V THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife

I

Her father was dead. In the fulness of years he had passed away. There was no great grief; only a hush in the house and that sense of emptiness that comes to even a crowded household after a death. The children had been taken to school. In the nursery a canary sang in a sunny window.

She sat alone in the room that had been the dead man’s study for many years. It was a small room in the back of the house on the second floor. Out of it opened his bedroom. The bed, strangely square and white and empty, stood where she could see it from the desk. All the morning she had been busy with his papers, his letters to her mother during the war, old receipts, newspaper cuttings, many photographs—the impedimenta of a long and busy life. Over the desk hung his sword, and under it were photographs on the wall, a picture of her as she looked at her first communion, a younger picture of a very little girl in a plaid dress, with velvet-topped shoes and straight hair cut into a bang, and just before her, level-browed, one taken when she was seventeen, about the time— She closed her eyes.

Receipts and cancelled checks went into the waste-basket; letters were laid aside for more careful scrutiny. The war records went into a box with half a dozen medals. They were to go to the Grand Army headquarters. He had been a very great soldier, this old man who died.

Most of the cancelled checks she recognised. He had brought her back into the big family home when her children began to come. Since then she had helped him with his affairs—not that he knew much of business himself. He had kept his books in a sort of crooked, comfortable fashion that had been her husband’s despair. She ran over the cancelled checks hastily before tearing them in half and consigning them to the waste-basket. There were a few that were not familiar; one of quite recent date puzzled her. Pay to the order of Joan Bailey, it said. The date was only a month or two ago. That was rather curious; a month or two ago he had been quite ill, and there had been a nurse. But the nurse’s name was not Bailey.

She went over the checks now with some care. The accumulated extravagances and necessities of thirty years were there. She found the piano that was her wedding gift; little Emily’s silver mug. And every now and then she came across a Joan Bailey check. When she had finished, she sat staring at twenty of them, each for a substantial sum, each endorsed across the back in the same neat feminine hand. Two a year for ten years! She sat with the checks in her hands, looking out through the window to the vista and garden and white road beyond.

The canary sang joyously. Beside the white bed in the next room was the great upholstered chair in which her father had sat during the past year. More than once he had sat there while she worked at his desk, watching her with loving, faded old eyes.

“Pay to Joan Bailey!” That was what he had been thinking when he looked at her through the doorway.

Her baby had lived then after all. They had told her it died. For ten years, he who had been frankness and truth itself, had lived a lie, had fought desperately for her happiness and—secured it.

Out of all the tumult of that terrible time, the name of Joan Bailey came back, loomed large. For years she had not thought of her. She had put her resolutely out of her intelligence, just as she had put away that one year. The child was dead, and what had been, had been.

Ah! but the child was not dead! Round in a circle again to the child.

How she had hated it—this visible little squalling symbol, this tangible sin! She had held it once—she remembered that. Sometimes still in the night she wakened to a consciousness of that pitiful little bundle which had been hers for only an hour. Such thoughts never came to her in the day, so rigorously had she schooled her mind to forgetfulness. But at night, with the barriers of caution and secrecy weakened by sleep, sometimes she was back again in the little house on Long Island, with Joan Bailey’s motherly face bending over her, and a tiny thing beside her that stirred against her heart.

One builds up a house of secrecy day by day; each new day adds thickness to its walls. And so she had built her house. Only to find now, after ten years, these twenty doorways.

The gardener was bending over some early crocuses down on the lawn. Lying out on the grass to the sun was a child’s frock put to bleach. The frock was Emily’s, who was seven—the other child would be ten—taller than Emily!

Her own composure surprised her. The thing was so new that as yet she was able to view it almost with detachment. It was as if another woman’s problem confronted her for solution, as though another woman with a husband and children had confessed a living illegitimate child and had asked her what to do.

The children were coming home from school. She could see the carriage on the white road, filled with a squirming mass that overflowed onto the steps, clung to the back, and stood between the old driver’s friendly knees.

The horse ambled along. Here and there a youngster dropped off as casually as a ripe apple from a tree, and scurried across a lawn to home and luncheon. Childish laughter came to her through the open window. But as the carriage neared the house, glee was succeeded by decorum. Grandfather had just gone away.

Something of their new dignity seemed to invest the two little girls in white as they drove in, short legs dangling, prim hair ribbons erect. They saw her through the window and waved to her. She waved back absently. These children belonged to the woman with the problem.

Of all life’s great questions, only death is met with a hush, and death after all is not a question but its answer. The man who is to be hanged must have his breakfast first. The tortures of the spirit are inextricably confused with food, with money, with covering our bodies, with putting them to rest at night—so shackled are our souls by the flesh.

