Front matter (continued 5)

"No," she replied bluntly.

"I'm going to do a public service," said he, absolutely unconscious of the real reason why his threat so jarred upon her. "I ought to have a vote of thanks."

She could not tell him that it was not his condemnation of Josiah but his merciless casting out of his friendship with Amy that revolted and angered and saddened her. If she did tell him, he, so self-absorbed and so bent upon his own inflexible purposes that he was quite blind to his own brutality, would merely think her jealous. Besides, she began to feel that her real ground for anger against him ought to be Josiah's fate, even if her femininity made the personal reason the stronger. She accordingly said, "You just got through telling me it was a system, and not any one man's fault."

Armstrong dismissed that with a shrug. "I'm in his way, he's in mine. One or the other has to go down. I'm seeing to it that it's not I." Then, angered by her expression, and by the sense of accusing himself in making what sounded like excuse, he cried, "Say it! You despise me!"

"It isn't a judgment," she answered; "it's a feeling."

"But you don't know what the man has done."

"One should not ask himself, What has the other man done? but, What will my self-respect let me do?"

He ignored this. "Let me tell you," he said, with a return of the imperious manner that was second nature to him nowadays. "This man brought me to New York because he found I knew how to manage the agents so that they would lure in the most suckers—that's the only word for it. When I came, I believed the O.A.D. was a big philanthropic institution—yes, I did, really! Of course I knew men made money out of it. I was making money out of it, myself. But I thought that, in the main, the object was to give people a chance to provide against old age and death."

"Yes, I remember," she said. "You used to talk about what a grand thing it was."

He laughed. "Well, we do give 'em some return for their money—if they aren't careless and don't give us a chance to cheat them out of part or all of it, under the laws we've been fixing up against them. But we never give anything like what's their due. I found I was little more than a puller-in for a den of respectable thieves—that life insurance is simply another of the devices of these oily rascals here in New York—like all their big stock companies and bonding schemes and the rest of it—a trick to get hold of money and use it for their own benefit. Ours is the vilest trick of all, though—it seems to me. For we play on people's heart strings, while the other swindles appeal chiefly to cupidity." He took a magazine from the table. "Look here!" He pointed to an illustrated advertisement. "It's the 'ad' of one of our rivals—same business as ours. See the widow with the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the three little children clinging to her; see the heap of furniture on the sidewalk—that means they've ejected her for not paying the rent. And the type says, 'This wouldn't have happened if the father had been insured in the Universal.' Clever, isn't it? Well, the men back of that company and those back of ours and, worst of all, Trafford's infamous gang, all get rich by stealing from poor old people, from widows and orphans. That is Fosdick's business—robbing dead bodies, picking the pockets of calico mourning dresses."

It gave him relief and a sense of doing penance, to utter these truths about himself and his associates that had been rankling in him. As he believed she knew nothing of business and as he thought her sex did not reason but only felt, he assumed she would accept his own lenient view of his personal part in the infamy, of his own deviations from the "ideal" standards. Her expression disquieted him. "The most respectable people in the country are in it, in some branch of it," he hastened to explain, without admitting to himself that he was explaining. "You must read the list of our directors."

Her silence alarmed him. He wished he had not been so frank. Recalling his words he was appalled by their brutality; he could not deny to himself that they stated the truth, and he wondered that he had not seen that truth in its full repulsiveness until now. "Of course, they don't look at it that way," he went on. "A man can get his conscience to applaud almost anything he's making money out of—the more money, the easier."

"Then they do these things quite openly?" said Neva, in amazement.

"Openly? Certainly not," replied Armstrong, with a slight smile at her innocence.

"If they don't do them openly, they know just what they're about."

"No," he said, imperious and impatient. "You don't understand human nature. You don't appreciate how men delude themselves."

His tone, its reminder of his intolerance of any independence of thought in a woman, or in anyone around him for that matter, brought the color to her cheeks. "A man who does wrong, but thinks he is doing right, is not ashamed," she answered. "If he shuffles and conceals, you may be sure he does not deceive himself, no matter how completely his pretense deceives you."

There seemed to be no answer to this. It made ridiculous nonsense of the familiar excuse for reputable rascality, the excuse he had heard a thousand times, and had accepted without question. But it also somehow seemed a home thrust through his own armor. With anger that was what he would have called feminine in its unreasonableness, he demanded, "Then you don't think I have the right to tear Fosdick down?"

"If you are going to tear them all down, and yourself, too," was her answer, slowly spoken, but firm.

He laughed ironically. "That's practical!"

"Does a thing have to be dishonorable and dishonest, to be practical?"

"From your standpoint, yes," he replied. "At this very moment Fosdick is chuckling over the scheme he thinks will surely disgrace me forever! And you are urging me to let him disgrace me. Is that what you call friendship? Is that your idea of 'heart'?"

She flushed, but rejoined undaunted, "You can juggle with your conscience all you please, Horace—just like the other men downtown. But you know the truth, in the bottom of your heart, just as they do. And if you rise by the way you've planned, you know that, when you've risen, you'll do just as he was doing."

"Then," said he, "your test of me is whether I'll let you beg off this old buzzard, Fosdick."

She made a gesture of denial and appeal. "On the contrary, I'd despise a man who did for a woman what he wouldn't do for his own self-respect." She was pale, but all the will in her character was showing itself in her face. "What is Fosdick to me? Now that you've told me about him, I think it's frightful to send men to jail for stealing bread, and leave such a creature at large. But—as to you—" Her bosom was rising and falling swiftly—"as to you, I'm not indifferent. You have stood for strength and courage, for pride—for manliness. I thought you hard and cold—but brave—really brave—too brave to steal, at least from the helpless, or to assassinate even an assassin. Now, I see that you've changed. Your ambition is dragging you down, as ambition always does. And what an ambition! To be the best, the most successful, at cheating the helpless, at robbing the dead!"

As she spoke, his expression of anger faded. When she ended, with unsteady voice and fighting back the tears, he did not attempt to reply. He had made of his face an impassive mask. They were still silent, he standing at the window, she sitting and gazing into the fire, when Molly entered to announce Raphael. He threw his coat over his arm, took up his hat. She searched his face for some indication of his thoughts, but could find none. He simply said, "I'll think it over."

XIX

TWO TELEPHONE TALKS

As Armstrong, at Fosdick's house, was waiting in a small reception room just off the front hall, he heard the old man on the stairs, storming as he descended. "It's a conspiracy," he was shouting. "You all want to kill me. You've heard the doctor say I'll die if I don't stop driving, and walk. Yet, there's that damned carriage always at the door. I can't step out that it isn't waiting for me, and you know I can't resist if I see it. It's murder, that's what it is."

"Shall I send the carriage away, sir?" Armstrong heard the butler say.

"No!" cried Fosdick, rapping the floor with his cane. "No! You know I won't send it away. I've got to get some air, and it seems to me I can't walk."

By this time he was at the door of the reception room. "Good morning, Armstrong," he said with surly politeness. "I'm sick to-day. I suppose you heard me talking to this butler here. I tell you, things to drive in are the ruin of the prosperous classes. Sell that damn motor of yours. Never take a cab, if you can help it. They're killing me with that carriage of mine. Yes—and there's that infernal cook—chef, as they call him. He's trying to earn his salary, and he's killing me doing it. I eat the poison stuff—I can't get anything else. No wonder I have indigestion and gout. No wonder my head feels as if it was on fire every morning. And my temper—I used to have a good disposition. I'm getting to be a devil. It's a conspiracy to murder me." There Fosdick noted Armstrong's expression. He dropped his private woes abruptly and said, with his wonted suavity, "But what can I do for you to-day?"

"I came to ask you to do an act of justice," replied the Westerner, looking even huger and more powerful than usual, in contrast with the other, whom age and self-indulgence were rapidly shriveling.

Armstrong's calm was aggressive, would better have become a dictator than a suitor. It was highly offensive to Fosdick, who was rapidly reaching the state of mind in which obsequiousness alone is tolerable and manliness seems insolence. But he reined in his temper and said, smoothly enough, "You can always count on me to do justice."

"I want you to give me a letter, explaining that those three hundred and fifty thousand dollars were drawn by me and paid over, at your order."

Fosdick stared blankly at him. "What three hundred and fifty thousand dollars?"

Armstrong's big hands clenched into fists and he set his teeth together sharply. Each man looked the other full in the eyes. Armstrong said, "Will you give me the letter?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," replied Fosdick steadily. "And don't explain. I can't talk business to-day."

"I've come to you, Mr. Fosdick," continued Armstrong, "not on my own account, but on yours. I ask you to give me the letter, because, if you do not, the consequences will be unfortunate—not for me, but for you."

"My dear Armstrong," said Fosdick, with wheedling familiarity of elder to younger, "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't want to know. Look at me, and spare me. Come for a drive. I'll set you down anywhere you say. Don't be foolish, young man. Don't use language to me that suggests threats."

"That is your final answer? Is it quite useless to discuss the matter with you?"

"I'm too sick to wrangle with business to-day."

"Then you refuse to give me the letter?"

"If my doctor knew I had let anybody mention business to me, he'd desert me."

