, and I fell down in the crowd, and some people walked over me, but some one else helped me up, and let me sit down in a big lighted hallway, the entrance to some theatre, and some one brought me some brandy, but somebody else said I was drunk, and they took it away again, and put me out. They could see I was a fool, that I hadn't a friend on earth. And when I went out, there was a big picture of a woman in tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead-- and then I remembered you. I knew you were my friend-- the only one I have on earth."

"It is very flattering--to be remembered like that," said Sister Soulsby, gently. The disposition to laugh was smothered by a pained perception of the suffering he was undergoing. His face had grown drawn and haggard under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.

"So I came straight to you," he began again. "I had just money enough left to pay my fare. The rest is in my valise at the hotel--the Murray Hill Hotel. It belongs to the church. I stole it from the church. When I am dead they can get it back again!"

Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips. "What nonsense you talk--about dying!" she exclaimed. "Why, man alive, you'll sleep this all off like a top, if you'll only lie down and give yourself a chance. Come, now, you must do as you're told."

With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again, and once more covered him with the fur. He submitted, and did not even offer to put out his arm this time, but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time. While she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby moving about upstairs became audible.

Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on some further disclosure seemed to suggest itself. "I can see you think I'm just drunk," he said, in low, sombre tones. "Of course that's what HE thought. The hackman thought so, and so did the conductor, and everybody. But I hoped you would know better. I was sure you would see that it was something worse than that. See here, I'll tell you. Then you'll understand. I've been drinking for two days and one whole night, on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big strange New York, going through places where they murdered men for ten cents, mixing myself up with the worst people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and they saw I had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me, or offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know why? They understood that I wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians won't harm an idiot, or lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile. They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. I haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of shape and life--that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a friend by me when--when I come to the end."

"You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware," remarked his companion. "It's cowardly to give way to notions like that."

"Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that," he remonstrated wearily. "If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking about hell," he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles about his mouth-- a stillborn, malformed smile--as if I believed in one! I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that frankly."

"It's none of my business," she reassured him. "I'm not your Bishop, or your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all."

"Look here!" he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of glance and voice. "If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience. I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor, Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really were happy; and I--I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God plays! You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an honest hair in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what I am. I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere of the good man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger to prevent the change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight. I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in my heart that it was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be telling the truth, even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope. Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one, in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear of corn to form and ripen and go off with the mildew? Or isn't there any God at all--but only men who live and die like animals? And that would explain my case, wouldn't it? I got bitten and went vicious and crazy, and they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes, that makes it all very simple. It isn't worth while to discuss me at all as if I had a soul, is it? I'm just one more mongrel cur that's gone mad, and must be put out of the way. That's all."

"See here," said Sister Soulsby, alertly, "I half believe that a good cuffing is what you really stand in need of. Now you stop all this nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still! Do you hear me?"

The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to soothe him. He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed profoundly.

"I've told you MY religion before," she went on with gentleness. "The sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a minute sooner. In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad, and indifferent are all braided up together in every man's nature, and every woman's too. You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than you're altogether bad now. You were some of both then; you're some of both now. If you've been making an extra sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction. In that way you'll find things will even themselves up. It's a see-saw with all of us, Theron Ware--sometimes up; sometimes down. But nobody is rotten clear to the core."

He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.

"This is what day of the week?" he asked, at last.

"Friday, the nineteenth."

"Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained for my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world. No king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful romance had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the most talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me to her, and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer, wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a life before him as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought I had grown and developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it. Oh, how happy I was! I tell you this because--because YOU are not like the others. You will understand."

"Yes, I understand," she said patiently. "Well--you were being so happy."

"That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth-- early in the morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some buttons, and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and she saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," you know. She was the first to find it out. It began like that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it. They had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool--like a little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.' That is what they said."

"Did SHE say it?" Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.

For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot brow.

"That is why I made my way here to you," he groaned piteously. "I knew you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful, to die there alone in the strange city-- I couldn't do it--with nobody near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There was no one but you. I wanted to be with you-- at the last."

His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance, wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.

Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs, rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his agonized visage. She patted the sufferer softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.

"I think he'll go to sleep now," she said, lifting her voice to the new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch. "Come out into the kitchen while I get breakfast, or into the sitting-room, or somewhere, so as not to disturb him. He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and try to sleep."

