Front matter (continued 4)

The staid hotel which Warren had selected, though yielding to modern demands sufficiently to institute a roof dining-room, discouraged such innovations as would be likely to attract the light-minded, and Warren's party had no difficulty in securing a table. Warren assumed the prerogative of host and ordered with a lavishness productive of a marked unbending on the part of Mrs. Knox. Julia, too, was hungry enough to look forward to a good dinner with unwonted anticipation, and she smiled on him appreciatively. Only Forbes remained moodily aloof.

It was over the soup that Warren said cheerily, "Well, now, what's it all about?" He was beginning to realize that something unusual must have occurred to bring Julia and her aunt to town in August, as well as to account for Forbes' strange, dispirited silence.

Mrs. Knox immediately protested. "Oh, Mr. Warren, don't spoil a good meal by bringing up that abominable affair."

"Oh, yes, let it wait, please, Mr. Warren," sighed Julia. "Actually when one realizes what wickedness there is in the world—deceit and imposture and things of that sort—it seems fairly heartless to enjoy one's self."

"Then we'll wait for explanations till dinner is over," Warren conceded, with undiminished buoyancy. But although he made himself entertaining in his usual fashion, his mind was busy with the problem Julia had suggested. Who was the girl hitting, with her talk of deceit and imposture? She could not refer to Miss Kent, naturally, and Howard was equally out of the question. Could it be that Hephzibah's existence had come to her attention? Was it possible that Forbes had been playing a lone hand and had thereby become involved in an entanglement from which his betrothed had magnanimously rescued him? The unrelieved melancholy of Forbes' face and manner rendered this explanation entirely plausible.

When the coffee was brought on and the men lighted cigarettes, Warren felt, not unnaturally, that his hungry curiosity had a right to satisfaction. "Well, I'm as ready to be shocked as I ever shall be," he said. "Let's hear what has happened. Don't tell me that the staid Miss Kent was on the point of eloping with old Forbes."

To Warren's surprise, this apparently innocent witticism caused Forbes to flush darkly. He noticed, too, that Julia's expression lost something of its pensive sweetness, but even then he was unprepared for the acidity of the tone with which she answered him.

"There is no Miss Kent."

"Eh?" Warren looked rather stupid.

"Strictly speaking," admitted Julia, "there is a person who calls herself by that name. But the nice old lady who was Burton's father's friend has been dead a dozen years."

Warren knocked the ashes from his cigarette with painstaking deliberation. "Must be a rather lively old ghost," he commented, striving to live up to his principle of never showing surprise, "according to all Forbes tells."

"Oh, poor Burton," Julia cried, with a glance of angelic commiseration in the direction of her grimly silent lover. "Wouldn't you have thought that Burton's misfortune would have appealed to the better instincts of the most depraved? But instead, they take advantage of his blindness to trick him in the most infamous fashion. The person who calls herself Agatha Kent—I suppose it really is her name, though any one so absolutely deceitful is as likely to lie about one thing as another—"

"Well?" trumpeted Warren, his strained patience showing itself in the unnecessary loudness of his challenge.

"Do hush, Mr. Warren, everybody's looking at us. This Kent woman isn't a nice motherly person. She isn't old at all, not a bit older than I am."

Warren sucked at his cigarette for a moment and blew the smoke through his nose. He needed a little time in order to preserve the imperturbable demeanor on which he prided himself. He looked at Julia to be sure she was in earnest, looked at Forbes to see if he were not going to deny this incredible story, and then expressed his feelings by a low whistle.

"Not a nice motherly person," he repeated inanely. "About as old as you are."

"She may even be a little younger," Julia admitted generously.

Warren's air of incredulity deepened. He threw the uncommunicative Forbes a challenging glance.

"Do you mean that Forbes has been spending all his time with her for the past three months and never suspected that she wasn't an old woman?"

"So he claims." Julia's inflection was decidedly tart.

Forbes made one of his rare contributions to the conversation. "I wouldn't have believed such a thing possible myself, but blindness makes one an easy victim."

"Poor Burton!" murmured Julia, melting at once. "To think that any girl should have the heart to take such advantage of another's misfortune."

"But I can't see what she was getting at," Warren demurred. "I've heard that occasionally ladies represent themselves as younger than they really are, and the reason for that seems plain enough. But why the devil should a young girl want to make herself out an old maid of seventy?"

"Purely mercenary at the start," Julia opined. "As I understand it, Burton saw her advertisement for a boarder, and wrote her, supposing she was his father's old friend. And she decided to pass herself off as her great-aunt so as to get as much out of Burton as she could."

"That young woman must have plenty of nerve. It's plain she needed the money, as far as that goes. Place is terribly run-down."

"Oh, shockingly," Mrs. Knox corroborated him, in her deepest tones. "All the furniture I could see through the windows seemed mere wrecks."

"On its last legs," Warren agreed. He waited for a moment and then asked casually, "Well, what's the fuss about? What harm did it do?"

The two women uttered a simultaneous ejaculation of horror. "A piece of barefaced fraud," cried Mrs. Knox.

"She has been getting money under false pretenses," flared Julia. "I believe she can be arrested like any other swindler, and punished."

Warren shrugged his shoulders. "I can't see where the harm comes in," he persisted stubbornly. "She made Forbes comfortable all summer, so comfortable that now he looks like a baby that's being weaned. She took his money, but judging from the meals I ate there, she gave him his money's worth. If she'd been an old party, passing herself off as a youthful beauty, Forbes would have a right to kick. But under the circumstances is seems to me you're making a mountain out of a mole-hill."

Warren's amiable defense of the guilty was not well received. Aunt Estelle regarded him with open hostility, and Julia seemed pained by his moral obtuseness. A flicker of interest lighted Forbes' impassive face and suggested to Warren that his line of argument appealed more strongly to his masculine listener than to the women. Although he held no brief for Agatha Kent, he pressed his advantage.

"We don't know, any of us, what we might do if we were up against it. I've often thought I would commit highway robbery if I were hungry enough. I'll say this for the girl, anyway: She must be a peach of an actress. If she could knock around with a man all summer, walk with him and talk with him and pet him a little, when he was down in the mouth, and yet never let him suspect that she wasn't old enough to be his grandmother—"

"Really, Mr. Warren," Julia said with asperity, "I can't see any point in continuing this conversation. I had hoped you might be able to make some helpful suggestions regarding Burton, for of course I understand that you can't be burdened with him for more than a few days. But if you are going to spend the evening defending that brazen, red-haired—"

"What!" roared Warren. This time he had done it. The head waiter looked in his direction apprehensively.

Aunt Estelle took the protest from Julia's lips. "Pardon me, Mr. Warren, but I must remind you that my niece and I dislike to be made conspicuous by such demonstrations."

Warren ignored the reproof. "What did you call her?" he demanded of Julia, whose only answer was an offended stare.

"Did you say she was red-haired?"

"I—I did. Though why you should attach any importance to anything so trivial, I confess I don't understand."

Warren did not attempt to enlighten her. He indicated to the waiter that he was ready for his check and his manner was offensively jubilant. "I'm afraid," he said genially, "that you'll have to make some plan for disposing of old Forbes besides committing him to my tender mercies. I've just remembered that I'm going out of town in the morning, early train."

Julia looked startled. "But what is Burton to do, then?"

"Just what he would have done if you hadn't run across me. Though if you'd like my candid advice—"

"Yes, please," said Julia, and tried to look winning. It did not suit her that Warren should slip away in this cavalier fashion, leaving her with a blind man on her hands. She had important plans for the remainder of the week. Twenty-four hours was all she could possibly spare for Forbes.

"Then I advise you to marry him offhand. You have taken him away from one young woman who was devoting herself to making him comfortable. I should say that the least you could do was to follow her example."

Julia's gasp of rage made Warren think of a cat whose tail has been trodden on. From across the table Forbes promptly requested him to mind his own business.

"Just a bit of good advice, old man," Warren soothed him. "Take it or leave it, as you please. Anything more I can do for you people before I go?"

A frigid silence indicated that any service he could offer would be unwelcome, whereupon Warren, having tipped the waiter with a liberality indicative of a jocund spirit, took his smiling departure, leaving dejection behind him.

After a talk with the night clerk, it was arranged that Forbes should remain at the hotel, an adaptable bell-boy agreeing to act as his valet in the morning. Before Mrs. Knox and Julia took refuge in another hostelry, the lovers had a moment to themselves.

Julia was in an unpleasant mood. The emphasis Warren had laid on Miss Kent's histrionic powers had awakened her ready suspicion. As she found herself alone for a moment with her lover, his look of weary dejection aroused her resentment.

"It's most extraordinary, Burton," she complained, "that you should never have suspected her of being younger than she pretended. I could see that Mr. Warren didn't believe it for a minute."

Forbes replied with perfect conviction that Warren was an ass.

"I should have thought that if you didn't find it out when you were holding her hands, you would have realized it the moment you took her in your arms."

"Damnation!" Forbes was goaded beyond endurance. "I never took her in my arms."

"She said you did," insisted Julia, eying him suspiciously. "In that preposterous letter she wrote me, you know. She said you often held her hands and patted them and that sort of thing."

"I did, I admit it. I supposed her a contemporary of my father's, you remember."

"And she said that once, under rather unusual circumstances, you took her in your arms."