Without a further word Armstrong turned, left the room and the house. Fosdick did not follow immediately. Instead, he seated himself to puzzle at this development. "Hugo stirred him up about that, and he's simply trying to get ready for the committee," he decided. "If he knew, or even suspected, he'd act very differently. He's having his heart broken none too soon. I've never seen a worse case of swollen head. I pushed him up too fast. I'm really to blame; I'm always doing hasty, generous things, and getting myself into trouble, and those I meant to help. Poor fool. I'm sorry for him. I suppose once I get him down in his place, I'll be soft enough to relent and give him something. He's got talent. I can use him, once I have him broken to the bit."

In came Amy, the color high in her cheeks from her morning walk. She kissed him on both cheeks. "Well, well, what do you want?" said he.

"How do you know I want anything?" she cried.

"In the first place, because nobody ever comes near me except to get something."

"Just as you never go near anybody except to take something," she retorted, with a pull at his mustache.

Fosdick was amused. "In the second place," he went on, "because you are affectionate—which not only means that you want something, but also that the something is a thing you feel I won't give. And you're no doubt right."

"What are you in such a good humor about?" said she. "You were cross as a bear in a swarm of bees, at breakfast."

"I'm not in a good humor," he protested. "I'm depressed. I'm looking forward to doing a very unpleasant duty to-morrow."

His daughter laughed at him. "You may be trying to persuade yourself it's unpleasant. But the truth is, you're delighted. Papa, I've been thinking about the entrance."

"Keep on thinking, but don't speak about it," retorted he, frowning.

"Really—it's an eyesore—so small, so out of proportion, so cheap——"

"Cheap!" exclaimed Fosdick. "Why, those bronze doors alone cost seventeen thousand dollars."

"Is that all!" scoffed his daughter. "Trafford's cost forty thousand."

"But I'm not a thief like Trafford. And let me tell you, my child, seventeen thousand dollars at four per cent would produce each year a larger sum than the income of the average American family."

"But I've often heard you say the common people have entirely too much money, more than they know how to spend. Now—about the entrance. Alois and I——"

"When you marry Fred Roebuck, I'll let you build yourself any kind of town house you like," interrupted her father.

She perched on the arm of his chair. "Now, really, father, you know you wouldn't let me marry a man it makes me shudder to shake hands with?"

"Nonsense—a mere notion. You try to feel that way because you know you ought to marry him."

"Never—never—never!" cried Amy, kissing him at each "never." "Besides, he's engaged to Sylvia Barrow. He got tired of waiting for me."

Fosdick pushed away from her. "I'm bitterly disappointed in you," he said, scowling at her. "I've been assuming that you would come to your senses. What would become of you, if I had as little regard for your wishes as you have for mine?"

"Fred Roebuck was a nobody," she pleaded. "You despised him yourself. Now, papa dear, I'm thinking of marrying a somebody, a man who really amounts to something in himself."

"Who?" demanded Fosdick, bristling for battle.

"Alois Siersdorf."

Fosdick sprang up, caught her roughly by the arm. "What!" he shouted. "What!"

"A man you like and admire," Amy went on, getting her tears ready. "He looks distinguished, and he is distinguished, and is certain to be more so. Besides, what's the use of being rich, if one can't please herself when it comes to taking a husband? I want somebody I won't be ashamed of, somebody I can live near without shuddering." And the tears descended in floods.

Her father turned his rage against Alois. "The impudence of a fellow like that aspiring to a girl in your position."

"But he hasn't been impudent. He's been very humble and backward."

Josiah was busy with his own rage. "Why, he's got nothing!"

"Nothing but brains."

"Brains!" Fosdick snorted contemptuously. "Why, they're a drug on the market. I can buy brains by the hundred. Men with brains are falling over each other downtown, trying to sell out for a song."

"Not brains like his," she protested.

"Better—a hundred times better. Why, his brain belongs to me. I've bought it. I have it whenever and for whatever I want."

"I—I love him, father," she sobbed, hiding her face in his shoulder. "I've tried my best not to. But I can't live without him. I—I—love him!"

Fosdick was profoundly moved. There were tears in his eyes, and he gently stroked her hair. She reached out for his hand, took it, kissed it, and put it under her cheek—she hated to have anyone touch her hair, which was most troublesome to arrange to her liking. "Listen to me, child," said the old man. "You remember when Armstrong was trying to impose on your tender heart? You remember what I said? Was I not right? Aren't you glad you took my advice?"

"But I never loved him—really," said Amy.

"And you don't love Alois. You couldn't love one of our dependents. You have too much pride for that. But, again I want to warn you. There's a reason—the best of reasons—why you must not be even friendly with—this young Siersdorf. I can't explain to you. He's an adventurer like Armstrong. Wait a few days—a very few days, Amy. He has been careful to let you see only the one side of him. There's another side. When you see that, you'll be ashamed you ever thought of him, even in jest. You'll see why I want you to be safely established as the wife of some substantial man."

"Tell me what it is, father."

"I tell nothing," replied Fosdick. "Wait, and you will see."

"Is it something to his discredit? If so, I can tell you right now it isn't true."

"Wait—that's all. Wait."

"But, father—after all he's done for us, isn't it only fair to warn him?"

"Warn him of what?"

"Of what you say is going to happen."

"If you want to do yourself and me the greatest possible damage, you'll hint to him what I've said. Do you understand?"

"It isn't fair not to warn him," she insisted. And she released herself from his arms and faced him defiantly. "I tell you, I love him, father!"

"Was ever parent so cursed in his children!" cried Fosdick. "I'm in the house of my enemies. I tell you, Amy, you are to keep your mouth shut!" He struck the floor sharply with his cane. "I will be obeyed, do you hear?"

"And I tell you, father," retorted Amy, "that I'm going to warn him. He's straight and honest, and he loves me and he has done things for me, for us, that make us his debtor."

Fosdick threw up his arms in angry impotence. "Do your damnedest!" he cried. "After all, what can you tell him? You can only throw him into a fever and put him in a worse plight. But I warn you that, if you disobey me, I'll make you pay for it. I'll cut off your allowance. I'll teach you what it means to love and respect a father." And he raged out of the house.

Even as her father went, Amy felt in the foundation of her defiance the first tremors of impending collapse. She rushed upstairs to the telephone; she would not let this impulse to do the generous, no, simply the decent, thing ooze away as her impulses of that sort usually did, if she had or took time to calculate the personal inconvenience from executing them. After a rather common and most pleasing human habit, she regarded herself as generous, and was so regarded, because she had generous impulses; to execute them was, therefore, more or less superfluous. In this particular instance, however, she felt that impulse was not enough; there must be action.

"Is it you?" came in Alois's voice, just in time to stimulate her flagging energy. "I was about to call you up."

"I must see you at once," said Amy, with feverish eagerness. "I've got something very, very important to say to you." She hesitated, decided that she must commit herself beyond possibility of evasion—"something about an attempt to do you a great injury."

"Oh!" His tone was curiously constrained; it seemed to her that there was terror, guilt, in it. "Shall I come up? I've just found out I must sail for Europe at noon."

"At noon! To-day?"

"In about two hours. And I must say good-by to you. It's very sudden. I haven't even told my sister yet, though she's in the next room, here."

"I'll come down—that is—I'll try to." Amy felt weak, sick, sinking, suffocating in a whirl of doubts and fears. "You are going on business?"

"Yes," came the answer in a voice that rang false. "On business. I'll be away only a few weeks, I think."

"If I shouldn't be able to come—good-by," said Amy.

"But I hope— Let me come— Wouldn't that be better?"

Not a word about what she had said, when it ought to have put him into a quiver of anxiety; certainly, his going abroad looked like knowledge, guilt, flight. "No—no—you mustn't come," she commanded. "I'll do my best to get to you." And she added, "We might simply miss each other, if you didn't wait there."

"Please—Amy!"

She shivered. How far she had gone with him! And her father was right! "Good-by," she faltered, hastily ringing off.

If she could have seen him, her worst suspicions would have been confirmed; for his hair was mussed and damp with sweat, his skin looked as if he were in a garish light. He tried to compose himself, went in where his sister was at work—absorbed in making the drawings of a new kind of chimney-piece she had been thinking out. "Cis," he said, in an uncertain voice, "I'm off for Europe at noon."

She wheeled on him. "Fosdick?"

He nodded. "His secretary, Waller, was just here."

A few seconds during which he could feel the energy of her swift thoughts. Then, "Wait!" she commanded, and darted into her private office, closing the door.

She was gone twenty minutes. "The person I was calling up hadn't got in," she explained, when she returned. "I had to wait for him. You are to stay here—you are not to go in any circumstances."

"I must go," was his answer in a dreary tone. "I promised Fosdick, and I daren't offend him. Besides—well, it's prudent."

"'Lois," said Narcisse earnestly, "I give you my word of honor, it would be the very worst step you could take, to obey Fosdick and go. I promise you that, if you stay, all will be well. If you go, you would better throw yourself into the sea, midway, for you will ruin your reputation—ours."

He dropped into a chair. "My instinct is against going," he confessed. "I've done nothing. I haven't got a cent that doesn't belong to me honestly. But, Cis, I simply mustn't offend Fosdick."

"Because of Amy?"

"Yes."

"If you go, you'll have no more chance for her than—than a convict in a penitentiary."

"You know something you are not telling me?"

"I do. Something I can't tell you."

He supported his aching head with his hands and stared long at the floor. "I'll not go!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet suddenly. "I've done nothing wrong. I'll not run away."