The gardener must have permission to put crocuses in a pot for the table, the children must have luncheon. Perhaps it was just as well—it gave her a little time. Very slowly she was comprehending this thing that had come to her. After she had grasped it, she could begin to think of what she must do.

Once in the house the children forgot their new-found dignity and called to her jubilantly. The reaction from the hush of the last three days was immensely cheerful. The house was full of sunlight, of open doors, of spring flowers, of little darting breezes full of promise.

The little girls danced through the hall and up the staircase. Only, at the door of the study, they moderated their shrill young voices. For here they were again on the threshold of the great Unknown. Each child as she kissed her mother threw a wide-eyed glance to the empty room beyond, with the square white bed and the great chair.

“The teacher,” said Emily, in her older sister voice, “was very considerate to Jane. Jane, tell mother what you did.”

“Throwed ink on the teacher,” said Jane gaily, “shook my pen and the ink went on her. She was all spotty.”

“How very naughty!” said the mother. “How very, very naughty!”

She drew a long breath. These were hers, hers by law, by every right of legitimacy. However she had failed before, here at least, she had done her best—and her best had been very good.

“The teacher,” said Emily, “the teacher says that she thinks she can get it out and you are not to worry, mother, but that to-morrow Jane is not to be allowed to eat her orange at eleven o’clock.”

“I should think not,” she heard her own voice saying. “I shall have to apologise for my naughty little daughter.”

She ate no luncheon, but she sat and spread bread and butter “and plenty of jam, please, mother” for the little girls.

Her orderly house soothed her; it was as if the very decorum and respectability of her surroundings had put this other thing far back, almost out of her life. The quiet step of the maid serving the table, the shaven green of the spring lawn, the dignified manœuvres of the goldfish in an aquarium in a sunny window—all these helped to keep her mental balance; she stored up, as it were, a reserve of saneness against the time that she knew was coming.

There was something of desperation in the way she clung to the small affairs of her household, something of fierce maternity in the way she held the children to her. It was as if she said to the other woman:

“These are my children—only these.”

But the evil hour could not be indefinitely postponed. At two o’clock came a message from a kindly neighbour:

“Please let me have the kiddies for a little while. I know how terribly tired you must be. I will take splendid care of them, and do lie down and take a nap.”

Even then, she prolonged the parting. In her black dress with white bands at the neck and wrists, she led the children down the drive to the gate and watched them scurry across the road and out of sight. When at last, she turned, she and the other woman, herself of ten years ago, were together alone for the first time: this other self, which she loathed, which had shamed her so.

“Your child,” said the other self.

She stood under the apple trees, which were still black but moist and swelling with promise, and put her hand to her throat.

“Not mine,” she said, “oh, my God! not mine, living and without a mother. I won’t face it; I can’t face it.” But after all, she was the daughter of a soldier and she had something of her father’s soul. Perhaps that afternoon she had some little conception of the burden the old man had carried through the years—a burden not of his own making, a weight of secrecy that must have almost crushed his upright spirit.

She went back to the study. The sun was in the west now and the room was cool and shadowy. She closed the door and resolutely faced her situation.

She was happily married to a man she both loved and respected. She had two children born of that marriage. About her lay secure ramifications of respectability, of domestic happiness and love. One of two things she must do and she must make her choice and abide by it.

She had a little money from her father’s estate. She could see Joan Bailey and continue her father’s secret arrangement, thus ignoring everything but her financial responsibility for the child. Or she could tell her husband.

She faced her dilemma squarely, for as yet it was only a dilemma. Only later on was she to find that between a mother and her child is a bond that no instinctive secrecy, no fear of shame, can entirely sever.

She went very far back. She went back to that early spring—years before—and her first love affair. Here was no tale of seduction of a young girl by an older man; merely the story of a boy and a girl, both in their teens, caught in the throes of a first love. A tale of long spring evenings when the motherless girl wandered unwatched among the trees, when the boy with his ardent young soul on his lips met her night after night. And even then it had not been wrong; they had always intended to marry.

April it was by that time, April, fast flowering into May.

They ran away finally, because the elders had said that years must elapse and at seventeen years are centuries—

But no one would marry them. They were so young—almost flagrantly young. They were discovered after a day or so of fruitless interviews with clergymen and brought back.

And for a time that had seemed to be all. They were to wait and in a few years they might marry.

But it had not been all. There had been—the small red bundle that had stirred against her heart.

