THE HOUSE OF MUSIC BY GERTRUDE HALL

One elating, blue and white April morning saw a cheerful company of six assembling in a railroad-station waiting-room. There were the manager of the tour, Duprez—gray-haired in comparative youth, at once care-worn and accommodating looking—the foreign stamp on him not entirely obliterated by the stamp of the country; and his wife, the popular Pearl Wharton-Duprez, whose habit of facing the world as an audience must have found its way into her features; she was recognizable at sight for a singer. Her brilliant face, while not precluding the possibility of a heart, suggested less remotely a temper.

There was one Milen Odiesky, gripping a black violin-box; who listened to a hilarious conversation he but half understood, with a fixed smile, revealing a marked division between his two broad, white front teeth,—disagreeable, for some reason, though he might pass for handsome in a dark, hairy, Oriental way.

Then there was one who at first glance looked in the group as if he must be an aquaintance come to see them off. He was tall and proportionately broad, with stalwart shoulders, a deep chest, and a big neck; superlatively well groomed and dressed. The gloss of his silk hat was not broken by the wilfulness of one hair. He carried himself a trifle more than erect, and swept his limited horizon with a calm, kingly eye. His face was close-shaven, a smooth coppery rose, shading easily into the color of his close-cropped hair. His features were of the rather thick, round, good-natured type, and time was beginning to divide up his face into heavier masses than occur in the forties; but these facts did not prevent his presence on the whole from impressing an observer with the sense that he looked at something really very fine. This was Bronson, whose name on the program would occupy the most room: the great Bronson, Anthony, the tenor of long sustained fame—sustained, indeed, so long that these appearances in parts that knew him only by that fame had now been projected.

Then there was a little plump woman, the one who kept the others laughing; and she carried, besides what one is accustomed to see on the arms of travelers, all the things she had forgotten to put into her trunk; among which were an alarm-clock, a sponge-bag, a pink flannel dressing-sacque, and a little image of the Virgin. She bubbled on, in a voice as impossible to forget or mistake for another's as her face; which face, however, was not pretty, but so faithfully reflected a nature as to be memorable for its want of all malice, concealment, or suspicion. It was not that her features were child-like which accounted for her face bringing to mind a child's, but that it shared some quality inclining one on shortest acquaintance, without fear of rebuff, to treat its winsome, unsevere, uncritical owner familiarly and affectionately. She was not pretty, but certainly her dark-edged, misty, pale blue eyes, with their capacity in the same measure for humor and sentiment, under eyebrows sympathetically working with her thoughts, and lids stained a tender bistre, had an attaching sweetness; and the clear spaces of her face, the forehead and temples, something cool and rare, like the stamp of talent; while just beside her ear, where a faint lock of silken black hung an inch or so down a soft, sallow cheek, was a spot creating an instant desire to kiss it. This was Miss Nevers, the pianiste; Nevers, they briefly called her in speaking of her, pronouncing the name like an English one; Marie-Aimée they called her in speaking to her, all excepting Odiesky, who did not yet know her well enough; except, too, the sixth member of the party, who could never take it into his head to do so. The latter was a homely, thin man, neither young nor old, of the name of Snell, who was engaged to play common accompaniments, and tune the pianos. He stood near the others, but only ventured a smile where they laughed.

Yet he with the rest, as they trooped to the train, was conscious of a lift to his spirits. The tour was a turning the back upon the old and known. It had the charm of beginnings; it opened to life, with this new combination, new possibilities. Hard work and wearing travel were a certainty in the prospect, but it showed nevertheless like a holiday, enlivened by daily change of scene, faces, food.

Beside these general justifications of a reasonable elation on starting, there was excuse for the festive jollity which made people turn to look after our friends as they progressed down the platform—the stately Bronson now carrying a bulging rubber sponge-bag, impossible to conceal—in the brilliant artistic auspices under which these musical peregrinations were undertaken, and the discovery, now that the artists were come together en troupe, that they severally brought elements promising uncommon liveliness and fun.

About five years had passed since the laurel-laden return of the Duprez Concert Company, when Marie-Aimée one morning, rather earlier than it is customary to make a call, rang the door-bell of a certain large impressive house.

Whether the explanations were hurry in dressing or absence of mind, she looked, on this occasion, somewhat as if her clothes, as the saying is, had been thrown at her. The velvet of her little bonnet needed brushing; and her little gloves, alas, mending. She wore no veil, and wisps of her hair had been blown on end. But this effect of disorder culminated in her face itself, where the colors were out of their places; her cheeks being pale, her poor small nose and her eyelids red. She had grown stouter since our last sight of her, and on this day was carrying herself so without pride or heed as to look fairly round-shouldered.

As she stood waiting, she must have forgotten that she was in a public street, or else felt bad beyond caring; two or three times she openly mopped her eyes. When, however, she faced the tall butler who opened the door, she appeared to have nothing worse the matter with her than a bad head-cold. She asked if Miss Cheriton were in, gave her card, and was shown into a vast hushed drawing-room. There, as soon as she had been left alone, she looked at herself in the mirror; after which she chose a seat with its back to the windows. She had occupied this but a moment, when, lest the thoughts stealing back upon her should drive her again to tears, she crossed over to the grand-piano glimmering in the half-light with liquid reflections of gilt moldings, brocade, and palms. She lifted the lid to peer at the name of the maker, and tried its tone with a scarce audible chord. Then she took up piece after piece of the music in the rack, questioning it as to Miss Cheriton's title to her high reputation as an amateur pianist.

On hearing a rustle, she hurriedly laid down the music, and got up, her heart rushing. Miss Cheriton had shaken hands, with expressions of pleasure in making her aquaintance, had offered her a seat, and taken one, before Marie-Aimée had been able to do more than clear her throat.

Miss Cheriton had allotted her a seat well in the lights; her curiosity about this caller could do no less; wherefore Marie-Aimée's reddened eyes at first refused a square encounter. But shortly, while Miss Cheriton was forcing a dullish conversation, Marie-Aimée forgot herself, and looked Miss Cheriton in the face; full as interested as she in the looks of the other at close range.

Marie-Aimée saw a well-grown young woman of eight or nine and twenty; faultlessly dressed in a fawn colored cloth matching her perfectly arranged abundant hair. Her face was entirely fine, if a little cold. She gave an impression of great self-poise; she could be imagined to have always thought and decided for herself, and had the fortune to see everything go as she wished, which no doubt she laid to the firm and just management she looked so capable of exercising. She had a beautiful calm complexion and calm dark-blue eyes, which weighed you thoughtfully, and would with difficulty, you fancied, alter their conclusions about you. But at least, Marie-Aimée felt with relief and hope, they were windows into a mind where there was room to breathe.

She began abruptly, in a suggestive pause occurring in Miss Cheriton's small talk, "You must be wondering what brought me."

The expression of Miss Cheriton's face, her only answer to this, signified that though she hoped she had not seemed to be wondering rudely, she would in effect be pleased to know.

Marie-Aimée picked at her glove. "It is this. I was told that I had been making mischief. And I came, wishing if possible to remedy it."

Miss Cheriton's eyebrows moved upward just enough to start a ripple in the beautiful smoothness of her forehead, and she waited, her eyes inquiring of Miss Nevers' troubled face; in their depths had flashed a prevision of what might be coming.

