Front matter (continued 4)

"Ah, you see!" I laughed, attempting to lighten his mood.

"Randolph," he uttered in a strange solemn tone that sent a slight thrill through me. "I told you once there was a woman I had cared about—and only one."

"Yes—but you never married her."

"No," he continued in the etiolated tone of a dead grief. "She was married already when I knew her."

And then my sympathy went out to grizzled old Dibdin.

"I am sorry," I murmured, touching his hand across the table. "Did I know her?"

"Yes," he said quietly, "you knew her. It was Laura."

In a flash of poignantly bitter and vain regret I saw the vista of the dead years—of what might have been! ...

CHAPTER XVI

Miracles—miracles are common as blackberries!

Pendleton is once again a faithful worker in the vineyard of the insurance company.

A commonplace miracle enough, but all miracles, I suppose, are commonplaces that happen to surprise us or that we don't understand.

The abstract office, I am sure, has more joy over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine—but I do not wish to be blasphemous. Like Death, it claims us all in the end. A voluptuary, an idler like myself, or a renegade who broke from it indefensibly like Jim Pendleton—all, sooner or later—turn or return to its yoke like starved runaway slaves—the unrelenting office! What a change it must be to Jim after the beaches and the barrooms of the gorgeous East! But for one closely relevant circumstance I could find it in my heart to be sorry for him.

What a strange and wonderful institution is the family! Another of those commonplace miracles so charged with mystery, like birth and death. If I were a classical writer or a Sir Barnes Newcome I might expatiate at length upon the subject. The things we swallow and condone and cover up for the sake of its ties!

Suffice it, however, that Jim Pendleton is quietly working out his salvation, a salary and plans for re-creating his dismembered home.

The children are becoming quite used to him. Randolph seems to be the nearest to him and Jimmie remains stubbornly farthest away. It is painful to think however that Jimmie's youth will the more certainly and completely detach him from me in the end.

When is it all to happen? I for one dare not fix the fateful day which, with every passing hour, draws nearer. No one fixes the day. It is left dangling in the air by an invisible thread of uncertain length and strength—

There are times when I could cry out in my anguish, my agony of nameless pain, fear, apprehension. But what a spectacle I should make of myself if I gave vent to emotion! We humans are not so much whited sepulchers as masked and silent volcanoes.

And Jim Pendleton—what is he thinking, feeling? He is suave, quiet, controlled. He is very gentle with them all, and particularly soft-spoken with Alicia. He has taken to consulting and confabulating with her touching the characteristics and the needs of the children. At times it seems to me that I cannot bear it and once at least I have called her and spoken harshly to her, and charged her with having mislaid a volume of Book Prices Current.

How childish on my part! But my nerves are not what once they were. They are tetchy and fractious. It has been decreed that I am to have a vacation and go away for a fortnight—go to Maine or New Hampshire. If I were to burst into laughter at the thought, I might end like an hysterical woman, in uncontrollable tears. I could no more go now than I could spread my arms and fly. I am as remote from the holiday spirit as from the North Star.

Poor Dibdin—how mistaken he is in me! He blathers of my "towering head and shoulders"—b-r-r-r! it makes me shudder with shame. What a weakling I am in the face of life!

No—I am a toiler in Bleecker Street, of its reeking pavements, its fly-infested purlieus, where the Italian children grub and shout and sun themselves in the gutters, in the air of a thousand smells throbbing under the noonday sun. The homecoming to the third-rate suburb used to be refreshing and soothing like a delicate perfume. To see the children laughing and rosy in the square inch of garden, to see Alicia, sparkling with her young energy and enthusiasm,—it had all been like coming into a cool temple filled with shapes of beauty, after wandering in some fetid bazaar. Now it is dust and ashes. I could never convey to Dibdin or to any one else how alone I feel in the world, what chill and cutting blasts of desolation sweep into my life every time I think of its present or its future.

Minot Blackden came in to Visconti's at noon to-day to drag me out to lunch.

"Let's stop in at my studio for a minute," he proposed as he steered me round a corner. "Something for you to see."

He showed me a small rose window designed for some church in Cincinnati and turned expectantly to catch my exclamations. I gasped out some inanities.

"Art, my boy!" he gloated. "That's art for you!"

"It is, indeed!" I assented helplessly. "Only surprising thing is how a real artist can acquire so much fame. Seems to me I see something about you in every Sunday newspaper I take up."

"Ah, that's business instinct," he chuckled. "I am no amateur, I can tell you. I live this thing. You may think it insane, but sometimes I think I am Benvenuto Cellini reincarnated." He was not laughing; he was in deadly earnest. "Come in," he added solemnly, directing me to a door in the rear of his shop. "I want to introduce you to my press agent."

I was duly introduced to a plain bustling Mrs. Smith of perhaps thirty-five, who rose from a typewriter and spoke with a devotional, a reverential fervor of "our work", while casting worshipful glances at the artist. How do the Minot Blackdens inspire such adoration? I know I have rediscovered no lost art and it is plain I am no incarnation of Benvenuto Cellini. No one will ever worship me.

"Have you seen Miss Bayard lately?" Blackden inquired as we sat down to an Italian luncheon, beginning with sardines and red pepper.

"No—I haven't," I answered, surprised. "Do you know her?"

"Do I know her! Don't you remember introducing us in front of Brentano's?"

I had forgotten it, and it seemed to hurt him that I did not regard his movements and events with the devotional attention of his press agent.

"Of course," I murmured lamely. "You've seen her again?" He smiled a detached, superior smile such as the immortals might smile over erring, unregenerate humans, and ran his fingers through his dark, artistic hair.

"I see her quite often," he explained. "Very wonderful woman, Miss Bayard. She is a great inspiration to me in my art. My art has taken strides and leaps since I met her. Surprised you don't seize the opportunity of seeing her oftener—a truly artistic nature!"

"Ass!" I thought. But aloud I explained that domestic preoccupations left me little time for social or any other visits. The casualness of my answer seemed to brighten Blackden perceptibly.

I recalled, incidentally, that I had promised Gertrude, though heaven knows why, to let her know the upshot of Pendleton's return.

"Tell her, when you see her, that I am coming very soon. I've had a good deal on my hands. She will understand."

"She understands everything," murmured Blackden absently. "Ah, there is a woman! Yes, I'll tell her." And his eyes glowed in anticipation.

He was positively affectionate to me, this austere artist, when he left me at Visconti's door.

To come home, as I have said, used to be a delight. The presence of one person in it has changed it to a torment.

This evening when I approached my châlet on the rock, I found Pendleton in high good humor playing a game with the children on the lawn.

A flap of canvas, making a sort of pup tent, had been fastened to the tree for Jimmie, to give him that touch of savage life which even at Crestlands little boys seem to crave. Savage life at Crestlands! Yet once the Mohicans roamed here and the Mohican that is in all of us craves an outlet in Jimmie. It craved an outlet in me when I saw the great hulk of Pendleton squatting tailor-fashion in the tent entrance, enacting the rôle of cannibal chief. I stood unobserved for a moment, watching the scene with bitterness in my heart and shame on top of the bitterness.

"Bring the prisoner before me," grunted Pendleton in the character of the chief.

Tittering in suppressed glee, Randolph and Laura marched Jimmie up to Pendleton, who measured the child with a fearful frown and demanded where were the other prisoners.

"They escaped, your majesty," exploded Randolph with stifled laughter. "This white man alone dared to remain and brave your power!"

"He should be boiled and eaten by rights," Pendleton growled truculently. "He dares to face the Big Chief of the Cannibal Islands! Because of his great courage, however," he added as an afterthought, "we shall spare his life. Of such stuff great warriors are made."

"Beware, your Majesty," giggled Laura, "he might treacherously plan some harm to you. He is very brave, this white chief!"

"We see he is a desperate blade," answered Pendleton judicially. "But we admire bravery. He shall be our spear-bearer in battle."

"No, I want to be eaten!" shrilled Jimmie in his excitement, whereat the others shrieked and shook with laughter.

Alicia alone seemed moderate in her merriment. I hugged it to my heart that she appeared to look a shade sadly upon the scene. But I am probably wrong. I went indoors and sank my chin upon my hands with a turmoil of emotions which I wish to forget.

Pendleton is winning them, there is no doubt about that. In all the world there is not a soul who would cling to me, excepting possibly Griselda. Shakespeare never uttered anything truer than that life was "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I wish I had never been born.

This morning I longed to romp and riot with the children, to shake off every atom of care, to laugh and roll on the floor with them, to be happy as I have been happy, but I could not. Held in the grip of a heartache that permeated every fiber in my body, I slunk sullenly away to my study after dinner to be alone. But even that I could not have.

Pendleton followed on my heels, lit a cigar and inquired whether he could have a talk with me. Naturally I could not prevent it. I can prevent nothing, for I am no longer master in my own house.

"Old man," he began in his suave thick voice, which he means to be friendly, which to me seems orgulous with triumph. "Seems to me you're about due for a rest."

"What d'you mean?" I faltered, wincing, though inwardly I knew well enough what he meant.

"Just what I say," he smiled. "You have worked hard enough—supporting my family. Time I took the load off your shoulders—that's what I mean."

I waved my hand in a gesture of deprecation, but I could not speak.

"Oh, I know," he insisted doggedly, though even now he cannot look me in the eyes, "you didn't do it specially for me. You did it because you are a man—you—bah! they don't make 'em like you, as I've told you. But you don't want praise from me, I know that. You don't need it. What's more to the point is, it's time I took a flat or small house in one of the suburbs and had the lot of them move over and live on me for a while. About time," he nodded his head and shifted his cigar, "about time!"