Little by little the boy had slipped out of her life. She saw him now and then, even yet. A chance meeting had long since ceased to have any shock about it—and she had felt so secure.

The boy had never known about Joan Bailey or the other.

The old father had not blamed the boy much. The hardest part for her had been that he blamed himself. She had heard him walking the floor of this very room hour after hour, those first days. Hard days they were, brooding hard days. He had looked very peaceful yesterday when they—

Her husband came home that night, swinging up the walk with an air of almost boyish freedom. The restraint of the last few days had told on him also. He had loved the old soldier—but when one is full of years and yearns for rest, death is not a captivity, but a release.

The dogs barked around him. He kept a weather eye on the window, suspecting ambuscade.

It was a twilight game with the children to ambush father from a window and pelt him with rag dolls—so being young and having in his pocket certain ammunition with which to return their fire, the ammunition being bonbons, he walked warily and with extreme caution, keeping a weather eye open for danger signals in the shape of hair ribbons over window sills.

But after all, his caution went for nothing, because instead of rag babies, it was crocuses, and they came from behind the hall door when he entered.

He was a tall young man and he carried the children upstairs, one on each shoulder, into his wife’s dressing room. The shades were drawn. She had a fear of the daylight, late as it was. She felt that since he knew her so well, he must see at once the veil that lay over her eyes.

He dropped the children in a laughing heap on the couch and came over to her.

“You are looking tired, sweetheart,” he said, “and you promised to rest to-day.”

“I have rested. There were some little things—”

“Look here, why not go away for a few days, just two or three. Mam’selle can keep the girlies well enough. We will take the car and just go quietly. We won’t even lay out a route. We’ll just wander about. What do you think of it?”

She patted his arm, still avoiding his eyes.

“Give me a little time,” she begged. “There are so many things just now, and I—somehow I don’t feel—” She broke down, her voice trembling.

“That’s natural, of course. In a day or so, I suppose the roads will be better anyhow. But you must get away. This whole thing has been too much for you.”

Still with his arm around her, they went downstairs to dinner. Between the lights on the table she could look across to him. How strong he looked—and how good! She knew his creed, an almost Puritanical insistence on integrity in women; she knew his belief in her.

Above, Mam’selle was putting the children to bed. There were short excursions in white nighties to the head of the stairs, last good-night messages, soft little kisses blown down. Across the table her husband smiled at her.

“After all,” he said softly, “he was very old, dear. You still have the children, and—and me.”

She smiled back at him with veiled eyes.

“Pay to Joan Bailey!”

II

She went to church the next morning with her husband. It was one of the conventions after a bereavement. She sat with her heavy veil down. There was a gleam of comfort for her in the sermon after all. The Rector saw her and delicately avoided any subject that might recall her recent grief. A personal man, that day he sought to be strictly impersonal. He must not preach of death or sorrow. He preached instead of sin, as a safe abstraction.

What could this small quivering young woman in black know of sin? He spoke about it to his wife on his way over.

“There is nothing gained in probing a raw wound,” he said. “There is comfort in the service itself. I am fond of her and I don’t want to sadden her. If you think I am treading on dangerous ground, let me know.” She often let him know such things. They had a signal system with a handkerchief.

So he preached from the text, “The wages of sin is death.”

He was a tall man with the eyes of a dreamer and some beliefs that he did not voice in the pulpit.

“Sin!” he said. “Men and women, there is no absolute standard for sin. The virtue of the untempted is nothing. He who sins and repents among you is greater than he who has never sinned, having never had desire.”

His wife was watching the congregation. Before long she got out her handkerchief.

His arm slipped through hers, her husband talked to her on the way home. She needed air; they must take a roundabout way. He showed her crocuses in fence corners, shrubbery bursting into dull red and green again, beds of early tulips lifting their spiked heads through the soil. The village streets were full of sedate couples walking home in the spring sunshine. How friendly they were, how kind! What would they be if they knew? Did she dare? Did she dare not to?

Their walk prolonged itself. Behind her veil she was gathering up courage to ask him a question.

“The sermon!” she said at last. “Do you—do you really believe what he said?”

He had to think a moment. Church to him was a matter of weekly habit, a quiet hour in which his soul fed on things spiritual and took in, as one may say, a week’s supply ahead. With the final “Amen” of the benediction, he closed and locked that part of his mind and laid it away.

“The text, oh, yes, ‘The wages of sin.’ Well, I don’t know about that. I never get past the fact that it’s a plural subject and a singular verb. I was trying to parse it all the time he was preaching.”