Narcisse had been watching him as if she were seeing him struggling for his life in deep water before her very eyes. At his words, at his expression, like his own self, the brother she had brought up and guarded and loved with the love that is deeper than any love which passion ever kindled—at this proclamation of the victory of his better self, she burst into tears. "'Lois! 'Lois!" she sobbed. "Now I can be happy again. If you had gone it would have killed me." And the tone in which she said it made him realize that she was speaking the literal truth.

The natural color was coming back to his face. He patted her on the shoulder. "I'm not a weak, damn fool clear through, Cissy," cried he, "though, I must say, I've got a big, broad streak of it. You are sure of your ground?"

"Absolutely," she assured him, radiant now, and so beautiful that even he noted and admired. But then, he was in the mood to appreciate her. So long as the way was smooth, he could neglect her and put aside her love, as we all have the habit of neglecting and taking for granted, in fair weather, the things that are securely ours. But, let the storms come, and how quickly we show that we knew all the time, in our hearts, whom we could count on, could draw upon for strength and courage—the few, real friends—perhaps, only one—and one is quite enough, is legion, if it be the right one.

"You're not trusting to somebody else?" said he.

"Of course I am. But he's a real somebody, one I'd stake my life on. 'Lois, I know."

"That settles it," said he. "But even if you weren't sure, even if I were certain the worst would overtake me, I'd not budge out of this town. As for Amy, if she's what I think her, she'll stand the test. If not— After all, I don't need anybody but you, Cissy."

And he embraced and kissed her, and went back to his own part of the offices, head high and step firm. He stirred round there uneasily for a while, then shut himself in with the telephone and called up Fosdick's house. "I wish to speak to Miss Fosdick," he said. Presently he heard Amy's voice. "Well, Hugo?"

"It isn't your brother," said Alois. "It's I."

"Oh!" Her tone was very different—and he did not like it, though he could not have said why. "The servant," she explained, "said she thought it was Hugo."

"I've changed my mind about going abroad. You said you wanted to see me about some matter. I think—in fact, I'm sure—I know what you mean. Don't trouble; I'll come out all right. By the way, please tell your father I'm not going, will you?"

"Father!" she exclaimed. "Did he want you to go?"

"I'd rather not talk about that. It's a matter of business. Please don't give him the impression I told you anything. Really, I haven't—have I?"

"Did father want you to go abroad?" insisted Amy.

"I can't talk about it over the telephone. I'll tell you when I see you—all about it—if you think you'd be interested."

"Please answer my one question," she pleaded. "Then I'll not bother you any more."

"Then—yes." He waited for her next remark, but it did not come. "Are you still there?"

"Yes," came her answer, faint and strange.

"What is it?" he cried. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Good-by—and—I'm so glad you're not going—oh, I can't express how glad—Alois!"

She did not give him the chance to reply.

XX

BORIS DISCLOSES HIMSELF

Hugo, sitting to Boris for the portrait afterward locally famous as "The Young Ass," fell into the habit of expatiating upon Armstrong. His mind was full of the big Westerner, the author of the most abject humiliation of his life, the only one he could not explain away, to his own satisfaction, as wholly some one else's fault. Boris humored him, by discreetly sympathetic response even encouraged him to talk freely; nor was Boris's sole reason the undeniable fact that when Hugo was babbling about Armstrong, his real personality disported itself unrestrained in the features the painter was striving to portray. The wisest parent never takes a just measure of his child; and, while the paternal passion is tardier in beginning than the maternal, it is full as deluding once it lays hold. Fosdick thought he regarded Hugo as a fool; also he had fresh in mind proof that Hugo was highly dangerous to any delicate enterprise. Yet he confided in him that they would both be soon signally revenged upon the impudent upstart. He did not tell how or when; but Hugo guessed that it would be at the coming "investigation."

A very few days after his father had told him, he told Boris. What possible danger could there be in telling a painter who hadn't the slightest interest in business matters, and who hadn't the intellect to understand them? For Hugo had for the intellect of the painter the measureless contempt of the contemptible. Also, Boris patterned his dress after the Continental fashions for which Hugo, severely and slavishly English in dress, had the Englishman's derisive disdain. Boris listened to Hugo's confidence with no sign, of interest or understanding, and Hugo babbled on. Soon, Boris knew more than did Hugo of the impending catastrophe to the one man in the whole world whom he did the honor of hating.

Hate is an unusual emotion in a man so tolerant, so cynical, at once superior and conscious of it. But, watching Armstrong with Neva, watching Neva when Armstrong was about, Raphael had come to feel rather than to see that there was some tie between them. He had no difficulty in imagining the nature of this tie. A man and a woman who have lived together may, often do, remain entire strangers; but however constrained and shy and unreal their intimacy may have been, still that intimacy has become an integral part of their secret selves. It is the instinctive realization of this, rather than physical jealousy, that haunts and harrows the man who knows his wife or mistress did not come to him virgin, and that does not leave him until the former husband or lover is dead. Boris did not for an instant believe Neva could by any possibility fall in love with Armstrong—what could she, the artistic and refined, have in common with Armstrong, crude, coarse, unappreciative of all that meant life to her? A man could care without mental or heart sympathy, and a certain kind of woman; but not a Neva, whose delicacy was so sensitive that he, with all his expert delicacy of touch, all his trained softness of reassuring approach, was still far from her. No, Neva could never love Armstrong. But why did she not detest him? Why did she tolerate a presence that must remind her of repulsive hours, of moments of horror too intense even to quiver? "It is the feminine, the feline in her," he reflected. "She is avenging herself in the pleasure of watching his torment."

That was logical, was consoling. However, Boris was wishing she would get her fill of vengeance and send the intruder about his stupid, vulgar business. Hugo's news thrilled him. "I hope the hulk will have to fly the country," he said to himself. He did not hope, as did Hugo, that Armstrong would have to go to the penitentiary. Such was his passion for liberty, for the free air and sunshine, that he could not think with pleasure of even an enemy's being behind bolts and bars and the dank dusk of high, thick prison walls. As several weeks passed without Armstrong's calling—he always felt it when Armstrong had been there—he became as cheerful, as gay, and confident as of old.

But he soon began to note that Neva was not up to the mark. "What is it?" he at once asked himself in alarm whose deep, hidden causes he did not suspect, so slow are men of his kind to accuse themselves of harboring so vanity-depressing a passion as jealousy. "Has he got wind of his danger? Has he been trying to work on her sympathies?" He proceeded to find out.

"What's wrong, my dear?" asked he, in his gentle, caressing, master-to-pupil way. "You aren't as interested as you were. This sunshine doesn't reflect from your face and your voice as it should."

"I've been worried about a friend of mine," confessed she. "There's no real cause for worry, but I can't shake off a foreboding."

"Tell me," urged he. "It'll do you good."

"It's nothing I can talk about. Really, I'm not so upset as you seem to imagine."

But a few moments later he heard a deep sigh. He glanced at her; she was staring into vacancy, her face sad, her eyes tragic. In one of these irresistible gusts of passion, he flung down his brushes, strode up to her. "What has that scoundrel been saying to you?" he demanded.

She startled, rose, faced him in amazement.

"Boris!" she cried breathlessly.

The body that is molded upon a spirit such as his—or hers—becomes as mobile to its changes as cloud to sun and wind. Boris's good looks always had a suggestion of the superhuman, as if the breath of life in him were a fiercer, more enduring flame than in ordinary mortals. That superhuman look it was that had made Neva, the sensitive, the appreciative, unable ever quite to shake off all the awe of him she had originally felt. The man before her now had never looked so superhuman; but it was the superhumanness of the fiend. She shrank in fascinated terror. His sensuous features were sensuality personified; his rings, his jeweled watch guard, his odor of powerful perfume, all fitted in with his expression, where theretofore they had seemed incongruous. "Boris!" she repeated. "Is that you?"

Her face brought him immediately back to himself, or rather to his normal combination of cynical good-humored actuality and cynical good-humored pose. The vision had vanished from her eyes, so utterly, so swiftly, that she might have thought she had been dreaming, had it not remained indelibly upon her mind—especially his eyes, like hunger, like thirst, like passion insatiable, like menace of mortal peril. It is one thing to suspect what is behind a mask; it is quite another matter to see, with the mask dropped and the naked soul revealed. As she, too, recovered herself, her terror faded; but the fascination remained, and a certain delight and pride in herself that she was the conjurer of such a passion as that. For women never understand that they are no more the authors of the passions they evoke than the spark is the author of the force in the dynamite it explodes or of the ensuing destruction; if the dynamite is there, any spark, rightly placed, will do the work.

"Yes, it's I," replied Raphael, rather confusedly. He was as much disconcerted by what he had himself seen of himself, as by having shown it to her. A storm that involves one's whole being stirs up from the bottom and lifts to the surface many a strange secret of weakness and of wickedness, none stranger than the secrets of one's real feelings and beliefs, so different from one's professions to others and to himself. Raphael had seen two of these secrets—first, that he was insanely jealous of Armstrong; second, that he was in love with Neva. Not the jealousy and the love that yet leave a man master of himself, but the jealousy and the love that enslave. In the silence that followed this scene of so few words and so strong emotions, while Neva was hanging fascinated over the discovery of his passion for her, he was gazing furtively at her, the terror that had been hers now his.

