BOOK III.

XV.

FANTASTIC shapes of heavy leaf-shadows on blinding whiteness. Torrents of blue and lilac and crimson foaming over the branches of unknown trees. Azure distances, snow-peaks, silver reefs, and an unbroken glare of dead-white sunshine merging into a moonlight hardly whiter. Was there never any night, real, black, obliterating, in all these dazzling latitudes in which two desperate women had sought refuge?

They had “travelled.” It had been very interesting; and Anne was better. Certainly she was much better. They were on their way home now, moving at a leisurely pace—what was there to return for?—from one scene of gorgeous unreality to another. And all the while Anne had never spoken—never really spoken! She had simply, a day or two after Mrs. Clephane’s furtive trip to Baltimore, told her mother that her engagement was broken: “by mutual agreement” were the stiff old-fashioned words she used. As no one else, even among their nearest, had been let into the secret of that fleeting bond, there was no one to whom explanations were due; and the girl, her curt confidence to her mother once made, had withdrawn instantly into the rigid reserve she had maintained ever since. Just so, in former days, Kate Clephane had seen old Mrs. Clephane meet calamity. After her favourite daughter’s death the old woman had never spoken her name. And thus with Anne; her soul seemed to freeze about its secret. Even the physical resemblance to old Mrs. Clephane reappeared, and with it a certain asperity of speech, a sharp intolerance of trifles, breaking every now and again upon long intervals of smiling apathy.

During their travels the girl was more than ever attentive to her mother; but her solicitude seemed the result of a lesson in manners inculcated long ago (with the rest of her creed) by old Mrs. Clephane. It was impossible for a creature so young and eager to pass unseeingly through the scenes of their journey; but it was clear that each momentary enthusiasm only deepened the inner pang. And from all participation in that hidden conflict between youth and suffering the mother continued to feel herself shut out.

Nevertheless, she began to imagine that time was working its usual miracle. Anne’s face was certainly less drawn—Anne’s manner perhaps a shade less guarded. Lately she had begun to sketch again ... she had suggested one day their crossing from Rio to Marseilles, continuing their wanderings in the Mediterranean ... had spoken of Egypt and Crete for the winter....

Mrs. Clephane acquiesced, bought guide-books, read up furtively, and tried to temper zeal with patience. It would not do to seem too eager; she held her breath, waiting on her daughter’s moods, and praying for the appearance of the “some one else” whose coming mothers invoke in such contingencies. That very afternoon, sitting on the hotel balcony above a sea of flowers, she had suffered herself to wonder if Anne, who was off on a long riding excursion with a party of young people, might not return with a different look, the clear happy look of the last year’s Anne. The young English planter to whose hacienda they had gone had certainly interested her more than any one they had hitherto met.

The mother, late that evening, was still alone on the balcony when, from behind her, Anne’s shadow fell across the moonlight. The girl dropped into a seat. No, she wasn’t tired—wasn’t hungry—they had supped, on the way back, at a glorious place high up over Rio. Yes, the day had been wonderful; the beauty incredible; and the moonlit descent through the forest.... Anne lapsed into silence, her profile turned from her mother. Perhaps—who could tell? Her silence seemed heavy with promise. Suddenly she put out a hand to Kate.

“Mother, I want to make over all my money to you. It would have been yours if things had been different. It is yours, really; and I don’t want it—I hate it!” Her hand was trembling.

Mrs. Clephane trembled too. “But, Anne—how absurd! What can it matter? What difference can it make?”

“All the difference.” The girl lowered her voice. “It’s because I was too rich that he wouldn’t marry me.” It broke from her in a sob. “I can’t bear it—I can’t bear it!” She stretched her hand to the silver splendours beneath them. “All this beauty and glory in the world—and nothing in me but cold and darkness!”

Kate Clephane sat speechless. She remembered just such flashes of wild revolt in her own youth, when sea and earth and sky seemed joined in a vast conspiracy of beauty, and within her too all was darkness. For months she had been praying for this hour of recovered communion with her daughter; yet now that it had come, now that the barriers were down, she felt powerless to face what was beyond. If it had been any other man! Paralysed by the fact that it was just that one, she continued to sit silent, her hand on Anne’s sunken head.

“Why should you think it’s the money?” she whispered at last, to gain time.

“I know it—I know it! He told Nollie once that nothing would induce him to marry a girl with a fortune. He thought it an impossible position for a poor man.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“Not in so many words. But it was easy to guess. When he wrote to ... to give me back my freedom, he said he’d been mad to think we might marry ... that it was impossible ... there would always be an obstacle between us....” The girl lifted her head, her agonized eyes on her mother’s. “What obstacle could there be but my money?”

Kate Clephane had turned as cold as marble. At the word “obstacle” she stood up, almost pushing the girl from her. In that searching moonlight, what might not Anne read in her eyes?

“Come indoors, dear,” she said.

Anne followed her mechanically. In the high-ceilinged shadowy room Mrs. Clephane sat down in a wooden rocking-chair and the girl stood before her, tall and ghostly in her white linen riding-habit, the dark hair damp on her forehead.

“Come and sit by me, Anne.”

“No. I want you to answer me first—to promise.”

“But, my dear, what you suggest is madness. How can I promise such a thing? And why should it make any difference? Why should any man be humiliated by the fact of marrying a girl with money?”

“Ah, but Chris is different! You don’t know him.”

The mother locked her hands about the chair-arms. She sat looking down at the bare brick floor of the room, and at Anne’s two feet, slim and imperious, planted just before her in an attitude of challenge, of resistance. She did not dare to raise her eyes higher. “I don’t know him!” she repeated to herself.

“Mother, answer me—you’ve got to answer me!” The girl’s low-pitched voice had grown shrill; her swaying tall white presence seemed to disengage some fiery fluid. Kate Clephane suddenly recalled the baby Anne’s lightning-flashes of rage, and understood what reserves of violence still underlay her daughter’s calm exterior.

“How can I answer? I know what you’re suffering—but I can’t pretend to think that what you propose would make any difference.”

“You don’t think it was the money?”

Kate Clephane drew a deep breath, and clasped the chair-arms tighter. “No.”

“What was it, then?” Anne had once more sunk on her knees beside her mother. “I can’t bear not to know. I can’t bear it an hour longer,” she gasped out.

“It’s hard, dear ... I know how hard....” Kate put her arms about the shuddering body.

“What shall I do, mother? I’ve written, and he doesn’t answer. I’ve written three times. And yet I know—”

“You know?”

“He did love me, mother.”

“Yes, dear.”

“And there wasn’t any one else; I know that too.”

“Yes.”

“No one else that he cared about ... or who had any claim.... I asked him that before I promised to marry him.”

“Then, dear, there’s nothing more to say—or to do. You can only conclude that he gave you back your freedom because he wanted his.”

“But it was all so quick! How can anybody love one day, and not the next?”

Kate winced. “It does happen so—sometimes.”

“I don’t believe it—not of him and me! And there was the money; I know that. Mother, let me try; let me tell him that you’ve agreed to take it all back; that I shall have only the allowance you choose to make me.”

Mrs. Clephane again sat silent, with lowered head. She had not foreseen this torture.

“Don’t you think, dear, as you’ve written three times and had no answer, that you’d better wait? Better try to forget?”

The girl shook herself free and stood up with a tragic laugh. “You don’t know me either, mother!”

That word was crueller than the other; the mother shrank from it as if she had received a blow.

“I do know that, in such cases, there’s never any remedy but one. If your courage fails you, there’s your pride.”

“My pride? What’s pride, if one cares? I’d do anything to get him back. I only want you to do what I ask!”

Kate Clephane rose to her feet also. Her own pride seemed suddenly to start up from its long lethargy, and she looked almost defiantly at her defiant daughter.

“I can’t do what you ask.”

“You won’t?”

“I can’t.”

“You want me to go on suffering, then? You want to kill me?” The girl was close to her, in a white glare of passion. “Ah, it’s true—why should you care what happens to me? After all, we’re only strangers to each other.”

Kate Clephane’s first thought was: “I mustn’t let her see how it hurts—” not because of the fear of increasing her daughter’s suffering, but to prevent her finding out how she could inflict more pain. Anne, at that moment, looked as if the discovery would have been exquisite to her.