"I know I talk a dreadful lot," Marie-Aimée burst forth in disgust, "I tell everything I know. I can't keep to myself even stories that are against myself. Whatever is on my heart, I say it. I have been making a dreadful fool of myself—which is bad enough, but I feel worse about having given annoyance to others.... Mr. Bronson came to see me yesterday evening."

She paused, as after a piece of news. Miss Cheriton waited in silence, her face expressing nothing beyond polite attention.

"And he said that my doing as I have been doing made a lot of gossip, which inevitably reached you, and was calculated to give you a mistaken impression of our relations in the past——" Marie-Aimée's voice stuck.

After a moment, "Please, please, don't be distressed," murmured Miss Cheriton; and as if her uneasiness at the sight of tears had made her restless, left her seat, and went to stand beside the mantle-piece, leaning on it with one elbow, ornaments at choice within reach, to pick up and play with.

Marie-Aimée laughed through a sob. "You see? Was there ever such a fool? And this is the way I have been ever since I heard of his engagement. But I want you to understand, Miss Cheriton, that that's just me. How can he help it, unhappy man, if I am made this way? I have cried like a pump. I have cried upon the shoulder of every one who would stand it. But I had no right, no possible right, to lament in the highways like that. It was only—when my heart was full, I let it run over. But I never in the least meant it as a reproach to anyone,—any more, put it this way, than a sunflower going draggled and crazy at sunset. But he told me last night I made him ridiculous. Oh, he was gentle. For all that, the things he said troubled me horribly; and I made up my mind, after he had left, to come directly to you and explain, so that if reports have vexed you, you should not mind them after this."

Miss Cheriton said quietly, not looking at Marie-Aimée, but at an ivory Chinaman she held: "It is not necessary, Miss Nevers. I did indeed hear something, but I did not give it much thought."

Upon which Marie-Aimée, as if these words had contained all the encouragement necessary, proceeded eagerly, "We never, never were engaged. You will believe me, whatever you may hear. We merely have been friends for years. I had known him slightly a long time already, when we went on a tour together, with Madame Wharton-Duprez. It was then we became such chums.... Mercy on me, that tour! Shall I ever forget it? Will any of us?" She smiled, with a sudden drenched reflection of sunshine on her tear-bedabbled face.

"I know!" Miss Cheriton smiled too. "Mr. Bronson has spoken of it to me."

"Has he?" asked Marie-Aimée, brightening still further, rainbow-like, and immediately at greater ease with Miss Cheriton, from a responsiveness she felt in her smile when the ever fertile subject of the tour was broached, dear in its time to Anthony Bronson's heart. "That's good. For it will in part explain.... Don't you agree with me that laughing together makes a stronger bond than even weeping? Well, on that tour, what we did best and chiefly, was to laugh. Did he ever tell you——" She dropped her voice like a person having something good to relate, and fun played over her face in ripples, "the adventure of the water-melon? Yes, of course! I suppose he has told you everything. And the adventure of the face-wash and the curling-irons? And the night of the great thunderstorm? Oh, make him tell you that one. It is incredible, the number of things, and the description of things, that happened to us in those six months. It was as if we had been a sort of lightening-rod attracting all the incongruous, ludicrous, delicious happenings that should have been distributed over the country. Or else, it is that we were in a disposition of mind to find everything funny. Of course, it may have been that. But still—imagine our arriving once at a little place where we had never been heard of. There is a mistake. And no one expects us. And there is no hotel. And it ends in our being obliged to sleep in the empty jail, we women, a dovecote of a jail, with just two wee cells; oh, slumbers of sweetness and safety, after our many nights in strange hostelries. No need for once to look under the bed for burglars; and the men in a barn. Odiesky didn't get the hayseed out of his hair that season. And imagine—imagine having along with you a man who has a nightmare every time he drops off to sleep. A poor Mr. Snell who went with us was like that, and we used to run into one another in the lobbies, in curl-papers, at dead of night, flying to knock him up, he made such awful, such blood-curdling sounds, which could be heard all over the hotel. It is unkind to laugh at an infirmity, but the sounds he made, could you have heard them, would excuse me to you. And imagine—but try to—imagine the six of us, six people who feel themselves not a little famous, going fourteen miles in a single-seated wagon, that, or miss our connection, and complications without end. I don't believe I stopped laughing the whole way. You see it? We two, the grace and beauty of the party, enthroned upon the laps of ces messieurs—no other way, no other way possible, none. Wharton-Duprez in the arms of her own husband; and Odiesky astride the horse, postilion, having to drive; and poor little Snell on the floor with his knees over the dash-board; and the danger at any moment of the wagon breaking down——" She pieced out that fourteen-mile long ecstasy of merriment with more of a singularly rich, unaffected laugh, in the midst of which her face fell blankly serious, and she held up, as if she had never seen it before, the hand which in the heat of her description she had been waving.

"Will you look at my glove?" she said; promptly closing which parenthesis she continued, "As I was saying, it may have been that circumstances really justified us, or our mood, which was exceptional. For myself, I never enjoyed myself so much. Oh, I was impressionable then, and ready to be pleased. Every day a new place, every night a new triumph. It was Mr. Bronson's triumph, but his glory fell upon us all. We lived in an atmosphere of success; and people were so nice to us, we were entertained everywhere like king and court. It was then, you see, when we were together from morning until night, we grew to know each other so well. And, you know him, you know how kind he would be to a little person traveling as I was doing; kind does not express it, and thoughtful and considerate. And you know the charming companion that he is, even-tempered, easy-going, good fellow. And in traveling like that you know the thousand little services a man can render you, and, among artists, the good turns. He, you will have discovered, has not a touch of that queer jealousy so common among artists.

"But there was even more than all that. Before the end of our engagement, Wharton-Duprez had taken the most cattish dislike to me; I have never known why. And everything that woman could do to make things uncomfortable for me she took pains to do, even, will you believe it, contriving that my luggage should be left behind, and I forced to appear on the stage in the filthiest little coal-begrimed traveling-suit—at the fag end of the season, you understand. Ferdinand, her husband, did not dare to say a word. It would have been past endurance for me then, had it not been for Mr. Bronson's invariably showing himself my friend, and keeping her within limits. I had reason to be grateful to him, you see. I should have had to be a monster not to become devoted to him. You can put yourself in my place, can't you? And then, add to everything else his singing. Never, never, never, to me, has there been anything like it."

Miss Cheriton bowed her head, slowly, in agreement.

"If with all your heart ye truly seek me," murmured Marie-Aimée, looking as if she listened to a voice singing in her memory.

"In manly worth and honor clad," murmured the other, likewise.

"It opens a door, doesn't it," Marie-Aimée spoke low, as if they had entered a church, "into a world where it is all beautiful, calm, eternal— the only world—where whoever breathes its air must worship and must love; just his mere voice, when it is what I call his ballad-voice, doesn't it contain all romance? Moonlight, boats on lonely seas, lattices with roses; and when it is his anthem-voice, it contains, doesn't it, all aspiration, cathedrals, matin-bells, archangel's choirs——"

Again Miss Cheriton nodded dreamily; then, raising her eyes, which in listening she had dropped, forgot the one of whom they were speaking for interest in the face of the speaker, who looked ahead with eyes which clearly did not see what was before them, but the cloudy white pillars, one might have surmised, and dim glimmering splendors of some temple of Music and Love.