Every word was a stab, but I steeled myself for the ordeal. Wasn't that what I had been expecting all this time?

"When—do you want to make the change?" I endeavored to speak crisply, as when I address the National City or the Guaranty Trust over the telephone at Visconti's.

"Well, I thought I'd begin to look round to-morrow. There'll be the place to find, some furniture to get—the installment plan will help—whole job ought to be fixed up in two or three weeks, I guess," he added with a laugh. "Uncle Ranny will have to come to supper pretty often to keep the kids as happy as we'd like to see them, eh?"

"But a going household—" I spoke quickly in a sort of last spasm of pitiful expostulation—"it's quite a—an undertaking to set going?"

"Yes—I know," he nodded soberly. "Don't think I don't know I'll have to push the wheel hard—with both shoulders. But d'you know," he lifted a confidential eyebrow, "that young woman—Alicia—will be a great help to me—quite a little housekeeper, she is—quite a kid—I hope Laura will take after her."

My heart was of lead. If he was watching my face, he must have perceived a deadly pallor sweeping every drop of blood away from it. There was a pounding in my ear's like rushing waters.

"Alicia," I heard myself saying as one speaking after being rescued from drowning, "Alicia, you know, isn't my child—or yours. I can't send her to you. She—there are formalities—but, anyway, her wishes are a factor in the matter. I'll do anything, old man," my head seemed to swell suddenly and shoot upwards like a cork from an abyss, and my face was damp with perspiration—"anything, but I can't send that child to you unless—unless she is keen—you see that, don't you?"

"Oh, yes, I see—certainly." He was looking away as he spoke. I have a lingering hope he had not been watching my face. "That's all true, of course. But put yourself in my place, Randolph. Here are three motherless children. She, that girl, has been a kind of mother to them. Seems to have a born faculty for it. What would I do without her, just starting in like that—you understand!"

"Surely, surely!" I hastened to assure him, because I felt slightly more master of myself. "But you see my point—she doesn't belong to me. And even if she did—I can't just pass her about—it's a responsibility—her wish—what I mean is, I can't coerce her in any way."

And suddenly I saw the children away from me, with this dubious, mysterious man, alone, and my heart was wrung with agony. With Alicia, at least—but, no! I could not acquiesce so completely.

"Coerce—certainly not," was his wholly reasonable comment. "I reckon a word from you would go a long way, though. But I see your point, Randolph, I see your point. Tell you what!" he began in a new tone. "Suppose we put it this way. I'll speak to her myself—I'll put it up to her—leave you out of it altogether, see?—leave it to her to decide—so you won't have to—you'll be neutral, you see?—What's the matter with doing it that way?"

A thousand devils within me moved me with all but irresistible force to jump at his throat, to stifle his words, to choke the beastly life out of him, to end the torment then and there. But I could not—I could not. I knew he was expressing by his words his sense of certainty that he could win over Alicia, as he had won the children—that I was helpless in his hands—that I was a weakling whom he was making the barest pretense of respecting—that he could strip my household of all I held dear with an ease so laughable that he could not even bother to ridicule me. And yet I could not rise up and strangle him.

As one in a vise, I sat for a moment chained by wild conflicting passions, and then—a strange thing happened. A feeling of nakedness, a sense of being stripped of everything like another Job, of being utterly alone in the world fell about me like an atmosphere. I felt deprived of everything, though not bereft. It was an odd feeling, a sort of involuntary renunciation of all that was my life in which yet I calmly acquiesced. I faced and addressed Pendleton almost with tranquillity. Certainly I experienced a strange new dignity that was very soothing, very grateful, as water to the thirsty after battle.

"Very well, Jim," I heard myself saying quietly. "Go ahead your own way. That perhaps is best."

All that I remember is a gleam of triumph in his eye. No word of all his chunnering and maundering afterwards do I recall. He talked on, smoking, for perhaps four or five minutes and then he left me.

By myself I felt at once strangely heavy as a mountain and insubstantial as the shadow thereof.

CHAPTER XVII

Again and again I have been told that I am a fool. But not even my dearest friends have called me mad.

Are the gods then really so anxious to destroy me? What have I done to deserve it?

This morning, after last night's interview with Pendleton, I saw Alicia—suddenly saw her as it seemed for the first time. And yet an overwhelming realization flooded me like a tidal wave that through countless ages she and she alone had been inexpressibly dear to me. She, the divine ideal I had been pursuing, catching fitful glimpses of in glades and forests, on mountain tops, in palaces, in fantastic surroundings, amid incredible scenes of a dim and ancient dream-life, more real than any reality—she was Alicia, this child Alicia.

And I am more than twice her age!

Nothing can come of it but misery and wretchedness for me. By no word or sign dare I convey such a thing to her or to any one else—to no one except these pale pages that receive my poor motley confidences with the only discretion I can trust.

She is dearer to me than all the worlds. Yet not only must I remain dumb but I must guard my every word, gesture, thought even, as never before.

In the midst of all else this is a catastrophe. Yet it overshadows and overbalances everything.

Let me disclose the truth by so much as a sign, and every act and motive of mine becomes abruptly suspect, and I shall stand revealed for the immoral, shameful creature that I suppose I am.

I could face that, I believe, if there were any possibility—but there isn't.

I must hide and cover and conquer the feeling by inanition. But how can I, when she is so untellably dear and precious to me?

No, no! A thousand times no! I cannot let Pendleton try to inveigle her to leave me. No!

And all I have to do is to betray this garish resolution and my secret will be out, and all that I am and have done will stand forth as naked pretense and I shall appear stripped and manacled like a common criminal too good for the hangman.

And I have dared to judge Pendleton!

The time-honored remedy in fiction, when a man finds himself in love with any one he has no business to love is, I believe, to go away, to travel. How ridiculous that sounds to me. The only place I can go to is Visconti's. To Visconti's! And now I have come back from Visconti's and I cannot stay in the house.

I cannot stay in the house because Alicia is in it—and Pendleton!

Oh, he will have his way, I am sure! The Old Man of the Sea infallibly has. Why should the unscrupulous always have the advantage? I abhor to think of him.

It is Alicia that is filling my mind, my heart, my life. I have been trying to think of her even until yesterday as a child, and I know I have been deceitful. She is a woman—she is womanhood. I see her now in her radiance and every movement and gesture of her, every act, every glance speaks of the freshness and youth of life, of a supreme, a divine beauty. I have called her a child and I yearn to sink at her knees and cry out my anguish and my adoration. I am the child, helpless before her. Whatever I conceal, I cannot conceal what her going would do to me. It would shatter what remains of my life. And I suffered Pendleton yesterday to propose calmly that she go over to him—trafficking in Alicia!—and with Pendleton! It is stifling to think of. I must go out. But I cannot let any of them see me. I feel like a thief in my own house. The window—ah, I can slip out for at least a solitary hour under the stars!

I did not manage to get out under the stars after all. Just as I began to fumble with the screen Alicia asked leave to come in. No presence could have been more welcome to me, but the dark thoughts under which I had been brooding made me wince with pain as she entered. Nevertheless I contrived to greet her with almost normal cheerfulness.

"Uncle Ranny," she began hurriedly in an undertone, coming close to me, "is it really coming, then?"

"What do you mean, my dear?" I asked her, though such subterfuges are quite useless with Alicia.

"Oh, he's just been telling me that he has his eye on a flat near Columbia University in New York—that he expects to have it going by the time the schools open—hasn't he told you?"

"What else did he say?" I queried breathlessly.

"Nothing much—only he asked me whether I didn't think it was wise to get settled there as soon as possible. He is very nice to me."

"Is that all?" I breathed.

"Yes, that's about all—but isn't that enough?"

I smiled feebly and sank into my chair with immense relief.

I longed to draw her to me, to enfold her, to rest her head against my heart, to hold her close and to exclude thereby all black care and worry, all overhanging shadows, all the threatening and looming clouds of existence—to make my world blissfully complete. But I am only "Uncle Ranny" to her—and I felt a shudder pass down my spine.

"And you, Alicia," I managed to say. "What did you answer?"

"Of course, I said that was true—what could I say? But oh, Uncle Ranny," she leaned toward me as she stood at my desk, "I am afraid, Uncle Ranny! They are ours—aren't they—I know he's their father, but I can't help feeling as though we were—handing them over to a stranger—Oh, I suppose I ought not say it—some one we don't know at all!"

And she burst into tears.

Blood and flesh could not bear it longer. I twitched and writhed in my chair for an instant, then I leaped up and threw my arms about her and strained her to me.

"My darling," I murmured brokenly, "and how do you suppose I feel?"

"I know," she sobbed and gently, very much as Jimmie or Laura might have done, she put her arms about me and nestled as though I were some one old and fragile for whom she had a deep affection—but that was all. Alicia's first embrace!

And then I knew also. She did not, I trust, for an instant suspect the bitterness of the cup I was that moment draining. But why should I expect anything else? The guilt in my own heart tells me enough,—and too much—of exactly where I stand. Alicia is still a child. As yet evidently she did not even suspect that Pendleton was bent upon taking her also. Suppose I prevented that, then what of the other three whom, in another way, I love no less? My head was throbbing dizzily, my pulses were beating like drums. For me this was the supreme moment of anguish and sacrifice, the dark night of the soul, that noche oscura that St. John of the Cross knows so well how to describe, that shakes one's being and changes one's life forever more. My lot seemed to be to sacrifice and break myself in final and complete renunciation, to drain my cup of bitterness to its uttermost dregs.