The mother dared not speak; she feared her whole agony would break from her with her first word. The two stood facing each other for a moment; then Mrs. Clephane put her hand out blindly. But the girl turned from it with a fierce “Don’t!” that seemed to thrust her mother still farther from her, and swept out of the room without a look.

XVI.

ANNE had decreed that they should return home; and they returned.

The day after the scene at Rio the girl had faltered out an apology, and the mother had received it with a silent kiss. After that neither had alluded to the subject of their midnight talk. Anne was as solicitous as ever for her mother’s comfort and enjoyment, but the daughter had vanished in the travelling companion. Sometimes, during those last weary weeks of travel, Kate Clephane wondered if any closer relation would ever be possible between them. But it was not often that she dared to look ahead. She felt like a traveller crawling along a narrow ledge above a precipice; a glance forward or down might plunge her into the depths.

As they drew near New York she recalled her other return there, less than a year before, and the reckless confidence with which she had entered on her new life. She recalled her first meeting with her daughter, her sense of an instant understanding on the part of each, and the way her own past had fallen from her at the girl’s embrace.

Now Anne seemed remoter than ever, and it was the mother’s past which had divided them. She shuddered at the fatuity with which she had listened to Enid Drover and Fred Landers when they assured her that she had won her daughter’s heart. “She’s taken a tremendous fancy to you—” Was it possible that that absurd phrase had ever satisfied her? But daughters, she said to herself, don’t take a fancy to their mothers! Mothers and daughters are part of each other’s consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

Well—this mother must put up with what she had, and make the most of it. Yes; for Anne’s sake she must try to make the most of it, to grope her own way and the girl’s through this ghastly labyrinth without imperilling whatever affection Anne still felt for her. So a conscientious chaperon might have reasoned—and what more had Kate Clephane the right to call herself?

They reached New York early in October. None of the family were in town; even Fred Landers, uninformed of the exact date of their return, was off shooting with Horace Maclew in South Carolina. Anne had wanted their arrival to pass unperceived; she told her mother that they would remain in town for a day or two, and then decide where to spend the rest of the autumn. On the steamer they languidly discussed alternatives; but, from the girl’s inability to decide, the mother guessed that she was waiting for something—probably a letter. “She’s written to him after all; she expects to find the answer when we arrive.”

They reached the house and went upstairs to their respective apartments. Everything in Anne’s establishment was as discreetly ordered as in a club; each lady found her correspondence in her sitting-room, and Kate Clephane, while she glanced indifferently over her own letters, sat with an anguished heart wondering what message awaited Anne.

They met at dinner, and she fancied the girl looked paler and more distant than usual. After dinner the two went to Kate’s sitting-room. Aline had already laid out some of the presents they had brought home: a Mexican turquoise ornament for Lilla, an exotic head-band of kingfishers’ feathers for Nollie, an old Spanish chronicle for Fred Landers. Mother and daughter turned them over with affected interest; then talk languished, and Anne rose and said goodnight.

On the threshold she paused. “Mother, I was odious to you that night at Rio.”

Kate started up with an impulsive gesture. “Oh, my darling, what does that matter? It was all forgotten long ago.”

“I haven’t forgotten it. I’m more and more ashamed of what I said. But I was dreadfully unhappy....”

“I know, dear, I know.”

The girl still stood by the door, clutching the knob in an unconscious hand. “I wanted to tell you that now I’m cured—quite cured.” Her smile was heart-breaking. “I didn’t follow your advice; I wrote to him. I told him—I pretended—that you were going to accept my plan of giving you back the money, and that I should have only a moderate allowance, so that he needn’t feel any inequality ... any sense of obligation....”

Kate listened with lowered head. “Perhaps you were right to write to him.”

“Yes, I was right,” Anne answered with a faint touch of self-derision. “For now I know. It was not the money; he has told me so. I’ve had a letter.”

“Ah—”

“I’m dismissed,” said the girl with an abrupt laugh.

“What do you mean, dear, when you say I was right?”

“I mean that there was another woman.” Anne came close to her, with the same white vehement face as she had shown during their nocturnal talk at Rio.

Kate’s heart stood still. “Another woman?”

“Yes. And you made me feel that you’d always suspected it.”

“No, dear ... really....”

“You didn’t?” She saw the terrible flame of hope rekindling in Anne’s eyes.

“Not—not about any one in particular. But of course, with a man ... a man like that....” (Should she go on, or should she stop?)

Anne was upon her with a cry. “Mother, what kind of a man?”

Fool that she was, not to have foreseen the consequences of such a slip! She sat before her daughter like a criminal under cross-examination, feeling that whatever word she chose would fatally lead her deeper into the slough of avowal.

Anne repeated her question with insistence. “You knew him before I did,” she added.

“Yes; but it’s so long ago.”

“But what makes you suspect him now?”

“Suspect? I suspect nothing!”

The girl stood looking at her fixedly under dark menacing brows. “I do, then! I wouldn’t allow myself to before; but all the while I knew there was another woman.” Between the sentences she drew short panting breaths, as though with every word speech grew more difficult. “Mother,” she broke out, “the day I went to Baltimore to see him the maid who opened the door didn’t want to let me in because there’d been a woman there two days before who’d made a scene. A scene—that’s what she said! Isn’t it horrible?” She burst into tears.

Kate Clephane sat stupefied. She could not yet grasp the significance of the words her daughter was pouring out, and repeated dully: “You went to Baltimore?” How secret Anne must be, she thought, not only to have concealed her visit at the time, but even to have refrained from any allusion to it during their stormy talk at Rio! How secret, since, even in moments of seeming self-abandonment, she could refrain from revealing whatever she chose to keep to herself! More acutely than ever, the mother had the sense of being at arm’s length from her child.

“Yes, I went to Baltimore,” said Anne, speaking now in a controlled incisive voice. “I didn’t tell you at the time because you were not well. It was just after you came back from Meridia, and had that nervous break-down—you remember? I didn’t want to bother you about my own affairs. But as soon as I got his letter saying the engagement was off I jumped into the first train, and went straight to Baltimore to see him.”

“And you did?” It slipped from Kate irresistibly.

“No. He was away; he’d left. But I didn’t believe it at the time; I thought the maid-servant had had orders not to let me in....” She paused. “Mother, it was too horrible; she took me for the woman who had made the scene. She said I looked just like her.”

Kate gasped: “The negress said so?”

Her question seemed to drop into the silence like a shout; it was as if she had let fall a platter of brass on a marble floor.

“The negress?” Anne echoed.

Kate Clephane sank down into the depths of her chair as if she had been withered by a touch. She pressed her elbows against her side to try to hide the trembling of her body.

“How did you know it was a negress, mother?”

Kate sat helpless, battling with confused possibilities of fear; and in that moment Anne leapt on the truth.

“It was you, mother—you were the other woman? You went to see him the day you said you’d been to Meridia?” The girl stood before her now like a blanched Fury.

“I did go to Meridia!” Kate Clephane declared.

“You went to Baltimore too, then. You went to his house; you saw him. You were the woman who made the scene.” Anne’s voice had mounted to a cry; but suddenly she seemed to regain a sense of her surroundings. At the very moment when Kate Clephane felt the flash of the blade over her head it was arrested within a hair’s-breadth of her neck. Anne’s voice sank to a whisper.

“Mother—you did that? It was really you—it was your doing? You’ve always hated him, then? Hated him enough for that?”

Ah, that blessed word—hated! When the other had trembled in the very air! The mother, bowed there, her shrunken body drawn in on itself, felt a faint expanding of the heart.

“No, dear; no; not hate,” she stammered.

“But it was you?” She suddenly understood that, all the while, Anne had not really believed it. But the moment for pretense was past.

“I did go to see him; yes.”

“To persuade him to break our engagement?”

“Anne—”

“Answer me, please.”

“To ask him—to try to make him see....”

The girl interrupted her with a laugh. “You made him break our engagement—you did it. And all this time—all these dreadful months—you let me think it was because he was tired of me!” She sprang to her mother and caught her by the wrists. Her hot fingers seemed to burn into Kate’s shivering flesh.

“Look at me, please, mother; no, straight in the eyes. I want to try to find out which of us you hated most; which of us you most wanted to see suffer.”

The mother disengaged herself and stood up. “As for suffering—if you look at me, you’ll see I’ve had my share.”

The girl seemed not to hear. “But why—why—why?” she wailed.

A reaction of self-defence came over Kate Clephane. Anne’s white-heat of ire seemed to turn her cold, and her self-possession returned.