Marie-Aimée swept her hand across her forehead. "And I," she continued, raising her voice in a tone of plaintive exculpation, "I was born mad for music! A voice has power over me like a spell. And I am flesh and blood! And so——" she ended feebly, "do you wonder?"

Silence, while Marie-Aimée turned her face wholly from the light. But even while she made application of her little damp pocket-handkerchief, a stealing sense warmed her in all her woe that she had somehow made a friend of Miss Cheriton. The exemplary piece of tranquility there felt drawn to her; something communicated this unimaginable fact directly to her heart; and it melted her, as the hint of kindness always did, and inclined her now verily to make no more circumstances about it, but show her whole heart in abandoned frankness, repeating just once more the fault she was here to confess. But simultaneously with gratitude for that liking, rose in Marie-Aimée the need to repay it greatly; whence a caution to herself to proceed more than ever guardedly with the truth.

"And after we were come back," she took up again, "we naturally continued seeing a great deal of each other. I won't say we would not have done so from choice, but it was inevitable, too. Our profession threw us together, concerts, rehearsals; he used, besides, to bring every bit of new music to learn at my house, with me to play it over for him. And so on, for years; and to me, I tell it frankly, that light-hearted, unconventional comradeship of ours gave its principal charm to life. In the last year I have seen less of him, and latterly very much less. He was not singing much, he was under treatment for his throat, and often out of town by his doctor's directions. I missed him, but I am busy from morning until night, the week round, work and a thousand things. I thought nothing of it. Do old friends need to see each other constantly to be assured nothing is changed? Then I hear of his engagement to you. I am thunderstruck! For never, never, never, had I dreamed of such a possibility. You see my folly? He was not bound to me by any promise, or by what you would call a moral obligation. There never had been any question of our marrying, not even at the beginning when we first got home, not even in my own mind—" Native honesty and poor human nature would not permit but that she should add, though in a tone that made little of it—" any definite, immediate, formulated idea of it. My poor sweet mother was living then, a sufficient reason against it. And when she was no longer there, all had got into a groove, and remained as it had been. And it seemed natural. I have nothing but what I earn. He was having bothers about money. He put all his in a mine, you know. We called ourselves poor working-people. But still! There it is! That's where you discover my bird's brain. That's me! The way I am! I flatly refused to believe it, and when I saw him again, I did not even ask. But I daresay I looked as he had never seen me look. Then he himself told me of it, as one tells such a thing to an old friend. And the past stood suddenly in a new light; and I saw clearly, in a flash, that just this and nothing else was to have been expected. And I knew that it was altogether the most fortunate thing that could happen to him; and, after the first, I acquiesced.

"Only, I followed my nature in making the outcry of one who has received a wound and is bleeding dreadfully. I have no dignity, Miss Cheriton. Discretion and I have never so much as been acquainted. I go around with my heart in my face, I forget my face, you see, in thinking of what has befallen me. And I run into some sympathetic woman who is fond of me, and she cries out 'Marie-Aimée, my poor child, what is the matter with you?' and I bend feebly upon her shoulder, and tell. And then I suppose she goes off and tells too. Hence, you see, the ground of Mr. Bronson's remonstrances with me yesterday evening. And in consequence of them I am here. I didn't know what else to do, Miss Cheriton. I hope it was best. And you do see, don't you? I have made the whole thing plain? I have made it all right? You know how he is, and now you have seen how I am, the inference will be simple! And I beg both your pardons. Oh, he is right, he is quite right, to feel put out with me, but not—" she forced a little watery smile, as she rose to take her leave—"not because it has ever seemed so terribly to a great singer's discredit that, when the whole world goes after him, among them should be a silly woman who does not manage to conceal her grande passion. It only makes him like Mario and others; you must not let it trouble you, Miss Cheriton. You must think of me in a thought of the same strain you bestow upon the thousands of photographs of him that have been sold in the course of his career, and are cherished and given places of honor in young ladies' rooms; and the sentimental follies school girls have committed in the way of sending him flowers and notes. Let these tributes to him merely increase your pride of possession. He is free from all blame, all, that is what I have wished you to feel assured of, or all—" she put out her hand in farewell—"except just a little, little bit. You don't mind? A little bit he certainly was to blame, though I suppose it can be laid to the account of his modesty, in not taking it home to himself that he could not be so nice, so consistently, persistently dear and nice to a person, without her falling to stupidly adoring him."

She stopped, and stood, vaguely shaking her head, prolonging her faint, watery, bitter-sweet smile; and would have withdrawn her hand, but Miss Cheriton retained it, by a firmer pressure, in the warm, kind clasp of hers. Marie-Aimée lifted her eyes, touched and full of thanks, to the fine calm eyes above her; and in their unclouded light read Anthony Bronson's unqualified exoneration, and that she herself had been impartially examined, and now stood classed, past appeal, among those soft, sweet, idiotic women who will fall into unwarranted love with any man of whom they see much, and are by their own passion made incapable of discerning the fact that he is not in love with them. The glance was full of honest sympathy for a sorrow so real; but it was not untinged with as much contempt as would be implied in the prayer, "I thank thee, my God, I am not as these women are!" Under which Marie-Aimée humbly bowed her head and waited but for the release of her hand to go. But Miss Cheriton, whom stiffness or delicacy kept from saying a word in reference to what she had heard, yet found herself utterly unwilling that her visitor should leave so uncheered. Still holding her hand, she told her, in a voice full of the suggestion of sincerity, the deep pleasure she had always had in hearing her; she amplified, tactfully, understandingly, upon all she had discovered of exquisite in her playing.

Marie-Aimée's face lightened a little; she had never become callous to praise. Miss Cheriton spoke of friends they had in common, from whom she had heard so much of her, of a sort that had long made it one of her most eager wishes to know her. Whereupon Marie-Aimée, as ever responsive, gave herself into Miss Cheriton's hands, to be known. And the two were shortly making acquaintance as they might have done had they been presented to each other at the house of those mutual friends. One could not have dreamed, to hear them, what had gone before. They talked of music mostly, and musicians, wholly forgetful of time. To illustrate some point, Marie-Aimée went to the piano and played a bar or two; after which, as she would have risen, Miss Cheriton entreated against it; and when Marie-Aimée, who never resisted, asked what she should play, suggested a composition of Miss Nevers' own, which the latter had imagined so obscure, she said, as to be almost her only secret. And she found, to her astonishment, that Miss Cheriton, whether moved by genuine musical congeniality, or a vulgarer curiosity, had procured everything ever published of Marie-Aimée's. Afterwards, Miss Cheriton took the place at the piano of Marie-Aimée urgent. Then Marie-Aimée begged leave, and supplanted her, to show how a different sequence of chords would be better; and the woman of talent and the woman of cultivation spent a long hour, delightful to both; in the course of which Miss Cheriton found the quaint enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée felt by her innumerable friends accounted for; and Marie-Aimée came to disdain, as paltry praise, the definition "very fine girl" which one was accustomed to hear joined to the name of Kate Cheriton.

Smiting her brow, aghast, at the recollection of an appointment missed, Marie-Aimée jumped to her feet. By running she might still be in time to apologize. They shook hands again, warmly; and Marie-Aimée said, all her heart in her voice, "I hope you will be very happy."

In the street, Marie-Aimée, as she hurried along, could think of nothing but Miss Cheriton. She would send her as a wedding-gift the French great-grandmother's rococo cross, the choicest bit of jewelry she owned.