"An absolute lie!" blazed Forbes. "But of course if you are going to doubt my word, Julia—"

Julia said no, that she did not doubt him. She added that when a person had lived a lie for months, one more little falsehood would not mean much. Then she gave him her hand to kiss, and was annoyed when he only pressed it and said good night. She had to remind herself that though there was no one near to witness the act of devotion, Burton could not know that he was unobserved, and his undemonstrative demeanor was undoubtedly due to his unwillingness to compromise her.

It was while the adaptable bell-boy was conducting his charge to his room, that enlightenment came. Forbes gave a convulsive start. "Damnation!" he exclaimed, for the second time in fifteen minutes.

"Yes, sir, our floor, sir!" The bell-boy eyed him expectantly. He had an adventurous spirit, though condemned to carry suit-cases and bring ice-water on request. It looked as if there might be something doing with a gentleman who jumped so high and swore so roundly in a public elevator.

Forbes had only realized that the letter Julia had quoted had contained no falsehood. He understood Warren's excitement over the discovery that Agatha Kent was red-haired. Agatha and Hephzibah were one and the same.

The circumstances which led to his taking her in his arms were unusual, indeed. In the close corridors of the city hotel he seemed to smell again the scent of sun-kissed fields. As the bell-boy gripped his arm, he felt against his heart the pressure of that lithe young body, shaken by sobs. His cheek had brushed another, smooth and fragrant. His pulses had answered the indefinable challenge of youth and beauty. They thrilled again at the mere memory.

Forbes did not fall asleep till nearly morning. He lay awake, trying to decide how far the situation was altered by the fact that Agatha Kent had saved his life.

CHAPTER XIX

THE WORM TURNS

In the hour or two of troubled sleep closing his wakeful night, Forbes dreamed vividly and woke with Agatha's voice echoing in his ears. He started up, his lips parted to speak her name, then dropped back upon his pillows with a sense of desolate loss that tried his powers of self-control.

So faithfully had his memory reproduced every intonation of the familiar voice that it had seemed to bring the living woman to his side. He recognized the maternal note which had appealed to him the more because of his unmothered boyhood, the undertone of indulgent humor which was characteristic of the friend on whom he had learned to lean. Only there was no such friend. Her place had been taken by a stranger, capable of bewildering changes of identity, Miss Kent, Hephzibah, and now this newcomer, Agatha, self-confessed impostress who could, even when unmasked and flouted, preserve the dignity which is the heritage of race. He found himself thrilled by an inexplicable pride as he remembered the even voice with which she had answered Julia's shrillness.

The adaptable bell-boy presented himself in due time and awkwardly assisted him with his dressing. After visiting the barber, he was conducted to the hotel dining-room, and here the realization was brought home to him that for many a month Agatha's tact had stood between him and embarrassment. She had prepared his food so that he ate without any especial sense of being at a disadvantage. His fork was always at hand when he wanted it. His glass of water and his cup of coffee were magically present to his need. In the hotel dining-room he heard whispers at his back, and once a sound like smothered laughter, and he tingled with the shamed consciousness of being a show for curious eyes. His face burned throughout the meal, and his eating was largely pretense.

Forbes' engagement with Julia was for ten o'clock. At quarter before the hour, the bell-boy who had taken him in charge conducted him to a stiff little parlor on the second floor, and left him after a whispered explanation to the maid. Time is proverbially slow-footed from the standpoint of lovers, but as Forbes sat waiting he felt sure that his impatience did not explain the seemingly endless duration of those fifteen minutes. The maid came to him at last to ask if there was anything she could do.

"I'd like to know the time, please."

"Half past eleven, sir."

"Half past eleven," Forbes repeated. Oddly his first emotion was a feeling of relief that Agatha did not know.

The parlor maid was offering encouragement. "Prob'ly something's happened to detain the young lady, sir. But I don't believe she'll be much longer."

"Let us hope not," Forbes replied dryly. The proudest of men, he winced at the unmistakable sympathy of the woman's tone. It was not fair that he should be subjected to such humiliation.

Julia arrived upon the stroke of noon, voluble over some undeniable bargains in blouses. She had stopped at one of the exclusive little shops, preferred by the knowing to the big emporiums, only intending, she explained vivaciously, to make one small purchase. But the woman had kept showing her the loveliest things, and all so reasonable. There was practically no one in the place, so that it had seemed like shopping in some strange city. And it was worth coming to town in the hot weather just to pick up such bargains.

"I'm glad your effort was not thrown quite away," Forbes remarked with an irony that glanced harmless from Julia's armor.

"Oh, no, Burton, I don't grudge any sacrifice I have made. Getting you out of the clutches of that harpy was worth it all."

She waited for a suitable expression of gratitude from the gentleman she had rescued. After a pause which Forbes failed to fill appropriately, she spoke again, and this time with grave seriousness.

"Now, Burton, it's only two hours before my train leaves and I must have luncheon, so we'd better lose no time deciding on the wisest course to take in this affair."

Again Forbes failed to respond. Julia eyed him suspiciously.

"I hope you haven't an idea of passing this outrage over without taking any action, Burton. It's that sort of laxity that makes criminals."

"Perhaps you have decided on the punishment appropriate to this particular crime," said Forbes, his voice rich in ironic inflections, which again passed harmlessly over Julia's head.

"To tell the truth, I have. There's only one point on which these mercenary people are really susceptible, and that's money. My advice is to write her that unless she returns every penny you paid her, you will prosecute her for swindling."

"She might not be able to do that, Julia. I judge from what you all say that she must be poor."

"Oh, she's evidently that. Everything about the place is poverty-stricken, and the gown she wore that day was so faded that you could hardly tell the original color. But I believe she has all that money put aside, for don't you remember, the boy said she wanted to send him to school."

"I remember. And you advise me to demand the money she has saved for his schooling, and ask her to charge up my board for those months to charity?"

Julia held to her point. "It's the sort of thing she'd feel, because it's evident there's nothing she wouldn't do for money. I confess I can't comprehend that temperament. Money means so little to me that I simply don't understand how it's possible for people to worship it as they do."

He listened with growing irritation. That this girl who had never earned a dollar, and had never denied herself anything she wanted, should assume so superior an attitude, offended his sense of justice. "Perhaps if you knew more of the value of money," he cut in crisply, "you might respect it more."

"Oh, I know I'm impractical, Burton. Dad was always making fun of me for that." The pensiveness of her tone was still evident as she added, "Perhaps you'd like to have me write the letter before I go."

"What letter?"

"To that woman, of course, threatening to prosecute her unless she returns the money."

His pause was long enough to give the idea that he was considering her suggestion. His tone when at length he spoke, implied nothing of the sort.

"Thank you, Julia. I shall not need your services. And when I write Miss Kent, I shall enclose a check to cover my board till the first of November."

He heard her catch her breath. "You mean you are going to pay a premium for being tricked and deceived?"

"She deceived me and that's not easy for me to forgive. But I'm hardly ready to sponge my living from a girl who is making a hand-to-hand fight with poverty."

"Dear, it's dreadful the way you men let your chivalry run away with you. I suppose if you were on a jury, you couldn't bring yourself to convict a woman of murder."

"I hardly think Miss Kent's offense can be classed in that category," Forbes said stiffly. "I suffered chiefly through the jolt to my sense of dignity. That's always been a sensitive point with me."

Julia sighed. "I can't bear to have you talk that way, Burton. It's bad enough for Mr. Warren to make light of falsehood and treachery. But it seems to me a person capable of that, is capable of anything." She laid her hand lightly on his. "Trust a woman's intuition, Burton. Let me write that letter."

Her touch not only left him cold, but roused his antagonism. He felt an irritated certainty that he was being played upon. "Thank you, but I have nothing to say to Miss Kent that I can not entrust to a public stenographer."

She did not take away her hand. "Let's not talk of that dreadful woman any more," she said, in a lowered voice. "Fate has given us this little hour out of the years, and we mustn't waste it."

Her words brought back something Agatha had said, her scathing scorn of those who took the easy way, and then held fate accountable. The remembrance steeled him against the insidious tenderness of her voice.

"You made your choice, Julia, as you had a right to do. And I wish you every happiness."

The fragrance of a delicate perfume he had always associated with her enveloped him. He felt the pressure of her body against his arm.

"What a queer, quiet hotel this is, Burton. Right in the heart of the city and yet we're as much alone as if we were off somewhere in the woods."

Had she been sensitive, she might have perceived a curious rigidity in the arm against which she leaned, an ominous tightening of the obstinately silent lips. Her vanity felt the challenge of his failure to respond. She flung prudence to the winds. "Burton! Burton!" she murmured, and whether her emotion was real or assumed, he did not know, "why don't you kiss me?"

His fastidious recoil was strengthened by the suspicion that she was attempting by playing on his passion to mold him to her will in the matter of Agatha's punishment. He moved away a little. "Excuse me," he said, "I shouldn't dream of taking such a liberty with the fiancée of Murray Prendergast."

"Oh, don't!" He felt her shudder, and again wondered if it were real, or a pretense. "All the years ahead belong to him, and just this little moment is yours and mine."

"I lay no claim even to a moment of your time, Julia. I asked from you all or nothing."

"Tell me just once that you love me, Burton."

At his continued silence, she drew herself away. "You're different. You don't care for me as you did."

She waited vainly for him to deny the accusation. Then again she caught his hand. She might have been a loyal wife, fearing that her husband's heart was slipping from her grasp and longing to be reassured. "Burton," she implored, "tell me whether you love me."