“He said,” she reminded him, “that the virtue of the untempted wasn’t—didn’t amount to much; it was only those who had been—been tempted that knew anything about it.”

He looked down at her, smiling.

“What is it! Has one of the maids been taking things?”

“No, not that. I was just—just thinking.”

“Oh, as to that,—well, if you really want my opinion about it—sin is sin wherever you find it. You cannot get away with it, either in this world or the next. He’s handling dangerous doctrine. Even to comfort the sinner, one need not compromise with crime.”

“But if one is tempted—”

“We are all tempted,” he said. “The only difference between the good ones and the bad ones is that the bad ones yield and the good ones do not.”

She had known it all along. He was like her father—only younger, more uncompromising. The older man had mellowed with the years. For her husband the world was divided into the sheep and the goats, the good and the bad.

Afterwards she could recall very little of that terrible Sabbath.

In the afternoon the children frolicked with their father. With his usual kindly thought, he kept them from her. Late in the afternoon she had rather a shock. He came into the room where she was lying on a couch and held a key before her.

“To father’s study,” he said.

It was still father’s study.

“I have been in there. You are not going to touch that mess of papers again. That’s a man’s job. I am going to start it to-night.”

Her heart seemed to stop.

“But—there are so many,” she gasped, “and I have always—”

“That’s exactly it. You have always looked after them, and I never realised until now what a lot there was to do. I’ll sort them out roughly, and to-morrow I will send one of the girls from the office to help put them in order.”

“But the key—”

“I’ll take care of the key,” he said, smiling, and thrust it into his pocket.

That night when he was safely asleep she got the key and slipped into the little study. Everything was as she had left it. The box of medals and papers, the stack of cancelled checks, and over on the desk, under a weight where she had placed them, the Joan Bailey checks.

Perhaps he had seen them and wondered. What if he asked her about them? What could she say?

Still building, you see, the secret house, still propping its falling walls.

Fortune favoured her next day. Her husband telephoned at ten o’clock that he would not be able to get home to dinner until late.

“Take things easy to-day, Bess,” he said. He dropped his voice. He was calling from the office. “I couldn’t stand it to have you ill.” His voice was a caress. “If you want me to go to pieces, just get sick.”

He meant it. She knew that he meant it. That morning it only added to her agony of mind. But it gave her a full day. She must know that this thing was real. Lying awake the night before, she had come to doubt it.

It was just possible that Joan Bailey had been exacting from her father a sort of hush money all these years. That had been done, she knew. “Blackmail,” they called it, and yet—

What she remembered of the Joan of years ago, was of a kindly, broad-faced woman who had closed her baby’s fingers around one of hers and watched in vain for the mother gleam in her eyes.

Anyhow she must know.

The children were at school. Mam’selle was darning stockings on a sunny corner of the terrace. She had no railroad schedules and must trust to luck. She dressed quickly in the still unfamiliar black and walked to the station.

Here and there a kindly neighbour spoke to her in the chastened dropped voice that one adopts toward the recently bereaved.

“So good,” they said; “so fine a man and so brave a soldier—and all your life wrapped up in you!”

She could have screamed. That was it exactly. If only he had not been so tender, if only he had made her face the thing at the time, if only when Will had gone to him and said he loved her, he had insisted that she tell the truth! But he had saved her then, as always, and now—

She had a very definite plan. Of one thing she was quite confident. Her father had not intended that she should find out this thing. She believed that through his lawyer he had made provision for the other child, and it was to the lawyer that she went first.

He saw her at once. She approached the subject bravely. It had come to the point with her when all the world might know, if only she could keep it from one man.

“I want you to be quite frank with me,” she said. “I am going to say something that is not particularly pleasant for me or for you, but I have to say it, and I want you to promise, first, to be quite honest.”

The lawyer was elderly, suave, rather judicial.

“My dear child,” he said, “lawyers have to be honest, or dishonest people would not come to them.”

She bent forward.

“Exactly what do you know of Joan Bailey?”

She had hit it right away. She had known her father very well, and men are tolerably certain quantities. Given a situation and a man, one can tell what the man will do. With a woman it is different; the woman herself does not know what she will do.

The lawyer put his finger-tips together.

“Ah!” he said, “Joan Bailey! Do you mind telling me why you ask?”

“My father left her money, I think—an annuity.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No, but I have reason to believe that he did.”

“And your reason?”

She held out two small, black-gloved hands to him.

“Please!” she cried. “I cannot fence. I only know that I must find out. I do not care about the money. It is not that at all. It is something else that I must know.”