Her heart might have been so much dusty, worm-eaten wood; remarking its astonishing lightness and insensibility, she reverted in thought, almost flippantly, to the horrors besetting her when she left home that morning. Surely, if it were possible that with Tony's marriage brought as close as a visit to his intended brought it, she should feel as she felt, she might still hope to put on a good face about it to the world.

In this mood she went about a good part of that day; and talked to some with so much of a return to her old spirit that they disguised their surprise by a greater cheerfulness than really their mystification allowed them to feel. Meeting an old aquaintance who put on the face of a sympathizer to say, "My dear, I did feel for you when I heard of his engagement, you know whose I mean," she looked as if not sure she understood; and the old aquaintance, after a searching look at her, dropped her mournfulness, to proceed, "It seems to be a fine thing for Bronson, this marriage. I hear that Miss Cheriton will be a millionaire. People exaggerate, you think? But she has bought a superb place out of town?"

By the late afternoon, that curious, unseasonable, baseless good cheer was wearing off, like the effects of wine, and the world, through its fading fumes, was returning to look like the world of yesterday. Weariness was overtaking her; but her heart had not recommenced its clamorous aching; it was only a little sick, when she went into a music-store for a score she needed. She was looking this over, with her eyes rather than her mind, when her attention became fixed in memory upon that expression of Miss Cheriton's face from which she had judged her mission successful—Tony cleared. Suddenly, as in the middle of the night she had sometimes known that in a letter sent off there was a word misspelled, she felt that triumph of confidence in Miss Cheriton's eyes not to have been the work of her own explanations. She herself had been fully explained to Miss Cheriton before ever she set foot in her house. How could it have been otherwise?

Marie-Aimée's ghost-seeing eyes became fixed upon nothingness. She sat so a long time, her chin dropped in dolorous absorption; a figure which struck discomfort in the beholder. Another woman buying music bent over the counter and whispered to the clerk, who whispered back, and both stole glances at the unconscious, rigid, dumpy profile, stamped with tragedy, of the well-known pianiste, whose most intimate sorrow had become town-talk.

She went out at last into the hubbub of the streets, which seemed a cruelty of men, under the gorgeous sunset sky, which seemed a cruelty of Heaven's, and, as much as a great heaviness would allow, hurried home and to bed and the dark. It was no use! no use! Though Tony's conduct to her admitted of the face she had put on it to Miss Cheriton, and though the world's jury, upon full evidence, might have acquitted him, he not being the last shade of black, she herself knew, and something of incorruptible justice in the bottom of her heart would not let her blink it, that she had been badly, badly treated. But that was not the most woeful, that she should have been badly treated, or that she must live her days hereafter without him; but that he, Tony, should have been capable of doing this thing to her, to her, who would have shed her blood for him, and he knew it.

In the days following, as she went about her crowded occupations, she did not, as she had allowed herself to do before, seek relief in speaking of what weighed upon her heart. But human strength did not suffice to keep the matter out of her face; her cheek was leaden, her eyes were in a fog.

But it was useless now, her avoiding Anthony Bronson's name. She had spoken too much before. Besides, too many remembered the soft, radiant, enamored face with which she had been used to beam up at him in those earliest days after their return from touring, and down upon which he had benignantly beamed, like a big, gratified idol. Furthermore, this gossip concerning persons so well known had too many of the elements which ensure a thing being repeated till everyone knows. Reports of "scenes" made by Marie-Aimée were still spreading after she had placed the seal upon her lips; and those who got them last did not know that they were old news; and as it was the least interested in her personally who last became au fait of her affairs, some among them took the view that little Nevers was disgracing herself; which sentiment once in the air, certain of Marie-Aimée's closer friends saw the matter more nearly in that light, experienced a reaction from too complete sympathy with her. One heard it said with a touch of impatience, "Some one ought to talk to Marie-Aimée!" Even those who loved her most, this, as it seemed, insistent and protracted harping upon an unfortunate attachment at last came near disgusting. And she did receive scoldings and lectures, of which she abjectly owned the justice; and she tried to keep herself more out of sight. Only so far as the necessity to earn a living made it imperative did she go about. Wherefore some whose invitations she refused said, "Nevers is moping. It is a pity she can't behave like the rest who have to suffer from the fickleness of man!"

A critical, less friendly attitude of the world toward her was beginning at last, through her dismal preoccupation, to penetrate her heart with its novel chill, and make the city where she had always lived seem not like home any more. She looked about, bewildered, for escape. The day of the Bronson-Cheriton wedding, too, was close at hand; but before it had arrived, there descended upon her from a distance a stern older married sister, whom rumors at last had aroused.

No one saw Marie-Aimée after the coming of this sister. To everyone's astonishment, in the busiest time of the season, Marie-Aimée's rooms were empty of her. It was thought that the sister had carried her off to keep her under surveillance: till it became known from Marie-Aimée herself, writing to her old friends, that she was in a convent of the Sacred Heart, hundreds of miles removed, and there proposed to remain until she had become free from the faintest taint of the folly that had made her a scandal and a laughing-stock,—yes, if she remained there until she died. Her time was profitably spent in study, and the giving of piano-lessons to the young girls receiving their education in the holy house. And she enjoyed the inestimable privilege, accorded to her by the Mother Superior, of weeping as much as she pleased.

II

To that little portion of the busy world-in-general which concerned itself with her, one may be sure it seemed very soon after her disappearance that it began to be said Nevers might be looked for again. Already? Yet, when one had grumbled that love, after all, does not last very long, he made calculations, and these told him that three years and more had slipped past since the tragico-comic retreat of the poor crossed-in-love. Certainly, something may be expected of three years.

She was really coming back? There was excitement. She was coming, no longer any doubt of it; there was glee, there was expanding of the heart. She was come; there was a rush to see her. Affection accounted for much of this; for the rest, curiosity to see the result of her three years. But when she had been seen, delight knew no reserve; each felt as if he had won a bet.

A movement arose, as a breeze comes up, and gradually gained force, till it resulted in a concert given for Marie-Aimée, a testimony of the regard felt for her, and the joy at her return. The occasion was made a magnificent one; the house was crowded, and contained such a proportion of personal friends of Marie-Aimée that the affair took the character of a huge family festivity. But the applause resounding when Marie-Aimée herself appeared to perform her little task at the piano was in excess of all the rest. In the sound, in the faces, in the air, one felt "How she is beloved!"

She came forward in the childlike manner one remembered of her, with that adorable absence of self-consciousness which touches more than grace, bowing from side to side with the moved air which infallibly moves, half in tears, yet smiling. To gratify her faithful, she had gone into hearty extravagance, and appeared wonderfully encased in a warm delicious pink, worthy of the event, much of it rustling off far from her heels, not much of it at all troubling her dimpled arms and shoulders. She held her sweet little black head on one side, like a tender bird; it looked as if dragged over by the weight of a big rose in her hair. And the people could not be satisfied with clapping their hands. The public was for the occasion become romantic, and, as much as the artist, was applauding the woman who had loved and, by this token, triumphed over a villainous deserter. They kept it up ad absurdum, intoxicated by the noise they made, more and more touched by their own loyalty to the old favorite, wishing to proclaim it still more loudly; and so expressing at last, it is sad to say, far more than any one felt. But it had been a goodly demonstration, and all thought better of themselves when finally those who were eager to hear the playing began hushing, and silence gradually came about.