“What is it you want me to tell you? I did go to see Major Fenno—yes. I wanted to speak to him privately; to ask him to reconsider his decision. I didn’t believe he could make you happy. He came round to my way of thinking. That’s all. Any mother would have done as much. I had the right—”

“The right?” Anne shrilled. “What right? You gave up all your rights over me when you left my father for another man!”

Mrs. Clephane rose with uncertain steps, and moved toward the door of her bedroom. On the threshold she paused and turned toward her daughter. Strength had come back to her with the thought that after all the only thing that mattered was to prevent this marriage. And that she might still do.

“The right of a friend, then, Anne. Won’t you even allow me that? You’ve treated me as a friend since you asked me to come back. You’ve trusted me, or seemed to. Trust me now. I did what I did because I knew you ought not to marry Major Fenno. I’ve known him for a great many years. I knew he couldn’t make you happy—make any woman happy. Some men are not meant to marry; he’s one of them. I know enough of his history to know that. And you see he recognized that I was right—”

Anne was still staring at her with the same fixed implacable brows. Then her face broke up into the furrows of young anguish, and she became again a helpless grief-tossed girl, battling blindly with her first sorrow. She flung up her arms, buried her head in them, and sank down by the sofa. Kate watched her for a moment, hesitating; then she stole up and laid an arm about the bowed neck. But Anne shook her off and sprang up.

“No—no—no!” she cried. They stood facing each other, as on that other cruel night.

“You don’t know me; you don’t understand me. What right have you to interfere with my happiness? Won’t you please say nothing more now? It was my own fault to imagine that we could ever live together like mother and daughter. A relation like that can’t be improvised in a day.” She flung a tragic look at her mother. “If you’ve suffered, I suppose it was my fault for asking you to make the experiment. Excuse me if I’ve said anything to hurt you. But you must leave me to manage my life in my own way.” She turned toward the door.

“Goodnight—my child,” Kate whispered.

XVII.

TWO days later Fred Landers returned.

Mrs. Clephane had sent a note begging him to call her up as soon as he arrived. When his call came she asked if she might dine with him that night, and he replied that she ought to have come without asking. Anne, he supposed, would honour him too?

No, she answered; Anne, the day before, had gone down to the Drovers’ on Long Island. She would probably be away for a few days. And would Fred please ask no one else to dine? He assured her that such an idea would never have occurred to him.

He received her in the comfortable shabby drawing-room which he had never changed since his mother and an old-maid sister had vanished from it years before. He indulged his own tastes in the library upstairs, leaving this chintzy room, with its many armchairs, the Steinway piano and the family Chippendale, much as Kate had known it when old Mrs. Landers had given her a bridal dinner. The memory of that dinner, and of Mrs. Landers, large, silvery, demonstrative, flashed through Mrs. Clephane’s mind. She saw herself in an elaborately looped gown, proudly followed by her husband, and enclosed in her hostess’s rustling embrace, while her present host, crimson with emotion and admiration, hung shyly behind his mother; and the memory gave her a pang of self-pity.

In the middle of the room she paused and looked about her. “It feels like home,” she said, without knowing what she was saying.

A flush almost as agitated as the one she remembered mounted to Landers’s forehead. She saw his confusion and pleasure, and was remotely touched by them.

“You see, I’m homeless,” she explained with a faint smile.

“Homeless?”

“Oh, I can’t remember when I was ever anything else. I’ve been a wanderer for so many years.”

“But not any more,” he smiled.

The double mahogany doors were thrown open. Landers, with his stiff little bow, offered her an arm, and they passed into a dusky flock-papered dining-room which seemed to borrow most of its lighting from the sturdy silver and monumental cut-glass of the dinner-table. A bunch of violets, compact and massive, lay by her plate. Everything about Fred Landers was old-fashioned, solid and authentic. She sank into her chair with a sense of its being a place of momentary refuge. She did not mean to speak till after dinner—then she would tell him everything she thought. “How delicious they are!” she murmured, smelling the violets.

In the library, after dinner, Landers settled her in his deepest armchair, moved the lamp away, pressed a glass of old Chartreuse on her, and said: “And now, what’s wrong?”

The suddenness and the perspicacity of the question took her by surprise. She had imagined he would leave the preliminaries to her, or at any rate beat about the subject in a clumsy effort to get at it. But she perceived that, awkward and almost timorous as he remained in smaller ways, the mere habit of life had given him a certain self-assurance at important moments. It was she who now felt a tremor of reluctance. How could she tell him—what could she tell him?

“Well, you know, I really am homeless,” she began. “Or at least, in remaining where I am I’m forfeiting my last shred of self-respect. Anne has told me that her experiment has been a mistake.”

“What experiment?”

“Having me back.”

“Is that what she calls it—an experiment?”

Mrs. Clephane nodded.

Fred Landers stood leaning against the mantelpiece, an unlit cigar in his hand. His face expressed perplexity and perturbation. “I don’t understand. What has happened? She seemed to adore you.”

“Yes; as a visitor; a chaperon; a travelling companion.”

“Well—that’s not so bad to begin with.”

“No; but it has nothing on earth to do with the real relation between a mother and daughter.”

“Oh, that—”

It was her turn to flush. “You agree with Anne, then, that I’ve forfeited all right to claim it?”

He seemed embarrassed. “What do you mean by claiming it?”

She hesitated a moment; then she began. It was not the story she had meant to tell; she had hardly opened her lips before she understood that it would be as impossible to tell that to Fred Landers as to Anne. For an instant, as he welcomed her to the familiar house, so full of friendly memories, she had had the illusion of nearness to him, the sense of a brotherly reassuring presence. But as she began to speak of Chris every one else in her new life except her daughter became remote and indistinct to her. She supposed it could not be otherwise. She had chosen to cast her lot elsewhere, and now, coming back after so many years, she found the sense of intimacy and confidence irreparably destroyed. What did she really know of the present Fred Landers, or he of her? All she found herself able to say was that when she had heard that Anne meant to marry Chris Fenno she had thought it her duty to try to prevent the marriage; and that the girl had guessed her interference and could not forgive her. She elaborated on this, lingering over the relatively insignificant details of her successive talks with her daughter in the attempt to delay the moment when Landers should begin to question her.

She saw that he was deeply disturbed, but perhaps not altogether sorry. He had never liked Chris, she knew, and the news of the engagement was clearly a shock to him. He said he had seen and heard nothing of Fenno since Anne and her mother had left. Landers, who could not recall that either Horace Maclew or Lilla had ever mentioned him, had concluded that the young man was no longer a member of their household, and probably not even in Baltimore. If he were, Lilla would have been sure to keep her hold on him; he was too useful a diner and dancer to be lost sight of—and much more in Lilla’s line, one would have fancied, than in Anne’s.

Kate Clephane winced at the unconscious criticism. “He gave me his word that he would go,” she said with a faint sigh of relief.

Fred Landers continued to lean meditatively against the chimney-piece.

“You said nothing at all to Anne herself at the time?” he asked, after another interval.

“No. Perhaps I was wrong; but I was afraid to. I felt I didn’t know her well enough—yet.”

Instantly she saw how he would interpret her avowal, and her colour rose again. She must have felt, then, that she knew Major Fenno better; the inference was inevitable.

“You found it easier to speak to Fenno?”

She hesitated. “I cared so much less for what he felt.”

“Of course,” he sighed. “And you knew damaging things about him? Evidently, since he broke the engagement when you told him to.”

Again she faltered. “I knew something of his past life—enough to be sure he wasn’t the kind of husband for Anne. I made him understand it. That’s all.”

“Ah. Well, I’m not surprised. I suspected he was trying for her, and I own I hated the idea. But now I suppose there’s no help for it—”

“No help?” She looked up in dismay.

“Well—is there? To be so savage with you she must be pretty well determined to have him back. How the devil are you going to stop it?”

“I can’t. But you—oh, Fred, you must!”—Her eyes clung imploringly to his troubled face.

“But I don’t know anything definite! If there is anything—anything one can really take hold of—you’ll have to tell me. I’ll do all I can; but if I interfere without good reason, I know it will only make Anne more determined. Have you forgotten what the Clephanes are like?”

She had lowered her head again, and sat desolately staring at the floor. With the little wood-fire playing on the hearth, and this honest kindly man looking down at her, how safe and homelike the room seemed! Yet her real self was not in it at all, but blown about on a lonely wind of anguish, outside in the night. And so it would always be, she supposed.