When they had passed together out of the room, she turned. "Soulsby," she said with half-playful asperity, "I'm disappointed in you. For a man who's knocked about as much as you have, I must say you've picked up an astonishingly small outfit of gumption. That poor creature in there is no more drunk than I am. He's been drinking--yes, drinking like a fish; but it wasn't able to make him drunk. He's past being drunk; he's grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.' Some girl has made a fool of him, and decoyed him up in a balloon, and let him drop. He's been hurt bad, too."

"We have all been hurt in our day and generation," responded Brother Soulsby, genially. "Don't you worry; he'll sleep that off too. It takes longer than drink, and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be slept off. Take my word for it, he'll be a different man by noon."

When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way to summon one of the village doctors. Toward nightfall, he went out again to telegraph for Alice.

CHAPTER XXXII

Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop, and looked across an intervening space of back-yards and fences to where the tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure, were silhouetted against the pure blue sky. The prospect recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit morning, a year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her own kitchen, and surveyed a scene not unlike this; it might have been with the same carolling robins, the same trees, the same azure segment of the tranquil, speckless dome. Then she was looking out upon surroundings novel and strange to her, among which she must make herself at home as best she could. But at least the ground was secure under her feet; at least she had a home, and a word from her lips could summon her husband out, to stand beside her with his arm about her, and share her buoyant, hopeful joy in the promises of spring.

To think that that was only one little year ago--the mere revolution of four brief seasons! And now--!

Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly out upon the stoop. Some cheerful commonplace was on her tongue, but a glance at Alice's wistful face kept it back. She passed an arm around her waist instead, and stood in silence, looking at the elms.

"It brings back memories to me--all this," said Alice, nodding her head, and not seeking to dissemble the tears which sprang to her eyes.

"The men will be down in a minute, dear," the other reminded her. "They'd nearly finished packing before I put the biscuits in the oven. "We mustn't wear long faces before folks, you know."

"Yes, I know," murmured Alice. Then, with a sudden impulse, she turned to her companion. "Candace," she said fervently, "we're alone here for the moment; I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you, it's simply and solely because I don't know where to begin, or what to say. I'm just dumfounded at your goodness. It takes my speech away. I only know this, Candace: God will be very good to you."

"Tut! tut!" replied Sister Soulsby, "that's all right, you dear thing. I know just how you feel. Don't dream of being under obligation to explain it to me, or to thank us at all. We've had all sorts of comfort out of the thing-- Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all by ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant company instead, that s all. Besides, there's solid satisfaction in knowing that at last, for once in our lives we've had a chance to be of some real use to somebody who truly needed it. You can't imagine how stuck up that makes us in our own conceit. We feel as if we were George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts, and several other philanthropists thrown in. No, seriously, don't think of it again. We're glad to have been able to do it all; and if you only go ahead now, and prosper and be happy, why, that will be the only reward we want."

"I hope we shall do well," said Alice. "Only tell me this, Candace. You do think I was right, don't you, in insisting on Theron's leaving the ministry altogether? He seems convinced enough now that it was the right thing to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find it harder than he thought to get along in business, and regret the change--and blame me."

"I think you may rest easy in your mind about that," the other responded. "Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within gunshot of a pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that."

Alice looked at her doubtfully. "Something came near murdering him, I know. But it doesn't seem to me that I would say it was the ministry. And I guess you know pretty well yourself what it was. Of course, I've never asked any questions, and I've hushed up everybody at Octavius who tried to quiz me about it-- his disappearance and my packing up and leaving, and all that-- and I've never discussed the question with you--but--"

"No, and there's no good going into it now," put in Sister Soulsby, with amiable decisiveness. "It's all past and gone. In fact, I hardly remember much about it now myself. He simply got into deep water, poor soul, and we've floated him out again, safe and sound. That's all. But all the same, I was right in what I said. He was a mistake in the ministry."

"But if you'd known him in previous years," urged Alice, plaintively, "before we were sent to that awful Octavius. He was the very ideal of all a young minister should be. People used to simply worship him, he was such a perfect preacher, and so pure-minded and friendly with everybody, and threw himself into his work so. It was all that miserable, contemptible Octavius that did the mischief."

Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head. "If there hadn't been a screw loose somewhere," she said gently, "Octavius wouldn't have hurt him. No, take my word for it, he never was the right man for the place. He seemed to be, no doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure was put on him, it found out his weak spot like a shot, and pushed on it, and--well, it came near smashing him, that's all."

"And do you think he'll always be a--a back-slider," mourned Alice.