He had been fancying he was leading her along the flower-walled path he had trod so often with some passing embodiment of his passing fancy, was luring her to the bower where he had so often taught what he called and thought "the great lesson." Instead, he was himself being whirled through space—whither? "I love her!" he said to himself, tears in his eyes and tears and fears in his heart. "This is not like the others—not at all—not at all. I love her, and I am afraid." And then there came to him a memory—a vision—a girl whom he had taught "the great lesson" years before; she had disappeared when he grew tired—or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, when he had exhausted for the time the capacity of his nerves; for how can a man grow tired of what he never had?—and the rake kills the bird for the one feather in its crest. At any rate, he sent her away; he was seeing now the look in her eyes, as she went without a murmur or a sigh. And he was understanding at last what that look meant. In the anguish of an emotion like remorse, yet too selfish, perhaps, too self-pitying for remorse, he muttered, "Forgive me. I didn't know what I was doing."

The vision faded back to the oblivion from which it had so curiously emerged. He glanced at Neva again, with critical eyes, like a surgeon diagnosing stolidly his own desperate wound. She was, or seemed to be, busy at her easel. He could study her, without interruption. He made slow, lingering inventory of her physical charms—beauties of hair and skin and contour, beauties of bosom's swell and curve of arm and slant of hip and leg. No, it was not in any of these, this supreme charm of her for him. Where then?

For the first time he saw it. He had been assuming he was regarding her as he had regarded every other woman in the long chain his memory was weaving from his experiences and was coiling away to beguile his days of the almond tree and the bated sound of the grinding. And he had esteemed these women at their own valuation. It was the fashion for women to profess to esteem themselves, and to expect to be esteemed, for reasons other than their physical charms. But Boris, searcher into realities, held that only those women who by achievement earn independence as a man earns it, have title to count as personalities, to be taken seriously in their professions. He saw that the women he knew made only the feeblest pretense to real personal value other than physical; they based themselves upon their bodies alone. So, women had been to him what they were to themselves—mere animate flesh.

He attached no more importance—beyond polite fiction—than did they themselves to what they thought and felt; it was what men thought of their persons, what feelings their persons roused in men—that is, in him. And he meted out to them the fate they expected, respected him the more for giving them; when they ceased to serve their sole purpose of ornament or plaything he flung them away, with more ceremony, perhaps, but with no less indifference than the emptied bottles of the scent he imported in quantity and drenched himself with.

But he saw the truth about Neva now—saw why, after the few first weeks of their acquaintance, he had not even been made impatient by her bad days—the days when her skin clouded, her eyes dimmed, her hair lost its luster, and the color, leaving her lips, seemed to take with it the dazzling charm of her blue-white teeth. Why? Because her appeal to his senses was not so strong as her appeal to— He could not tell what it was in him this inner self of hers appealed to. Heart? Hardly; that meant her physical beauty. Intellect? Certainly not that; intellect rather wearied him than otherwise, and the sincerest permanent longing of his life was to cease from thinking, to feel, only to feel—birds, flowers, perfumed airs, the thrill of winds among grasses and leaves, sunshine, the play of light upon women's hair, the ecstasy of touch drifting over their smooth, magnetic bodies. No, it was neither her intellect nor her heart, any more than it was her loveliness. Or, rather, it was all three, and that something more which makes a man happy he knows not why and cares not to know why.

"I would leave anyone else to come to her," he said to himself. "And if anyone else lured me away from her, it would be only for the moment; I would know I should have to return to her, as a dog to its master." He repeated bitterly, mockingly, "As a dog to its master. That's what it means to be artist—more woman than man, and more feminine than any woman ever was."

He stood behind her, looking at her work. "You'd better stop for to-day," he said presently. "You're only spoiling what you did yesterday."

"So I am," said she.

She put down palette and brushes with a sigh and a shrug. When she turned, he stood his ground and looked into her eyes. "I've been letting outside things come between me and my work," she went on, pretending to ignore his gaze.

"You guessed my secret a few minutes ago?" he asked.

She nodded, and it half amused, half hurt him to note that she was physically on guard, lest he should seize her unawares.

His smile broadened. "You needn't be alarmed," said he, clasping his hands behind his back. "I've no intention of doing it."

She was smiling now, also. "Well," she said. "What next?"

"Why are you afraid?"

"I am not afraid." She clasped her hands behind her, like his, looked at him with laughing, level eyes; for he and she were of the same height. "Not a bit."

"Why were you afraid?" he corrected. "You never were before."

She seemed to reflect. "No, I never was," she admitted. Her gaze dropped and her color came.

"Neva," he said gently, "do you love me?"

She lifted her eyes, studied him with the characteristic half closing of the lids that made her gaze so intense and so alluring. He could not decide whether that gaze was coquetry, as he hoped, or simply sincere inquiry, as he feared. "I do not know," she said. "I admire and respect you above all men."

He laughed, carefully concealing how her words had stung him. "Admire! Respect!" He made a mocking little bow. "I thank you, madam. But—in old age—after death—is soon enough for that cold grandeur."

"I do not know," she repeated. "I had never thought about it until a while ago—when you—when your expression—" She dropped her gaze again. "I can't explain."

Coquetry or shyness? He could not tell. "Neva, do you love anyone else?"

"I think—not," replied she, very low.

His eyes were like a tiger peering through a flower-freighted bush. "You love Armstrong," he urged, softly as the purr before the spring.

She was gazing steadily at him now. "We were talking of you and me," rejoined she, her voice clear and positive. "If I loved you, it would not be because I did not love some other man. If I did not love you it would not be because I did love some other."

There might be evasion in that reply, but there could be no lack of sincerity. "I beg your pardon," he apologized. "I forgot. The idea that there could be such a woman as you is very new to me. A few minutes ago, I made a discovery as startling as when I first saw you—there at the Morrises."

"How much I owe you!" she exclaimed, and her whole face lighted up.

But his shadowed; for he remembered that of all the emotions gratitude is least akin to love. "I made a startling discovery," he went on. "I discovered you—a you I had never suspected. And I discovered a me I had never dreamed of. Neva, I love you. I have never loved before."

She grew very pale, and he thought she was trembling. But when, with her returning color, her eyes lifted to his, they were mocking. "Why, your tone was even better than I should have anticipated. You—love?" scoffed she. "Do you think I could study you this long and not find out at least that about you?"

"I love you," he insisted, earnestly enough, though his eyes were echoing her mockery.

"You could not love," affirmed she. "You have given yourself out little by little—here and there. You have really nothing left to give."

A man of less vision, of slower mind would have been able to protest. But Boris instantly saw what she meant, felt the truth in her verdict. "Nothing left to give?" he repeated. "Do you think so?"

"I know it," replied she.

There are some words that sound like the tolling of the bells of fate; those words of hers sounded thus to him. "Nothing left to give," he repeated. Had he indeed wasted his whole self upon trifles? Had he lit his lamps so long before the feast that now, with the bride come, they were quite burned out? He looked at her and, like the vague yet vivid visions music shows us and snatches away before we have seen more than just that they were there, he caught a haunting glimpse of the beauty supernal which he loved and longed for, but with his tired, blunted senses could not hope to realize or attain.... The blasphemer's fate!—to kiss the dust before the god he had reviled.... He burst out laughing, his hearty, sensuous, infectious laughter. "I'm getting senile," said he. With a flash of angrily reluctant awe, "Or rather, you have bewitched me." He got ready to depart. "So, my lady of joy and pain, you do not love me—yet?" he inquired jestingly.

She shook her head with a smile which the gleam of her eyes from their narrow lids and the sweeping lashes made coquettish. "Not yet," replied she, in his own tone.

"Well, don't try. Love doesn't come for must. To-morrow? Yes. A new day, a new deal."

They shook hands warmly, looked at each other with laughing eyes, no shadow of seriousness either in him or in her. "You are the first woman I ever loved," said he. "And you shall be the last. I do not like this love, now that I am acquainted with it." The sunlight pouring upon his head made him beautiful like a Bacchus, with color and life glittering in his crisp, reddish hair and virile, close-cropped beard. "I do not feel safe when my soul's center of gravity is in another person." He kissed her hand. "Till to-morrow."

She was smiling, coloring, trying to hide the smile; but he could not tell whether it was because she was more moved than she cared to have him see, or merely because his curious but highly effective form of adoration pleased her vanity and she did not wish him to see it. "To-morrow," echoed she.

He bowed himself out, still smiling, as if once beyond the door he might burst into laughter at himself or at her—or might wearily drop his merry mask. Her last look that he saw was covertly inquiring, doubtful—as if she might be wondering, Is he in earnest, does he really care, or was he only imagining love and exaggerating the fancy to amuse himself and me?

Outside the door, he did drop his mask of comedy to reveal a face not without the tragic touch in its somberness. "Does she care?" he muttered. And he answered himself, "After all my experience! ... Experience! It simply puts hope on its mettle. Do I not know that if she loved she would not hesitate? And yet— Hope! You Jack-o'-lantern, luring man deeper and deeper into the slough of despond. I know you for the trickster you are, Hope. But, lead on!"

And he went his way, humming the "March of the Toreadors" and swinging his costly, showy, tortoise-shell cane gayly.