"I thank God—no."

She fell back, and he could hear her stormy breathing. Well as he knew every inflection of her voice, he hardly recognized it when she spoke again.

"That wretched woman! That creature! She's to blame. She's stolen your heart from me."

"Don't be a fool." The brutality, foreign as it was to Forbes' training and temperament, seemed demanded by the occasion. "My heart and all the rest of me was yours while you chose to keep me. You threw me away like a worn glove when my trouble came, and looked about for a more fitting match."

"Burton, you said yourself—"

"I own I made your way easy for you, Julia. I was fool enough to be satisfied to have you yourself and made no inconvenient demands in the way of loyalty and truth. And the fate you are so fond of invoking was kinder to me than I deserved."

"You love her. You love that abandoned—"

"Stop!" he commanded. "Don't dare finish." But he himself went on talking rapidly. "As far as Miss Kent is concerned, of course I have made it impossible for her ever to think well of me again, since after her months of uninterrupted kindness, I could listen to your venomous attack upon her, and not speak a word in her defense."

"How dare you! How dare you speak like that to me!"

"Whether I love her or not, I don't know. It's too bewildering for me to be sure. But I know she's the most loyal friend, and the dearest comrade and the bravest, most unselfish—"

Julia sprang from her place beside him with a cry. His face was toward her, and at the sound of her voice, an extraordinary thing happened. He saw her for an instant quite distinctly, though the face he had loved had undergone as hideous a change as if death and decay had done their devastating work upon it. Secure in the knowledge of his blindness, she faced him with the mask thrown aside. He saw her features distorted by hate, her eyes narrowed malignantly, her lips drawn back from the teeth. Something Hephzibah Diggs had said in their memorable interview flashed across his mind. "When she showed herself up for what she was, you'd ought to have got down on your marrow bones and thanked the Lord."

Darkness shut down over the unwelcome vision. There was a rushing in his ears so that he heard only faintly Julia's farewell, "I hate you! Oh, how I hate you!" He leaned back against the cushions, realizing that he was a sick man, but enveloped in a strange serenity. When next the parlor maid proffered her services, he sent her to telephone for his physician. An hour later he was comfortably ensconced in a private hospital on the outskirts of the city, and sick as he felt, his mood was increasingly cheerful, for the doctor considered the momentary return of vision, elusive and disappointing as it had been, most encouraging.

It was a week before Forbes was equal to dictating a letter to Agatha. He passed over the peculiar circumstances of their parting, expressed rather formally his sense of gratitude and enclosed a generous check. His acknowledgment came with gratifying promptness. But the nurse on opening the envelope was puzzled.

"It doesn't seem a letter at all, just bits of paper. Why, it looks like a check, torn into little pieces."

"You can't find the number of the check among the scraps, can you?" asked Forbes.

The nurse could and did and Forbes' suspicion became certainty. He turned on his pillow, unreasonably wounded. The Agatha Kent he had loved and trusted had never been, and this stranger who called herself by the familiar name had rejected his overture of friendship.

CHAPTER XX

THE DAY AFTER

The day of judgment has its drawbacks, but it is the day after that really hurts. The first shock numbs. It is when the nipping pain begins, the remorseless pain too cruel to kill, that the sinner takes the full measure of his punishment.

On the day of Forbes' departure, Agatha ate her evening meal as usual and went to bed at eight o'clock. She slept heavily till midnight, roused and speedily dozed off again, but now to be the victim of torturing dreams.

Years before a pet dog of Howard's had become old and sickly and Agatha's father had decided it must be killed. He had attempted to shoot the animal in its sleep, but his nervousness had caused him to miss his aim. It had taken three shots to finish the business. Agatha had come upon the scene just in time to see the look the dying brute turned on its idolized master, and the incident had stamped itself on her memory as the supreme tragedy in her experience. She invariably dreamed of it when feverish and ill. This night she underwent the familiar agony with a difference. In the grotesque necromancy of the dream-world, the wounded dog had become Forbes, turning his stricken gaze upon the friend who had done him to death. She woke in a cold sweat and did not sleep again.

At four o'clock she was up and cleaning house as the one adequate antidote for the remorseful thoughts that threatened to wreck her reason. She worked furiously all the morning, barely stopping to eat. Miss Finch watched her from a distance, heart-wrung and afraid, but knowing from experience that at certain crises Agatha was best left to herself. Howard, with the characteristic masculine reluctance to witness suffering out of his power to relieve, took his fishing rod and departed for a day of his favorite sport.

About two o'clock in the afternoon, Ridgeley Warren came strolling up the driveway between the rows of stately trees which made the battered old house at the end of the avenue appear an anti-climax, and so reached her unheralded. Agatha had thrown a braided rug across the clothes-line and was beating it as if she had a personal spite against each individual rag. The sun was full on her hair and despite her menial occupation, she seemed to him a splendid figure, furiously vital, crowned with light. Excitement whipped up his pulses as he left the driveway and walked across the grass in her direction, but when near enough to make his voice heard above the volley of blows, he only said nonchalantly, "Good afternoon, Hephzibah."

Agatha turned and stood panting. She had been working at high pressure since daybreak, and close inspection revealed not a masquerading goddess but a tired, bedraggled girl. Her hair had slipped from the restraining pins and a wayward coil partly extinguished one eye. Her fair skin was clouded by successive layers of dirt. A disfiguring smudge successfully effaced the dimple in her chin. With quickening admiration Warren realized that this soiled and disheveled apparition still had a distinct claim to beauty.

"Hard at work, I see, Hephzibah." He stood with his hands in his pockets, immaculate in his light summer clothing, and as always he roused her to defiance.

"My name is Kent. Please use it."

"I'm ready to call you anything you please, my dear spitfire. Only remember that it's not my fault that I've always thought of you as Hephzibah."

Agatha glared at him. His presence restored her poise. She realized that as an antidote Warren was better than a thousand years of house-cleaning.

"I don't know why you should think of me as Hephzibah or anything else. I don't know why you shouldn't dismiss me from your mind altogether as I should like to dismiss you."

"Out of the question, Hephzibah, or Miss Agatha Kent, if you like that better. You see, you interest me."

"I'm sorry I can't return the compliment, but you bore me—excruciatingly."

"To begin with," Warren explained analytically, "you are the prettiest girl I know, bar none. And in the second place, I'm inclined to believe you're the brainiest. If what they told me last night is true, you ought to make your fortune on the stage."

Agatha regarded him silently and the antagonism died out of her face. He was almost sorry, for it left her white and wan and rather pitiful.

"You know what a fraud I am, then?" she said wistfully.

"I know you're the cleverest girl of my acquaintance, if you could get by with a thing like that."

"I suppose he simply despises me." Into Agatha's mind had flashed the preposterous hope that possibly Warren's tolerant attitude toward her escapade was shared by the only man who counted.

"Who? Forbes? Why the devil should you care what he thinks? Old Forbes was always a bit of a prig."

Positive hatred looked out of Agatha's eyes. "Oh, I don't know. I shouldn't call a man a prig simply because he objected to being tricked and deceived and lied to. I suppose he has a high enough ideal of women so that he expects a girl to tell the truth, just as much as if she were a man. I consider that attitude a compliment, myself."

Warren was somewhat staggered. "Then I suppose I'm insulting you by thinking you are a darned clever kid, and the rest of them a pack of fools for making a fuss over nothing."

Agatha left him in doubt on this delicate point. The little hope that had stirred in her heart had died almost as soon as it was born, and the resulting anguish seemed out of all proportion to its brief existence. Forbes did not share Warren's leniency toward her summer's masquerade. He was one of the fools who condemned her. She looked away toward the hills and suddenly her face twisted in passionate weeping.

"Don't do that, Hephzibah. For God's sake, don't cry. Can't you let me help you, little girl? You need a friend I'm sure, and there's nothing I'd like better than to help you. You've bewitched me, Hephzibah. I lost my head over you when I thought you were an ignorant little country girl, murdering the king's English every time you opened your mouth. And the more I know of you, the more wonderful you seem. I'm crazy about you."

Agatha's sobs quieted as she listened. When a woman has been humiliated beyond a certain point, nothing can restore her self-esteem like being made love to by a personable man. Warren's irreproachable costume, his good looks, his convincing air of prosperity all helped in her struggle against intolerable mortification. Yet though she dried her eyes at his agitated request, and favored him with a faint, watery smile, she thought of him, if the truth be told, less as a lover than as a life-preserver.

Warren sat upon the porch and smoked while Agatha made herself presentable. It took her some time and he was not sorry, for he wanted a chance to get himself in hand. He had said very much more than he had intended to say when he bought his ticket that morning, and though he did not exactly regret his indiscretion, he told himself that he had better go slow. Twenty-four hours earlier the name Agatha Kent had suggested to him a benevolent old lady with a double chin, the chin an entirely gratuitous contribution of his active imagination. Hephzibah Diggs was a beautiful but deplorably ignorant country girl who had got herself into trouble, like many another ignorant beauty. It was too soon to propose to either. Yet as he glanced impatiently at his watch, Warren realized that the charm of Agatha was her unexpectedness. You never knew what she was going to do. You never could tell what she might make you do, in spite of your better judgment.