The lawyer hesitated, then:

“The woman, Joan Bailey, was left a small annuity. It amounts, I believe, to three hundred dollars a year.”

“Do you know why it was left to her?”

For just a moment his eyes dropped. Then he glanced up at her with something of pity, much of comprehension.

“Yes,” he admitted, “I know.”

Even then she must be sure. There must not be another mistake. She forced her dry lips to speak.

“The child is living?”

“The child is living—a fine boy. I never approved—”

She rose. In another moment she felt that she would scream.

“Thank you,” she said. “If you will give me the address—”

He was not so sure about that. In his kindly way he urged against it.

“Let the dead past bury its dead,” he said with a hand on her shoulder. “The child is well enough.”

“I am living a lie. I have been living a lie for ten years, but then I thought that it affected no one but myself. Now that I know that—now that I know that—there is some one else, it is different—I—”

The old man shook his head after her as she went out. He thought she was making a mistake. He did not understand, of course. Once a mother, always a mother, no doubt would have been his explanation. He did not believe in native honesty in women; in fact, he did not believe there was such a thing as honesty. Elderly lawyers lose their faith and substitute for it tolerance.

She got the address from him finally. It was not the Long Island village that she remembered. It was in New Jersey, an hour’s ride, perhaps.

A sort of exaltation of sacrifice was on her now. She was quite clear, no longer dazed and uncertain—to see the child, to comprehend him, that he was hers, that whether she would or not she could no longer plan her life without him—this she kept before her all the way. She could only look forward. She dared not look back to the white house with the crocuses, to Emily and little Jane, to the thousand homely trifles that up to now had made up her day, almost her life. She did not think. She was like a runner striving for the tape, eyes only for the goal ahead, all effort, all tenseness. An instant of softening would be fatal.

And so after a long time she reached the house. It was a very small house of clapboards with a porch. A poor little house, but not untidy—quite thrifty, indeed, with its white curtains in the window and its geranium box, rather spindling from the long winter.

She walked past it before she summoned courage to come back. There was no door-bell. She rapped. Perhaps she had a moment of relief when there was no reply from within. There was no one there. Surely she had done her part. She had tried—

A second rap brought a response, a small voice from well beyond the door. She knew immediately that it was the child’s voice. She had no thrill, certainly; only a sickness, a sort of dizziness that made her steady herself by the door-post.

“Come in,” said the small voice; “just open the door. It’s not locked.”

Somehow or other she pushed the door open and stepped inside. The early spring sunshine had been very warm, but the little house was cool. That was the first thing she noticed—coolness and order and a sort of prim austerity.

Then she saw the boy. He was propped up on a sofa-bed in the back of the room.

“Miss Joan isn’t here,” he said politely; “she’ll be here at five o’clock.”

She could make out around him the various impedimenta of a child’s convalescence. Pictures cut out and pinned to the wall over the sofa-bed, papers covered with childish drawings, and on a chair, neatly covered with cold water, four pared potatoes with the knife beside them. Evidently the small hands had been labouring as well as playing.

She stood in the centre of the room looking down. Nothing quite appropriate came to her to say. But the boy was at ease.

“You will have to excuse me,” he said. “I have a broken leg. It’s almost better. In about a week I am going to get a pair of crutches.”

Still she could think of nothing to say. The child was almost exactly like his father. It was a further complication. The same brown eyes, heavily lashed, the same droop to the corners of his mouth, the same rather wistful smile.

“Crutches,” said the small voice, “with rubber tips on ’em. Miss Joan is afraid I’ll slip and fall again.”

She sat down. She was never theatrical, and the whole episode had an air of unreality. When she did speak at last, her voice was very well controlled; she even managed to smile.

“I will not wait for Miss Joan,” she said, “but I will sit down and talk to you, if I may.”

The boy was delighted. Naïvely he showed her his drawings, marvellous ships with flags as large as themselves in bow and stern, accompanied by sharks, also as large as the vessels, the whole sailing a sea ferociously disturbed. He showed her the potatoes and how thin the peelings were.

He was pathetically glad of a visitor.

With an experienced eye, she noted that although he was a little pale from confinement, his eyes were clear and healthy. He looked well cared for and well nourished, abundantly cheerful.

The little house itself was comforting. This was no hovel, but a home in which love and order abided. So far, so good. But, after all, that was not her problem.

Perhaps a half hour passed during this one-sided conversation. She was not thinking at all—she was remembering. Back, as she sat there, came every forgotten detail of the other spring. Back came the boy with his dark eyes and wistful mouth. Back out of the limbo of things wilfully forgotten came that twenty-four hours of flight and terror and delight.