Then she played, and it was to many what they were pleased to call a revelation. It was at all events a fresh, delicate, inspirating, moving music. There were those who listened with eyes upturned, and thought of sunrise upon Eden; there were those who nodded surprise and commendation, and spoke of technique.

Marie-Aimée was one of those persons about whom all who know them talk. She offered opportunity for it, certainly, by herself talking; her manner of being and her ways were fertile in food for comment; but her modest ray of fame was also accountable, being felt to brighten all who could claim sufficient nearness to her to know her affairs.

Had she changed? was the capital question in the discussions of her following upon her return. Most said not in the least, except, the presumption was, toward Bronson. She was open-hearted as ever, merry once more as she had used to be when her star first rose among them. She was still the one that so lent herself to be loved and gently, almost enviously, laughed at. But if she were changed, as some maintained, it was for the better. She looked younger, rested; her face was clear and untroubled now. If, after the first, one missed something in her, she explained that it was her old faults.

"When I began to see glimmering ahead of me in the distance a triumphal re-entrance among you," she held forth to a little group, "I began to prepare for it. I tried to fit myself better to please you. For the bon Dieu's sake, I had tried to obtain a clean soul; but for the world's sake—your sake, my dears—I tried to become thin! I did gymnastics, I walked, I dosed myself, I gave up eating everything I liked, and you see the result? Honor my beautiful shape, will you? and do not press upon me sponge-cake and plum-cake, as you used to do. Then I became orderly. Haven't you noticed? All my buttons there, all my hooks and eyes. And every little spot at once rubbed out with cologne. When did you know such things of me before? But look at my head! I tell you I hunt up mirrors expressly to see myself in them; and I set my bonnet straight, and tuck in my loose ends. Then I became prudent. I always think before I act, now, and before I speak, and before I spend my money. And punctual! I catch trains, and I keep appointments. I look at my watch, like the rest of you, and see that it is time to go, and I go. I no longer, like some one I remember, sit down and play and play and play, or talk and talk and talk, till it is dinner time, and I have to be invited. And then I am not a chatter-box now, no, not what you could call a chatter-box."

Her joy at being again among her old friends softened and won them; and no less did the humility of her attitude toward the past. In regard to that she was shame-faced, apologetic, reformed.

So much of the story of her exile filtered through those who received it at first hand, that a legend of it was before long public property; and such a character was given the event, Marie-Aimée's own view perhaps initially tinging it for all, that, without fear of being thereby unacceptable, the multitude of those who stood with Marie-Aimée on a footing of good-humored comradeship neglected, even in speaking to her, to disguise their familiarity with what concerned her. It was common, on the ground of a perfect understanding with her, and a supposition of at least some small degree of that enmity which often succeeds love and takes satisfaction in hearing of Fortune's disparaging turns on the ex-beloved, to entertain her with late accounts of Bronson. And though she merely listened, as she would have done to anything well-intentioned, her unoffended air left a feeling that encouragement had not been wanting. One irresponsible, feather-brained youth, of the baritone variety, reached such recklessness, while regaling her with good stories as they stood waiting for her cab, as to inquire, "Have you heard the latest joke about old Bronson?" He brought his lips near her ear, and breathed through a chuckle: "They say it takes two years and seven months to get over being in love with Bronson, but if you marry him it doesn't take so long!" And as he laughed heartily, she let her bright laugh ring out companionably alongside of his. Having got into her cab, she repeated the joke carefully over to herself, to apprehend the point of it.

It was not to have been expected that the peculiar extreme enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée, with the exaggerated form of tribute to her, should continue long unabated. Still, with discretion on her part, it might have had the ordinary length of such things. As it was, alas, there soon seemed occasion to believe that the public mind is ruled by the law of reaction: By so much as the public had gone beyond rational appreciation, it seemed now threatening to fall below it.

Those who watched Marie-Aimée's fortunes with most interest, with a sinking of the spirit began to note a decrease in her social popularity. As they witnessed this trifling evidence of it and that, these lifted their eyebrows and pushed out their chins, with the expression which one interprets, "But what can be done about it?" Whenever there was reference to her now, it seemed to bring about in the atmosphere a vague fall of temperature. A just appreciable effect of disappointment, disapproval, regret, followed the long-loved name.

Those fondest of her could scarcely be brought to speak of it; when they did speak, it was not frankly and openly, as everyone had used to discuss her affairs once, shaking the head amusedly. They talked in dreary undertones, and ended asking each other "Now, can you understand it?"

Presently, she was by certain ones avoided, because of an awkwardness they felt in meeting her, with a consciousness of what were best not mentioned—disagreeable to those accustomed to dealings with her of a perfect candor. When met, she was at best in these days indifferent fun, preoccupied, unlike herself, with little to say.

At last, as an increasing coldness takes a definite pattern of frost, certain persons refrained from calling upon her, explaining privately that they had heard it said that it was possible to come upon Anthony Bronson in her little drawing-room. This refraining did not signify by any means in all a wish to express condemnation; on the part of most it really expressed a good-humored wish not to be in the way.

It was as winter was waning, that, reversing somewhat the order of the day, one who had never called on her resolved to do so. With her clothes and her hair and her eyes full of March, she ascended to Miss Nevers' little flat. The door was opened by Marie-Aimée herself, who stood looking up, uncertain, inquiring.

"I fear you do not remember me," the visitor said. "May I come in?"

"Your voice," Marie-Aimée faltered, "is familiar —but the light—the light is behind you. Do, I pray, come in."

She hurried ahead into the drawing-room, which was unexpectedly light, from the reflection upon its ceiling of the snow on lower neighboring roofs. She turned and looked at the visitor who was entering; she uttered an exclamation, unfollowed by any word.

"I see you have recalled me," said the visitor. "Mrs. Bronson? Kate Cheriton that was?"

"Take a seat, I pray!" said Marie-Aimée faintly.

Mrs. Bronson looked around her for once. Though her eye confessed no more scrutiny than accords with good breeding, it missed little in the tiny room, warm-colored, crowded, a bit untidy, but genially so, as where a pair of evening gloves and a crumpled play-bill lay on a chair, and a lace bonnet saddled a green bronze lion. The walls were covered with gimcracks and pictures, among which in profusion photographs of the celebrated, overscrawled with their various calligraphies. The piano stood open, littered with music; a tea-table, ready for service, the kettle steaming, was drawn close to the fire; a faint smell of macaroons mingled in the air with the smell of violets, whereof a big double handful was fading in a bowl. A well-worn leather chair, deep and wide, patriarchal, was on one side of the fire-place; and, suggestively at its elbow, matches and an ash-tray.

In this seat, after her casual circular glance, Mrs. Bronson quietly arranged herself; and Marie-Aimée took the rocker on the opposite side of the fire. She dropped back in it, leaning, and loosely folded her hands; which no sooner had she done, than she sat upright, and moved forward to the edge of her chair.

There was a longer silence than is often suffered by persons of the world. To attempt "carrying off" anything whatsoever was not in Marie-Aimée's moyens.

"Do you know why I have come, Miss Nevers?" Mrs. Bronson asked.

Marie-Aimée regarded her with eyes as steady as they were inwardly frightened. Her whole face expressed what one had never expected to see in it, something very near hostility; its like could be imagined in the look of a tame animal uncertain whether harm is meant to its young.

"I judge you have come here to find Mr. Bronson," she answered, "I expect him at any moment."