Agatha's delay gave him the time he needed. She presented herself in a faded gingham which nevertheless had the advantage of being freshly laundered, her heavy hair wound about her head with a negligence a woman would have interpreted to mean that to Agatha, her caller mattered very little. Now that her face was clean he saw how pale she was, and how dark the circles under her eyes, and this discovery was responsible for an unwonted gentleness in his manner. He talked as a big brother might have talked, and the instinctive, virginal defiance which his unconcealed admiration had always roused in her, changed by imperceptible degrees to confidence.

He asked her bluntly about her finances and she told him without hesitation or evasion. He hinted at monetary assistance and she stopped him midway, with an imperious tilt of her chin and a haughty stare. "You are not talking to Hephzibah Diggs," she reminded him.

Warren sighed and changed his tactics. "Did you ever think of selling your place?"

"I'm afraid nobody would want it, it's so dreadfully old and tumbledown. And besides we've got to have a roof over our heads."

"You couldn't sell it here, of course. But there are possibilities in this place. A small summer hotel ought to do well. Magnificent old trees, fine view, convenient to the city." He studied his surroundings with an appraising eye. "It should bring at least fifteen thousand if you found the right purchaser."

She caught her breath and the sound brought his eyes back to her face. What he saw touched him profoundly. Indeed he felt the smart of tears under his drooping lids. "My God," he said to himself, "to have her look like that over a paltry fifteen thousand."

"Then I could send Howard to college," Agatha was saying, breathlessly.

"Sure you could."

"And there would be enough to take care of Fritz—Miss Finch, as long as she lives."

"I hope you'd do something for Hephzibah Diggs," said Warren gruffly, to hide his emotion. "That girl has something coming to her, believe me!"

Warren spent most of his leisure entertaining people, but he seldom felt better repaid than when Agatha greeted this jest with a quiver of laughter.

"I promise you she shall have a new gingham, perhaps a party dress if the money holds out."

"Yes, that's what Hephzibah would want, a party dress," said Warren. "And I speak for the first dance the first time she wears it." He went on to discuss sales and investments, and Agatha hung upon his words. He perceived that the practical line appealed to her. His tentative love-making bored and angered her. When he talked of gilt-edged first mortgages, bringing six per cent., she leaned toward him, her reddish-gold eyes melting into his, and seemed ready to leap into his arms.

The carriage he had ordered came for him at what he considered a ridiculously early hour and he kept it waiting while he explained that he would immediately take up the matter of the sale of her property with several people who might possibly be interested. She let him hold her hand while he protracted his good-by to an unconscionable length, and he argued well from this, till she disconcerted him by saying faintly, "Shall you see Mr. Forbes soon?"

"I can't say. The fair Julia may have hustled him away before I'm back."

"If—if you should see him," said Agatha, her lips white, "try to make him think kindly of me. Try to make him understand that I didn't realize that I was doing anything wrong."

"To be sure I will," replied Warren with misleading heartiness. "But if a man is such a blasted fool as to need that assurance, it's not worth troubling your little head about him, don't you see?" And then he said good-by again and went off in an unprecedentedly bad humor, damning Forbes whole-heartedly all the way to town.

Warren's call left Miss Finch pleasurably excited. For a man to come out from the city for a few hours' talk with a girl, argued his intentions serious. And Agatha's abstraction, the dreamy look in her eyes, the irrelevant nature of her replies to the simplest questions, seemed to imply a gratifying responsiveness in her mood. Little did the innocent spinster dream that Agatha's absorption was due to calculating the wisest expenditure of an income derived from an investment of fifteen thousand dollars in first mortgages at six per cent.

But Miss Finch's elation was short-lived, for Howard came home with a startling piece of news. "Heard the funniest thing to-day. Who do you suppose has been getting married?"

To please him Agatha hazarded a guess. Howard shook his head.

"It's the last one you'd ever think of. Old Billy-goat Wiggins. He married a widow out on the Jericho pike and I guess he's had six or seven wives already."

Without attempting to correct her brother's exaggeration, Agatha cast an apprehensive glance in Miss Finch's direction. Miss Finch met her look with an air of resolute calm. At last the matter was settled. Now that one of her lovers was out of the running, the only thing left was to take the other. Her days of anxious deliberation, due to weighing one man against his rival, were over, and it was a great relief. "Mrs. James Doolittle," said Miss Finch to herself and blushed high. Well, Doolittle was as good a name as Wiggins. "I b'lieve if anything, it's a little more aristocratic," Miss Finch decided.

But as the evening wore on, she found herself disquieted. In her thoughts of James Doolittle there was little of roseate illusion. She saw him mentally as she had seen him uncounted times in reality, his trousers patched and bagging at the knees, his shirt soiled and faded, his hat suggesting that some predatory animal had taken frequent bites out of the rim. "I do like a man to look neat," sighed Miss Finch. She recalled too, the tumbledown cottage where James Doolittle had kept bachelor's hall since his mother's death six years earlier, and compared it disadvantageously with her present quarters. Romance had spread her wings, and taken flight. Marriage had become a very drab, prosaic affair. But there was no help for it.

Miss Finch retired to her room rather early and wrote Mr. Doolittle accepting the offer of marriage made nearly two months before. It was a prim little note and if her delay had been unflattering, there was nothing in her formula of acceptance to restore the masculine amour propre. She said that marriage was a very serious matter, and she hoped they were making no mistake. She signed her name Zaida Finch, and realizing that the compact signature would soon be replaced by that of an unknown female, Zaida Doolittle, she shed some agitated tears.

The letter was sealed and stamped on the table beside her and Miss Finch was lying awake wondering whether the tongue of slander would be set wagging if she should decide on giving the Doolittle cottage a thorough cleaning before taking the step that would make her its permanent mistress, when Phemie came blundering up the stairs.

Miss Finch sprang out of bed and, candle in hand, appeared in the doorway. She shook a chiding finger at the girl. "Don't make such a racket," she hissed. "Everybody's been in bed for hours. You oughtn't to stay out so late, Phemie. It don't look right in a young girl."

Phemie did not seem aware that she was being scolded. She was full of silly giggles and pleased to find a confidante to share her amusement. She pushed her way uninvited into Miss Finch's room.

"I never had so much fun in my life," wheezed Phemie in what she mistakenly supposed to be a whisper. "Oh, my goodness, I've laughed fit to bust myself."

"Where've you been?" demanded Miss Finch, eying her disapprovingly.

"I've been to a shivaree. Whole crowd of us went. We had horns and tin pans and Ernie Cox took a cow-bell along. Oh, my goodness!" Phemie placed her hands on her hips, and rocked back and forth in an ecstasy of mirth.

Miss Finch's severity became more pronounced. "I think you might have been in better business. Deacon Wiggins has been married quite a few times, I know, but he's a good citizen and a pillar of the church."

"'Twarn't Deacon Wiggins. 'Twas Jim Doolittle. He just got married to that cross-eyed old maid who used to work at Phelps' store."

When Miss Finch could get rid of Phemie she tore the letter she had so painstakingly composed into the minutest fragments, promising herself to burn them in the morning before any one was up. Innocent as her intentions had been, the fact remained that she had written a compromising letter to a married man, and she could not feel safe till the sole evidence of her indiscretion had been reduced to ashes. As she climbed back into bed she might perhaps have been excused for indulging in pessimistic reflections on masculine perfidy, and the hollowness of lovers' vows, but in point of fact her mood was eminently Christian. To her own secret amazement she was chiefly conscious of overwhelming relief.

The critical relatives of Deacon Wiggins' three deceased partners were nothing to her. Mr. Doolittle's tendency to wear his trousers with only one frail suspender as a support was no concern of hers, except as any respectable spinster might venture to hope that his rashness would not carry him too far. That good old name Finch, which had been identified with her personality for half a century, would not be exchanged for any unfamiliar polysyllable. Without knowing it, she had been shrinkingly apprehensive of coming changes, and now everything was going on exactly as it had before.

"If Agatha marries Mr. Warren and has a family of children," thought Miss Finch, "she'll need somebody reliable in the house. And if she doesn't get a husband, I ought to be around to look after her. And anyway, nobody can ever say that the reason I never married is that I never had a chance."

And so comforting was that concluding thought that even after sleep claimed her as its own, a complacent, almost a triumphant smile, hovered about Miss Finch's parted lips.

CHAPTER XXI

ENLIGHTENMENT

Warren stamped the snow from his feet, shook himself like a wet dog, and entering the apartment hotel, passed at a step from the frigid zone to the tropics. At the desk he gave his name to a businesslike young woman who ascertained over the telephone that Mr. Forbes was in, and forthwith Warren was shot to the fifth floor. A smiling Japanese boy opened the door of Forbes' rooms, and Forbes himself came forward and gripped his friend's hand.

For a moment neither man found speech possible. "Congratulations, old fellow," Warren got out at last. "Best news I've heard for many a moon."

He gave his snowy coat to the waiting servant, seated himself and lighted a cigarette as a preliminary to conversation. "Well, how does it seem to have two eyes again? A bit intoxicating, I fancy. Rather like too much champagne."

"You know when a man has suffered enough, his idea of perfect happiness is to have the pain stop," Forbes answered. "I suppose the only way to size up a blessing at its real value is to have to do without it for a time." His words seemed to meet the requirements in the case, but Warren's quick ear detected in his voice a note of melancholy, and he thought he knew the explanation. Not being remarkable for tact, he promptly broached the delicate subject.