“Won’t you tell me exactly what there is against him?” she heard Landers repeat.

The answer choked in her throat. Finally she brought out: “Oh, I don’t know ... women ... the usual thing.... He’s light....”

“But is it all just hearsay? Or have you proof—proof of any one particular rotten thing?”

“Isn’t his giving up and going away sufficient proof?”

“Not if he comes back now when she sends for him.”

The words shot through her like a stab. “Oh, but she mustn’t—she can’t!”

“You’re fairly sure he will come if she does?”

Kate Clephane put up her hands and pressed them against her ears. She could not bear to hear another question. What had been the use of coming to Fred Landers? He had no help to give her, and his insight had only served to crystallize her hazy terrors. She rose slowly from her armchair and held out her hand with a struggling smile.

“You’re right. I suppose there’s nothing more to do.”

“But you’re not going?”

“Yes; I’m tired. And I want to be by myself—to think. I must decide about my own future.”

“Your own future? Oh, nonsense! Let all this blow over. Wait till Anne comes back. The chief thing, of course, is that you should stay with her, whatever happens.”

She put her hand in his. “Goodbye, Fred. And thank you.”

“I’ll do all I can, you know,” he said, as he followed her down the stairs. “But you mustn’t desert Anne.”

The taxi he had called carried her back to her desolate house.

XVIII.

HER place was beside Anne—that was all she had got out of Fred Landers. And in that respect she was by no means convinced that her instinct was not surer than his, that she was not right in agreeing with her daughter that their experiment had been a failure.

Yet, even if it had, she could not leave Anne now; not till she had made sure there was no further danger from Chris. Ah—if she were once certain of that, it would perhaps be easiest and simplest to go! But not till then.

She did not know when Anne was coming back; no word had come from her. Mrs. Clephane had an idea that the house-keeper knew; but she could not ask the house-keeper. So for another twenty-four hours she remained on, with a curious sense of ghostly unconcern, while she watched Aline unpack her trunks and “settle” her into her rooms for the winter.

It was on the third day that Nollie Tresselton telephoned. She was in town, and asked if she might see Mrs. Clephane at once. The very sound of her voice brought reassurance; and Kate Clephane sat counting the minutes till she appeared.

She had come up from the Drovers’, as Kate had guessed; and she brought an embarrassed message of apology from Anne. “She couldn’t write—she’s too upset. But she’s so sorry for what she said ... for the way she said it. You must try to forgive her....”

“Oh, forgive her—that’s nothing!” the mother cried, her eyes searching the other’s face. But Nollie’s vivid features were obscured by the embarrassment of the message she had brought. She looked as if she were tangled in Anne’s confusion.

“That’s nothing,” Kate Clephane repeated. “I hurt her horribly too—I had to. I couldn’t expect her to understand.”

Mrs. Tresselton looked relieved. “Ah, you do see that? I knew you would! I told her so—” She hesitated, and then went on, with a slight tremor in her voice: “Your taking it in that way will make it all so much easier—”

But she stopped again, and Kate, with a sinking heart, stood up. “Nollie; she wants me to go?”

“No, no! How could you imagine it? She wants you to look upon this house as yours; she has always wanted it.”

“But she’s not coming back to it?”

The younger woman laid a pleading hand on Mrs. Clephane’s arm. “Aunt Kate—you must be patient. She feels she can’t; not now, at any rate.”

“Not now? Then it’s she who hasn’t forgiven?”

“She would, you know—oh, so gladly!—she’d never think again of what’s happened. Only she fears—”

“Fears?”

“Well—that your feeling about Chris is still the same....”

Mrs. Clephane caught at the hand that lay on her arm. “Nollie! She knows where he is? She’s seen him?”

“No; but she means to. He’s been very ill—he’s had a bad time since the engagement was broken. And that makes her feel still more strongly—” The younger woman broke off and looked at Mrs. Clephane compassionately, as if trying to make her understand the hopelessness of the struggle. “Aunt Kate, really ... what’s the use?”

“The use? Where is he, Nollie? Here—now—in New York?”

Mrs. Tresselton was silent; the pity in her gaze had turned to a guarded coolness. Of course Nollie couldn’t understand—never would! Of course they were all on Anne’s side. Kate Clephane stood looking helplessly about her. The memory of old scenes under that same roof—threats, discussions, dissimulations and inward revolts—arose within her, and she felt on her shoulders the whole oppression of the past.

“Don’t think,” Nollie continued, her expression softening, “that Anne hasn’t tried to understand ... to make allowances. The boy you knew must have been so different from the Major Fenno we all like and respect—yes, respect. He’s ‘made good’, you see. It’s not only his war record, but everything since. He’s worked so hard—done so well at his various jobs—and Anne’s sure that if he had the chance he would make himself a name in the literary world. All that naturally makes it more difficult for her to understand your objection—or your way of asserting it.”

Mrs. Clephane lifted imploring eyes to her face. “I don’t expect Anne to understand; not yet. But you must try to, Nollie; you must help me.”

“I want to, Aunt Kate.” The young woman stood before her, affectionately perplexed. “If there’s anything ... anything really wrong ... you ought to tell me.”

“I do tell you,” Kate panted.

“Well—what is it?”

Silence fell—always the same silence. Kate glanced desperately about the imprisoning room. Every panel and moulding of its walls, every uncompromising angle or portly curve of its decorous furniture, seemed equally leagued against her, forbidding her, defying her, to speak.

“Ask Fred Landers,” she said, at bay.

“But I have; I saw him on my way here. And he says he doesn’t know—that you wouldn’t explain.”

“Why should I have to explain? I’ve said Major Fenno ought not to marry Anne. I’ve known him longer than any of you. Isn’t it likely that I know him better?”

The words came from her precipitate and shrill; she felt she was losing all control of her face and voice, and lifted her handkerchief to her lips to hide their twitching.

“Aunt Kate—!” Nollie Tresselton gasped it out on a new note of terror; then she too fell silent, slowly turning her eyes away.

In that instant Kate Clephane saw that she had guessed, or if not, was at least on the point of guessing; and fresh alarm possessed the mother. She tried to steady herself, to raise new defences against this new danger. “Some men are not meant to marry: they’re sure to make their wives unhappy. Isn’t that reason enough? It’s a question of character. In those ways, I don’t believe character ever changes. That’s all.”

“That’s all.” The word was said. She had been challenged again, and had again shrunk away from the challenge.

Nollie Tresselton drew a deep breath of relief. “After knowing him so well as a boy, you naturally don’t want to say anything more; but you think they’re unsuited to each other.”

“Yes—that’s it. You do see?”

The younger woman considered; then she took Mrs. Clephane by the hand. “I do see. And I’ll try to help—to persuade Anne to put off deciding. Perhaps after she’s seen him it will be easier....”

Nollie was again silent, and Mrs. Clephane understood that, whatever happened, the secret of Chris’s exact whereabouts was to be kept from her. She thought: “Anne’s afraid to have me meet him again,” and there was a sort of fierce satisfaction in the thought.

Nollie was gathering up her wrap and hand-bag. She had to get back to Long Island, she said; Kate understood that she meant to return to the Drovers’. As she reached the door a last impulse of avowal seized the older woman. What if, by giving Nollie a hint of the truth, she could make sure of her support and thus secure Anne’s safety? But what argument against the marriage would be more efficacious on Nollie’s lips than on her own? One only—the one that no one must ever use. The terror lest Nollie, possessed of that truth, and sickened by it, should after all reveal it in a final effort to prevent the marriage, prevailed over Mrs. Clephane’s other fears. Once Nollie knew, Anne would surely get to know; the horror of that possibility sealed the mother’s lips.

Nollie, from the threshold, still looked at her wistfully, expectantly, as if half-awaiting the confession; but Mrs. Clephane held out her hand without a word.

“I must find out where he is.” It was Kate’s first thought after the door had closed on her visitor. If he were in New York—and he evidently was—she, Kate Clephane, must run him down, must get speech with him, before he had been able to see her daughter.

But how was she to set about it? Fred Landers did not even know if he were still with Horace Maclew or not—for the mere fact of Maclew’s not alluding to him while they were together meant nothing, less than nothing. And even if he had left the Maclews, the chances were that Lilla knew where he was, and had already transmitted Anne’s summons.