XXI

A SENSATIONAL DAY

When Fosdick, summoned by telephone, entered the august presence of the august committee of the august legislature of the august "people of the State of New York, by the grace of God free and independent," there were, save the reporters, a scant dozen spectators. The purpose of the committee had been dwindled to "a technical inquiry with a view further to improve the excellent laws under which the purified and at last really honest managements of insurance companies and banks had brought them to such a high state of honest strength." So, the announcement in the morning papers that the committee was to begin its labors for the public good attracted attention only among those citizens who keep themselves informed of loafing places that are comfortable in the cold weather. Fosdick bowed with dignified deference to the committee; the committee bowed to Fosdick—respectfully but nervously. There were five in the row seated behind the long oak table on the rostrum under the colossal figure of Justice. Furthest to the left sat Williams, in the Legislature by grace of the liquor interests; next him, Tomlinson, representing certain up-the-country traction and power interests; to the right of the chairman were Perry and Nottingham, the creatures of two railway systems. The chairman—Kenworthy, of Buffalo—had been in the Assembly nearly twenty years, for the insurance interests. He was a serious, square-bearded, pop-eyed little old man, most neat and respectable, and without a suspicion that he was not the most honorable person in the world, doing his full duty when he did precisely what the great men bade. Since the great capitalists were the makers and maintainers of prosperity, whatever they wanted must be for the good of all. The fact that he was on the private pay rolls of five companies and got occasional liberal "retainers" from seven others, was simply the clinching proof of the fitness of the great men to direct—they knew how properly to reward their helpers in taking care of the people. There are good men who are more dangerous than the slyest of the bad. Kenworthy was one of them.

The committee did not know what it was assembled for. It is not the habit of the men who "run things" to explain their orders to understrappers. Smelling committees are of four kinds: There is the committee the boss sets at doing nothing industriously because the people are clamoring that something be done. There is the committee the boss sends to "jack up" some interest or interests that have failed to "cash down" properly. There is the committee that is sent into doubtful districts, just before election, to pretend to expose the other side—and sometimes, if there has been a quarrel between the bosses, this kind of committee acts almost as if it were sincere. Finally, there is the committee the boss sends out to destroy the rivals of his employers in some department of finance or commerce. This particular smelling committee suspected it was to have some of the shortcomings of the rivals of the O.A.D. put under its nostrils by its counsel, Morris; it knew the late Galloway had owned the governor and the dominant boss, and that Fosdick was supposed to have inherited them, along with sundry other items of old Galloway's power. Again, the object might be purely defensive. There had been, of late, a revival of popular clamor against insurance companies, which the previous investigation, started by a quarrel among the interests and called off when that quarrel was patched up, had left unquieted. This committee might be simply a blindfold for the eyes of the ass—said ass being the public with its loud bray and its long ears and its infinite patience.

As Fosdick seated himself, after taking the oath, he noted for the first time the look on all faces—as if one exciting act of a drama had just ended and another were about to begin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Westervelt and Armstrong, seated side by side—Westervelt, fumbling with his long white beard, his eyes upon the twenty-thousand-dollar sable overcoat lying across Fosdick's knees; Armstrong, huge and stolid, gazing straight at Fosdick's face with an expression inscrutable beyond its perfect calm. "He's taking his medicine well," thought Fosdick. "For Westervelt must have testified, and then, of course, he had his turn."

Morris, a few feet in front of him, was busy with papers and books that rustled irritatingly in the tense silence. Fosdick watched him tranquilly, as free from anxiety as to what he would do as a showman about his marionette. Morris straightened himself and advanced toward Fosdick. They eyed each the other steadily; Fosdick admired his servant—the broad, intelligent brow, the pallor of the student, the keen eyes of the man of affairs, the sensitive mouth. The fact that he looked the very opposite of a bondman, at least to unobservant eyes, was not the smallest of his assets for Fosdick.

"Mr. Fosdick," began the lawyer, in his rather high-pitched, but flexible and agreeable tenor voice, "we will take as little of your time as possible. We know you are an exceedingly busy man."

"Thank you, sir," said Fosdick, with a dignified bend of the head. A very respectable figure he made, sitting there in expensive looking linen and well cut dark suit, the sable overcoat across his knee and over one arm, a top hat in his other hand. "My time is at your disposal."

"In examining some of the books of the O.A.D.—you are a director of the O.A.D.?"

"Yes, sir. I have been for forty-two years."

"And very influential in its management?"

"They frequently call on me for advice, and, as the institution is a philanthropy, I feel it my duty always to respond."

Fosdick noted that a smile, discreet but unmistakably derisive, ran round the room. Morris's face was sober, but the smile was in his eyes. Fosdick sat still straighter and frowned slightly. He highly disapproved of cynicism directed at himself.

"In looking at some of the books with Mr. Westervelt a while ago," continued Morris, "we came upon a matter—several items—which we thought ought to be explained at once. We wish no public misapprehensions to arise through any inadvertence of ours. So we have turned aside from the regular course of the investigation, to complete the matter."

Fosdick's face betrayed his satisfaction—all had gone well; Armstrong was in the trap; it only remained for him to close it. Morris now took up a thin, well-worn account book which Fosdick recognized as the chief of Westervelt's four treasures. "I find here," he continued, "fourteen entries of twenty-five thousand dollars each—three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in all—drawn by the President of the O.A.D., Mr. Armstrong here. Will you kindly tell us all you know about those items?"

Mr. Fosdick smiled slightly. "Really, Mr. Morris," replied he, with the fluency of the well-rehearsed actor, "I cannot answer that question, as you put it. Even if I knew all about the items, I might not recognize them from your too scanty description."

"We have just had Mr. Armstrong on the stand," said the lawyer. "He testified that he drew the money under your direction and paid it—the most of it—in your presence to Benjamin Sigourney, who looked after political matters for your company."

Fosdick's expression of sheer amazement was sincerity itself. He looked from Morris to Armstrong. With his eyes and Armstrong's meeting, he said energetically, "I know of no such transaction."

"You do not recall any of the fourteen transactions?"

"I do not recall them, because they never occurred. So far as I know, the legislative business of the O.A.D. is looked after by the legal department exclusively. I have been led to believe, and I do believe that, since the reforms in the O.A.D. and the new management of which Mr. Shotwell was the first head, the former reprehensible methods have been abandoned. It is impossible that Mr. Armstrong should have drawn such amounts for that purpose. You must—pardon me—have misunderstood his testimony."

"Let the stenographer read—only Mr. Armstrong's last long reply," said Morris.

The stenographer read: "Mr. Armstrong: 'Mr. Fosdick explained to me that the bills would practically put us out of business, except straight life policies, and that they would pass unless we submitted to the blackmail. As he was in control of the O.A.D., when he directed me to draw the money, I did so. All but two, I think, perhaps three, of the payments were made to Sigourney in his presence.'"

"That will do—thank you," said Morris to the stenographer.

There was a pause, a silence so profound that it seemed a suffocating force. Morris's clear, sharp tones breaking it, startled everyone, even Fosdick. "You see, Mr. Fosdick, Mr. Armstrong was definite."

"I am at a loss to understand," replied Fosdick, gray with emotion, but firm of eye and voice. "I am profoundly shocked—I can only say that, so far as I am concerned, no such transaction occurred. And I regret exceedingly to have to add that if any such moneys were taken from the O.A.D. they must have gone for other purposes than to influence the Legislature."

"Then, you wish to inform the committee that to the best of your recollection you did not authorize or suggest those drafts, and did not and do not know anything about them?"

"I know nothing about them."

"But, Mr. Fosdick," continued Morris slowly, "we have had Mr. Westervelt on the stand, and he has testified that he was present on more than half a dozen occasions when you told Mr. Armstrong to draw the money, and that on one occasion you yourself took the money when Mr. Armstrong brought it from the cash department."

Fosdick stiffened as if an electric shock had passed through him. For the first time he lowered his eyes. Behind that veil, his brain was swiftly restoring order in the wild confusion which this exploding bomb had made. There was no time to consider how or why Westervelt had failed him, or how Morris had been stupid enough to permit such a situation. He could only make choice between standing to the original programme and retreating behind a pretense of bad memory. "I can always plead bad memory," he reflected. "Perhaps the day can be saved—Morris would have sent me a warning if it couldn't be." So he swept the faces of the committeemen and the few spectators with a glance like an unscathed battery. "I am astounded, Mr. Morris," said he steadily. "In search of an explanation, I happen to remember that Mr. Armstrong was recently compelled to relieve Mr. Westervelt from duty because of his failing health—failing faculties." His eyes turned to Westervelt with an apologetic look in them—and Westervelt was, indeed, a pitiful figure, suggesting one broken and distraught. Fosdick saw in the faces of committeemen and spectators that he had scored heavily. "I repeat," said he boldly, "it is impossible that any such transactions should have occurred."

He was addressing Morris's back; the lawyer had turned to the table behind him and was examining the papers there with great deliberation. Not a sound in the room; all eyes on Fosdick, who was quietly waiting. "Ah!" exclaimed Morris, wheeling suddenly like a duelist at the end of the ten paces.

Fosdick startled at the explosive note in his servant's voice, then instantly recovered himself.

"This letter—is it in your handwriting?" Fosdick took the extended paper, put on his nose-glasses, and calmly fixed his eyes upon it. His hand began to shake, over his face a dreadful, unsteady pallor, as if the flame of life, sick and dying, were flaring and sinking in the last flickerings before the final going-out.

"Is it your writing?" repeated Morris, his voice like the bay of the hound before the cornered fox.

Fosdick's hand dropped to his lap. His eyes sought Morris's face and from them blazed such a blast of fury that Morris drew back a step.

Morris was daunted only for a second. He said evenly, "It is your handwriting, is it not?"