"Well, the fair Julia has done it. I got her cards week before last. Gosh, when you see the fellows the dear girls marry, it almost seems a compliment when they turn you down. You'd think it would take more than the Prendergast money and family connections and all that, to sugarcoat a pill like Murray."

"I wish her more happiness than she's likely to have, I'm afraid." Forbes spoke formally, his manner implying that it might be as well for Warren to change the subject, but his visitor took his time.

"Oh, well, Julia isn't capable of real unhappiness. She could be uncomfortable, or disappointed, or humiliated, or anything that doesn't go too deep, but unhappiness is beyond her. That other little girl now, she's different."

Forbes did not ask what girl was referred to. He kept his eyes on the floor.

"Julia looks as soft as a ripe plum," Warren continued. "Most of the dear creatures do, as if a rough word would crush them. But believe me, she's made of the same hard, calculating stuff as her old man. You never heard of old Studley's losing any sleep over the men he'd ruined on the street, did you? Julia won't have a wrinkle when she's sixty. If anybody is going to marry Murray Prendergast it ought to be that kind of woman."

If Forbes agreed with this frank expression of opinion, he gave no sign. He had the appearance of waiting patiently for the other to finish.

"Our little friend Hephzibah," continued Warren, "is the sort whose hair turns white in a single night, you know. Not that hers has—God forbid. You never saw that hair, my boy. You've got something to live for."

Forbes made a gesture of impatience. "Do you happen to know Miss Kent's address at the present time?"

"Do you happen to want Miss Kent's address at the present time?" mocked Warren truculently.

Forbes hesitated. "Yes," he said with a seeming effort at frankness, "I do. Some of the things that were said, Warren, about her poverty, you remember, caused me considerable uneasiness. I felt that my leaving as I did when she had counted on having me until the cold weather, might have embarrassed her, and whatever ground I may have had for resentment, I had no wish to add to her financial worries. And so I sent her a check for the full amount I would have paid for board, up to the first of November."

Warren laughed sardonically. "Oh, you did, did you?"

"Yes, I did." Forbes' manner was a trifle aggrieved. "She returned it."

"Of course!"

"Perhaps you are in her confidence," Forbes said in a tone of annoyance.

"She never mentioned that particular matter to me. But I am glad to believe that she repays my friendship by a degree of trust."

Forbes waited a moment before continuing his explanation. "I did not write her again for some time. I was rather put out by the return of the check, foolishly, I suppose. But the last of November I sent her a rather long letter. You know, Ridgeley, when all is said and done, the girl saved my life."

"Well?"

"The letter came back to me from the Dead Letter Office. I thought it was a trick of some sort. It seemed incredible, you know, that when her family has been living at Oak Knoll for generations, she should drop out of sight and leave no more trace than an extinguished candle flame. I sent Evans down to look her up, and he reported that the three of them, Miss Kent, her foster brother, Howard, and Miss Finch, had all left town, and none of the old neighbors could give him any information as to their whereabouts. The old place has been sold to some one who is planning to build a summer hotel on the site."

Warren nodded. "I engineered that deal. It's a good location for such an enterprise. She sold for twelve thousand. I think I could have got her two or three thousand more, if she had been willing to wait, but she wasn't."

Forbes tried to appear relieved. "Twelve thousand! Well, I am glad to know she is not in immediate need. At the same time, Ridgeley, I should like her address."

Warren eyed him with malevolence. "It looks to me as if she wasn't particularly anxious for you to have it."

Forbes reddened. "Nonsense! Don't be an ass, Warren. It's quite important that I should have a talk with Miss Kent."

"I suppose you want to be sure that she's sufficiently penitent for the deception she practised on you."

"Really, my dear fellow, I can hardly see that it is any of your business what I have to say to her."

"Simply that I'm a friend of the lady's. And the only reason that I'm not her husband is that she's refused me, by letter and word of mouth, just eleven times by actual count. A singularly consistent character, our Hephzibah."

Forbes sat biting his lips. "I'm very sorry, Warren. I needn't say I had no idea—"

"Of course you had no idea. You took her devotion as a matter of course. You let your Julia insult her without speaking a word in her defense. And it never occurred to you that another man might think her unselfishness and her courage and her beauty and her wit made her a woman in a million."

"I must correct you on one point," Forbes said stiffly. "It is true the discovery that Miss Kent was not what I supposed her took me by surprise and I was both hurt and angry. But the engagement between Miss Studley and myself was broken finally and irrevocably because I defended—partly at least—the course Miss Kent had taken." He hesitated before adding, "If you really wish to marry her—"

"Oh, to hell with your 'ifs!' I've been on my knees to her from the first minute I saw her. I'd marry her if she were Hephzibah Diggs."

"I was only going to say, Ridgeley, that if you are in earnest, you are pretty sure to win out. I can hardly imagine any woman's continuing to turn you down."

Warren did not appear touched by the obvious sincerity of this tribute. He glowered at the other man ill-naturedly.

"I dare say she would have married me but for one thing. I came on the scene too late."

"Too late?"

"Another man got ahead of me. She couldn't love me because she loved him."

"Do you mean that she's engaged?"

"Damn you!" Warren shouted furiously. "Don't put on those unconscious airs with me. You know well enough what man I mean, and you know whether you're engaged to her or not."

"You're out of your mind, Warren. You're talking like an insane man."

"Let it go at that, then. Call it that I'm crazy."

"If you will remember that I thought Miss Kent an elderly woman, you will realize that I—"

"Oh, your immaculate skirts are clean," exclaimed Warren, with preposterous bitterness. "You didn't make love to the nice old lady who was your father's boyhood flame. But you were so helpless and so darned pathetic and so dependent on her that you didn't have to. She's not like Julia, looking for an easy berth and a through ticket. Her idea of love is giving, giving without keeping count."

"You don't know what you're talking about," said Forbes, but with less conviction.

"Don't I, though! Do you remember the scheme we hatched to send Hephzibah to school?"

Forbes nodded.

"I came up and had a talk with her. Of course she was playing a part, but it wasn't all play-acting. She practically told me there was somebody she cared for. She—hang it all, Forbes, she's not always the audacious little devil who can palm herself off on an intelligent man as her own great-aunt, and never miss a cog. There was a look on her face when she spoke of that man—she was all angel, then."

"But what possible reason have you for thinking—why, you make me feel an ass for listening." Forbes' humility was so obvious as to be disarming.

"I know you're the man. She was always at me to have a talk with you and plead her cause, you know."

"But surely that wouldn't mean—"

"Yes, if you'd seen her eyes. You know how a dog looks when his master kicks him. Like that."

"Good God, Warren—"

"Oh, I don't suppose you like it," said Warren grimly. "But let me remind you that if it's unpleasant for you to listen, it's hell for me to tell you. I suppose you know what brought Julia to Oak Knoll to rescue you by force of arms."

"I believe Miss Kent wrote a letter."

"Yes, under pretense of congratulating Julia on her prospective engagement, she wrote her that you had been spending the most of your summer in the company of an attractive young girl. She'd sized up Julia's disposition pretty cleverly and she reckoned that if anything would hold her back, it would be a suspicion that there was a flaw in her title to your life-long devotion."

"But surely if she had felt as you imagine—"

"We're talking of Hephzibah, you know," growled Warren. "She was thinking of your happiness, not of hers. Of course she knew she was taking a long shot. She was too smart to miss that little point. She risked exposure to give you what you wanted. That's the sort she is." He added gloomily, "I don't know why I'm such a fool as to tell you all this. I suppose it's because I know I haven't the ghost of a chance."

There was a long, depressing silence. "Well," said Forbes at length, his voice curiously shaken, "where shall I find her?"

"Good God, man, I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"The last word I had from her was a Christmas card and the blasted post-mark was so blurred that I couldn't make out where it was mailed. And in November I had this letter. You might as well read it, I suppose."

He took the worn missive from his pocket, handed it to Forbes, and began to smoke furiously. Forbes, his face very pale, read without comment.

"My Dear Mr. Warren:

"Well, the thing is accomplished. I am a capitalist, a woman of wealth, and also a wanderer on the face of the earth. But I'm not worrying about that side of it, it's so delicious to feel that all this money is mine and that I can have a trunk full of new clothes if I feel like it.

"Howard left for school yesterday. He will be a little behind his class, but the principal thinks he will have no difficulty in catching up if he is willing to work. Howard is so ambitious and eager that I know he is going to make me proud of him.

"You see I am sending you a check. It was awfully good of you to want to put this deal through because of your interest in me, but I can't help thinking it's better to be businesslike in business and friendly in friendship. So this check is for the celebrated lawyer, Mr. Warren, who has managed this affair so wonderfully, and my heart-felt gratitude is for my dear friend, Ridgeley Warren, whose kindness and generosity have been so much more than I deserved. I shall never forget it. When I am a wrinkled old woman, and can smile at some of the things that hurt now, it will warm my heart to remember your goodness.

"Dear Mr. Warren, I am not going to write you again at present. I have a feeling that if you keep on seeing me, you are more likely to keep on wishing for something it is better for you to forget. I am sure your generosity has more to do with your feeling than you have any idea of, and that when I am no longer at hand to make a continual appeal to your sympathy, you will soon be your usual self. I hope you will love the most beautiful and noblest girl in the world and marry her, and if you ever have reason to think that she doesn't appreciate the fact that she has drawn a prize, just send for me and I'll open her eyes.