It was plain there would be no delicate fencing this afternoon.

Mrs. Bronson shook her head, and laughed in spite of herself at this unheard-of directness. "Oh, no! I scarcely think he will come to-day, I mentioned at lunch that I should call on you."

This was spoken without the hint of a sneer, yet Marie-Aimée flushed.

"You are quite mistaken if you think he makes love to me," she blurted out, her breath coming quick.

Mrs. Bronson lifted her hand in deprecation. "And you are mistaken, my dear Miss Nevers, if you think I have come to make a vulgar scene about him. I am here, and solely, because I like you!"

Marie-Aimée stared, doubt in her eyes; then, expressing wonder by the faintest possible effect of a shrug, looked down in her lap, all her face slowly relaxing to a plaintive look of trouble. Her lips composed themselves to lines of such stiff stillness, it might be guessed that if she tried to speak they would tremble; she picked at the folds of her tea-gown, readjusting them, smoothing the fabric across her knees.

"I don't believe you have any idea how much I felt myself attracted to you that single time we met, Miss Nevers. You made my conquest completely, and I am not one who takes fancies. Though you are so contrary to all I am, it seemed to me I understood you better than all the others did, just as I had always felt that I appreciated your work more truly at its worth. I don't know what I would not have given to have you for a friend."

Marie-Aimée put out her hands, to stop her, her kindness at that moment hurt so much. But Mrs. Bronson went on eagerly. "You are not made right for this low world. Your very virtues have the effect of faults, and bring calamity upon you. There you are, one piece of honesty, lovingness, unselfishness; and the consequence,—you have no chance among us who are nothing of the sort. Being as you are would be all right in a world peopled with angels, but here——!"

Marie-Aimée, with a deepening look of dejection and a vast returning softness, slowly shook her head; rather as if she were trying to make these notions of herself fit into place, than in denial of what she heard.

"And now I find you doing something dreadfully foolish," Mrs. Bronson continued, with a remonstrative mother's persuasive inflections, "something, I am afraid, which will prove the deadliest mistake. I cannot resist the impulse to come and warn you of it, to try to drag you back into the safe path—all, I do assure you, because I so sincerely like and respect and admire you. Of those in question, believe me, it is you, you, who are the one I care about."

There was a pause. Marie-Aimée sat as if considering a proposition; but in reality she was only groping after thoughts among emotions. She made a gesture of resignation, casting up her hands and letting them drop again. "Well? I am listening, but is it not likely that I know already all you are intending to say?"

"No, no, it is not possible!" Mrs. Bronson said emphatically. "You cannot see clearly for yourself, else you would have turned back long ago. Mind you, I know how easy it will be for you to misunderstand me in this. Almost necessarily, you will imagine that it is myself I have principally in view, that I am jealous, perhaps, or anxious about appearances, concerned in the figure I myself cut in all this. But you would be wrong. To all that I am highly indifferent. Jealous! For jealousy there must be some remnant of the folly of fondness. And, for the rest, I refuse to grant that anything Mr. Bronson does can either lift or lower me. No, what he chooses to do affects me not at all. But for you, I tell you, I am sorry."

"If it is as you say," said Marie-Aimée, regaining a little life, "you need be troubled about nothing. It is all so much simpler than one thinks, than, I find, one is willing to think. Because once or twice a caller has found him here, a caller likewise, it has been taken for granted that he spends I don't know how much of his time with me, which is particularly false and unfair. He comes from time to time; I will be quite honest, perhaps once or twice in the week, when he happens to be in town. Then we try over music, and I tell him the gossip of the world which used to be his as well as mine, and we laugh together as we used to do. You know that I always had a knack of cheering him. And I give him tea, and let him smoke, and that is all. And is it not truly innocent enough?"

"I believe you perfectly, Miss Nevers. And for that you are willing to give up all that I know you are losing?"

Marie-Aimée repeated her little French gesture of resignation. "When it comes to contending with the evil mind of the world, how can one hope to do it? I used to believe in the world, I loved it. I have lately discovered it to be such that I care very little what I lose with it. Its good opinion? I don't want it any more!"

"Quite right, Miss Nevers. You are as right as possible in valuing the opinion of the world lightly. Still, the loss of all that comes to make life pleasant, from being on good terms with it, is serious. There should be something to counterbalance it, in that for the sake of which one renounces it. And you, will you tell me what you are getting? You are ruining your life, Miss Nevers, no other word serves, for a man who is perfectly willing to let you do it, for the satisfaction he derives from his occasional afternoons here of gossip and tea, music and smoke."

Marie-Aimée kept her eyes unflinchingly upon Mrs. Bronson's, eyes full of resentment and denial, but she was too moved now to speak.

"He spoiled the best years of your life," Mrs. Bronson went on, her nostrils sharpening till their edges were white, a cold fire in her eyes. "Oh, how well I see now, now that I know him better, what his conduct would be with you. But when the moment came in which it was convenient, he set you aside without one second's hesitation. You patiently take the broken pieces of your life out of sight, you manage to put them together again, you reappear bravely patched up, poor child; oh, I saw you. To me, you were pathetic—and again, because it is convenient, just a little bit convenient, he takes you up, calmly, to break you into pieces a second time."

"You don't understand him!" burst forth Marie-Aimée, in her tone the deepest hopelessness that the other ever could understand.

"I don't understand him? I don't?"

"No, no, no!"

"Then you think three years of marriage not instructive?" Mrs. Bronson asked rapidly. "Or do you think him complicated? The truth is, he is as simple as simplicity. Suppose a man with one instinct, one motive, heretofore and forever: to do that which is at the moment easiest and pleasantest and most profitable for himself, and you have him. But you must, to have him exact, accommodate this tendency with a brain the most elementary; and must suppose his objects always of the lowest and most ordinary: little common satisfactions, material or mental, good wine and cigars, or the flattery of some woman's silly admiration. And, for I will do him justice, you must accommodate it with a constitution completely healthy, like a prize animal's, without any more viciousness than he has imagination. For the rest, ideas?" continued the coldly indignant woman, reaching a fearful fluency, "he has none. All the fine things which his singing brings to our minds have no existence in himself. Talent? I do you the credit, Miss Nevers, to suppose you with me in the secret of his musical talent. Talent he has none, nor ever had any, nor the least real love or appreciation of music. But a God-given voice he had, and an instinct for using it to perfection which he shares with nightingales and mocking-birds; and, besides these, what you call a presence, combined with an enormous vanity and an equal hatred of hard work!"

"Why do you say all this to me?" gasped Marie-Aimée, choking.

"Because I cannot conceive but that you misrepresent him to yourself, but that you still have illusions about him. If I were removed to-morrow, do you imagine he would by any chance marry you? If my removal left him wealthy, he would not marry at all; if it left him poor, you can be sure he would not marry you."

After another gesture of warding off, Marie-Aimée, shuddering, buried her face in her hands, as if blinding herself might deaden hearing too.

Mrs. Bronson at once accorded the respite for which this action seemed to entreat. She sat in silence, critically regarding the top of Marie-Aimée's bent head, as if one could hope to see through it into her brain.

"Can you tell me that all this is not so?" she asked at last, heat and anger conspicuously absent from her voice, speaking in that reasonable tone of debate which seems to lay a compulsion of reasonableness upon others. The question sounded genuine, as if, for plain human curiosity's sake, she would like to know if there could be two points of view about Anthony.