Mrs. Clephane consulted the telephone book, but of course in vain. Then, after some hesitation, she rang up Horace Maclew’s house in Baltimore. No one was there, but she finally elicited from the servant who answered the telephone that Mrs. Maclew was away on a motor trip. Perhaps Mr. Maclew could be reached at his country-place.... Kate tried the country-place, but Mr. Maclew had gone to Chicago.

The sense of loneliness and helplessness closed in on her more impenetrably than ever. Night came, and Aline reminded her that she had asked to have her dinner brought up on a tray. Solitary meals in John Clephane’s dining-room were impossible to her.

“I don’t want any dinner.”

Aline’s look seemed to say that she knew why, and her mistress hastily emended: “Or just some bouillon and toast. Whatever’s ready—”

She sat down to it without changing her dress. Every gesture, every act, denoting intimacy with that house, or the air of permanence in her relation to it, would also have been impossible. Again she had the feeling of sitting in a railway station, waiting for a train to come in. But now she knew for what she was waiting.

At the close of her brief meal Aline entered briskly with fruit and coffee. Her harsh face illuminated with curiosity, she handed her mistress a card. “The gentleman is downstairs. He hopes Madame will excuse the hour.” Her tone seemed to imply: “Madame, in this case, will excuse everything!” and Kate cast a startled glance at the name.

He had come to her, then—had come of his own accord! She felt dizzy with relief and fear. Fear uppermost—yes; was she not always afraid of him?

XIX.

CHRIS FENNO stood in the drawing-room. The servant who received him had turned on a blast of lamps and wall-lights, and in the hard overhead glare he looked drawn and worn, like a man recovering from severe illness. His clothes, too, Kate fancied, were shabbier; everything in his appearance showed a decline, a defeat.

She had not much believed in his illness when Nollie spoke of it; the old habit of incredulity was too strong in her. But now his appearance moved her. She felt herself responsible, almost guilty. But for her folly, she thought, he might have been standing before her with a high head, on easy terms with the world.

“You’ve been ill!” she exclaimed.

His gesture brushed that aside. “I’m well now, thanks.” He looked her in the face and added: “May we have a few minutes’ talk?”

She faltered: “If you think it necessary.” Inwardly she had already begun to tremble. When his blue eyes turned to that harsh slate-gray, and the two perpendicular lines deepened between his brows, she had always trembled.

“You’ve made it necessary,” he retorted, his voice as harsh as his eyes.

“I?”

“You’ve broken our compact. It’s not my doing. I stuck to my side of it.” He flung out the short sentences like blows.

Her heart was beating so wildly that she could not follow what he said. “What do you mean?” she stammered.

“That you agreed to help me if I gave up Anne. God knows what your idea of helping me was. To me it meant only one thing: your keeping quiet, keeping out of the whole business, and trusting me to carry out my side of the bargain—as I did. I broke our engagement, chucked my job, went away. And you? Instead of keeping out of it, of saying nothing, you’ve talked against me, insinuated God knows what, and then refused to explain your insinuations. You’ve put me in such a position that I’ve got to take back my word to you, or appear to your daughter and your family as a man who has run away because he knew he couldn’t face the charge hanging over him.”

It was only in the white-heat of anger that he spoke with such violence, and at such length; he seemed spent, and desperately at bay, and the thought gave Kate Clephane courage.

“Well—can you face it?” she asked.

His expression changed, as she had so often seen it change. From menace it passed to petulance and then became almost pleading in its perplexity. She said to herself: “It’s the first time I’ve ever been brave with him, and he doesn’t know how to take it.” But even then she felt the precariousness of the advantage. His ready wit had so often served him instead of resolution. It served him now.

“You do mean to make the charge, then?” he retorted.

She stood silent, feeling herself defeated, and at the same time humiliated that their angry thoughts should have dragged them down to such a level.

“Don’t sneer—” she faltered.

“Sneer? At what? I’m in dead earnest—can’t you see it? You’ve ruined me—or very nearly. I’m not speaking now of my feelings; that would make you sneer, probably. At any rate, this is no time for discussing them. I’m merely putting my case as a poor devil who has to earn his living, a man who has his good name to defend. On both counts you’ve done me all the harm you could.”

“I had to stop this marriage.”

“Very well. I agreed to that. I did what I’d promised. Couldn’t you let it alone?”

“No. Because Anne wouldn’t. She wanted to ask you to come back. She saw I couldn’t bear it—she suspected me of knowing something. She insisted.”

“And you sacrificed my good name rather—”

“Oh, I’d sacrifice anything. You’d better understand that.”

“I do understand it. That’s why I’m here. To tell you I consider that what you’ve done has freed me from my promise.”

She stretched out her hands as if to catch him back. “Chris—no, stay! You can’t! You can’t! You know you can’t!”

He stood leaning against the chimney-piece, his arms crossed, his head a little bent and thrust forward, in the attitude of sullen obstinacy that she knew so well. And all at once in her own cry she heard the echo of other cries, other entreaties. She saw herself in another scene, stretching her arms to him in the same desperate entreaty, with the same sense of her inability to move him, even to reach him. Her tears overflowed and ran down.

“You don’t mean you’ll tell her?” she whispered.

He kept his dogged attitude. “I’ve got to clear myself—somehow.”

“Oh, don’t tell her, don’t tell her! Chris, don’t tell her!”

As the cry died on her lips she understood that, in uttering it, she had at last cast herself completely on his mercy. For it was not impossible that, if other means failed, he would risk justifying himself to Anne by revealing the truth. There were times when he was reckless enough to risk anything. And if Kate were right in her conjecture—if he had the audacity he affected—then his hold over her was complete, and he knew it. If any one else told Anne, the girl’s horror would turn her from him at once. But what if he himself told her? All this flashed on Kate Clephane in the same glare of enlightenment.

There was a long silence. She had sunk into a chair and hidden her face in her hands. Presently, through the enveloping cloud of her misery, she felt his nearness, and a touch on her shoulder.

“Kate—won’t you try to understand; to listen quietly?”

She lifted her eyes and met his fugitively. They had lost their harshness, and were almost frightened. “I was angry when I came here—a man would be,” he continued. “But what’s to be gained by our talking to each other in this way? You were awfully kind to me in old times; I haven’t forgotten. But is that a reason for being so hard on me now? I didn’t bring this situation on myself—you’re my witness that I didn’t. But here it is; it’s a fact; we’ve got to face it.”

She lowered her eyes and voice to whisper painfully: “To face Anne’s love for you?”

“Yes.”

“Her determination—?”

“Her absolute determination.”

His words made her tremble again; there had always been moments when his reasonableness alarmed her more than his anger, because she knew that, to be so gentle, he must be certain of eventually gaining his point. But she gathered resolution to say: “And if I take back my threats, as you call them? If I take back all I’ve said—‘clear’ you entirely? That’s what you want, I understand? If I promise that,” she panted, “will you promise too—promise me to find a way out?”

His hand fell from her shoulder, and he drew back a step. “A way out—now? But there isn’t any.”

Mrs. Clephane stood up. She remembered wondering long ago—one day when he had been very tender—how cruel Chris could be. The conjecture, then, had seemed whimsical, almost morbid; now she understood that she had guessed in him from the outset this genius for reaching, at the first thrust, to the central point of his antagonist’s misery.

“You’ve seen my daughter, then?”

“I’ve seen her—yes. This morning. It was she who sent me here.”

“If she’s made up her mind, why did she send you?”

“To tell you how she’s suffering. She thinks, you know—” He wavered again for a second or two, and then brought out: “She’s very unhappy about the stand you take. She thinks you ought to say something to ... to clear up....”

“What difference will it make, if she means to marry you?”

“Why—the immense difference of her feeling for you. She’s dreadfully hurt ... she’s very miserable....”

“But absolutely determined?”

Again he made an embarrassed gesture of acquiescence.

Kate Clephane stood looking about the rich glaring room. She felt like a dizzy moth battering itself to death against that implacable blaze. She closed her lids for an instant.

“I shall tell her, then; I shall tell her the truth,” she said suddenly.

He stood in the doorway, his hard gaze upon her. “Well, tell her—do tell her; if you want never to see her again,” he said.

XX.

HE must have been very sure of her not acting on his final challenge, or he would not have dared to make it. That was the continuous refrain of Kate Clephane’s thoughts as the train carried her down to Long Island the next morning.