"Words seem such inadequate things, don't they, when one's heart is full? I wish you could know all I mean when I say, Thank you.

"Gratefully yours, "Agatha Kent.

"P.S. You will, I am sure, be seeing Mr. Forbes soon. The greatest favor you can do me is to make him understand how thoughtlessly I entered on the deception he so naturally resents. You see we were such good friends in a way—he really liked me and trusted me while he thought I was somebody else—it hurts to realize how completely I have forfeited his good opinion. You seem to understand so well that perhaps you may influence him to think of me a little more kindly."

Forbes folded the letter and gave it to its owner. "You deserve her if any man does, Ridgeley," he said with proper humility.

"I deserve her more than you do, if that's what you're trying to say," barked Warren. "And now you see what we're up against. Between us we've lost all trace of her."

"We must find her again," Forbes said firmly.

Warren's hostile gaze challenged him. "What for? Do you want to rub it in how she's outraged the sacred name of truth and all that rot?"

"No."

"Perhaps you're going to be magnanimous enough to forgive her?"

"Possibly," Forbes offered quietly, "I want to ask her to forgive me."

Warren's unhappy eyes met his full. "I suppose I'm in a rotten humor, old man. I do think you're a damned sight luckier than you deserve to be. But let it go. The question is, how are we to find her?"

As one result of the deliberations protracted over several hours, the following advertisement appeared in the leading newspapers of a dozen large cities:

"Information wanted. Any person acquainted with the present whereabouts of Hephzibah Diggs will confer a favor by communicating at once with the undersigned."

The anxious weeks went by. The two men consulted almost daily, with growing perplexity and diminishing hope. And Agatha made no sign.

CHAPTER XXII

FELLOW TRAVELERS

The hat Agatha was adjusting before the mirror was a black toque with a quill at the side. On most heads it would have possessed no more individuality than a clover blossom. It was one of the hats which apparently are planned with a view to being inconspicuous. But as Agatha pinned it in place it seemed to assume a certain provocative quality. It became a challenge to the masculine eye.

The same was true of the blue serge suit she wore. Nothing can be imagined more innocuous than a suit of blue serge, embellished with narrow black braid. Miss Finch could have worn one of the identical cut and material and it would have looked as if it had been designed for her. Yet on Agatha the blue serge was alluring. It captured the eye as though striped with scarlet.

Mrs. Van Horne, a stout, middle-aged woman who occupied a swivel chair at a businesslike desk, watched the operation of adjusting the black toque and rubbed her nose with a flourish indicating mental perturbation. It had occurred to her that Agatha was a somewhat colorful person for the task to which she had been assigned, that she looked undeniably youthful for so responsible an errand, that some one grayer in tone and of an aspect radiating propriety and decorum, would have been better fitted for the duty in hand. Mrs. Van Horne looked at the clock, saw it lacked but thirty-seven minutes to train time, and brushed aside her scruples. It was now too late to change.

"You are sure you feel equal to taking charge of the four, Miss Kent?" she said, more for the reassuring effect of Agatha's self-confident answer than because she had the slightest doubt what that answer would be.

Agatha turned a vivacious face. "I'm really looking forward to the trip. It'll be such fun."

"I should hardly use that term to describe traveling in charge of four children," observed Mrs. Van Horne, with a grim smile. "And one of them a teething baby. You will naturally attract a good deal of attention."

"Not a bit," said Agatha briskly.

"You think not?"

"Every one will take it for granted that I am a young mother, coming home with my little family to visit grandpa and grandma."

Mrs. Van Horne's brow cleared. As the representative of a serious-minded organization, with an established reputation for prudence and sagacity, she had been accusing herself of indiscretion in entrusting this important commission to a young woman of such butterfly aspect, even though in self-defense she insisted that of her assistants, Miss Kent was easily the most resourceful and capable. Agatha's suggestion brought relief. Without doubt she was right. The traveling public would assume her to be a matron of extraordinarily youthful appearance. No one would question the discretion of the head of the Hamilton Orphanage for committing four children to the care of one who, whatever her capacity, looked a fly-away girl.

"I imagine you are right, Miss Kent," she said. "And if I were you, I should take no pains to correct the impression. It will save you a great many annoying questions."

A maid appeared with news that the taxi had arrived. A nurse brought in the baby, hooded and cloaked for its journey. Outside on the steps waited the three older children, about to be placed in homes which had been duly inspected and approved by authorized representatives of the orphanage. As Agatha assembled her charges and led the way to the cab, little faces appeared at the windows, small hands waved farewells and a chorus of shrill voices called good-by. An irrepressible little orphan of a plainness which so far had defied the efforts of the society to place her in a desirable home, came running to the curb as Agatha was arranging her charges about her. "I don't want anybody to 'dopt you, Miss Kent," she quavered.

"Bless your heart!" Agatha leaned out and kissed her squarely. "No one's going to adopt me. I'll be back by Saturday."

As the cab rattled down the street, Agatha turned for a look at the square, uncompromising building where she had found a haven six months before. Despite the opulent tone of her letter to Warren, Agatha had fully realized that twelve thousand dollars does not constitute wealth. Howard's education was provided for, and that was an enormous relief, but her responsibility for Miss Finch still lay heavy on her heart and she was determined not to draw on her principal any more than was absolutely necessary. The opening at the Hamilton Orphanage had come to her through a series of fortunate accidents, and Agatha had flung herself into the work with an enthusiasm which had insured her immediate success. Agatha loved the orphanage and the orphans. The maternal instinct, always strong in her, exulted in the swarm of children on whom she could lavish herself. There was no urchin so refractory that Agatha could not find excuses for him, no little face so plain that she could not discern in it something of winsomeness. She saw the humor in the naughtiness of some unruly youngster where most of her associates perceived only irrefutable confirmation of the doctrine of original sin. Mrs. Van Horne, accustomed to aids who did their duty with automatic faithfulness, found Agatha too good to be true.

Miss Finch boarded in the vicinity of the orphanage and Agatha spent with her all the time she was not on duty. It had been hard to reconcile Miss Finch to being in the same city with Warren and not acquainting him with the fact. The sudden termination of her own double romance had intensified her passionate interest in Agatha's love-affairs. She thought of the subject continually. She dreamed of Agatha as a bride lovely in creamy silk and floating veil. She harped on the subject till Agatha's nerves suffered and sometimes she betrayed her irritation in speech.

Agatha was not thinking either of Warren or Forbes as she was bounced to the station, the baby in her arms and the three other children mixed in indistinguishably with the luggage. Children are an admirable antidote to unprofitable thinking, because of their capacity for demanding one's entire attention. There were two little girls between three and four years, who looked rather like twins, but were not even sisters, and there was a boy soon to be five. The baby was just getting old enough to be afraid of strangers and was fretful because of teething. It did not look as if Agatha would have many minutes for meditating on the hardships of her own lot.

At the station, with the aid of two sympathetic porters, Agatha got her charges aboard the Pullman and settled herself comfortably some minutes in advance of the other passengers. As they entered by ones and twos, she was aware of interested glances in her direction, in some cases the interest blended with apprehension. "Horrors!" she heard one woman say to her husband as she passed. Agatha looked after her darkly. She was instantly convinced that the speaker was the owner of a toy poodle.

A moment before the train pulled out, a man came into the Pullman and took his seat in the section opposite hers, glancing amiably at the promising little family across the aisle. Agatha shrank away from the look, feeling faint and sick. There was an ominous ringing in her ears. So strong was her sense of panic that if she had had another moment in which to act, she might have marshalled her brood off the train and trusted to finding some excuse that would satisfy Mrs. Van Horne. But before her impulse toward flight had time to crystallize, the last "All aboard" had been shouted. The train shuddered, groaned and moved out.

As the clear daylight replaced the semi-darkness of the terminal station, Agatha blushed furiously. She sat huddled in her corner, awaiting the outcome like a criminal who anticipates arrest. Gradually her unreasoning alarm was replaced by coherent thinking. If Forbes were still blind, she might travel as his fellow passenger to the Pacific coast without his being the wiser. But he had come on board unattended, moving freely and fearlessly. If his sight had been restored, she was still safe, for he had never seen her face.

After a time she brought her courage to the point of stealing a glance at him. A newspaper lay upon his knee, and though he was not reading at the moment, its presence confirmed the impression she had formed as he entered. He could see again. She found herself trembling for gladness and swallowing hard at an obstinate lump in her throat. The dark spectacles he had worn throughout his sojourn at Oak Knoll had been replaced by a pair of eye-glasses, which, to her prejudiced judgment, added to his air of distinction. Now that her first unreasonable terror had subsided, she found his proximity delightfully exhilarating.

The next thought brought a pang. If he could see again there was no longer a barrier between himself and Julia. Agatha's duties at the Hamilton Orphanage left her little time for perusing the society columns, so prominent a feature of the city journals, and she had missed the detailed accounts of Julia's wedding, with their emphasis on the beauty of the bride and the family connections of the groom. If he were about to marry Julia, Agatha reasoned, he should look very happy. She peered interrogatively in his direction to settle this important point, encountered his eyes unexpectedly, and looked away in crimson confusion.

Forbes found the domestic group in such close proximity more entertaining than his newspaper. He thought he had never seen a prettier picture of radiant motherhood than this lovely young creature with her little ones around her. It was a pity, he reflected, that none of the children had inherited her rare beauty. They were all wholesome little youngsters, bidding fair to grow to commonplace maturity as far as externals were concerned. He found himself forming a somewhat uncomplimentary picture of the father of the quartet, a rather heavy, gross individual with a muddy skin.