“Surely it had not been so wrong,” she said to herself, when the result had been so beautiful.

“Sin is sin wherever you find it. You cannot get away with it, either in this world or in the next.”

“I wonder,” said the boy, “if you would look at the clock in the kitchen. At half-past three school is out, and somebody generally comes and sits with me.”

She got up a little blindly and went to the kitchen door. She felt that the boy’s eyes followed her. That probably he knew the significance of her dark clothing and veil, that he would even—had he dared—have offered his mite of comfort.

“Almost three-thirty,” she said; “if you are sure some one will come to sit with you, I think I must go.”

He smiled.

“Some one!” he said. “Why, yesterday there were eleven, and when Miss Joan came home, she had to scrub the floor.”

She did not kiss the boy good-bye. It would have been an audacity, almost an impertinence. She stood beside him, looking down.

“Miss Joan will be sorry she missed you.”

“Do you always call her Miss Joan?”

“Why, yes; that’s her name.”

“You don’t call her Aunt Joan or—or mother?”

“But she’s not my aunt or my mother either. I just live with her. But we are great friends. Miss Joan says I am all she has, and she’s mostly all I have got.”

Dangerous ground this!

She had a frantic impulse to drop on her knees beside the sofa-bed and to catch the small cheerful figure to her. The diversion came at the right moment—a clatter of feet outside, a slamming open of the door, an influx of small boys, not too tidy, and bearing curious small boy offerings.

She moved back and let the mob surround him. She had the pain of seeing herself forgotten as she herself had forgot. She worked her way very quietly to the door and out to the street.

And now at last she found that she could think. There was something concrete about which to reason, a fact to be faced, not a fear as before. Some of her father’s gallant blood made her throw back her shoulders and sit straight. She had risen to meet her hour, as women always do rise to meet the great crises of life.

The responsibility was not hers alone. This one thing—the child—she shared in common with the boy of years ago. The responsibility was his, too. She had not thought of reproach, of course. It was simply that they two must face this thing together, must talk it over, think it out, decide what was best.

Had it not been that the secret involved him also, probably in her exalted mood, she would have taken the whole thing to her husband that night. But in all the years that she had been building the secret house she had forgotten that she had a partner in this ownership. It was not hers alone. Now she remembered.

In the city between trains she had time to telephone to him. She found him without the slightest difficulty. For years their paths, never crossing, had closely paralleled. A hand out in this, her darkness, and she could touch him.

She called his apartment at first and was given his club.

There was a slight constraint in his manner when she gave him her name. The constraint was not immediate; it seemed to take him a moment to place her. For, of course, what had been a tragedy for her had been but an episode for him.

“Oh, of course!” he said, after a moment. “How stupid of me! How are you, Bess?”

“Very well,” she said quickly. “I wish I might see you and talk to you.”

“Yes?”

“Something has happened,” she said hastily, “something I think you ought to know. I’m—I’m rather upset about it.”

There was instant sympathy in his tone.

“Oh, yes, I know. Your father has just died, hasn’t he? I am very sorry.”

“It isn’t that; it’s something entirely different. Could you—could you come to see me?”

He hesitated just the fraction of a second. Then:

“I could come out to-night, if it is very important.”

She caught the slightest possible change in his inflection. It was as if he emphasized the fact that to-night he knew her husband would be there.

In the darkness of the telephone booth she flushed.

“It is something that concerns only you and me. I am sorry, but I would like to have you come when Will is not at home.”

There was a real silence, very short, very illuminating.

“Where are you living?”

“In the old house.”

“I see.” Then another pause. “I am very busy just now. Probably you know that I am to be married—but if to-morrow afternoon will do, I can arrange to come.”

“Shall I send the carriage for you?”

“No; I’ll take the short cut across the fields.”

How familiar that was, how many times he had telephoned to her and said that he would take the short cut across the fields!

Once again the children, once again the quiet dinner with her husband smiling at her through the candles, once again evening with the two of them pacing the terrace under the stars while he smoked. Once again the thousand and one soft sounds of early spring: the distant roaring of a little creek swelled with rain, the belated twitter of a bird working late to build its home, the raising of windows in the night nursery after Mam’selle put out the lights.

From a hand on her elbow as they moved her husband slipped his arm around her. Once, at the far end of terrace, where the shadows were deepest, he stopped—and drew her close.

“You look very young to-night,” he told her, “quite saintly in your black dress. I am almost afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me! Because I wear a black gown!”

“No. Because your virtues shine in your face. I am very common clay, I am afraid, only—you keep it hidden from me!”