For a moment the world was as a shadow, swaying, airy and insubstantial. The cowled monk that is buried somewhere within me was suddenly uppermost and the life of the world seemed sordid and leprous; a deadly thing rotted with lusts and passions, a thing to run away from—that was pulling me into its sensual center. But only for a moment.

Then suddenly the blood surged to my temples, as Alicia lay in my arms, and the ancient cunning of a thousand male ancestors, of savage hunters and crafty warriors who died that I might live, swept into my thews and nerves and brain and I crackled with eagerness to fight for my own.

No!—I would not—could not give up all that I held dear. I would fight! I gripped Alicia's shoulders in a spasm of fierce joy and in a hoarse guttural voice that surprised her no more than it surprised me, I breathed out:

"Never fear, Alicia—it can't be! It won't be. He hasn't done it yet. I'll do something—I don't know what as yet. But give me time—a little time—I'll work it out. We'll fight if we must—but we won't give up tamely!"

Alicia's warm cheek against mine, though with a trust that can only be described as childlike, was reward enough for victory, let alone for this still empty challenge. But an irresistible, throbbing feeling of confidence tells me that something will happen—that I shall win!

Is it simply the confidence of a fool, and the surge of melodrama that is never very far from any of us? Possibly. But my blood still throbs and my muscles still crackle with the strange eagerness and lust for battle. It may be that the fragrance and the starry look of Alicia that linger with me yet, the sweet joy and pride of Alicia when she returned my good-night kiss before she left me, the affection with which she clung, the reluctance with which she went, all have something to do with this new accession of courage. But I do not comfort myself with vain things. Alicia happens to be a girl whose affections have never been pampered by any doting parents. If she looks upon me in loco parentis, that ought to be enough for me. It is not enough. And the pain of that leaves a barbed sting in my breast. But that wound I shall carry gladly—I shall wear my hair shirt like the girl wife of Jacopone da Todi—if only I can play the man.

The evening and the morning were a day—the first day of a new life, and what a day!

I went down in the train with Pendleton and briskly suggested that he need not hurry with his arrangements.

"I thought," said he, with a furtive, sidelong glance at me, "that my first duty was to ease you. I owe you too much already," he added, looking out toward the drabness of the Mt. Vernon right of way.

"It's only strangers and enemies that owe each other things;" I countered easily. "Friends owe each other everything and nothing. There is no audit for such accounts."

He laughed out of proportion to the deserts of this lump of wisdom and exclaimed:

"You're great, Randolph—great!"

It was my turn to laugh, and I felt that I had the advantage of him. With the sixth sense, or the pineal gland, or whatever it is, I was conscious that he was a little afraid of me—and that did not damage my temper.

"Your experience in life has been so—peculiar," I told him, "that anybody would be glad to be of any service possible. And you must remember that Laura was my only sister. Tell me," I added conversationally, "don't you find the harness galling at times after all—you have been through?"

"Galling! Say, Randolph, those little machine people in their skyscraper beehives—cages—don't know what living is!—Freedom!" ...

For the first time I had noted the light of spontaneity glowing in his eyes, and my heart bounded: I was about to hear a confession. But on a sudden he checked himself and looked away. "Of course," he added in a forced tone, "one has to face one's responsibilities. No—take it all in all, I am glad to be doing my share of the work and carrying my burden."

I knew he was lying. I knew that his first outburst was the true Pendleton; that the addendum was meant, as politicians say, for home consumption.

"Of course, of course," I muttered hastily, "but we're only human." And alternately I cudgeled my poor wits to stand by me and prayed to them as to deities to light my way.

This lawless spirit, Pendleton, I had a vague gleam of intuition, was repenting his return to the yoke of duty, to the restraints of civilization. What, then, was it that held him? It was not a suddenly developed conscience. Of that I was certain. There was a problem I must solve and solve immediately.

We parted with cordiality at Grand Central station and twenty minutes later I was one of those little machines functioning at Visconti's.

"I want a draft at thirty days," I was saying, "for ten thousand lire on Naples. Your best rate at that date." And with the receiver to my ear I heard a voice within me, independent of the telephone, whispering:

"Could it be that he too is bewitched by Alicia?—with all his roving and experience—or is it his sense of duty to his children?"

"Four ninety-eight," said the exchange man, Hoskyns, at the National City, and "four ninety-eight," I repeated after him automatically. "Can't you do better—at thirty days?" And the independent voice in my brain put in: "Perhaps I am hipped upon the subject of Alicia?" And so the morning wore on.

Gertrude, to my surprise and confusion, rang me up at eleven.

"Good morning, Ranny," she opened sweetly. "You haven't kept your promise, have you?"

"Promise?" I repeated dully. "What promise?"

"You said you would keep me informed about Pendleton's return. You haven't done it—have you?"

"But you have been away for the summer, haven't you?" I ventured desperately.

"Yes, and I am back," she murmured gently, "and still—better come and lunch with me to-day—don't you think so?"

If there's any one thing that my career as a business man has done for me, it is to implant in my heart a hatred for procrastination and shiftiness. I had no luncheon engagement, and yet I despairingly told her I had.

"Dinner," she answered, "would suit me even better."

"I ought to go home," I protested feebly, with a sinking instinctive feeling that I really ought not to resume such relations with Gertrude.

"We'll have an early little meal, at six-thirty," she smoothly ignored me, "Until then, good-by."

I clicked the receiver angrily for a moment, but Gertrude had hung up. Her high-handed manner irritated me, but that was her characteristic. We were more leagues apart, Gertrude and I, than ever she or I could travel backward. And though the results of our meeting seemed to be unsatisfactory to Gertrude, I must in justice to her admit that she is always an admirable hostess.

I had telephoned to my house that I was not to be expected to dinner, and when Griselda had dryly answered, "Ye don't know what ye'll miss," I thought with a pang that I knew more about that than she did. Gertrude's calm and comfortable atmosphere, however, her deep chairs and sofas and the air of excluding a disorderly world, were not disagreeable to one fresh from the filthy pavements south of Fourth Street. Could those junk shops, paper-box factories, delicatessen "garages" and machine shops be in the same world with Gertrude's flat, in Gramercy Park? Yet they were only a little more than a mile away, and those were my real world, my daily environment. Gertrude's flat was now foreign ground.

"Yes—goose of a man!—don't you see? What could be better? The man comes back anxious to reassume his responsibilities. You have had a Hades of a time, but you have done the square thing, acquitted yourself like a man and a hero. And now the little romance ends happily and everything is satisfactory and you are free again—what could be more delightful?"

The heaviness of my heart portended anything but delight, but I remained silent.

"Don't think I am being trivial, Ranny," she resumed with a more sober vehemence. "It was a wonderful thing to do. I feel I was wrong in what I advised in the past. Your sticking to the children has done heaps for you—for your development, I mean—more for you than for them, perhaps," she inserted as a parenthesis with a laugh. "But don't be quixotic now. Everything's coming right in the best of all possible worlds. So don't go throwing a wrench into the machinery just because you've had the wrench in your hand so long you can't think what else to do with it!"

"I am not good at changes," I murmured gloomily. "I was catapulted from one kind of life into another by main force of circumstances. Now I don't feel I can stand being shot back into something else. The wear and tear, the strain is too great."

I will not deny that what I chiefly saw at that moment was a disruption that would rob me not only of the affection of the children of which I could not speak, but of Alicia, of whom I could speak even less.

Gertrude graciously lit a cigarette for me and sat down beside me. She herself, however, was not smoking.

"There is one change, Ranny," she began in a new and strange voice that was almost tender, "that would do you more good than anything else in the world—can you guess what I mean?"

"A trip abroad?" I fumbled uncertainly.

"No"—smiled Gertrude quietly laying her hand on mine, "I mean—marriage."

"Oh, my God!" I exclaimed in an agony of apprehension, and a cold perspiration bedewed my forehead. That was one thing I never had expected Gertrude to discuss with me again, even in the abstract.

I do not remember what I ate, except that the dinner was dainty and cool and exquisite. There was a dewy cup of something light and refreshing and Gertrude's frock was charming, her eyes were bright and there was a touch of color in her cheeks. She did little talking herself at first, but pressed me to tell her all I could of Pendleton.

I told her. I told her of his coming, of his air of penitence, of his returning to the offices of the insurance company and of his present effort to reëstablish a home for his children. The only suppressions I was conscious of were any references to Alicia or to my own somber emotions on the score of the children. Otherwise I was frank enough, Heaven knows, for it is hard for me not to be. To the very end Gertrude did not interrupt me. Only when I had done she made one crisp, incisive comment with a faint smile that was merely a lift of the upper lip.

"The one thing I cannot understand, Ranny," she observed, "is your unreasonable skepticism."

"You feel you could trust such a man implicitly?" I demanded.

"Yes," was the firm reply. "If there is any one thing clear, it is that Jim Pendleton is genuinely penitent. Suppose that lost-memory story is all moonshine, as you and Dibdin seem to think. By coming back that way doesn't the man really display more character than if it were true? He really shows that if he's gone wrong he has the stamina to come right again—and that's a good deal in this wicked world, Ranny."

"I had not looked at it in that light," I muttered, disturbed.