Marie-Aimée raised her face, all sickened protest and repudiation. "Everything you have said, and have made to sound so heinous, might, differently worded, fit perfectly into one's description of a nice normal boy. And is a boy unworthy of one's love? Say that Anthony Bronson remained all his life a boy, and who will contradict you? It is the same nature, that reaches out so simply toward what pleases him, that wants what it wants without thought of afterwards. But you must add to this, in his case, that sort of native kingliness of the great, who have never a doubt but theirs is the first right, and that others will be glad to yield for them. He has never meant to hurt anyone, one could not be further from cruel. He merely, in order to go where he would be, must drive steadily onward. He would be sorry if his wheels crushed anything, but that it should stop him could never enter his brain. Call it an incapacity, it is that of most strong, healthy big boys."

"It must have likewise characterized arboreal man."

"Don't, Mrs. Bronson!" Marie-Aimée cried, and rose whole-heartedly at last to the encounter, bringing to bear the most piercing of her arguments, "He is not happy now! He wants things as much as ever, but he no longer can get what he wants. He can't sing any more. His voice is gone. You think he doesn't care, but he does, indeed, he does! He feels so dreadfully out of it. The public is ungrateful. His friends are not yours, they scarcely any longer seem his own; your friends are not his; Everything has turned out wrong. Don't sneer at him. Nothing can brighten his life to what it was before. And he feels helpless against it, just as the boy we were speaking of would feel. Oh, he is blue—blue! You have not made him happy!"

"Has he made me happy?"

"He has meant to!" Marie-Aimée said earnestly. "Your quarrel is with his whole manner of being. One must take him as he is."

"Yes! And whatever he is is to be enough, so he thinks in his calm Jovian babyhood. How could he but satisfy any woman? How should any but feel honored to be his servant and worshipper? the great, heavy, self-pleased, all-sufficient Male!"

"You married him!"

"You are right. My stupidity deserves exactly what I have got. But I didn't come here to speak of myself, or to complain of him. It has been vulgar enough, as it is. I beg your pardon and I beg you to believe, Miss Nevers, that I speak to no one—no one, I assure you—as I have spoken to you. I go my way, with my chin high, my eyes well above the heads of the scandal-mongering crowd. It was by accident I discovered his renewed visits to you; and the brazenness, the heartlessness of it, revolted even me, prepared for anything, God knows, in the way of calm, colossal selfishness. My first thought was the most common one—that he acted from pique, that his vanity could not quite stand having it blazed abroad that you had recovered. But I know him better than that, after all. I am just. It was simpler. It was nothing more than a big dog wanting to be petted. He felt in need of consolation, sympathy, condolence, some one to talk to about me—oh, I know it—and never stopping a moment to think of you, poor woman, he turned to the quarter where he felt surest of getting it. But what puzzles me beyond everything is that he should have guessed right. Pardon me, Marie-Aimée, but in those three years at the convent, what were you doing? You seem to have wasted your time. What was that far-spread anecdote that you had come out because it was all over, lived down, you were cured, immune? Did others make up this fable, or did you?"

"Ah, don't speak of it! I was in good faith."

"You really thought it was all done with? You honestly felt sure of yourself?"

"But certainly! More than sure! How otherwise would I have come back?"

"And then?"

"Then at the rehearsal for Mrs. MacDougal's charity concert I met him again. He had consented to sing, you remember, but afterwards withdrew. And I had scarcely more than seen him, when the three years might as well not have been. But to whom—dear me, to whom am I saying this?"

Mrs. Bronson leaned forward till she could touch Marie-Aimée's knee. "It's all right," she said gently. "Don't mind because it's I. I can understand," and as she saw tears springing into Marie-Aimée's eyes, she patted the knee, and murmured in her most soothing note, "You poor darling!"

"Oh, you needn't pity me at all!" Marie-Aimée laughed harshly through her tears. "When I think that I might—that there could have been the possibility—that those three years should so have changed me, that I should have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud of my dry-hearted coldness, and supposed it a virtue, and called it morality, that when he turned to his old comrade for a little cheer against the thickening shadows, the fast-coming gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic misères, I might have refused, I am glad and grateful for the ill-name and the snubs that may follow me the rest of my life because I didn't." Whereupon her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided into soft unrestrained weeping.

Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her seat for the corner of a divan which was nearer Marie-Aimée. After listening helplessly a moment, fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit of undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands, quick as darting swallows, and enclosed one of Marie-Aimée's, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring, "Don't! Don't! You are a dear!"

Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet face to kiss the cheek of the consoler. Mrs. Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat crushed against each other with interlocked, hands—and so, silently drifted into a different relation. It was as if the thoughts of their blood had communed through their hands, and there were no need more to conceal anything.

"Imagine," Marie-Aimée said, in a voice cracked with rueful laughter, "that when I was in the convent I had reached the point of believing that it was one of the laws of nature which was being accomplished in me! I said that love was like a plant, and if it got neither sunshine nor rain, it perished. I was not in the least happy over it, you know. But I became philosophical about it, and was glad, as one might be over something one owned which was not beautiful, but had a practical use. When I went into that place, you know, I honestly believed I should never come out of it again; and I used to read his old letters, and pore upon photographs of him, and play over and over all the music associated with him.

"But one day I found them flatly wearying me. I shall never understand it! I could picture seeing him again, meeting him in company with you at his side, and not minding. I could picture meeting him again, free, and anxious that all should be as before, and I could be calm over it, inclined, if anything, to refuse. I was worn out, I suppose. I imagined it was my illusion about him which had worn out. I judged him! But in the same breath I judged myself, as likewise incapable of any but shallow feelings; and I despised us both equally, and forgave him, as one forgives offences one no longer suffers from. And so, foolhardily, I come forth again. And when I see him, all I know is that it is he, the same one, who was all the romance of life to me once; that the same door is still open between our eyes through which we come and go familiarly into each other. All that I had thought dead and buried comes to life again. And I know that I may go into a convent for twenty years, that I might be buried and dust as many more, but when Anthony Bronson comes by, and we are face to face again, it will be all as nothing. And the marvel is that though it can only mean a return to suffering, I can only be glad. Isn't it strange?"

"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bronson pressed one of her hands across her tearless eyes; her cheek was pale. "Strange, and beautiful. But terrible too!"

She got up abruptly, as if to escape an oppression from the atmosphere down on Marie-Aimée's level; she made a motion with her head as if to disengage it; and walking to the window, stood looking out across the snowy roofs and the steeples, to the dull distance, the bank of purplish dun hanging at the horizon over the enormous city, her eyes full of gloomy distances too.

In the long silence ensuing there developed small homely noises of tea-making, over yonder, near the fire.