Fosdick looked round—-at Westervelt, whose wrinkled hand had paused on his beard midway between its yellowed end and his shrunken, waxen face; at Armstrong, stolid, statuelike; at the reporters, with pencils suspended and eyes glistening. He drew a long breath and straightened himself again. "It is," he said.

Morris extended his hand for the letter. "Thank you," he said with grave courtesy, as Fosdick gave it to him. "I will read—'Dear Bill—Tell A to draw three times this week—the usual amounts and give them to S.' Bill—that is Mr. Westervelt, is it not? And does not A stand for Armstrong? And is not S, Sigourney, at that time the O.A.D.'s representative in legislative and general political matters?"

"Obviously," said Fosdick, promptly and easily. "I see my memory has played me a disgraceful trick. I am getting old." He smiled benevolently at Morris, then toward Westervelt. "I, too, am losing my faculties." Then, looking at Armstrong, and not changing from kindly smile and tone, "But my teeth are still good."

"You now remember these transactions?"

"I do not. But I frankly admit I must have been mistaken in denying that they ever occurred."

"I trust, Mr. Fosdick," said Morris, "your memory will not fail you to the extent that you will forget you are on oath."

The muscles in Fosdick's spare jaws could be seen working violently. Morris was going too far, entirely too far, in realism for the benefit of the public. "Is it part of your privilege as examiner," said he, with more than a suggestion of master-to-servant, "to insult an old man upon his failing mind?"

"As none of these transactions was of older date than three years ago," replied Morris coldly, "and as the note bore date of only six months ago—the week before Sigourney died—it was not unnatural that I should be anxious about your testimony. We do not wish false ideas, detrimental to the standing of so notable and reputable a man as yourself, to get abroad."

A titter ran around the room; Fosdick flushed and the storm veins in his temples swelled. He evidently thought his examination was over, for he took a better hold on his coat and was rising from the chair. "Just a few minutes more," said Morris. "In the course of Mr. Westervelt's testimony another matter was accidentally touched on. We feel that it should not go out to the public without your explanation."

Fosdick sank back. Until now, he had been assuming that by some accident his plan to destroy Armstrong had miscarried, that Morris and Westervelt, to save the day, had by some mischance been forced into a position where they were compelled to involve him. But now, it came to him that Morris's icily sarcastic tone was more, far more, arrogant and insolent than could possibly be necessary for appearances with the public. The lawyer's next words changed suspicion into certainty. "We found several other items, Mr. Fosdick, which we requested Mr. Westervelt to explain—payments of large sums to your representatives—so Mr. Westervelt testifies they are—and to your secretary, Mr. Waller, and to your son—Hugo Fosdick. He is one of the four vice-presidents of the O.A.D., is he not?"

"He is," said Fosdick, and his voice was that of a sick old man.

"It was on your O.K. that one hundred thousand dollars were paid out to furnish his apartment?"

"You mean the uptown branch of the O.A.D.?" said Fosdick wearily, his blue-black eyelids drooped.

"Oh! We will inquire into that, later. But—take last year, Mr. Fosdick. Take this omnibus lease, turning over to corporations you control properties in Boston and Chicago which cost the O.A.D. a sum, two per cent. interest on which would be double the rental they are getting from you. Mr. Westervelt informs us that he knows you get seventeen times the income from the properties that you pay the O.A.D. under the leases they executed to you—you practically making the leases, as an officer of the company, to yourself as another corporation. My question is somewhat involved, but I hope it is clear?"

"I understand you—in the main," replied Fosdick. "But you will have to excuse me from answering any more questions to-day. I did not come prepared. My connection with the O.A.D. has been philanthropic, rather than businesslike. Naturally, though perhaps wrongly, I have not kept myself informed of all details."

He frowned down the smiles, the beginnings of laughter. "But the record is sound!" he went on in a ringing voice. "The O.A.D. has cost me much time and thought. I have given more of both to it than I have to purely commercial enterprises. But moneymaking isn't everything—and I feel more than rewarded."

"We all know you, Mr. Fosdick," said Morris, with an air of satiric respect.

"I ask you to excuse me to-day," continued the old man, in his impressive manner. "I wish to prepare myself. To-morrow, or, at most, in two or three days, I shall demand that you let me resume the stand. I have nothing to conceal. Errors of judgment I may have committed. But my record is clear." He raised his head and his eyes flashed. "It is a record with which I shall soon fearlessly face my God!"

Josiah Fosdick felt that he was himself again. His eyes looked out with the expression of a good man standing his ground unafraid. And he smiled contemptuously at the faint sarcasm in Morris's cold voice, saying, "That is quite satisfactory—most satisfactory."

The committee rose; the reporters surrounded Fosdick. He was courteous but firm in his refusal to say a word either as to the testimony he had given or as to that he would give. A dozen eager hands helped him on with his coat, and he marched away, sure that he was completely reëstablished—in the public esteem; his self-esteem had not been shaken for an instant. The good man doubts himself; not the self-deceiving hypocrite. There was triumph in the long look he gave Morris—a look which Morris returned with the tranquil shine of a satisfied revenge, a revenge of payment with interest for slights, humiliations, insults which the old tyrant had put upon him. Long trafficking upon the cupidity and timidity of men gives the ruling class a false notion of the discernment of mankind and of their own mental superiority, as well as moral. It was natural that Fosdick should believe himself above censure, above criticism even. He returned to his office, like a king upon whom the vulgar have sought to put indignities. His teeth fairly ached for the moment when they could close upon the bones of these "insolent curs."

It was not until he set out for lunch that another view of the situation came in sight. As he was crossing Waller's office, he was halted by that faithful servant's expression, the more impressive because it was persisting in spite of hysterical efforts to conceal it and to look serenely worshipful as usual. "What is it, Waller?" he demanded.

"Nothing—nothing at all, sir," said Waller, as with a clumsy effort at pretended carelessness he tossed into the wastebasket a newspaper which Fosdick had surprised him at reading.

"Is that an afternoon paper?"

Waller stammered inarticulately.

Fosdick shot a quick, sharp glance at him. "Let me see it."

Waller took the paper out of the basket, as if he were handling something vile to sight, touch and smell. "These sensational sheets are very impudent and untruthful," he said, as he gave it to his master.

Fosdick spread the paper. He sprang back as if he had been struck. "God!" he cried. "God in heaven!"

In the committee room, after the first unpleasantness, all had been smooth, and there was not to his self-complacent security of the divine right monarch the remotest suggestion of impending disgrace. Now—from the front page of this newspaper, flying broadcast through the city, through the country, shrieked, "Fosdick Perjures Himself! The eminent financier and churchman caught on the witness stand. Denies knowledge of political bribery funds and is trapped! Evades accusations of gigantic swindles and thefts."

Disgrace, like all the other strong tragic words, conveys little of its real meaning to anyone until it becomes personal. Fosdick would have said beforehand that the publication of an attack on him in the low newspapers would not trouble him so much as the buzzing of a fly about his bald spot. He would have said that there was in him—in his conscience, in his confidence in the approval of his God—a tower of righteous strength that would stand against any attack, as unimperiled as a skyscraper by a summer breeze. But, with these huge, coarse voices of the all-pervading press shrieking and screaming "Perjurer. Swindler! Thief!" he shook as with the ague and turned gray and groaned. He sat down that he might not fall.

"God! God in heaven!" he muttered.

"It's infamous," cried Waller, tears in his eyes and anger in his voice. "No man, no matter how upright or high, is safe from those wretches."

Fosdick gripped his head between his hands. "It hurts, Waller—it hurts," he moaned.

"Nobody will pay the slightest attention to it," said Waller. "We all know you."

But Fosdick was not listening. He was wondering how he had been able to delude himself, how he had failed to realize the construction that could, and by the public would, be put upon his testimony. Many's the thing that sounds and looks and seems right and proper in privacy and before a few sympathetic witnesses, and that shudders in the full livery of shame when exposed before the world. Here was an instance—and he, the shrewd, the lifelong dealer in public opinion, had been tricked at his own trade as he had never been able to trick anyone else in half a century of chicane.

"I want to die, Waller," he said feebly. "Help me back into my office. I can't face anybody."

Into Armstrong's sitting room, toward ten that night, Fosdick came limping and shuffling. Even had Armstrong been a "good hater" he could hardly have withstood the pathos of that abject figure. Being too broadly intelligent for more than a spasm of that ugliest and most ignorant of passions, he felt as if the broken man before him were the wronged and he himself the wronger. "But this man made a shameful, treacherous, unprovoked attempt to disgrace me," he reminded himself, in the effort to keep a just point of view for prudence's sake. It was useless. That ghastly, sunken face, those frightened, dim old eyes, the trembling step— If a long life of soul-prostitution had left Josiah Fosdick enough of natural human generosity to appreciate the meaning of Armstrong's expression, he might have been able to change his crushing defeat into what in the circumstances would have been the triumph of a drawn battle. But, except possibly the creative geniuses, men must measure their fellows throughout by themselves. Fosdick knew what he would do, were he in Armstrong's place. He clutched at Armstrong's hand with a cringing hypocrisy of deference that made Armstrong ashamed for him—and that warned him he dared not yet drop his guard.

"I've been trying to get you since three o'clock this afternoon," said Fosdick. "I had to see you before I went to bed." He sank into a chair and sat breathing heavily. He looked horribly old. "You don't believe I deliberately lied about that money, do you, Horace?"