“He’s convinced I shall never tell her; but what if I do?” The thought sustained her through the long sleepless night, and gave her the strength and clearness of mind to decide that she must at once see Anne, however little her daughter might desire the meeting. After all, she still had that weapon in her depleted armoury: she could reveal the truth.

At the station she found one of the Drover motors, and remembered with a start that it was a Saturday, and that she would probably come upon a large house-party at her sister-in-law’s. But to her relief she learned that the motor had only brought a departing visitor to the up-train. She asked to be driven back in it, and in a few moments was rolling between the wrought-iron gates and down the long drive to the house. The front door stood open, and she went into the hall. The long oak tables were so laden with golf-sticks, tennis racquets and homespun garments that she saw she had been right in guessing she would encounter a houseful. But it was too late to turn back; and besides, what did the other people matter? They might, if they were numerous enough, make it easier for her to isolate herself with Anne.

The hall seemed empty; but as she advanced she saw a woman’s figure lazily outstretched in a deep armchair before the fire. Lilla Maclew rose from the chair to greet her.

“Hallo—Aunt Kate?” Mrs. Clephane caught the embarrassment in her niece’s rich careless voice, and guessed that the family had already been made aware of the situation existing between Anne and Anne’s mother, and probably, therefore, of the girl’s engagement. But Lilla Maclew was even more easy, self-confident and indifferent than Lilla Gates had been. The bolder dash of peroxyde on her hair, and the glint of jewels on her dusky skin, made her look like a tall bronze statue with traces of gilding on it.

“Hallo,” she repeated, rather blankly; “have you come to lunch?”

“I’ve come to see Anne,” Anne’s mother answered.

Lilla’s constraint visibly increased, and with it her sullen reluctance to make any unnecessary effort. One hadn’t married money, her tone proclaimed, to be loaded up like this with family bothers.

“Anne’s out. She’s gone off with Nollie to a tennis match or something. I’m just down; we played bridge till nearly daylight, and I haven’t seen anybody this morning. I suppose mother must be somewhere about.”

She glanced irritably around her, as if her look ought to have been potent enough to summon her mother to the spot; and apparently it was, for a door opened, and Mrs. Drover appeared.

“Kate! I didn’t know you were here! How did you come?” Her hostess’s mild countenance betrayed the same embarrassment as Lilla’s, and under it Mrs. Clephane detected the same aggrieved surprise. Having at last settled her own daughter’s difficulties, Mrs. Drover’s eyes seemed to ask, why should she so soon be called upon to deal with another family disturbance? Even juries, after a protracted trial, are excused from service for seven years; yet here she was being drawn into the thick of a new quarrel when the old one was barely composed.

“Anne’s out,” she added, offering a cool pink cheek to her sister-in-law.

“May I wait, then? I came to see her,” Kate said timidly.

“Of course, my dear! You must stay to lunch.” Mrs. Drover’s naturally ceremonious manner became stiff with apprehension. “You look tired, you know; this continuous travelling must be very exhausting. And the food!... Yes; Anne ought to be back for lunch. She and Nollie went off to the Glenvers’ to see the tennis finals; didn’t they, Lilla? Of course I can’t promise they’ll be back ... but you must stay....” She rang and gave orders that another seat should be put at table. “We’re rather a large party; you won’t mind? The men are off at a polo practice at Hempstead. Dawson, how many shall we be for lunch?” she asked the butler. Under her breath she added: “Yes; champagne.” If we ever need it, she concluded in a parenthetic glance, it will be today!

The hall was already filling up with a jocund bustle of Drovers and Tresseltons. Young, middle-aged and elderly, they poured out of successive motors, all ruddy, prosperous, clamouring for food. Hardly distinguishable from the family were the week-end friends returning with them from one sportive spectacle or another. As Kate Clephane stood among them, going through the mechanical gestures of greeting and small-talk, she felt so tenuous and spectral that she almost wondered how she could be visible to their hearty senses. They were all glad to see her, all a little surprised at her being there, and all soon forgetful of their own surprise in discussing the more important questions of polo, tennis and lunch. Once more she had the impression of being hurried with them down a huge sliding stairway that perpetually revolved upon itself, and once more she recalled her difficulty in telling one of them from another, and in deciding whether it was the Tresseltons or the Drovers who had the smallest noses.

“But Anne—where’s Anne?” Hendrik Drover enquired, steering the tide of arrivals toward the shining stretch of a long luncheon-table. He put Mrs. Clephane at his left, and added, as he settled her in her seat: “Anne and Nollie went off early to the Glenver finals. But Joe was there too—weren’t you, Joe?”

He did not wait for Joe Tresselton’s answer, but addressed himself hurriedly to the lady on his right. Kate had the feeling that they all thought she had committed an error of taste in appearing among them at that particular moment, but that it was no business of theirs, after all, and they must act in concert in affecting that nothing could be more natural. The Drovers and Tresseltons were great at acting in concert, and at pretending that whatever happened was natural, usual, and not of a character to interfere with one’s lunch. When a member of the tribe was ill, the best doctors and most expensive nurses were summoned, but the illness was spoken of as a trifling indisposition; when misfortune befell any one of them, it was not spoken of at all. Taking Lilla for granted had brought this art to the highest point of perfection, and her capture of Horace Maclew had fully confirmed its usefulness.

All this flashed through Kate Clephane while she refused the champagne ordered on her behalf, and pretended to eat Maryland chicken and corn soufflé; but under the surface-rattle of her thoughts a watchful spirit brooded haggardly on the strangeness and unreality of the scene. She had come, in agony of soul, to seek her daughter, to have speech with her at all costs; and the daughter was away watching a tennis match, and no one seemed surprised or concerned. Life, even Anne’s life, was going on in its usual easy way. The girl had found her betrothed again, and been reunited to him; what would it matter to her, or to her approving family, if the intruder who for a few months had gone through the pretence of being one of them, and whose delusion they had good-naturedly abetted, should vanish again from the group? As she looked at them all, so obtuse and so powerful, so sure of themselves and each other, her own claim to belong to them became incredible even to herself. She had made her choice long ago, and she had not chosen them; and now their friendly indifference made the fact clear.

Well—perhaps it also made her own course clearer. She was as much divided from them already as death could divide her. Why not die, then—die altogether? She would tell Anne the truth, and then go away and never see her again; and that would be death....

“Ah, here they are!” Hendrik Drover called out genially. Lunch was over; the guests, scattered about in the hall and billiard-room, were lighting their cigarettes over coffee and liqueurs. Mrs. Clephane, who had drifted out with the rest, and mechanically taken her cup of coffee as the tray passed her, lifted her head and saw Anne and Nollie Tresselton. Anne entered first. She paused to take off her motor coat, glanced indifferently about her, and said to Mrs. Drover: “You didn’t wait for us, Aunt Enid? We were so late that we stopped to lunch at Madge’s—.” Then she saw her mother and her pale cheek whitened.

Mrs. Clephane’s eyes filled, and she stood motionless. Everything about her was so blurred and wavering that she dared not stir, or even attempt to set down her cup.

“Mother!” the girl exclaimed. With a quick movement she made her way through the cluster of welcoming people, and went up with outstretched arms to Mrs. Clephane.

For a moment the two held each other; then Mrs. Drover, beaming up to them, said benevolently: “Your mother must be awfully tired, Anne. Do carry her off to your own quarters for a quiet talk—” and dazed, trembling, half-fearing she was in a dream from which the waking would be worse than death, Mrs. Clephane found herself mounting the stairs with her daughter.

On the first landing she regained her senses, said to herself: “She thinks I’ve come to take back what I said,” and tried to stiffen her soul against this new form of anguish. Anne moved silently at her side. After the first cry and the first kiss she had drawn back into herself, perhaps obscurely conscious of some inward resistance in her mother. But when the bedroom door had closed on them she drew Mrs. Clephane down into an armchair, dropped on her knees beside it, and whispered: “Mother—how could you and I ever give each other up?”

The words sounded like an echo of the dear unuttered things the mother had heard said to herself long ago, in her endless dialogues with an invisible Anne. No tears rose to her eyes, but their flood seemed to fill her thirsty breast. She drew Anne’s head against it. “Anne ... little Anne....” Her fingers crept through the warm crinklings of hair, wound about the turn of the temples, and slipped down the cheeks. She shut her eyes, softly saying over her daughter’s name.