"I know you haven't," she gave a triumphant laugh. "You couldn't be calm on the subject. You really are an emotional, high-strung romantic, Ranny, and I don't altogether blame you for being prejudiced. But any dispassionate person knowing the facts will tell you I am right."

"It would be difficult for me to feel dispassionate on the subject," I returned doggedly.

"Certainly it would," was her ready reply. "That's why I am glad I captured you. Some friend had to show you your own interest."

"My interest?"

"Ranny," she cried in a voice charged with purpose if not with emotion,—with an intense, a vibrating resolution that impinged like a heavy weight upon my senses. "Ranny—don't let's be children—we are too old for that. Let bygones be bygones. I'll humiliate myself before you. I—I love you, Ranny—" and her lips really quivered—"I have always loved you—will you marry me, Ranny?"

Her face seemed strange, transformed by the force of an irresistible, a final compulsion. I writhed under her gaze as one on a rack. She hung for a moment, her eyes glittering into mine, positively tremulous; I had never seen Gertrude so serious. I could not bear it. It was excruciating. I know Gertrude was not herself. I leaped from the sofa, her hand still clinging to mine.

"I can't—I can't, Gertrude," I whispered hoarsely. "Oh—I—wish—but I am horribly sorry—I can't!"

Gertrude's nerves are strong and her control over them is stronger. She gazed at me for an instant, intently, searchingly, dropped my hand and turned away.

"There is some one else," she murmured in level tones to herself; "there is some one else now."

"Yes," I breathed, "though it won't—it can't—" and I paused.

"You needn't tell me," she turned, smiling harshly. "I know—it's that girl—the gutter-sni—but it doesn't matter. Every man is a fool—and you are the least likely to prove an exception. Oh, I always knew that—felt it—but never mind. I can't humiliate myself any more, can I?—Ranny," her voice suddenly struck a quieter note. "One thing I must ask for our old friendship's sake: You will forget this—episode—will you not? And I shall try to."

"My dear Gertrude—" I threw out my hands in a gesture of helplessness. If there was any humiliation it was I who was suffering it. She looked at me calmly, stonily. The color in her cheeks was exactly the same as before. Had Gertrude stooped to rouge?

"Your dear Gertrude—yes; then that's all right. Have a drink before you go? No? Very well. You will remember some day that I have given you my best—done my best for you."

It seems inherent in the nature of woman, so cosmic is the sweep of her outlook, or else so near to the earth, that when her desires are frustrated she feels the laws of the universe are frustrated. I did not make this comment to Gertrude, however; I could only murmur an entreaty for her forgiveness—which she ignored. Her only answer was a brief hard gesture of the head, a sort of jerk that expressed at once futility, contempt and dismissal.

As one dazed and paralyzed I must have made my way somehow downstairs, into a street car or some other conveyance at Fourth Avenue and into the babel at Grand Central station. But of this I have no recollection whatsoever. It is a blank. I must have walked like a somnambulist. I never came to until I left the train at Crestlands about a quarter past nine, and the first thing I was conscious of was the pain I must have inflicted.

CHAPTER XVIII

I can write this almost calmly now because so much has passed since that dreadful evening and details begin to emerge cloudily from the fog of that confusion.

I remember striking out homeward from the station down our drably progressive suburban Main Street, following the bumping, grinding, loitering trolley across the little bridge over a stream that sends up a dank, fishy odor, though all the living things I have ever seen in its neighborhood were mosquitoes and water snakes.

Over the rusty iron parapet I stood leaning for a few minutes and the original thought feebly stirred my dazed brain that life was not so much a dream—as the Spaniard Calderon would have it—as it is a stream. There is no knowing what it may not bring upon its bosom.

"That's it," I muttered to myself aloud. "Life is a stream within a dream."

"That's about the size of it," gruffly remarked a passing laborer behind me, his dinner pail clanking against his side, and he burst into a hoarse guffaw.

I laughed too, and concluded that I was still maudlin at the end of my perfect day.

I left the bridge and the highway, turned to the right and began to climb the ill-lighted crooked street, anciently a Dutch cattle track, no doubt, that leads to my isolated châlet upon the rock.

With all geography, history, the visible and invisible universe to draw upon, the fathers of Crestlands had denominated this obscure street Milwaukee Avenue. Milwaukee Avenue put the last touch to my nightmarish state. A sickly laugh escaped me as I bent my back to the ascent.

A young mounted policeman, who rode like another Lancelot by this remote Shalott, interrupted his tune long enough to give me a cheery greeting and rode on humming to himself.

The September evening was mild and I vaguely purposed walking past my house and strolling about for a bit before I went in. It was early for returning from dinner in town, and I was not overanxious to encounter anybody. A sudden sense of something eerie and awesome came to me as I looked at that deeply shadowed cottage. It appeared unfamiliarly remote, detached, and I gazed upon it with a weird sense of foreboding that sent a slight shiver down my back. The window shades of the châlet were drawn with only their rectangular lines of light showing through,—light, I reflected bitterly, by which Pendleton was no doubt beguiling Alicia to desert my house and follow him.

This thought lodged like a barb in my heart and my feet suddenly turned to lead. I could not go on farther and irresistibly I felt myself drawn homeward.

The somber habit of my recent reflections urged me with a plausibility strange and inexplicable to enter my study by the window instead of the comparatively public door. The window nearly always stood open. In case of storm Griselda or Alicia would dash about the house and close the windows, beginning always with my study. But this day had been clear.

I tiptoed around through the garden to the side upon which my study window gives. From it the land slopes away under a covering of trees until it reaches the stream.

There was a light in the study, though the shade was drawn, flapping gently against the rusty wire screen. This shade, as it happens, does not quite fit. It is short a full half-inch on either side, so that the peering observer can see as much as he pleases of what is going on in that room when it is lighted.

Automatically, without any premeditation that I can now recall, I gazed into my own room like a prowling thief. The picture I saw riveted me to the spot with an irresistible magnetic force.

Alicia was reclining on my leather couch, seemingly asleep. Instinctively I knew that she had decided to wait up for me and with some book in her hands had nodded in her vigil. It was still early, but Alicia's day began early and was always charged with activity. What an exquisite picture she made as she lay there in her thin frock, with a look of childlike trust and unconsciousness—radiating beauty.

Pendleton, who at that moment entered the door of the study, possibly to find Alicia, stood for a few moments spellbound by the picture, even as I stood outside. My burglarious entry was now frustrated. I must make use of the door. But I could not move from the spot. Somehow I could not let Pendleton out of my sight.

How dared he look at her in that manner!

My nerves were suddenly tense and my muscles quivering. Strange unfamiliar thoughts of savage acts, of sudden violence, of thrusts and blows, of blood-lust seethed and bubbled within me like a lurid boiling pitch. The inhibitions and restraints of a lifetime, however, held me writhing as in a vise.

I turned away for a twinkling as though to gather resolution from the murmurous night.

On a sudden, as I peered again eagerly, I saw Pendleton's great hulk bending over her, with a look peculiar and intense, with a strange speculation in his eyes that froze me. His huge hands were spasmodically, irresistibly hovering as if to embrace her delicate unconscious shoulders. Before I knew it he was kissing her cheek and it was I—I—who felt his hot vile breath as though Alicia's face and mine were one!

I cried out in a torment of fury and pain, but only a hoarse distant sound as of some night bird issued out of my parched constricted throat.

I rattled the sash violently, seized the screen and ripped it out, tearing my hands with the cheap twisted screen frame, though I was unaware of it then. The thin opaque shade flapped defiantly in my face. And all at once I heard a piercing scream—the terrified voice of Alicia!

Rage maddened me. And because of my state, I experienced difficulty, this time of all times, in entering the window out of which normally I stepped with ease. I stumbled, slipped, fell, rose again and leaped into the room like a maniac.

But Griselda, drawn by Alicia's scream, no doubt, was already filling the doorway, facing Pendleton, and with a look of concentrated hatred that remains engraved in my memory she was saying:

"Ye blackguard! Ye vile, black-hearted blackguard!"

With a wild leap to my table I seized a pointed bronze paper cutter. I should have plunged it into his heart, but for the swift intervention of the aged Griselda.

"No!" she cried huskily, seizing the blade, "we need nae add murder to this!"

I dropped the paper cutter to the floor and threw myself at the purple throat of the beast Pendleton. For a moment the guilty hang-dog look left his eyes and with an oath he thrust out his open hands against my face to throw me off. I was blinded by his huge hot palms against my eyes but I clung convulsively to his throat. His hands spasmodically closed about my neck; a momentary blackness fell upon me but I clung, my fingers eating more savagely into the hateful flesh of his throat. The pent-up force of years of hostility was that instant in my destroying hands. He gurgled and gasped and reeled backward.

In the meanwhile Alicia, emerging from her bewilderment and realizing the scene enacting itself with lightning-like rapidity, gave a low cry and sat up, moaning with terror. This vision of Alicia recalled me to myself. I flung his head away from me and I myself staggered backward with the force of my effort. I was breathing like a wrestler as I stood leaning with one hand upon the table. I could not speak.

My desire was to fold Alicia in my arms, to press her to me, exulting in her safety. But I dared not move for fear I should topple and fall, with the sheer working of the rage that was tearing me.

"Go—Alicia!" I gasped out finally. "Upstairs. Leave us!" Dead, banal phrases, when I panted to pour out endearments!

With a look of wild anxiety from Pendleton to me, like a terrified doe, Alicia rose, stood for a moment irresolute, then suddenly throwing up her hands to her face, she ran out of the room with a piteous stifled cry.