"For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend to be anything else!" exclaimed the other. "The last state of that man would be worse than the first. You must make up your mind to that. And you mustn't show that you're nervous about it. You mustn't get nervous! You mustn't be afraid of things. Just you keep a stiff upper lip, and say you WILL get along, you WILL be happy. That's your only chance, Alice. He isn't going to be an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort, and it's no good expecting it. But he'll be just an average kind of man--a little sore about some things, a little wiser than he was about some others. You can get along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up, and don't show the white feather."

"Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me," commented Alice. "It used to come easy to me to be cheerful and resolute and all that; but it's different now."

Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting face of her companion which was not all admiration, but her voice remained patiently affectionate. "Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough. You'll have your hands full, you know, finding a house, and unpacking all your old furniture, and buying new things, and getting your home settled. It'll keep you so busy you won't have time to feel strange or lonesome, one bit. You'll see how it'll tone you up. In a year's time you won't know yourself in the looking-glass."

"Oh, my health is good enough," said Alice; "but I can't help thinking, suppose Theron should be taken sick again, away out there among strangers. You know he's never appeared to me to have quite got his strength back. These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark on a man."

"Nonsense! He's strong as an ox," insisted Sister Soulsby. "You mark my word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree."

"Seattle!" echoed Alice, meditatively. "It sounds like the other end of the world, doesn't it?"

The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy, and the women went indoors, to join the breakfast party. During the meal, it was Brother Soulsby who bore the burden of the conversation. He was full of the future of Seattle and the magnificent impending development of that Pacific section. He had been out there, years ago, when it was next door to uninhabited. He had visited the district twice since, and the changes discoverable each new time were more wonderful than anything Aladdin's lamp ever wrought. He had secured for Theron, through some of his friends in Portland, the superintendency of a land and real estate company, which had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked its affairs with the future of all Washington Territory. In an hour's time the hack would come to take the Wares and their baggage to the depot, the first stage in their long journey across the continent to their new home. Brother Soulsby amiably filled the interval with reminiscences of the Oregon of twenty years back, with instructive dissertations upon the soil, climate, and seasons of Puget Sound and the Columbia valley, and, above all, with helpful characterizations of the social life which had begun to take form in this remotest West. He had nothing but confidence, to all appearances, in the success of his young friend, now embarking on this new career. He seemed so sanguine about it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast room lightened up, and the parting meal, surrounded by so many temptations to distraught broodings and silences as it was, became almost jovial in its spirit.

At last, it was time to look for the carriage. The trunks and hand-bags were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby was tying up a package of sandwiches for Alice to keep by her in the train.

Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly into the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment. Then he sauntered out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head and drawing as long a breath as he could, looked over at the elms.

Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell. The long winter's illness, with its recurring crises and sustained confinement, had bleached his skin and reduced his figure to gauntness, but there was none the less an air of restored and secure good health about him. Only in the eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon the prospect, did a substantial change suggest itself. They did not dwell fondly upon the picture of the lofty, spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green leafage stirring against the blue. They did not soften and glow this time, at the thought of how wholly one felt sure of God's goodness in these wonderful new mornings of spring.

They looked instead straight through the fairest and most moving spectacle in nature's processional, and saw afar off, in conjectural vision, a formless sort of place which was Seattle. They surveyed its impalpable outlines, its undefined dimensions, with a certain cool glitter of hard-and-fast resolve. There rose before his fancy, out of the chaos of these shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more behind them, then a great concourse of uplifted countenances, crowded close together as far as the eye could reach. They were attentive faces all, rapt, eager, credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent upon a common object of excited interest. They were looking at HIM; they strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice. Involuntarily he straightened himself, stretched forth his hand with the pale, thin fingers gracefully disposed, and passed it slowly before him from side to side, in a comprehensive, stately gesture. The audience rose at him, as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a mighty roar of applause, in volume like an ocean tempest, yet pitched for his hearing alone.

He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor, and turned on the stoop to the open door.

"What Soulsby said about politics out there interested me enormously," he remarked to the two women. "I shouldn't be surprised if I found myself doing something in that line. I can speak, you know, if I can't do anything else. Talk is what tells, these days. Who knows? I may turn up in Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty. Stranger things have happened than that, out West!"

"We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I," said Sister Soulsby, cheerfully. "You shall take us to the White House, Alice, and introduce us."

"Oh, it isn't likely I would come East," said Alice, pensively. "Most probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle. But there--I think that's the carriage driving up to the door."