Other people than Forbes found an irresistible attraction in the family group. The woman Agatha had branded as the owner of a poodle, an overfed blonde, came down the aisle and paused to settle some points on which she was uncertain. Agatha, mindful of Mrs. Van Horne's injunction, gave the desired information as to the sex of the baby and the brand of artificial food she favored, without any hint that her sense of responsibility was less than maternal.

"Are the little girls twins?" quizzed the stout woman, with an arrogant assumption of having every right to know.

"No, the curly-haired one is the older."

"They must have come very close," said the stout woman disapprovingly.

"There is about six months' difference," replied Agatha unthinkingly. The stout woman's start told her too late what she had done, but as no satisfactory explanation occurred to her, she sat stolidly making a pretense of being absorbed in soothing the fretful baby. Her late interrogator, assuming the reply to be an impertinent substitute for telling her to mind her own business, stalked away, her manner implying that she washed her hands of Agatha and her family.

Agatha had no time for unavailing grief. Four children under five are capable of providing abundant occupation for the most strenuous nature. She was rising for the third time in twenty minutes to minister to the wants of the oldest boy who had announced emphatically that he was "fursty," when Forbes stepped across the aisle.

"Just let me wait on him," he said. "At this rate you will be worn out before you reach the end of your journey."

The sound of his clear voice was almost her undoing. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to cry. She wanted most of all to put her head down on his broad shoulder and cling to him till he had forgiven her. As none of these things appeared feasible, she contented herself with saying, "Thank you," in a voice so faint as hardly to be audible.

Forbes gave the restless lad a drink of water and took him into his section. Agatha heard her charge announcing in a penetrating voice that his name was Charlie Briggs, whether in answer to a question or not, she was not sure. Then the small boy nestled close to the big man, and listened raptly. She judged that Forbes must be telling him a story, and after the manner of her kind, she found this additional ground for worship. As a matter of fact Forbes was giving in detail the life-history of a pony he had owned when a boy. This chronicle concluded, he went on to describe a bear hunt in which he had once participated, and found his reward in the admiring gaze his listener fastened upon him.

Presently Charlie Briggs felt constrained to be entertaining in turn. "I'm going to get a new papa, pretty soon," he announced.

Forbes felt an uncomfortable sense of shock. If the woman in the opposite section were a widow, the age of the child in her arms indicated that her bereavement was extremely recent. It seemed more probable that it was one of the cases which prove the frailty of the marriage bond in America. He did not know why this conjecture should be responsible for so marked a feeling of discomfort.

He changed the subject abruptly and proceeded to entertain Charlie with an imaginary incident in the life of a gray squirrel, taking Thompson Seton as his model. In the course of the narrative the baby had an attack of crying and its shrieks distracted Forbes' attention. He hesitated, lost the thread of his story, became hopelessly entangled.

Charlie understood his friend's confusion. He looked across the aisle, scowling darkly. "She's going to get rid of the baby pretty soon," he informed his companion. "To-morrow it won't be 'round to bother."

Again Forbes was conscious of a feeling of revulsion. The child's remark was capable of several interpretations, but to his thinking the meaning was obvious. This pretty little woman was about to marry for the second time, and the husband-to-be objected to the size of the ready-made family. Evidently she planned to give the baby away. Rather absurdly Forbes found himself thinking that he would not have believed it of her.

The baby was behaving outrageously, almost justifying its mother's unnatural intention. Agatha had become sadly disheveled. Her hair—she really had wonderful hair, Forbes owned, for all his disapproval—was gradually slipping down. Her face was crimson from her exertions. The shirt-waist, immaculate when she boarded the Pullman, was mussed, and one shoulder damp, due to the baby's repeated experiments to ascertain whether it possessed nutritive qualities. As Forbes involuntarily looked at the opposite section, the ear-splitting sounds compelling his reluctant attention, Agatha transferred the baby's head to the other shoulder, cuddling the little form close to her heart. There was such divinely patient tenderness in the gesture that Forbes underwent an instant revulsion of feeling.

He did not understand it in the least, but he suddenly felt sure of the woman. Whatever the shortcomings of Mr. Briggs or his probable successor, the girlish wife did not lack womanly qualities. He was unjust enough to feel decidedly vexed with the little boy. Probably he had listened to discussions of matters he did not understand, and mixed things up. Forbes told himself that he had never liked precocious children.

The baby suddenly decided to go to sleep. Its squalls ceased magically. Its little body, stiffened in unavailing protest against all the injustice of the world, relaxed in complete forgetfulness. The feverish flush receded from Agatha's brow. She sat with drooping eyelids, a pensive madonna. Forbes' wilful gaze would not observe the bounds of propriety. Again and again it sought her, and when at length his eyes encountered hers, he smiled his congratulations. She gave him back a timid smile with a curious underlying wistfulness. It needed only that smile to clinch his faith in her.

When the call for luncheon was given, he crossed the aisle. "Won't you let me stay with the children while you eat? With the baby asleep, I think I can safely make the offer."

In a voice hardly above a whisper, Agatha explained that they had brought sandwiches.

"But you'll let me bring you in a cup of tea or coffee, won't you? You've had a very strenuous morning and you certainly need something in the way of a stimulant."

Perversely Agatha declined the offer, though she was longing to say yes. It was not that she felt the need of tea or coffee or of anything so gross as food or drink, but there was something ineffably refreshing in his solicitude for her comfort. His good offices declined, Forbes touched his hat and was turning away, when Charlie Briggs plunged into the aisle and seized his coat. "I don't want you to go," he howled.

Forbes came back, boyishly eager. "Let me take him with me, won't you? You will have your hands full enough with the three and I promise not to give him anything a child of his age ought not to eat."

Agatha had already regretted her obduracy. She gave the desired permission with a radiant smile, impelling Forbes to think excusingly how very young she must have been when she married Mr. Briggs. As he went toward the dining-car, Charlie clinging to his hand, the owner of the poodle expressed to her husband the conviction that something or somebody was shameless. She would have characterized herself as possessing a forgiving disposition but would have added that there are some things nobody can be expected to overlook. The case of the two children, six months apart, was one of them.

Forbes returned from the dining-car looking at his watch. The porter appeared without warning and brushed him off obsequiously. Agatha's heart contracted. It needed no prophet to foretell what was about to happen.

He came to her side, addressing her pleasantly. "I leave you at the next station. I expect to meet a friend there. I wish I might have gone farther and relieved you a little of your responsibilities."

He checked himself suddenly, thinking that this rather silent young woman was about to speak. She was looking up at him with a strange, disconcerting earnestness. Nor had his intuition been at fault. For a moment Agatha did battle with an almost irresistible temptation to shout at him, "I am Agatha Kent."

Almost at once she realized the folly of her momentary purpose. He was about to leave the train. There was no time for explanations, to say nothing of coming to an understanding. Moreover it was possible that the friend he was to meet was Julia herself. This last thought completed the paralysis of her passing impulse. In a stifled voice she told him that he had been very kind.

"You are a very courageous young woman," Forbes replied. "I hope you won't be too tired when you reach your destination." He patted Charlie's shoulder and turned away. The obsequious porter was removing his grips. With a last smile to Agatha he went down the aisle.

Agatha leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. The tears ran down her cheeks unchecked. Probably this was the last time she would ever see him and that was no cause for regret since the pleasure of such encounters was so over-balanced by the pain. And moreover he must be on the point of marrying Julia, if he had not already made her his wife. It was better that he should go his way, unaware that again their paths had crossed.

Forbes, stepping to the station platform, gave his grips to a station porter and looked about for Warren. A minute or two passed before he could distinguish him in the crowd and he was beginning to think his friend was late, when his eye fell upon him standing at the edge of the platform and gazing idly at the train which had been a little behind-hand, and was already beginning to pull out.

Forbes approached him briskly, the porter at his heels. His lips were parted to speak the other's name, when Warren started violently and took a step forward. "Hephzibah!" he shouted.

Forbes spun on his heel. The coach he had just quitted was passing. From the window a girl looked out, a girl with disheveled red-gold hair and tear-stained cheeks. In an instant he understood. The girl in charge of the four children was Agatha. It could be nobody but Agatha. He knew now what she had wanted to say when she had looked up at him. He understood the wistfulness of her smile, the entreaty in her eyes. He had searched for her vainly all winter, and a moment before he had talked to her face to face and had not known.

Forbes' reason was in abeyance. The last car of the long vestibuled-train was just abreast him, moving with considerable velocity. With a spring he gained the lower step, seizing the railings on either side. He was vaguely aware of a shout from the receding platform and he almost thought he could distinguish Warren's voice lifted in a bellow of astonishment. But for the time being all other emotions were submerged by an overwhelming satisfaction in the realization that Agatha and he were still fellow travelers.

CHAPTER XXIII

AN INTRODUCTION

Forbes waited for the door to be opened with sensations approximating those of a naughty boy, caught in mischief. Man of the world as he was, he recoiled from the prospect before him. He had never been of the temperament to ignore precedent and defy regulations, and the necessary explanations to outraged authority were no more attractive because they were something new in his experience. Hardly more agreeable than his anticipations of an interview with the conductor was the realization of the probable comments of his fellow passengers, the smiles that would be exchanged, the curious conjectures passed from one to another, as to the occasion for his act.