We stood for a space silent, all three of us, Griselda, Pendleton and I, after the door had closed.

"Now, Pendleton," I said finally, when I was a little more sure of my voice, "nothing you can say will matter in the slightest. We saw. Question is what d'you mean to do?"

He glanced hostilely toward Griselda. She, interpreting his look, flashed defiantly, with arms akimbo.

"Look, ye villain, look your fill. I will na leave the master alone with a murderer, the likes of you! No, I will na!" How often I have wished since then that she had not been so zealous.

"Talk about murder!" Pendleton, with the ghost of a grin, pointed at the paper knife still clutched in Griselda's hand.

"You needn't be afraid on my account," I told Griselda quietly. "I don't fear him."

"I will na go away," obstinately retorted Griselda, moving forward, pushing Pendleton aside like a man, and placing her back against the door.

"Very well, Griselda," I said. "I have no secrets to hide from you. And this man has betrayed what he can never hope to hide. Pendleton, what do you mean to do?"

"Do—" muttered Pendleton, with a dark abstraction in his look, "I'd like to tell you what I'd like to do to such as you—but it isn't worth while. This namby-pamby, mollycoddle, rotten doll-life favors you. Do! If I had the money, I'd get so far away I couldn't even think of insects like you."

"Then you realize you are no more fit to take Laura's children than you're fit to live among decent people?" He was silent for a moment, with the abstraction merging into cunning in his eye, and that in turn, as though cunning were of no avail, fading into heaviness.

"They'll become like you," he finally answered with the somber trace of a sneer. "There's the oldest boy—I wish—I'd make a man of him." A snort of derision from Griselda interrupted.

"You mean a criminal," I put in, in spite of myself. "Well, you can't, Pendleton. Lift a finger and as surely as you sit there, I'll prosecute you—children or no children. Don't forget I have witnesses."

He gazed at me open-mouthed with half-defiance, half-alarm on his moist fleshy countenance.

"That's your little scheme, is it?" he muttered sardonically.

"Only if you drive me to it!"

"Blackmail, eh?"

I laughed at him. "What's the use of being melodramatic, Pendleton? You are hardly the one to talk like that."

"Where's the money Laura left?" he snapped with truculent sharpness, and I experienced a pang of pain to hear her name upon his lips. Nevertheless, I answered him evenly:

"That exists intact—about nineteen hundred dollars. It's the children's, unless I should need it for their education. I am the executor."

"Give me a thousand of that!" he cried passionately, yet with a tentative uncertainty in his voice, "and I'll go where I'll never see your face again!"

"That's a consummation, Pendleton—but of that not a penny!"

"Executor!" he repeated with vicious bitterness—"with your little laws and safeguards. God! How I hate you all! God! To be again where real men are—who move—and laugh—and live! Peddling mollycoddles—caged white mice! Damn you! I wish to God I had never met any of you!"

"You don't know how often I have wished that," I murmured, but he paid no heed.

"Lord! I want to be again where the sun shines, where a man can take a chance! I wish to God I had never met that moldy old rotten Dibdin! I was going into the commission business with an Englishman at Osaka—or I could have gone into one of the mines of Kuhara in Korea—copper—made a fortune!"—he spoke as if he were vehemently thinking aloud—"but that plausible rotter Dibdin came along—dragged me away—and I had a hankering for the lights of Broadway. Broadway! What have I seen of it? Want to put me in a cage—in a flat! Hell, man! Give me a thousand dollars—and let me—I'll pay it back!"

I did not laugh at his last words. His mention of Dibdin suddenly brought to my mind what was like a flash of light. To be rid of him was my paramount desire. Dibdin—Dibdin's check—to be used for the children! It lay yellowing in my pocketbook. Now if ever was the time. Never, I felt certain after Pendleton's confession, could I benefit the children more with a thousand dollars!

"Yes!" I cried explosively. "I understand you, Pendleton. I'll give you a thousand dollars. You don't belong here—it was a mistake bringing you—go where you came from—where you'll be at home." It was only afterwards I recalled that he had mentioned blackmail.

"You'll give it to me?" he exclaimed avidly, thrusting out his hand.

"Yes—I will!"

"Now?"

"To-morrow morning." His face fell.

"Some trick? You'll go back on it." I ignored him.

"But you can't sleep here," I went on. "I'll meet you in town anywhere you say. No, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll come with you to town now, to-night. To-morrow morning we'll settle it."

To be rid of him—to get him out from under this roof—seemed suddenly a great, a priceless boon.

"God! I could kiss you!" he cried in derisive exultation.

"Go pack your things," I said, through the tumult in my brain. "I'll call a cab—or better still, you telephone Hickson, Griselda. I'll go and help him."

Pendleton nodded with grim insolence and shouldered out of the door.

"A better night's work ye've never done in your life," flashed Griselda, with a look of approbation that pleased me as much as any praise I have ever received; and she shuffled out to the telephone.

For one moment of silence I stood alone in the middle of my study, throbbing with a jumble of half-formed thoughts and racing flashes of ideas upon none of which my mind was able to fasten. But this single fact finally emerged from the welter: It was I, by my own act, who was now sending the father of Laura's children into exile. But on the heels of that came the certain conviction that never had any judge since justice was invented made a more accurate decision. And it seemed to me then as though something new and massive and stubborn and hard was born in my bosom that solidified and toughened me: That, come sorrow or joy, I should be able to present a surer front to their encounter, a greater certitude in meeting them. I felt myself at last an active, fashioned and tempered part of the machinery of life, and all my past seemed as chaff that had been blown by the winds of circumstance.

Alicia! My heart cried out for her! But I could not go to her now. I must clean my house for her and when next I saw her it should be in a cleared and wholesome atmosphere that no longer reeked of Pendleton. I made my way to his room and opened the door.

"Have you packing space enough?" I asked him coldly.

"I could use another suit case," he muttered.

"I'll give you mine," I told him and brought forth my bag from a closet in the hall. Whether Alicia had heard any or all of our words I could not tell. The children were evidently sleeping. I walked on tiptoe.

"Where d'you intend to go?" growled Pendleton, without looking at me.

"To an hotel," I told him curtly—"any hotel you like."

"Go to the Hotel de Gink for all I care," he muttered and went on with his packing.

"Do you want to see the children before you go?"

I could not forbear asking him that. He paused for a moment and straightened up, breathing heavily. Then he shook his head. "No—I guess not."

The tin taxicab was rattling at the door, and Griselda came futilely to announce it.

"You'll hear from me to-morrow morning some time," I whispered to her quickly, as Pendleton, stooping under his bags, lumbered on in front of me. "Look after Alicia—and the others."

"Ay," she murmured, "have no fear."

There was a train, and in the longest half-hour of any journey we were at the Manhattan Hotel. Adjoining rooms were assigned to us with a bathroom between. There had been a sort of intoxication about the entire business that had carried me on with a blind nameless force as one is carried in a dream. Once I was alone in the four walls of the impersonal chamber, a sudden lassitude fell upon me, followed by an immense wave of dreariness. How somber and sinister was life, full of a drab and hidden tragedy. Trafficking with Pendleton—slaving at Visconti's—the dreams that had been mine! And this was the life I was living. Suppose in the morning he should refuse? On a sudden my door opened and Pendleton's hatless head appeared.

"Sure you won't back out in the morning?"

And again my nerves snapped back into their steel-like tension.

"Not even doomsday morning."

"Will you have a drink on it?"

"No," I told him, "but there is no reason why you shouldn't have one."

"I think I will," he said, and with a malign gleam of triumph he approached the telephone in my room.

"The bar!" he demanded, and when the connection was made he added: "Two rye highs for 436." Then he turned his face toward me and grinned.

"Now, Randolph," he began quite amicably, "why keep me here any longer than you can help?"

"What d'you mean?"

"This: It's only about half-past ten—quarter to eleven. There is—there must be a train for the West round midnight. Why prolong the sweet agony of parting—why not let me go?"

"Now? You must be crazy!" I exploded nervously. "How can I get the money for you? Besides, there's another thing—I want you to sign something—something a lawyer must draw up—a paper of some sort—so you can't repeat this business."

"So that's it—is it?" he nodded his heavy head up and down, as though thinking aloud. "Well, put that out of your mind. I'll sign nothing. Take me for a fool? Here's your chance. Give me the money now and let me go or the deal's off. See? I'm just as anxious to go as you're to have me go. But I wasn't born yesterday. I'll sign no papers in any damn lawyer's office. Take it or leave it. That's that!"

There was something unspeakably horrible to me about sitting there and chaffering with this man whose every word breathed contamination. For a moment the thought of Dibdin came to me. I would call upon Dibdin in this emergency. Dibdin had hardly been near me of late. Excepting for an occasional luncheon together or a sporadic telephone conversation, I had scarcely seen him. It was as though he dreaded to encounter the monster Pendleton, whom, in a sort he had himself brought into being, and was only waiting until I should be free of him. But somehow I could not then call Dibdin. This was my crisis and my mind revolted at dragging any one else into it. Oddly enough it was not the children that seemed to be the barrier, but Alicia. The picture of Pendleton obscenely hovering over her came scorching, before my vision and I at once, dismissed the thought of calling upon Dibdin. The club,—that was my one chance of getting cash at that hour.

"What's the matter with your club?" Pendleton snapped me up so suddenly that I was startled. Could that fleshy brute read my thoughts?

"Just what I was thinking of," I murmured excitedly and snatched up the telephone. "Give me 9100 Bryant."