"But it's all really wasted!" Mrs. Bronson exclaimed unexpectedly, as if in expostulation with herself as much as with Marie-Aimée, "I know it! You saw him again, he had grown older, it shocked you. His hair had turned—it is his time of life—it saddened you. You say he has lost his voice. That is a manner of speaking; nothing is wrong with his throat. But he has never cared to sing since he was married. A little careful practice, and he could sing very acceptably still—I won't say in public, but for his own pleasure—if he cared anything for music, and for that of others who have had a cult for his singing. You have thought him blue, and it has moved you. I understand it. But do believe me that he is a little bit of a humbug. Why should he be so blue? Everything is his own fault. Do you really believe that I have never tried? He is blue when he is with you, just because it will move you. He is not so very blue when among others. I can imagine circumstances, with which you would have nothing to do, you, nor music, nor the past, but simple, sordid, material circumstances, in which he would be perfectly happy, perfectly content—"

She had said this staring out of the window. She turned, feeling Marie-Aimée at her elbow. Marie-Aimée held toward her a cup of tea and a piece of thin bread-and-butter. Mrs. Bronson let her stand there, apparently not seeing these things, while she searched her little shut over-clouded face, which showed plainly enough a resolve to say no more about it. "But to you, I do believe, all this makes no difference!" Mrs. Bronson pursued. "Let him be, let him do, what he pleases, you will care just the same, just as much. Are you completely a fool, my dear, and blind as a mole, or—do you see more than we do? That's what I can't make out. I beg your pardon!"

She accepted the cup from her, and helped herself to the bread, and took a seat on the music-stool. She drew the gloves off her beautiful milk-white hands liberally begemmed with diamonds and sapphires, and mechanically folded her bread. She tasted the tea, and continued looking off out of the window. Marie-Aimée brought a cup of tea for herself, and stood in the window-place too, looking off, drinking.

What Mrs. Bronson thought in her long stare at the grave distance from which the light was beginning to depart, she may, as her eye caught the silhouette against it of the other woman's meek, set profile, have perceived the futility of saying. "You have a beautiful view," was her next remark.

Marie-Aimée deplored its not being to-day at its best; she described it by touches, when finest. And they talked a while like parties to the most ordinary call, of views, flats, and so forth, but in intonations so curiously detached and melancholy that they might have been ghosts talking over a tragedy that had its end three centuries ago.

Suddenly, over the roofs, flashed an arc of light, splendid; strings of lamp-like jewels, red and green and golden, publishing to earth and sky the name of an actor and of a melodrama. Mrs. Bronson looked at her watch, set down her cup, and rose.

"So I shall go as I came," she said; "I had thought I had such things to say to you, Miss Nevers, so to the point, so irrefutable, that you could not but listen to me. I thought that the fact that it was I who came to you and said them would have its weight. I meant, at a pinch, Miss Nevers, to demand of you to leave, at all events to break off relations with Anthony. But now, see, I am going, and I have demanded nothing. I am all adrift. You have taken me out beyond my depth. You shall do as you feel right. As for me, I don't know. I have not a heart to lead me, as you have. I have only my common share of hard worldly sense, and you have made me feel that it might be unsafe sometimes to trust it. Do as you please. I don't know! I don't know! Perhaps it is you who are right, you who love him, and all we who are fools."

In Marie-Aimée's face, which her eyes were intently interrogating as she spoke this, Mrs. Bronson could not fail to read a perplexity equal to her own, but coupled with a forlornness such as her own nature could never match, no, not if Fate should place her alone on a storm-beaten rock in mid-ocean—as Marie-Aimée might have been imagined standing, with that face. Marie-Aimée drew in the air through her lips, till her shoulders were lifted, and let it out in a great sigh.

"Ah, we are poor things all!" Mrs. Bronson agreed, with an echo of the sigh; and repeated that gesture of pressing her hand to her eyes, not to hide tears, but as part of an attempt to concentrate the mental vision upon those mysteries in life which offer the effect of blank impenetrable walls. She tore away her hand almost at once, her brief pantomime declaring the uselessness of trying to understand anything, verily, of all that happens in this sorrowful world; and whether in mockery of it, or of herself, or in the wish merely to effect a change in the current of their thoughts, struck a startling, brilliant chord on the piano under her hand; and while it still vibrated, another, and another, and executed a cadenza that seemed to laugh aloud and shake fool's-bells.

"Do you remember," she sat fairly down before the keyboard, and preluded while she talked, "the last time? After that scene of blood and tears, you poor sweet thing, how you played for me, so dearly obliging as you were? And polonaises and waltzes you played; as well as elegies and nocturnes. And then I played and then you played. You played and played, my dear, till you had missed an engagement. I shall miss one now if I don't hurry off instantly, but let it be missed. I shall count it well done, if you will sit down here a moment and play for me."

"Oh," moaned Marie-Aimée, putting up the ever-willing hands, like a martyr in prayer, "don't ask me. And don't take it ill if I can't. It's not the same thing any longer." She let her head hang; "I haven't the heart for it to-night."

"I am a beast!" said Mrs. Bronson heartily, and without adding a note further to the musical phrase she was in the middle of, jumped up, sick at herself. And feeling of so little importance before depths of woe such as she suspected near her that it mattered nothing whether she apologized, she pressed Marie-Aimée's hand with all her strength, and murmuring, "I will take myself away," made haste to be gone.

Mrs. Bronson was conscious of a vast relief, by which she first learned in what suspense she had been living, when a few days later she recognized Marie-Aimée's hand-writing on a letter to her. She read:

"I went, you see, after all. I am at my sister's, to remain with her and the dear children until I have thought further what I had better do. You were right in wishing me to go, though not perhaps for the reasons you gave. My thoughts are not at all clear upon the subject of the rightness or wrongness of what I was doing then, or what I have done since. I felt sure I was justified against the whole world, and even now I find no good argument against it. Only, it came home to me that I who used to love everyone and have only feelings of kindness towards others, was fast coming to hate everybody, myself most, and it seemed a sufficient sign. But you won't think that was quite all. I did also think of you, who perhaps—which of us knows her own heart?—care more than you believe. Very likely not. But on the barest possibility of the sort, how could I continue obstinately fixed in my position?

"And now, lest the sympathy you showed me be troubled on my account, I want you to be sure that I shall not be unhappy. For one thing, because there is something strangely compensating in the assurance a person may gain that the one she loves is never, to the edge of doom, to lack the whole love of at least one heart; and then, because I believe you will grant a request I am about to make, oh, more humbly and supplicatingly than pen and ink can show: which is that you will try to see him more truly, to discern what is good and lovable in him; and that—I find it difficult. Yet why? Let me seem brazen and indelicate, I will finish. I have thought I divined that he is a pensioner of yours, and sometimes a straightened one. It cannot be but that you are by nature as generous as you are kind, nothing else would accord with your forehead and eyes. I can only think that you have imagined things about him, that his marriage perhaps was mercenary, and this has been your revenge. Do differently hereafter. Show him and yourself this respect. Grudge him not the independence and the honors that beseem the state of the lion growing old. For, do not deceive yourself, he has been great. Those upon whom God bestows such a gift are marked for the reverence of others.

"You will forgive my meddling and will do what I ask? You asked me to go, and I went. You could not demand it, nor can I demand this. Yet let it be as a bargain between us, will you?

"For your infinite kindness and gentleness and generosity to myself, receive the assurance of my utmost gratitude; and for the affection you were so good as to say you feel for me, a return of affection which is of sufficient strength, I believe, to outlast all that divides us.

Marie-Aimée."

Mrs. Bronson kissed the name, like a school-girl; but glancing back over the letter could not repress a laugh tinged with disdain as the thought presented itself: "She wishes to provide against his missing her. Oh, the poor child, how well she knows him, after all!" Rising to the noblest height of her nature, she determined to set the figure of Anthony Bronson's income, as near as her fortune permitted, at what should represent her own estimate of his loss in Marie-Aimée; at the same time reflecting that very much less—but very much less, indeed—would quite as effectually have kept him from missing her overmuch.