“Oh, no.”

“I love you with all my heart, dearest.” He bent over her. “I am afraid I don’t say it often enough, but I always think it. You are my saint—my star! And you are more than that—you are the mother of my two little girls.”

It was a rare outburst for him. Two days ago, so absolutely had she dismissed the past, two days ago she would have deprecated and adored the little speech. Now it left her terrified and ashamed. To tell him! To see the light die out of his eyes, never to come back! To have no more hours together like this one, with his arm about her and perfect trust between them.

A light wind had sprung up, with a threat of rain. Upstairs Mam’selle, always watchful, was bowing the shutters in the night nursery. A vision of the room came to her. Two white beds, two small white chairs, one beside each bed, covered with an orderly array of fresh garments for the morning; small shoes, neatly rolled white stockings, fluffy little petticoats.

And then—a sofa-bed in the back of a tidy little room in a clapboard house, childish drawings pinned to the walls, four potatoes pared thin!

III

The other man came in the afternoon. She watched him make his way up through the fields, which were fields no longer, being laid out with neat cement streets and rows of young trees. The day was warm for so early in the year. He carried his hat. It was an old trick. How often she had watched him come through those very fields carrying his hat, the wind blowing his heavy hair back from his face. Even the gesture with which he attempted to restore its order was familiar.

How many things were coming back to her!

Their meeting was very quiet, just a minute eye to eye, hand to hand, and then she was sitting and he was standing looking down at her.

He approved of her. He had always liked her, even when the madness of young love had died. Many friendships are refined out of the crucible of passion.

“How little you have changed!” he said. “You are, if anything, even lovelier.”

“I am older, and just now I am very sad.”

“I know. I only heard about it yesterday. He was splendid.” There was a little pause. Both were thinking. “How decent he was to me, when—when I deserved almost any brutality.”

She nodded. He was making it easier for her. He was leading back.

“He was very understanding,” she said. “He knew life and people, and he knew youth. He was very young himself, always, although after—that, he aged, rather.”

She had thought she could tell him immediately, but it was harder than she had expected.

“Jove!” he said, looking around the room. “How changed it is and yet—how much the same! To think of you being married and having—is it one child or two?”

“Two.”

“And you are happy, of course.”

“I have been until recently.”

He was impatient at himself for forgetting her father’s death. They seemed to talk around in circles. If they touched that madness of ten years before it was to rebound quickly to something else.

And now, looking at him, she wondered why it had all been. She had never really cared—she knew that now. He touched nothing in her that was vital or real. He was not her man. This terrible thing had been spring madness—that was all.

He had been there for a half hour and they had touched many conversational surfaces. Was he afraid, or did he not know that she must have had some real need when she sent for him?

She moved uneasily about the room and, turning suddenly, caught him off guard.

Ah; he was afraid! She saw it in his eye.

That gave her courage. She turned and crossed the room to him, her slim black gown dropping about her.

“I sent for you,” she said, “not to talk about how the neighbourhood has changed or what we had done to the house. You know it. Why don’t you ask me what it is?”

“I have been trying to guess.”

During the long hours of the night before she had framed a dozen ways to tell him, roundabout ways leading him on so that he himself at last might frame it, but when the time came, so desperate was her situation that she blurted out the truth from mere madness of getting it over with.

“Do you know—have you never thought that there might have been a very tragic result to that—that excursion of ours?”

His eye sharpened, grew keen and watchful.

“I am not sure that I understand exactly—”

“I think you understand. It is quite true.”

For a moment they stood facing each other. In her face only shame and distress, in his a curious mixture of amazement and a growing exultation.

“There was a child—a boy. He let me think it had died. I have always thought so. But a few days ago, in going over his papers—”

Quite without warning she turned white and caught at a chair. He made a quick step forward but she would not let him touch her.

“Poor little girl!” he said. He seemed to understand. He made no further attempt to approach her.

“I did not bring you here to talk about—what is past,” she said, speaking very fast. “That’s over and done with. I am not blaming you. I never have blamed you. But my problem is so terrible—I don’t know what to do—I can’t even think. Don’t you understand? Here I am with a husband and two little girls, and yet, off in a wretched little town in New Jersey, in a poor little house, I have another child. Don’t you see?”

He did not see exactly. That was the tragedy of it. The need of secrecy he could comprehend, the necessity of concealment, the physical problem. But this spiritual question of hers was beyond him—this new and crying responsibility. Still there was a question at issue. He could see that. He fell to pacing up and down the room.

“It is awkward, isn’t it?” he said, at last. “A boy, you say. How—how old is he?”