"Damn it—you're a sport! I like a dead game bird like you."

When the club answered, I asked whether Mr. Fred Salmon happened to be in and was informed that the doorman thought he was and that he would page him. I sat waiting with the receiver to my ear.

"Tell you what I'll do," said Pendleton, under the stimulus of expectation. "If you pull this off for me so I can start to-night, while the mood's on me, I'll sign any damn thing you please."

"Hello!" I suddenly heard in Fred Salmon's deep voice, "Salmon speaking."

"Fred," I told him, "this is Randolph Byrd."

"Hello, Ranny!" he broke in exuberantly. "Well, of all the ghosts—" but I checked him.

"—I want to cash a check for a thousand dollars right now, Fred. I am at the Manhattan Hotel. The banks are closed. Will you do this for me: Ask at the office and turn out your pockets and get what you can from any of the card players there and anybody else you know. Do you follow me?"

"I get you all right—all right—" said the voice of Fred, hardening to a businesslike tone now that money was in question. "Hold the wire a minute, Ran. I'll see what I can do."

Fred's raucous voice was as plainly audible to Pendleton as it was to me.

"Get it," he muttered. "Get it. I'd hate to wait till to-morrow."

I nodded. To be rid of him to-night would be a vast relief. And I longed to return home.

"I guess we can fix it all right," came Fred's voice in the telephone. "But you'd better come over with the check. There's about six hundred dollars in the club till. I have a couple of hundred with me. And we can raise the rest."

Pendleton heard him.

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll fix up about a berth with the head porter in the meanwhile."

"What's the big idea?" was Fred's greeting, as I entered the club.

"Private," I told him laconically. "Sending a man to the antipodes because he's unfit to live in this climate."

"Oh—sick man?" Fred was sympathetic.

"Very sick," I told him. "Incurable,"

Fifteen minutes later I was in the hotel, handing Pendleton the money.

"Now what d'you want me to sign?" he queried carelessly.

"Not a thing," I answered. For on a sudden the futility of holding Pendleton to any bond overwhelmed me. Any respite, even a few weeks from his presence, seemed a paradise. Paradise seemed cheap at a thousand dollars. And who can safeguard paradise? Besides, if I knew my man at all, it would be some time before he would return to an environment he so thoroughly loathed. I was no more safe with his signature than without—and no less.

"That's about all, then," he said, and he had the decency not to hold out his hand. "Good luck," he added in an undertone.

I made no answer and turned my face away from him with a wonderful sense of relief.

No sooner had the porter bustled out with his things and the door closed than I looked toward my own small bag with the dominant thought of returning home. But I could not move. I found myself shaking like a leaf and I sank down in the nearest chair, quivering as though the vibration in my nerves would hurl my body to pieces. No, I could not go home in this state. And taking off my coat with hands that shook as in a palsy, I threw myself upon the bed. But before I passed into the sleep of stupefied exhaustion a single insistent foreboding kept dully throbbing through my brain.

"He will come back—Pendleton will come back!"

CHAPTER XIX

Exultation filled me when I awoke late in the morning.

Though I had slept in my clothes and felt particularly disheveled, I stripped with the joy of an athlete after a victory and plunged into the cool invigorating bath.

Pendleton was gone! I do not remember the emotions of Sinbad when he had rid himself of the Old Man of the Sea. But his emotions must have resembled mine. My heart sang, I sang myself. I was manumitted. I was free. To my intimate journal may I not say that I felt myself a man?

I had fought the beast at Ephesus, my pulses blasphemously and jubilantly informed me, and by the Lord, I had won!

The children were mine! Alicia was mine! Would that I could bind them to me with triple brass. But I have bound them. In ridding myself of Pendleton, I had made them securely mine. Suppose he should return one day? They would be grown—reared by me. He would be merely the family skeleton. What is a family without a skeleton? He was that now. He wouldn't matter. It is human destiny to revolve about the child, about children. With the exception of Pendleton the outcast and Gertrude the—well, Gertrude—every one attained completeness only in rearing the next generation. And as I rubbed my body with the coarse towel I felt complete!

As for Alicia—ah—well, who was I to expect from life everything? At any rate she was mine, now, even as the children were mine. And the very first thing I would do—oh, jeweled inspiration—is to adopt her, legally and formally. That thought suddenly made the blood sing in my ears to so delicious a tune that absurdly, ridiculously, I began like some pagan or satyr to dance about the room. Mine, mine, mine! I danced into the room in which Pendleton had not slept and with crazy gestures made as if to sweep his memory out of the garish window. I had saved the children and safeguarded Alicia.

I felt I had played the man. And let no man say he has lived until he has fought for those he loves. Inevitably my mind dwelt upon Alicia. Who is that child? What were her beginnings? Did she come out of the sea and chaos of life only to vanish in some bitter poignant dream like that of last night? I only knew that she was mine now and that I would bind her to me yet more strongly. I would not ask for too much; I would be humbly grateful. She had come into my life as a divine offering and I would not question overmuch. There is no other origin. I felt supremely, tremulously content. If only she would abide and never leave me!

And it occurred to me, as I stood shaving before the mirror, that life is a beleaguered city, with deadly arrows falling over the wall, and the great enemy, death, certain to enter in the end. But by virtue of the love implanted in the human heart, one may snatch many hours of happiness amid the tumult and the shouting in the winding ways.

Over my hasty breakfast I recalled with a shock of guilt that I had not yet communicated with Griselda. But as I was already late I decided I should call her from the office.

How swift is mischief to enter in the thoughts of desperate men I discovered bitterly only a few minutes later.

For the first word I received upon entering Visconti's was that Griselda had called me repeatedly and Griselda's news chilled and numbed every fiber in my body.

Alicia had disappeared!

Pendleton! That was the thought that seared my brain.

"You—don't think"—I stammered brokenly to Griselda, "that she—that Pendleton—"

"I have thought of that," was her reply. "But—no! It canna be possible. She hated him—no! She must hae gone before ye left the house. I looked into her room soon after and she wasna there. I thought the girlie was hiding somewhere—or maybe she had run out into the garden until the mischief should blow over. I looked high and low; I called her in the garden. But she was nowhere to be found."

"Did she take any things?" I queried huskily.

"A wee bundle—" said Griselda—"night things and the like."

The shuddering dismay of that moment I shall never forget.

"Did she talk with—with him at all during the evening?" The words struggled out of my parched throat in spite of me, and I should have hated to see my own eyes.

"Ay," said Griselda, "that he did, the leper! All the evening he was wheedling her to come to him with the bairns when he set up his house. She was weeping sair to me in the kitchen afterward. It was to ask you if you wanted her to go that she waited for you in the study—and fell asleep, the poor maidie!"

"And what did you say to her?" I all but whispered into the mouthpiece.

"I told the lass not to greet," shouted Griselda. "I told her I could nae believe it would happen. He would never take the bairns. And if he did he would nae keep them. He was a bad one—the evil brute! But she was frightened, the puir lassie!"

"Very well, Griselda," I muttered stonily. "I must think. I shall call you a little later. Don't alarm the others."

She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort. But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a half-scorched moth around the ugly, sinister vision of Pendleton. Could he be at the bottom of Alicia's disappearance? How had he contrived the trick? If only I had gone to the station with him! Was it that that accounted for his hurry to be gone? No! It was impossible. Ought I to start in pursuit at once? No, no, no! I could not believe it. It could not be—not of her own free will! Yet my heart was lacerated by the possibility. When I lifted my head from my bosom, I gasped in a desolation of emptiness.

I had stifled the prompting to call Dibdin last night, but now I felt I must find him. I needed the solace and advice of a friend. I rose heavily and put on my hat. Visconti had not yet come in.

"Tell Mr. Visconti," I said to Varesi, my young understudy, "that I have been called away suddenly, on a serious private matter. I shall telephone him later."

"Yes, Mr. Byrd," responded Varesi, his lustrous Italian eyes flashing sympathy. He thought, no doubt, from what he must have overheard, that some rascal had run off with my younger sister—a killing matter, very possibly, to a properly constituted male. Had he known the truth, his Latin mind would have been shocked at my seeming Anglo-Saxon composure. Out of doors I heaved a deep sigh and boarded a north-bound elevated train for the eighties, where Dibdin has his lodgings, near the Museum of Natural History.

I found Dibdin not at his lodging but at the Museum, directing the rearrangement of the Polynesian section in the light of his additions to it.

He turned one intense glance upon me without speaking, hurriedly gave some directions to the men at work, and led me to an alcove where there was a bench.

"Now, let's hear—" he said. "What's he been doing?" He concluded at once that Pendleton was at the bottom of whatever wild appearance I must have presented.

Briefly, but without omitting any essential detail, I gave him an account of all that had happened the previous evening, including Griselda's announcement of the morning.

"And you think he enticed her to go off with him?" he demanded.

"Well—what do you think?" I queried.

"I think no," said Dibdin. "What does Griselda say?"

"She says Alicia hated him."

"Then take her word for it!" snapped Dibdin. "But why the devil didn't you call me last night from the Manhattan?" he turned upon me angrily.

"Why didn't I?" I murmured. "Maybe it's because you've done enough—maybe it's because there are some things a man wants to do without assistance."

Dibdin glanced at me sharply and gave a low whistle.

"Oh, that's it—" he muttered—"I see," and he looked away.

I am certain that at that moment Dibdin read my secret. For his expression swiftly changed. He grew suddenly warm and friendly, more than his usual self.