"Is it necessary to discuss that, Mr. Fosdick? Hadn't we better get right at what you've come to see me about?"

"I've wired the governor. He don't answer. Morris refuses to see me. Westervelt—it's useless to see him—he has betrayed me—sold me out—he on whom I have showered a thousand benefits. I made that man, Horace, and he has rewarded me. That's human nature!"

Armstrong recalled that, when he was winning over Westervelt by convincing him of Fosdick's perfidy to him, Westervelt had made the same remark, had cried out that he loaned Fosdick the first five hundred dollars he ever possessed and had got him into the O.A.D. "It seems to me, Mr. Fosdick, that recriminations are idle," said he. "I assume you have something to ask or to propose. Am I right?"

"Horace, you and I are naturally friends. Why should we fight each other?"

"You have come to propose a peace?"

"I want us to continue to work together."

"That can be arranged," said Armstrong.

"I hoped so!" Fosdick exclaimed. "I hoped so!"

"But," proceeded Armstrong, seeing the drift of the thought behind that quick elation, "let us have no misunderstanding. You were permitted to leave the witness stand when you did to-day because I wished you to have one more chance to save yourself. That chance will be withdrawn if you begin to act on the notion that my forbearance is proof of my weakness."

"All I want is peace—peace and quiet," said Fosdick, with his new revived hope and craft better hid. But Armstrong saw that it was temperamentally impossible for Fosdick to believe any man would of his own accord drop the sword from the throat of a beaten foe.

"You can have peace," continued Armstrong, "peace with honor, provided you give a guarantee. You cannot expect me to trust you."

"What guarantee do you want?"

"Control of the O.A.D."

Fosdick's feebleness fell from him. He sprang erect, eyes flashing, fists shaking. "Never!" he shouted. "So help me God, never! It's mine. It's part of my children's patrimony. I'll keep it, in spite of hell!"

"You will lose it in any event," said Armstrong, as calm as Fosdick was tempestuous. "You have choice of turning it over to me or having it snatched from you by Atwater and Trafford and Langdon."

"Atwater!" exclaimed Fosdick.

"When I found you had arranged to destroy me," explained Armstrong, "I formed a counter-arrangement, as I wasn't strong enough to fight you alone."

"You sold me out!"

Armstrong winced. Fosdick's phrase was unjust, but since his talk with Neva he was critical and sensitive in the matter of self-respect; and, while his campaign of self-defense, of "fighting the devil with fire," still seemed necessary and legitimate, it also seemed lacking in courage. If Fosdick had crept and crawled up on him, had he not also crawled and crept up on Fosdick? "I defended myself in the only way you left me," replied Armstrong. "I formed an alliance with the one man who could successfully attack you."

"So, it is Atwater who has bought the governor—and Morris—yes, and that ingrate, Westervelt!"

"However that may be," replied Armstrong, "you will be destroyed and Atwater will take the O.A.D. unless you meet my terms." He was flushing deep red before Fosdick's look of recognition of a brother in chicane.

He knew Atwater was simply using him, would destroy him or reduce him to dependence, as soon as Fosdick was stripped and ruined. He felt he was as fully justified in eluding the tiger by strategy as he had been in procuring the tiger to defeat and destroy the lion that had been about to devour him. Still, the business was not one a man would preen himself upon in a company of honest men and women. And Fosdick's look, which said, "This man, having sold me out, is now about to sell out his allies," hit home and hit hard.

But he must carry his project through, or fall victim to Atwater; he must not let this melting mood which Neva had brought about enfeeble his judgment and disarm his courage. "If you refuse my offer," he said to Fosdick, "the investigation will go on, and Atwater will get the O.A.D. and take from you every shred of your character and much of your fortune—perhaps all. If you accept my offer, the investigation will stop and you will retire from the O.A.D. peaceably and without having to face proceedings to compel you to make restitution."

"How do I know you can keep your bargain?"

"I have the governor and Morris with me," replied Armstrong, frankly exposing his whole hand. "They, no more than myself, wish to become the puppets of the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford crowd."

Fosdick reflected. Now that he knew the precise situation, he felt less feeble. Before Armstrong explained, he had been like a man fighting in a pitch dark room against foes he could not even number. Now, the light was on; he knew just how many, just who they were; and, appalling though the discovery was, it was not so appalling as that struggle in the pitch dark. "You evidently think I'm powerless," he said at last. "But if you press me too far, you will see that I am not. For instance, you need me. You must have me or fall into Atwater's clutches. You see, I am far from powerless."

"But you forget," replied Armstrong, "you are heavily handicapped by your reputation. A man who has to fight for his good name is like a soldier in battle with a baby on his arm and a woman clinging to his neck. How can you fight without losing your reputation? The committee is against you. At Monday's session, if you let matters take their course, all that Westervelt's books show of your profits from the O.A.D. will be exposed—even the way you made it pay for the carpets on your floors, for the sheets on your beds, for towels and soap and matches."

Armstrong would not have believed there was in Fosdick's whole body so much red blood as showed in his face. "It's a custom that's grown up," he muttered shufflingly. "They all do it—in every big company, more or less, directly or indirectly."

"True enough," said Armstrong. "But you'll be the only one on trial. If you accept my offer, you'll be let alone. Cancel the worst of those leases, settle the ugliest accounts, all at comparatively trifling cost, and the public will soon forget."

"And what guarantee do you give that the agreement would be carried out?"

"My pledge—that's all," replied Armstrong—and again he flushed. He had avoided specifically giving his word to the Atwater crowd when he formed alliance with them; still, his "my pledge" had a hollow, jeering echo. "It's the only possible guarantee in the circumstances—and, as you are solely responsible for the circumstances, Mr. Fosdick, I do not see how you can complain."

Fosdick again reflected; the awful, deathly pallor, the deep scams, the palsylike trembling came back. After a long wait, with Armstrong avoiding the sight of him, he quavered, "Horace, I'll agree to anything except giving up the O.A.D." There he broke down and wept. "You don't know what that institution means to me. It's my child. It's my heart. It's my reason for being alive."

"Yes, it has been a source of enormous profit to you, Mr. Fosdick," said Armstrong calmly, for his own strengthening more than to get Fosdick back to facts. "I appreciate how hard it must be to give up such a source of easy wealth. But it must be done."

"You don't understand," mourned the old man. "You have no sentiment. You do not feel those hundreds of thousands, those millions of helpless people—how they look up to me, how they pray for me and are full of gratitude to me. Do you think I could coldly turn over their interests to strangers? Why, who knows what might not be done with those sacred trust funds?"

"If you persist in letting Atwater get control," said Armstrong, "I fear those sacred trust funds will soon be larger by about two thirds of what you regard as your private fortune. I do not like to say these things; you compel me, Mr. Fosdick. It is waste of time and breath to cant to me."

If Fosdick had had anything less at stake than his fortune, he would have broken then and there with Armstrong. As it was, his prudence could not smother down the geyser of fury that boiled and spouted up from his vanity. "I must be mad," he cried, "to imagine that such matters of conscience would make an impression on you."

Armstrong laughed slightly. "When a man is in the jungle, is fighting with wild beasts, he has to put forward the beast in him. You tried to ruin me—a more infamous, causeless attack never was made on a man. You have failed; you are in the pit you dug for me. I am letting you off lightly." And now Armstrong's blue eyes had the green gray of steel and flashed with that furious temper which he had been compelled to learn to rule because, once beyond control, it would have been a free force of sheer destruction. "If you had not been interceded for, you would now be a pariah, with no wealth to buy you the semblance of respect. Don't try me too far! I do not love you. I have the normal instinct about reptiles."

At that very moment Fosdick was looking the reptile. "Yes, I did try to tear you down," he hissed. "And I'll tell you why. Because I saw your ambition—saw you would never rest until you had robbed me and mine of that which you coveted. Was I not right?"

Armstrong could not deny it. He had never definitely formed such an ambition; but he realized, as Fosdick was accusing him, that had he been permitted to go peacefully on as president, the day would have come when he would have reached out for real power.

Fosdick went on, with more repression and dignity, but no less energy of feeling, "I cannot but believe that God in His justice will yet hurl you to ruin. You are robbing me, but as sure as there is a God, Horace Armstrong, He will bring you low!"

Well as Armstrong knew him, he was for the moment impressed. The only born monsters are the insane criminals; the monstrous among our powerful and eminent and most respectable are by long and deliberate indulgence in self-deception manufactured into monsters, protected from public exposure by their position, wealth, and respectability. We do not realize any more than they do themselves, that they have become insane criminals like the monsters-born. There is a majesty in the trappings of virtue that does not altogether leave them even when a hypocrite wears them; also, Armstrong was more than half disarmed by his new-sprung doubts whether he was wholly justified in meeting treachery with treachery. He surprised Fosdick by breaking the silence with an almost deprecating, "I said more than I intended. What you have done, what I have done, is all part of the game. Let us continue to leave God and morals—honesty and honor—out of it. Let us be practical, businesslike. You wish to save your reputation and your fortune. I can save them for you. I have given you my condition—it is the least I will ask, or can ask. What do you say?"

"I must have time to think it over," replied Fosdick. "I cannot decide so important a matter in haste."

"Quite right," Armstrong readily assented. "It will not be necessary to have your decision before noon to-morrow. The committee has adjourned until Monday. That will give us half of Saturday and Sunday to settle the plans that hang on your decision."