Anne was the first to speak. “I’ve been so unhappy. I wanted you so to come.”

“Darling, you were sure I would?”

“How could I tell? You seemed so angry.”

“With you? Never, child!”

There was a slight pause; then, raising herself, the girl slipped her arms about her mother’s neck.

“Nor with him, any longer?”

The chill of reality smote through Mrs. Clephane’s happy trance. She felt herself turning again into the desolate stranger who had stood below watching for Anne’s return.

“Mother—you see, I want you both,” she heard the girl entreating; and “Now!” the inward voice admonished her.

Now indeed was the time to speak; to make an end. It was clear that no compromise would be of any use. Anne had obviously imagined that her mother had come to forgive and be forgiven, and that Chris was to be included in the general amnesty. On no other terms would any amnesty be accepted. Through the girl’s endearments Kate felt, as never before, the steely muscles of her resolution.

Anne pressed her closer. “Can’t we agree, mother, that I must take my chance—and that, if the risks are as great as you think, you’ll be there to help me? After all, we’ve all got to buy our own experience, haven’t we? And perhaps the point of view about ... about early mistakes ... is more indulgent now than in your time. But I don’t want to discuss that,” the girl hurried on. “Can’t we agree not to discuss anything—not even Chris—and just be the perfect friends we were before? You’d say yes if you knew the difference it has made, this last year, to have you back!” She lifted her face close to Mrs. Clephane’s to add, with a half-whimsical smile: “Mothers oughtn’t ever to leave their daughters.”

Kate Clephane sat motionless in that persuasive hold. It did not seem to her, at the moment, as if she and her child were two, but as if her whole self had passed into the young body pressed pleadingly against her.

“How can I leave her—how can I ever leave her?” was her only thought.

“You see,” the cajoling voice went on, “when I asked you to come back and live with me, though I did want you to, most awfully, I wasn’t as sure ... well, as sure as Uncle Fred was ... that the experiment would be a success—a perfect success. My life had been rather lonely, but it had been very independent too, in spite of Granny, and I didn’t know how well I should behave to my new mother, or whether she’d like me, or whether we’d be happy together. And then you came, and the very first day I forgot all my doubts—didn’t you?”

Kate Clephane assented: “The very first day.”

“And every day afterward, as I saw how right Uncle Fred had been, and how perfectly he’d remembered what you were, and what you would have been to me if we hadn’t been separated when I was a baby, I was more and more grateful to you for coming, and more and more anxious to make you forget that we hadn’t always been together.”

“You did make me forget it—”

“And then, suddenly, the great gulf opened again, and there I was on one side of it, and you on the other, just as it was in all those dreary years when I was without you; and it seemed as if it was you who had chosen again that we should be divided, and in my unhappiness I said dreadful things.... I know I did....”

Kate felt as if it were her own sobs that were shaking her daughter’s body. She held her fast, saying over and over, as a mother would to a child that has fallen and hurt itself: “There, there ... don’t cry.” She no longer knew what she herself was feeling. All her consciousness had passed into Anne. This young anguish, which is the hardest of all to bear, must be allayed: she was ready to utter any words that should lift that broken head from her breast.

“My Anne—how could I ever leave you?” she whispered. And as she spoke she felt herself instantly caught in the tight net of her renunciation. If she did not tell Anne now she would never tell her—and it was exactly on this that Chris had counted. He had known that she would never speak.

XXI.

IT had been decided that Mrs. Clephane must, of course, stay over the Sunday; on Monday morning she would return to town with Anne. Meanwhile Aline was summoned with week-end raiment; and Kate Clephane, after watching the house-party drive off to a distant polo match, remained alone in the great house with her sister-in-law.

Mrs. Drover’s countenance, though worn from the strain of incessant hospitality, had lost its look of perturbation. It was clear that the affectionate meeting between mother and daughter had been a relief to the whole family, and Mrs. Drover’s ingenuous eye declared that since now, thank heaven, that matter was settled, there need be no farther pretence of mystery. She invited her sister-in-law to join her in her own sitting-room over a quiet cup of tea, and as she poured it out observed with a smile that she supposed the wedding would take place before Christmas.

“The wedding? Anne’s wedding?”

“Why, my dear, isn’t everything settled? We all supposed that was what you’d come down for. She told us of her engagement as soon as she arrived.” Wrinkles of apprehension reluctantly reformed themselves on Mrs. Drover’s brow. “At least you might have let me have my tea without this new worry!” her look seemed to protest. “Hendrik has the highest opinion of Major Fenno, you know,” she continued, in a tone that amicably sought to dismiss the subject.

Kate Clephane put down her untasted cup. What could she answer? What was the use of answering at all?

Misled by her silence, Mrs. Drover pursued with a clearing brow: “Of course nowadays, with the cut of everything changing every six months, there’s no use in ordering a huge trousseau. Besides, Anne tells me they mean to go to Europe almost immediately; and whatever people say, it is more satisfactory to get the latest models on the spot....”

“Oh, Enid—Anne mustn’t marry him!” Kate Clephane cried, starting to her feet.

Mrs. Drover set down her own cup. Lines of disapproval hardened about her small concise mouth; but she had evidently resolved to restrain herself to the last limit of sisterly forbearance.

“Now, my dear, do sit down again and drink your tea quietly. What good will all this worrying do? You look feverish—and as thin as a rail. Are you sure you haven’t picked up one of those dreadful tropical microbes?... Of course, I understand your being unhappy at parting so soon again with Anne.... She feels it too; I know she does. It’s a pity you couldn’t have been together a little longer, just you two; but then—. And, after all, since Anne wants you to keep the Fifth Avenue house for yourself, why shouldn’t the young people buy that property just round the corner? Then the lower floors of the two houses could be thrown into one for entertaining. I’m not clever about plans, but Lilla’ll tell you exactly how it could be done. She’s got hold of such a clever young architect to modernize their Baltimore house. Of course, though Horace didn’t realize it, it was all library; no room for dancing. And I daresay Anne—not that Anne ever cared much for dancing.... But I hear Major Fenno likes going out, and a young wife can’t make a greater mistake than to have a dull house if her husband is fond of gaiety. Lilla, now, has quite converted Horace—”

Kate Clephane had reseated herself and was automatically turning the spoon about in her cup. “It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare.” The thought, flashing in on her aching brain, suddenly quieted her, helped her to compose her features, and even to interject the occasional vague murmur which was all her sister-in-law needed to feed her flow of talk. The mention of the Maclews and their clever architect had served to deflect the current of Mrs. Drover’s thoughts, and presently she was describing how wonderfully Lilla managed Horace, and how she and the architect had got him to think he could not live without the very alterations he had begun by resolutely opposing, on the ground that they were both extravagant and unnecessary.

“Just an innocent little conspiracy, you know.... They completely got the better of him, and now he’s delighted, and tells everybody it was his own idea,” Mrs. Drover chuckled; and then, her voice softening, and a plump hand reassuringly outstretched to Mrs. Clephane: “You’ll see, my dear, after you get over the first loneliness, what a lovely thing it is to have one’s child happily married.”

“It won’t happen; it can’t be; he’ll never dare!” the other mother continued to murmur to herself.

Horace Maclew, among numerous other guests, arrived for dinner. He sat nearly opposite Mrs. Clephane, and in the strange whirl and dazzle that surrounded her she instinctively anchored her gaze on his broad frame and ponderous countenance. What had his marriage done to him, she wondered, and what weight had it given him in the counsels of his new family? She had known of him but vaguely before, as the conscientious millionaire who collects works of art and relieves suffering; she imagined him as having been brought up by equally conscientious parents, themselves wealthy and scrupulous, and sincerely anxious to transmit their scruples, with their millions, to their only son. But other influences and tendencies had also been in play; one could fancy him rather heavily adjusting them to his inherited principles, with the “After all” designed to cover venial lapses. His marriage with Lilla must have been the outcome, the climax, of these private concessions, and have prepared him to view most of the problems of life from an easier angle. Undoubtedly, among the men present, though no quicker-witted than the others, he would have been the one most likely to understand Kate Clephane’s case, could she have put it to him. But to do so—one had only to intercept their glances across the table to be sure of it—would have been to take Lilla also into her confidence; and it suddenly became clear to Mrs. Clephane that no recoil of horror, and no Pharisaical disapproval, would be as intolerable to her as Lilla’s careless stare and Lilla’s lazy: “Why, what on earth’s all the fuss about? Don’t that sort of thing happen all the time?”