"A fine job you did there, Randolph," he cried, clapping my shoulder; "an excellent piece of work. I certainly admire your technique. As for Alicia—she didn't go with him—of that I feel sure!" I could have groveled before him in gratitude for those words.

"But where do you suppose she is?" I could not help eagerly asking. There was a gleam of amusement mingled with the sympathy in his eyes.

"Not very far, I imagine. We'll find her. Have no fear. Young girls are funny things. The instinct of sacrifice and the instinct of independence are always struggling in a woman like the twins in Rebekah's womb. When they're young it hits them very hard. Some notion like that must have swamped Alicia—sacrifice—earn her own living—ceasing to be a source of trouble—who knows? They don't think when they're young—or even when they're old. They feel. We'll find her—but we've got to think. Pull yourself together, old man."

"How," I asked in stupefaction, "do you come to know all that about women?" And my heart felt perceptibly lightened at his words.

"Oh, I've been studying them all my life," he laughed. "Never having had one of my own, I've been watching and thinking about the whole sex all over the earth. We'll find her. Have you communicated with the police?"

At the word "police," my heart turned leaden again.

"The—p-police!" I stammered aghast. "Invoke the publicity that means?—Horrible!" A shudder ran down my back.

"Right again!" cried Dibdin, nudging me. "Young man, you have an appreciation! Quite useless—the police. But you still—have a suspicion of Pendleton, haven't you?" I found myself wishing that even the best of men weren't so ready to imagine themselves amateur detectives. The very core of my heart of hearts, Alicia, had disappeared, and I wanted swift concrete help, not speculative questions.

I admitted that I had a lingering suspicion of Pendleton.

"Then, this is what we do," Dibdin rubbed his forehead as over a problem in chess. "We see a private detective agency here and acquaint them with the facts. Have them pick up Pendleton on the way—he hasn't reached Chicago yet, you know—and see if he's traveling alone. If he is, let him go on his way. If not—then, a description of the girl—you understand—"

A livid fury possessed me suddenly as I saw the all too vivid picture that Dibdin had evoked and was now trying to believe.

"No, no!" I cried. "I am going myself. I dare not—I cannot trust anybody else to do this. You don't know—you can't understand—"

"I know only too damned well," growled Dibdin staring at me quizzically. "But I am trying to show you sense—difficult, I admit, to one in your condition. However, I must try again," he went on with the patience of resignation.

"You are only one man—don't you see? A detective agency is an organization of many men in different places who can concentrate on the same job simultaneously. At this minute they would know on which train he might be traveling and some one or several could already be watching for his arrival. Suppose they miss him. There are many hotels in Chicago—there are many trains leaving for the coast—don't you see?"

"Yes," I breathed brokenly. "Then it's useless."

"Far from it," he laughed. "Come with me."

Less than an hour later we were at the Mahoney Detective Agency and a suave young Irishman was listening without emotion or eagerness to my story supplemented by Dibdin's interpolations. He seemed to care little for what concerned me most, but he was keen for personal details of Pendleton's appearance, height, build, clothes, lettering on his luggage and so on.

When it came to giving a detailed description of Alicia, my confusion was so pitiful that even the young detective glanced at me only once and then, like the gentleman he was, looked sedulously down upon the paper before him.

"Sixteen—in her seventeenth year!" he murmured in astonishment.

"But she is an unusual girl—well grown for her age," I caught him up.

"I see," he murmured gravely. "What's the color of her hair?"

I went on as best I could with the description.

"I could save you money," he smiled blandly, "by telling you that the girl is not with him—" and I could have wrung his hand like a brother's. "But," he added, "it won't cost much to pick him up. I'll have news for you to-morrow this time, I'm thinking."

As I sat down to lunch with Dibdin at his club, though in truth nothing was farther from my cravings than food, he suddenly burst forth into hearty laughter.

"So it's my thousand you gave Pendleton?" he chuckled. "That was sheer inspiration, Randolph—sheer, unadulterated genius! If you weren't so lugubrious just now, I could accuse you of a high ironic sense of humor that only a great man would be capable of!"

How terrible were the next twenty-four hours, in spite of Dibdin's companionship and his efforts to cheer me, no one will ever know. No funeral could possibly have darkened my household to such an extent. I dreaded to be seen by the children, who walked about like wraiths under the sense of tragedy. I dreaded to tell them lies and yet I could not tell them the truth. Finally I felt I must say something to Laura and Randolph.

The departure of their father they received without the least surprise. Randolph inquired where he had gone, but this, I answered, I could not tell him, save that he had gone West. But the absence of Alicia left them puzzled and strained and awed. Alicia's disappearance shook them almost as it had shaken me.

"When will she be back?" demanded Randolph.

"I don't know exactly," I answered miserably, "soon, I hope."

The following morning I gave up all thought of going to the office. If my mysterious truancy should cost me my job, then it must be so. I hovered in the region of the telephone. Again and again I was about to call up Mahoney's, but I forebore. Finally, toward noon, I could wait no longer. When the connection was made, I gave my name and asked for the young man who had charge of my case.

"Was just going to call you," was the bland apologetic answer. "Your man is at the La Salle Hotel, going out on the Santa Fe to-night. He is alone and arrived alone last night. We'll see whether he starts alone to-night."

Then, of course, I cursed myself for my folly in thinking that it might be otherwise and realized that I had really thought nothing of the sort.

But where in the meanwhile was Alicia?

I had believed myself by now schooled to emergencies, but here was an emergency that left me dazed and helpless. I had fondly thought myself a match for life, but life was crushing me with pain like a blind force.

I leaped up suddenly and wandered about the house and the garden like a dog searching miserably for a departed loved one. There was the stream—but I turned from it shivering. No—that was impossible! The sense of life in Alicia, her vitality, was too potent, too radiant to suffer extinction. I looked up at my little nest from the edge of the muddy stream, that frail eyrie upon the rock that I had felt so nestling, secure; barred by the trunks of intervening trees, it now seemed a prison. A faint breeze that was stirring the leaves made them murmurous with secret things which my heart cried out to interpret. Was it a litany, a dirge, or a whisper of hope? I could not read the riddle, but my bruised spirit was passionately clinging to hope.

Dibdin pretended not to observe my vagaries; when I returned I found him absorbed in Epictetus.

"This is rather good," he growled, pointing to a passage and puffing his pipe as he spoke:

"Have you not received facilities by which you may support any event? Have you not received a manly soul? Have you not received patience?"

"Yes," I muttered dejectedly, "all very well, but Epictetus never lost Alicia."

Dibdin laughed shortly. "Now," he said, "we must start out to find her. Though my feeling is she'll come back of her own accord very soon. The girl was frightened—no more."

I ignored the last part of his speech but leaped at the first.

"How would you start?" I queried sharply.

"What is the high-sounding name of that institution where she was brought up?"

"Oh, don't tell them, for Heaven's sake," I cried out in alarm. "If she is not there and they learn I have lost her, they'll never consent to my adopting her; they'll consider me irresponsible."

"Don't let's be fools," retorted Dibdin. "Those people are not. Do you know how many boys, girls, men and women turn up 'willfully missing' every year?" No, I didn't know.

"But, by George!" he suddenly clapped his forehead in a burst of inspiration—"Sergeant Cullum! Ever hear of Sergeant Cullum?." I shook my head. "He is a policeman I know who has a genius for finding missing persons. It's positively a sixth sense with him. He's a prodigy—has traveled everywhere—a human bloodhound—he is the man to go to!"

"But—the police!" I stammered.

"Yes, I know—but we'll see whether we can make him take this as a private case—out of hours—I'll find him!"

The surge of hope to my eyes must have told Dibdin better than any words I could have uttered what I felt at that instant.

"But first we'll call that institution," he directed. "You put in a call for the number and I'll tell you what to say."

"You needn't," I decided after a moment's reflection. "I know. I shall simply inquire about the regulations governing adoptions. I can so word it that if Alicia is there they will tell me."

"Ah, now your brain is functioning again," he concluded. "That being so, I shall leave you and look up Cullum at the bureau of missing persons."

Then I recalled that I had met with the phrase in newspapers. The fact that missing persons were so numerous that a bureau of the metropolitan police was required to handle them cheered me more than any other single fact. It was consoling to feel that even, in my peculiar misery I had joined a great multitude who suffered the loss of loved ones, even as in toil and labor and poverty I had merged into the vast majority.

When Dibdin left me I learned that I might adopt Alicia without any great obstacles, if she were willing, but I was no wiser as to her whereabouts. The Home, in the person of the Matron, inquired how "she was getting along." She was obviously not there, and I experienced a misery of guilt as though I had robbed the world of its dearest possession and then lost it.

Alone and bereft I sat, sinking to a mere pin's point in my abasement. I had begun to believe myself schooled in life, something of a man among men. But my own ineffectiveness was now dismally revealed to me. I had proved myself incapable of guarding even what was dearest to me in the world. I was at the bottom of an abyss from which I now felt hopeless to scramble upward. The sheer and beetling walls of granite were overpoweringly steep and forbidding. For the first time in long years, I believe I mentally prayed. I waited for Dibdin.

And then suddenly, as is the way with me when I am at the bottom, my spirits bounded upward. Alicia would come back to me, I felt in a sudden surge of assurance. At that moment I felt sure that she was thinking of me, that she was yearning to return. And before I knew it, I was blocking in magnificent plans for her education, for making a splendid woman of her, even though she already seemed perfect, of supplementing nature's handiwork with all the force that was in me. I saw her resplendent, a shining creature, the woman of my dreams! What a florid designer is hope!