"To-morrow noon," said Fosdick, sunk into a stupor. "To-morrow noon." And he moved vaguely to the door, one trembling hand out before him as if he were blind and feeling his way. And, so all-powerful are appearances with us, Armstrong hung his head and did not dare look at the pitiful spectacle of age and feebleness and misery. "He's a villain," said the young man to himself, "as nearly a through-and-through villain as walks the earth. But he's still a man, with a heart and pride and the power to suffer. And what am I that I should judge him? In his place, with his chances, would I have been any different? Was I not hell-bent by the same route? Am I not, still?"

He walked beside Fosdick to the elevator, waited with him for the car. "Good night," he said in a tone of gentlest courtesy. And it hurt him that the old man did not seem to hear, did not respond. He wished that Fosdick had offered to shake hands with him.

He went to Morris, expecting him at a club across the way, and related the substance of the interview. Morris, who had both imagination and sensibility, guessed the cause of his obvious yet apparently unprovoked depression, guessed why he had been so tender with Fosdick. Nevertheless he twitted him on his soft-heartedness: "The old bunco-steerer hasn't disgorged yet, has he?—and hasn't the remotest intention of disgorging. So, my tears are altogether for the policy holders he has been milking these forty years." Then he added, "Though, why careless damn fools should get any sympathy in their misfortunes does not clearly appear. As between knaves and fools, I incline toward knaves. At least, they are teachers of wisdom in the school of experience, while fools avail nothing, are simply provokers and purveyors to knavery."

XXII

A DUEL AFTER LUNCH

In the respectable morning newspaper the Fosdicks took in, the facts of Josiah's latest public appearance were presented with those judicious omissions and modifications which the respectable editor feels it his duty to make, that the lower classes may not be led to distrust and deride the upper classes. Thus, Amy, glancing at headlines in search of the only important news—the doings of "our set"—got the impression that her father had had an annoying lapse of memory in testifying about something or other before somebody or other. But the servants took in a newspaper that had no mission to safeguard the name and fame and influence of the upper classes; probably not by chance, this newspaper was left where its vulgar but vivid headlines caught her eye.

She read, punctuating each paragraph with explosions of indignation. But when she had finished, she reread—and began to think. As most of us have learned by experience in great matters or small, truth is rubberlike—it offers small resistance to the blows of prejudice, and, as soon as the blow passes, it straightway springs back to its original form and place. Amy downfaced a thousand little facts of her own knowledge as to where the money came from—facts which tried to tell her that the "low, lying sheet" had revealed only a trifling part of the truth. But, when she saw her father, saw how he had suddenly broken, his very voice emasculate and thin, she gave up the struggle to deceive herself. There is a notion that a man's family is the last to believe the disagreeable truth about his relations with the outside world. This is part of the theory that a man has two characters, that he can be a saint at six o'clock in the morning and a scoundrel at six o'clock in the evening, that he is honest at a certain street and number and a liar and a thief at another street and number. But the fact is that character is the most closely woven and homogeneous of fabrics, and, though a man's family do not admit it publicly when the truth about him is exposed, they know him all the time for what he really is. Amy knew; her father's appearance, indicating not that he was guilty but that he was found out and was in an agony of dread of the consequences, threw her into a hysteria of shame and terror. She avoided the servants; she startled each time the door bell rang; it might mean the bursting of the real disgrace, for, in her ignorance of political conditions, she assumed that arrest and imprisonment would follow the detection of her father and probably Hugo in grave crimes. She dared not face any of the few that called; she would not even see Hugo.

On Sunday morning came a note from Alois—a love letter, begging to see her. She read it with tears flowing and with a heart swelling with gratitude. "He does love me!" she said. "He must know we are about to be disgraced, yet he has only been strengthened in his love." Though the actual state of the family's affairs was vastly different from what she imagined, though she would have been little disturbed had she known that publicity was the only punishment likely to overtake persons so respectable as Fosdick and his son, still the crisis was none the less real to Amy. In such crises the best qualities of human nature rise in all their grandeur and exert all their power. She sent off an immediate answer—"Thank you, Alois—I need you— Come at three o'clock. Yours, Amy."

When he came, she let him see what she wanted; how, with all she had valued and had thought valuable transforming into trash and slipping away from her, she had turned to him, to the only reality—to the love that welcomes the storm which gives it the opportunity to show how strong it is, how firmly rooted. With his first stammering, ardent protestations, she flung herself into his arms. "I have loved you from the beginning," she sobbed. "But I didn't realize it until I looked round for some one to turn to. You do love me?"

"I am here," he said simply, and there is nothing finer than was the look in his eyes, the feeling in his heart. "And we must be married soon. We must be together, now."

"Yes, yes—soon—at once," she agreed. "And you will take me away, won't you? Ah, I love you—I love you, Alois. I will show you how a woman can love." And never had she been so beautiful, both without and within.

"As soon as you please," said he. He was not inclined to interrogate his happiness; but he was surprised at her sudden and unconditional surrender. He guessed that some quarrel about him with her father or with Hugo had roused her to assert what he was quite ready to believe had been in her heart all the time; or, it might be that she wished to make amends for her father's having planned to send him away when honor commanded him to stay and guard his reputation. Had the cause of her hysteria been real, or had he known why she was so clinging and so eager, he would not have changed—for he loved her and was never half-hearted in any emotion. Though her money and her position were originally her greatest attractions for him, his ideal of his own self-respect was too high and too real for him to rest content until he had forced love to put him under its spell.

When he left her she sent for Hugo and told him. Hugo went off like a charge at the snap of the spark. "You must be mad!" he shouted. "Why, such a marriage is beneath you—is almost as bad as your sister's. It's your duty to bring a gentleman into the family."

She would not argue that; she would at any cost be forbearing with Hugo, who must be in torture, if he was not altogether a fool—and sometimes she thought he was. She restrained herself to saying gently, "You don't seem to appreciate our changed position."

"What 'changed position'? What are you talking about?" demanded Hugo, rearing and beginning to stride the length of the room.

She did not answer; answer seemed unnecessary, when Hugo was so obviously blustering to hide his real state of mind.

"You mean father's testimony?" he said. "What rot! Why, nobody that is anybody pays the slightest attention to that. Everyone understands how things are in finance and how vital it is to guard the secrets from lying demagogues and the mob. There isn't a man of consequence, of high respectability, on Manhattan Island, or in big affairs anywhere in the country, who wouldn't be in as difficult or more difficult a position, if he happened to be cornered. Everyone whose opinion we care anything about is in the game, and this attack on us is simply a move of our enemies."

"Deceive yourself, if you want to," replied Amy. "But I know I can't get married any too soon."

"And marrying a nobody, a mere architect, whose sister works for a living. You haven't even the excuse of caring for him."

"Don't be too sure about that! In the last twenty-four hours I've learned a great deal about life, about people. Everybody talks of love, and of wanting love. But nobody knows what it really means, until he has suffered. Oh, Hugo, don't be so hard! I need Alois!" And there were tears in her eyes.

Hugo tossed his head; but he was not unimpressed. "I'm sorry to see you so weak," said he in a tone that was merely surly and therefore, by contrast, kindly. "Of course, it's none of my business. But I don't approve it, I want you distinctly to understand."

"You won't be disagreeable to Alois?"

"I don't blame him," said Hugo. "It's natural he should be crazy to marry you. And, in his way, he isn't a bad sort. He's been about in our set long enough to get something of an air." Hugo was thinking that Amy had now lost young Roebuck, the only eligible in her train; that, after all, since he himself was to be the principal heir to his father's estate, she was not exactly a first-class matrimonial offering and might have to take something even less satisfactory than Alois, if she continued to wait for the husband he could warm to. "Go ahead, if you must," was his final remark. "I'll not interfere."

This was equivalent to approval, and Amy, strengthened, moved upon her father. To her astonishment, he listened without interest. She had to say pointedly, "And I've come to find out whether you approve," before he roused himself to respond.

"Do as you like," he said wearily, not lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper on which he had been making aimless markings, when she interrupted him.

"You wouldn't object if I married—soon?"

"Don't bother me," he flamed out. "Do as you please. Only, don't fret me. And, no splurge! I'm sick. I want quiet."

Thus it came about that on the Thursday following the engagement, a week almost to the hour from Fosdick's tumble into his own carefully and deeply dug pit, Amy married Alois Siersdorf, "with only the two families present, because of Mr. Fosdick's age and illness"; and at noon they sailed away on the almost empty Deutschland.

Alois did not let his perplexity before Amy's astounding docility interfere with his happiness. He saw that, whatever the cause, she was in love with him, so deeply in love that she had descended from the pedestal, had lifted him from his knees, had set him upon it, and had fallen down meekly to worship. There were a few of "our people" on the steamer—half a dozen families or parts of families, of "the push," who were on their way to freeze and sneeze in the "warm" Riviera for the sake of fashion. Alois was delighted that Amy was so absorbed in him that she would have nothing to do with them—this for the first three days. He had not believed her capable of the passion and the tenderness she was lavishing upon him. She made him hold her in his arms hours at a time; she developed amazing skill at those coquetries of intimacy so much more difficult than the enticements that serve to make the period of the engagement attractive. And he found her more beautiful, too, than he had thought. She was one of those women who are not at their best when on public or semipublic view, but reserve for intimacy a charm which explains the otherwise inexplicable hold they get upon the man to whom they fully reveal and abandon themselves.