As Forbes reflected ruefully on the coming ordeal, his hat was lifted lightly from his head and sent whirling on an independent journey. His impulse to snatch after it was checked by the discovery that he needed both hands for another purpose, needed them imperatively, for the lurch of the train had nearly thrown him off his balance. He tightened his grip and gave himself up to irritated reflection. Like most men, Forbes was pathetically dependent on his hat. He never so much as crossed the street without it. Now it would be necessary to make the rest of his journey hatless and leave the train in some unfamiliar city, stared at by the crowd who would mistake him for a faddist, demonstrating a protest against conventional garb. Forbes' annoyance gave vent in a profane ejaculation.

The next to go were his eye-glasses. Again Forbes' inclination to clutch for his vanishing possessions was conquered just in time to save him from following in their wake. The narrow margin by which he had missed death did not prevent him from grieving over his glasses. He had no others with him. He would not be able to read till he reached home, and the strain on his eyes would probably bring on a severe headache. His hat could be replaced at the first shop, but not his glasses. He found it hard to be reconciled to such ill luck.

It was several minutes before the realization was brought home to Forbes that the loss of these belongings was a very trifling matter. By that time his feeling of reluctance to have the door opened had entirely vanished. In his boyhood he had frequently played "crack the whip." His sensations when the line of runners suddenly halted, and he, a little fellow bringing up the rear, was sent sprawling over the grass, were being duplicated in this memorable ride. The express was playing "crack the whip" with himself as snapper. Once as the train rounded a curve, both feet flew from under him, and the unexpected jerk upon his arms almost broke his hold. He could hardly believe in his good fortune when he found himself still standing on the step, holding on literally for dear life. For now he knew that in his desperate determination to see Agatha again, he had taken his life in his hands.

Oddly enough it was not the likelihood of a sudden and violent death which presented itself most forcibly to his imagination. The opportunities he had missed with Agatha were infinitely more disturbing. If only he had spoken in her defense the day Julia had exhausted her ingenuity in wounding and insulting the rival she instinctively feared. But he had stood silent while Julia's malice spent itself. And later when time had revealed the affair in a truer perspective, if he had but gone to her and said to her all that was in his heart, she might have been his wife by now. One inevitably gets down to realities when life flickers like a candle in the wind, and Forbes no longer debated the question of Agatha's love for him. In addition to Warren's testimony, he had the memory of a kiss, a dream kiss, pressed on his cheeks as he struggled back to consciousness after the stormy interview with Hephzibah, a kiss salt with tears and sweet with ineffable promise. Forbes heard his bitter laughter above the roar of the train. "God!" his voice said, "what a mess I've made of things."

Forbes had never had a high opinion of the intelligence of that portion of the traveling public which puts its head out of the window of a moving train. Indeed he had always classified it with the people who maim or kill their best friends by playful maneuvers with guns that are not loaded. From this time on, his ideas on the subject were to be revolutionized. He was destined to think of the above-named individuals as philanthropists of a high order.

A man in the smoking-car, thrusting his head out of the window at a time when the curving of the track brought the rear coach into full view, made a discovery which he promptly imparted to the conductor. That official, properly incredulous, extended his own head from the window and verified the passenger's astonishing statement. And at the moment when Forbes' imagination was busy with the gruesome details relating to the discovery of his lifeless body lying beside the tracks, the vestibule door suddenly opened and the face of indignant authority looked down at him.

They dragged Forbes inside after unclenching his hands for him, his stiffened muscles refusing that simple service. The conductor failing to recognize in this disheveled individual with the unsteady knees, the respectable passenger whose ticket he had punched earlier in the trip, not unnaturally assumed that Forbes was drunk and acting on that supposition, proceeded to make himself very disagreeable. As Forbes regained his shaken dignity, and paid his fare, the man in uniform became less truculent and in the end, positively congratulatory.

Forbes' grips were in the possession of an unknown porter at a station some thirty miles back, and he made as satisfactory a toilet as was possible without the aid of their contents, before returning to the coach where lately he had devoted himself to entertaining Charlie Briggs, unaware that the door of Paradise stood ajar just across the aisle. Here disappointment awaited him. Agatha, having learned from bitter experience that activity is the best of balms for a sore heart, had resolved on washing the hands and faces of her charges and giving their hair proper attention. To make the toilet of four children in the limited accommodations of a Pullman, with the certainty that at any moment the lurch of the train may precipitate you into the wash basin, or through the hanging curtains out into the aisle, is a process requiring time and patience. Forbes sat in his former place, biting his lips for three-quarters of an hour before he saw the little procession slowly making its way down the aisle.

Forbes' uncomfortable uncertainty as to whether he had made a fool of himself or not, vanished at the sight of Agatha. Worn and weary as she looked, her eyes still reddened from weeping, she had never seemed to him so infinitely dear and desirable. Such trivial things as corrugated palms and lost eye-glasses and a narrow escape from death, no longer mattered.

Charlie Briggs was the first to discover him. "My man's come back," he shouted jubilantly and ran into Forbes' arms. Agatha's eyes followed him, and she stopped short, her flushed cheeks paling. For a moment Forbes thought her about to faint and started to his feet to assist her, but immediately she had regained her self-control and walked steadily to her seat, though as a matter of fact she did not feel the floor beneath her feet and was scarcely conscious of the child in her arms. He had come back and intuition told her why.

Forbes rose and crossed the aisle. "Charlie," he said in a voice of authority, "take your little sisters to my seat and play with them for a while."

Charlie Briggs demurred.

"Run along," Forbes insisted. "And when I get a chance to buy you some candy you shall have enough to make you sick for a month."

"Us too?" asked the curly-haired girl, ready to oppose any unfair sex-discrimination.

"Yes, you, too," Forbes promised recklessly. "Enough so all three of you will need a doctor."

It was not in human nature to resist such a bribe. The three crossed immediately to the opposite section. Forbes took the seat at Agatha's side.

A silence at once inevitable and ridiculous fell between them. There was so much to be said that there seemed no rational starting point. He wanted to ask what she was doing with all those children, but the query seemed to put her on the defensive. She was longing to know how after leaving the train, he could possibly be aboard again, but she left the first move to him. Presently a mutual attraction drew their eyes together and Forbes lost no more time.

"Have you had long enough," he said a trifle unsteadily, "to decide on that proposition I made you nine months ago to a day?"

"I—I—What proposition do you mean?"

"That we should set up housekeeping together?"

Agatha seemed trying to remember. "Wasn't that for last winter only?"

"No. It's for this summer and next winter and for all the summers and winters that ever will be."

She regarded him amazedly. "You're not—you can't be—"

"But I am, exactly that. Will you marry me, Agatha?"

"Listen!" A little flutter of laughter escaped her and he loved the sound of it. "Do you realize those are the first words you've ever spoken to me—the real me, that we've just been introduced? Of course we had any number of good talks when I was Great-aunt Agatha Kent."

"Bless her dear heart!" Forbes interjected gratefully.

"And we had one rather exciting interview when I was Hephzibah."

"Yes, I have reason to remember that interview." He looked at her meaningly and gloated over her blush.

"And now I'm just Agatha," she went on bravely, ignoring her scarlet cheeks. "And the very first words you say to me are to ask me to marry you."

"And they're the words I shall keep saying till you promise."

She shot him a side-long glance. "But what—what about Julia?"

"She was married early in January. They have been spending the winter in Palm Beach, I understand."

"Oh!" There was such compassion in her voice, such pitying tenderness in her eyes that she had a narrow escape from being kissed on the spot.

He compromised by taking her hand. "Listen, dear girl. Let's clear this thing up once for all. I've had a narrow escape. The Julia I loved was no more real than your Hephzibah. I knew my mistake that day when she attacked you at Oak Knoll. The cruelty of it was a revelation. I can't understand now why I listened without protest, but you must remember that I had received a staggering surprise."

"Staggering and cruel!" Her fingers tightened about his. "I tried so hard to tell you everything that day in the woods and I was such a coward that the words wouldn't come. How can you ever forgive me?"

"Hush, dear love! I shall shock this train-load of people if you are not careful. I was too dazed and bewildered that first day to be quite responsible for what I did or left undone. But within twenty-four hours I spoke my mind so plainly as to terminate the friendship between Miss Studley and myself. I have never seen nor heard from her since."

The look she turned on him made him hang his head. The certainty that elates most men, humbles those of finer mold.

"Agatha, my dearest, you talk of my forgiving you. Can you ever forgive me?"

The train was slowing for a stop before they had settled that delicate question. Agatha argued that it was preposterous to talk of forgiving one who in every relation of life was absolute perfection. Forbes insisted that her attitude proved her an angel. The baby, with a discretion beyond its years, refrained from offering any interruption to this absorbing conversation, though occasionally its toothless gums were revealed in what might have impressed the unprejudiced on-looker as a derisive smile.

After the brief stop, a train boy appeared shouting Forbes' name. He proved to be the bearer of a telegram from Warren. Forbes and Agatha read it together:

"If enough is left of you to make the marriage ceremony valid advise clenching matter at the first stop run no risk of letting her get away from us again."

"Warren seems to be laboring under the impression," frowned Forbes, "that he comes in on this. Except for that slight error—"

Agatha interpolated irrelevantly that Warren was a dear.