But why should she have been taken from me so abruptly? The vast mystery of life encompassed me again like a shell, impenetrable—a carapace through which nature must supply the openings—and she had evidently not supplied them. Would Dibdin never come with his policeman?

Books, for so long my mainstay and support, were now useless to me. I turned over many volumes idly but my mind no longer reacted to that old and magical alchemy. The volume of Epictetus that Dibdin had fingered might have been a seed catalogue, so remote it seemed and so null. I was now a ghost among my books: I was plunged in "The Woods of Westermain," and my memory flung me the lines:

Enter these enchanted woods,

You who dare.

Nothing harms beneath the leaves

More than waves a swimmer cleaves.

Toss your heart up with the lark,

Foot at peace with mouse and worm,

Fair you fare.

Only at a dread of dark

Quaver, and they quit their form;

Thousand eyeballs under hoods

Have you by the hair.

Enter these enchanted woods,

You who dare.

It was clear. I must toss my heart up with the lark to fare fairly, even though my pain was great.

Late that afternoon; Dibdin returned, bringing Sergeant Cullum.

That excellent policeman gave me more hope than any one, excepting my own heart, had yet succeeded in doing. He insisted upon being made privy to all the circumstances, to which he listened, his broad shaven face turned ceilingward, with the rapt air of a mystic, expecting momentarily that lightning flash of inspiration that would reveal all. Then he asked to be allowed to wander by himself throughout the house, over which he went pointing and sniffing like some well-trained hound. In the end he declared himself satisfied.

"Now give me a little time," he said.

"But what means—how do you go to work?" I asked, nettled that he should see possibilities regarding Alicia that I had overlooked.

"I swear, Mr. Byrd, I don't know," he answered reverently. "I wait for guidance."

"Guidance?" I faltered.

"Yes—from on high."

"You depend on that—only?"

"Only!—Well, yes and no. I pray, Mr. Byrd—I pray."

"You have no other means?" I queried, with a sinking heart.

"What other means are there," he demanded with glowing eyes, "that the Lord can't supply? What detective in the world can equal the Lord—tell me that, Mr. Byrd."

I saw that I was in the presence of a fanatic and I stood abashed.

"The best man in the Department," Dibdin put in encouragingly. "Sergeant Cullum is the bureau of missing persons."

"Give me a little time," he urged again, with the fervid intensity of prayer—Time! And it was Alicia who was missing!

I shook his hand and gave him time and parted from him with a hope that I should not have to wait for his ecstatic visions to restore her.

"He'll find her!" Dibdin exclaimed reassuringly. "Never fear. If there is one thing I've learned, it's to accept the methods of people so long as they produce the results. Let them use the divining rod if they want to, or incantations with henbane and hellebore, or trances and visions, or prayer. This almost human race of ours is made up of some very odd fish," he added with a laugh, and he looked at me quizzically as though I were the oddest fish of them all.

"But an ecstatic policeman"—I murmured—

"Yes—queer—I know," said Dibdin, "but I don't care. And now, old boy, I've got to run back to the museum and take a squint at the work. Cheer up."

I was alone in my study after a pretense of eating supper with the children, when Jimmie burst in and flung himself upon me.

"I want to know where is Alicia," he demanded with quivering lips, and he burst into a pitiful freshet of bitter weeping. His childish tears fell like scalding lead upon my hands and I hugged the quivering small figure to me in an anguished embrace.

"Don't you want Laura to put you to bed?" I murmured with my lips against his ear.

"Don't want Laura," he sobbed chokingly; "want Alicia to give me my bath and put me to bed. Where is she? Why don't she come?"

It was a cry that tore at my heart as it echoed there and reverberated. I hugged him closer.

"I'll give you your bath, Jimmikins," I endeavored to soothe him, "and we'll float ships."

"'Licia—tells me—stories!" he sobbed out, as one broken with tragedy, and I declare I came very near to joining him in his grief.

"I'll—tell you a story—Jimmie," I gulped foolishly, "and until Alicia comes back you must be the fine little man you are—and let me."

"When is she coming back?"

"I am not sure, Jimmie—possibly to-morrow." It was my throbbing hope. For that we could go on any longer without her was simply inconceivable to me.

Gradually his paroxysm subsided. He grew quiescent in my arms and heaved a deep sigh as we nestled against each other in silence. It is fortunate that the grief of children is like a summer shower. For so intense is it while it lasts that any serious continuation of agony would rack their small frames to pieces.

"All right, Uncle Ranny," he murmured finally. "Will you come in and give me my bath? I'll go and run it—I know how, first the hot and then the cold. And I'll put the ships in and undress. Then you come in and tell me a long story while I sail them." And he ran out of the room in a little whirlwind of energy.

I sat bowed in silence for a few minutes and then heavily made my way to the bathroom.

"Is the temp'ture a'right?" queried Jimmie, with an intense air of responsibility, his erect nude little figure standing with a ship under each arm, like a symbol of man adventuring his petty argosies on this storm-beaten planet. I put my hand judicially into the water. How important is the temperature of a child's bath! It must be neither too hot nor too cold, or disastrous results might follow.

I began to tell him an ancient story of an island that proved to be a sleeping whale, but he was impatient of that.

"'Licia," he informed me in deprecating protest, "tells me stories of Mowgli in the jungle—out of the 'Jungle Book.'" I endeavored with a heavy heart to match Alicia, and gradually I became absorbed in my task and in Jimmie, so that the darkness of life fell away from me. The water splashed and the ships tacked about in wild maneuvers, while Jimmie kept reminding me that "he was listening, Uncle Ranny."

The great mystics are those who submerge their intellect and senses into night so that their souls emerge before them like the full moon out of the blackness. Every parent, I suppose, must be in part a mystic: for by centering his heart on little children he discerns the pulsating irresistible life of the universe, the past and the future, alpha and omega.

At least Jimmie was courteous enough to assure me, when he hugged me for the last time, with sleepy eyes, that my tale was won'erful. "But, oh, Uncle Ranny," he whispered, "say that Alicia will be back to-morrow."

I kissed him but made no promise. In the dining room Laura and Randolph were sitting over their books,—Laura grave with an anxious pucker in her white forehead and Randolph with dilated, somewhat fevered eyes. He was obviously thinking rather than reading. But I dared not enter into any more discussion of Alicia's absence that evening.

Only now after many days can I write down the events of the day following my last entry with anything approximating composure; and even now my fingers are tremulous as they hold the pencil.

I had risen early, for my sleep had been broken and fitful—as, indeed, how could it have been otherwise?

I was parched and burning within, to act, to do something, to range the city, the country—Good God, I thought, can a person like Alicia disappear in that way like a pebble in the sea? But my frenzy of thought, that seemed as if it would burst the poor narrow limits of my skull, produced no definite idea. I lashed against the bars of the brain like a beast in its cage.

I entertained no thought of going to the office that morning, but half an hour after I was up, that was the only thought that flooded my mind. There are blessings in a routine of daily labor that those engaged therein can hardly understand. The treadmill, I imagine, leaves the mule but little time for speculation or grief or any other emotions. I was that kind—or, rather that mule let loose—that could find oblivion nowhere better than in the treadmill. For routine can dull despair.

It was still half an hour before breakfast when my nephew Randolph came clattering down the stairs, meticulously dressed, though somewhat wild-eyed. He gave me the impression of having—he also—slept badly. "Uncle Ranny," he approached me, "are you going to the office this morning?"

"Yes, I think I am. Why, Randolph?"

"I'd like to go in to town with you—and go round—look around."

"What do you mean, my boy?"

"Somebody ought to be looking for Alicia all the time—don't you think so, Uncle Ranny? I'd like to try," and he looked away shamefaced.

A boy in his sixteenth year can be a considerable pillar in a household. I had somehow overlooked Randolph in that rôle. Perhaps I had been inclined to treat Laura's children too much as nestlings all, wholly dependent upon me? I experienced a thrill of pleasurable surprise in the boy's words and manner. He had said no word concerning his father, had asked no disconcerting questions. He merely desired to help.

"But of course there is somebody looking for Alicia," I informed him.

"Yes, I know, Uncle Ranny—a policeman! What does a policeman know about girls like Alicia? I—we talked a lot, she and I," he stammered. "I have a hunch I could sort of tell what she'd think of doing if she left home. Let me have a try at it, Uncle Ranny, please. It'll only be a few nickels in carfare."

"Certainly, my boy," I put my arm about his shoulders. To frustrate young intentions simply because they are young has never appealed to me as wisdom. "Come into town with me by all means. I am certain Alicia will come back"—he could not know the effort this easy answer was costing me—"but there is no reason why you shouldn't try to find her." I had thrown off any mask of secrecy with all excepting Jimmie. Insincerity is a difficult habit to wear.

"Thanks, Uncle Ranny," he answered with suppressed jubilation, and for the first time in our common history I suddenly felt that I had a companion in Randolph—that he was growing up.

When he left me at the station, charged with avuncular instructions that he was to telephone me at various times of the day and that he was to lunch with me if he could, I had a tender impulse to embrace this lad, Laura's first-born, before all the concourse. But I knew he would be shamed to death by such a demonstration. So I tapped him on the shoulder and we parted grinning to keep each other in heart. I experienced a fleeting intuition that Alicia would be restored to us, but I expected nothing at all from Randolph's romantic quest for her.