“Almost ten. He looks like you.”

Again there was the gleam of exultation, very momentary, very undeniable.

It took her a long time to make him see what she felt, her responsibility to this child, her duty to be honest now for her own sake, and something that she had only begun to suspect herself—her longing for the boy. But they seemed to get nowhere at all.

“But what am I to do?” he said finally. “It’s—it’s damned awkward in every way. Of course you are not going to be foolish enough to take the child or—tell your husband about it?”

“Why not?”

“Because the time to have told him was before you married him. It’s too late now.”

“I know that. I was young and afraid. I am not afraid now. I am only afraid—not to. You are going to be married. Shall you tell her?”

“That’s different. Of course I shall not tell her. My dear girl, I have no intention of shirking my responsibility. The child is mine. I believe you absolutely. I will do my share, of course. He will have to be brought up, educated.”

She flung out her hands helplessly.

“That isn’t it. Am I to go on all the rest of my life living a lie? Am I to let my husband call me a good woman when I am not a good woman?”

“Well, as to that—if you insist on an argument, are you any worse woman because the child is living? Now, look here, don’t be silly and hysterical. The thing is true and we will have to face it, but don’t forget this: Don’t be selfish. You spiritual women with eyes of saints are very selfish with your souls. What is your conscience to the happiness of three other people? To sleep at night with the feeling that you have made a clean breast of it, that having done a wrong thing you have helped it by telling about it, and at the same time to destroy permanently the happiness of a good man—that’s got to be figured on. I am not afraid. It won’t be pleasant, but if you tell I will face it. But don’t forget one thing. To secure your spiritual ease and the further happiness of a boy who is already quite contented as he is, you are going to destroy your husband’s faith and happiness, you may break up your home. And there are the two little girls.”

He was right—she knew it all at once. She could never tell. Telling would be easy. The hard thing would be to live on year after year shoring up with ceaseless vigilance the walls of her secret house, fighting endlessly for the three she loved, against this child who was also hers and for whom every instinct of her was now crying out. No compromise with her conscience this, a pure sacrifice. And not the least of her burdens would be that even her husband would never understand. A moment of carelessness, a crumbling wall and she would stand before him as a woman who had deceived him and continued to deceive him, not to save him—but to save herself.

When she held out her hand he bent over it very low.

“I am afraid you think I am hard,” he said. “But it is life. Only don’t think I am not sorry—I am terribly sorry. I had never dreamed of it, and if at any time there is anything I can do—”

She was ghastly, but she tried to smile.

“Then I wish now and then you would go to see him. He is very lonely. He has—he has broken his leg.”

“Go? Of course I’ll go,” he replied heartily. “I am feeling like a yellow dog, but that sort of thing I can and will do. I—I like boys, you know.”

She wrote the address on the back of one of her cards and gave it to him.

“If you could go soon,” she said, “while he is still unable to get around, it would—it would be very kind.”

The children were coming in. As they stood there a door slammed and a shrill young voice called “Mother.”

He put his hand over hers.

“Remember,” he said. “It is three against one.”

There was a young moon that night. Wrapped in a steamer rug she lay in a deep chair at the end of the terrace.

Mam’selle opened the window above. From the nursery came a chorus of sleepy “Good-nights.”

Her husband sat on the balustrade. She could see only the deeper shadow. That was he, and the glowing end of his cigar.

“Trouble,” he was saying in his young voice, “trouble is a great thing, darling. I believe we are closer together to-night than we have ever been before. A little while ago I was thinking—”

“What were you thinking?”

“Well, I was hoping—rather hoping that sometime when you are quite strong again, that we might have a son. I—I am very fond of boys, you know.”

“A son!”

A son, a brown-eyed wistful small boy on a sofa-bed in a little clapboard house. If she could only have said: “I have a son, a little lonely boy! I have a son and my arms are aching for him!”

But she did not dare. How could she kill the happiness in her husband’s voice, the hope, the trust. He had asked her for a son. Could she offer him the child of another man? How much was honesty to count against his suffering? Her decision was made, but the question would always be hers, seeking answer.

Suddenly her hands went cold. She had given the boy’s father his address on one of her visiting cards! How careless, how madly careless! She must get it back, know that it was destroyed. And could her visit to the child have betrayed her? Had she been seen? How could she explain?

Her husband sat on the balustrade and smoked. The peace of the night was on his soul. And she, to whom he had confided his happiness, lay back in her deep chair and plotted and schemed, as she must plot and scheme all the rest of her life, to keep intact her secret house.