It did, no doubt; Mrs. Clephane had already tried to adjust her own mind to that. She had known such cases; everybody had; she had seen them smoothed over and lived down; but that she and Anne should ever figure as one of them was beyond human imagining. She would have felt herself befouled to the depths by Lilla’s tolerance.

Her unquiet eyes wandered from Horace Maclew to her daughter. Anne shone with recovered joy. Her anxiety had left only the happy traces of a summer shower on a drooping garden. Every now and then she smiled across the table at her mother, and Kate felt herself irresistibly smiling back. There was something so rich, dense and impregnable in the fact of possessing Anne’s heart that the mother could not remember to be alarmed when their eyes met.

Suddenly she noticed that Anne was absorbed in conversation with one of her neighbours. This was the Reverend Dr. Arklow, Rector of St. Stephen’s, the New York church of the Clephane and Drover clan. Old Mrs. Clephane had been a pillar of St. Stephen’s, and had bequeathed a handsome sum to the parish. Dr. Arklow, formerly the curate, had come back a few years previously as Rector of the church, and was now regarded as one of the foremost lights of the diocese, with a strong possibility of being named its Coadjutor, or possibly Bishop of the American Episcopal Churches in Europe.

The Drovers and all their tribe took their religion with moderation: they subscribed handsomely to parochial charities, the older members of the family still went to church on Sunday mornings, and once in the winter each of the family invited the Rector to a big dinner. But their relations with him, though amicable, were purely formal, and Kate concluded that his presence at one of the Drover week-ends was to be attributed to the prestige he had acquired as a certain Coadjutor or possible Bishop. The Drover social scheme was like a game of chess in which Bishops counted considerably more than Rectors.

The Rector of St. Stephen’s struck Mrs. Clephane, who had met him only once before, as a man accustomed to good company, and eager to prove it. He had a face as extensive as Mr. Maclew’s but running to length instead of width. His thin gray hair was carefully brushed back from a narrow benevolent forehead, and though he loved a good cigar, and wore a pepper-and-salt suit on his travels, he knew his value as a decorative element, and was fastidiously clerical on social occasions. His manly chest seemed outspread to receive the pectoral cross, and all his gestures were round and full, like the sleeves for which they were preparing.

As he leaned back, listening to Anne with lowered lids, and finger-tips thoughtfully laid against each other, his occasional faint smile and murmur of assent suggested to Mrs. Clephane that the girl was discussing with him the arrangements for the wedding; and the mother, laying down her fork, closed her eyes for an instant while the big resonant room reeled about her. Then she said to herself that, after all, this was only what was to be expected, and that if she hadn’t the courage to face such a possibility, and many others like it, she would assuredly never have the courage to carry out the plan which, all through the afternoon and evening, had been slowly forming in her mind. That plan was simply, for the present, to hold fast to Anne, and let things follow their course. She would return to New York the next day with Anne, she would passively assist at her daughter’s preparations—for an active share in them seemed beyond her powers—and she would be there when Chris came, and when they announced the engagement. Whatever happened, she would be there. She would let Chris see at once that he would have to reckon with that. And how would he be able to reckon with it? How could he stand it, day after day? They would perhaps never exchange another word in private—she prayed they might not—but he would understand by her mere presence what she meant, what she was determined on. He would understand that in the end he would have to give up Anne because she herself would never do so. The struggle between them would become a definite, practical, circumscribed thing; and, knowing Chris as she did, she felt almost sure she could hold out longer than he.

This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her.

On the return of the gentlemen to the drawing-room Dr. Arklow moved to her side, and she welcomed him with a smile. He opened with some mild generalities, and she said to herself that he was too anxiously observant of the social rules to speak of her daughter’s marriage before she herself alluded to it. For a few minutes she strove to find a word which should provide him with an opening; but to say to any one: “My daughter is going to be married” was beyond her, and they lingered on among slumbrous platitudes.

Suddenly Anne drifted up, sat down an on arm of her mother’s chair, and took her mother’s hand. Kate’s eyes filled, and through their mist she fancied she saw Dr. Arklow looking at her attentively. For the first time it occurred to her that, behind the scrupulous social puppet, there might be a simple-hearted man, familiar with the humble realities of pain and perplexity, and experienced in dealing with them. The thought gave her a sense of relief, and she said to herself: “I will try to speak to him alone. I will go to see him when we get to New York.” But meanwhile she merely continued to smile up at her daughter, and Dr. Arklow to say: “Our young lady has been telling me about the big tennis finals. There’s no doubt all these sports are going to be a great factor in building up a healthier, happier world.”

None of the three made any allusion to Anne’s engagement.

XXII.

“MISS ANNE CLEPHANE weds War Hero. Announces engagement to Major Christopher Fenno, D.S.M., Chevalier of Legion of Honour.”

The headline glared at Kate Clephane from the first page of the paper she had absently picked up from the table of her sitting-room. She and Anne, that morning, had journeyed back from Long Island in Hendrik Drover’s motor, separated by his genial bulk, and shielded by it from the peril of private talk. On the day before—that aching endless Sunday—Anne, when with her mother, had steadily avoided the point at issue. She seemed too happy in their reunion to risk disturbing its first hours; perhaps, Kate thought, she was counting on the spell of that reunion to break down her mother’s opposition. But as they neared New York every mile brought them closer to the reality they were trying not to see; and here it was at last, deriding the mother from those hideous headlines. She heard Anne’s step behind her, and their glance crossed above the paragraph. A flush rose to the girl’s cheek, while her eyes hesitatingly questioned her mother.

The decisive moment in their struggle was at hand. Kate felt that everything depended on her holding fast to the line she had resolved to follow, and her voice sounded thin and small in the effort to steady it.

“Is Major Fenno in New York?”

“No. He went back to Baltimore on Saturday.” Anne wavered. “He’s waiting to hear from me ... before he comes.”

A hope leapt up in the mother’s breast, then sank its ineffectual wings. She glanced back slowly at the newspaper.

“This announcement was made with your permission?”

The unwonted colour still burned in the girl’s cheek. She made a motion of assent, and added, after another pause: “Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid thought it only fair.”

“Fair to Major Fenno?”

“Yes.”

The silence prolonged itself. At length the mother brought out: “But if you’ve announced your engagement he has a right to be with you.”

Anne looked at her almost timidly. “I wanted first ... we both wanted ... to feel that when he came you would ... would be ready to receive him.”

Kate Clephane turned away from her daughter’s eyes. The look in them was too intolerably sweet to her. Anne was imploring her approval—Anne could not bear to be happy without it. Yes; but she wanted her other happiness also; she wanted that more than anything else; she would not hesitate to sacrifice her mother to it if there were no other way.

All this rushed over Kate in a final flash of illumination. “I want you both!” Anne had said; but she wanted Chris Fenno infinitely the more.

“Dear—.” At her mother’s first syllable Anne was at her side again, beseechingly. Kate Clephane lifted her hands to the girl’s shoulders. “You’ve made your choice, dearest. When Major Fenno comes of course I will receive him.” Her lips felt dry and stiff as she uttered her prevarication. But all her old arts of casuistry had come back; what was the use of having practised them so long if they were not to serve her now? She let herself yield to Anne’s embrace.

That afternoon, as Mrs. Clephane sat alone upstairs, Fred Landers telephoned to ask if she would receive him. Anne was out, and her mother sent word that when Mr. Landers came he was to be shown up to her sitting-room. He entered it, presently, with outstretched hands and a smile of satisfaction.

“Well, it’s all settled, then? Thank God! You’ve done just the right thing; I knew you would.”

Her hand fell lifelessly into his; she could not answer.

He drew up an armchair to the little autumnal fire, and continued to contemplate her approvingly.

“I know how hard it must have been. But there was only one thing to be considered: Anne needs you!”

“She needs Major Fenno more.”

“Oh, well—that’s the law of life, isn’t it?” His tone seemed to say: “At any rate, it’s the one you obeyed in your own youth.” And again she found no answer.

She was conscious that the gaze he still fixed on her had passed from benevolence to wistfulness. “Do you still mind it so awfully?”

His question made her tears rise; but she was determined not to return upon the past. She had proved the uselessness of the attempt.

“Anne has announced her engagement. What more is there to say? You tell me she needs me; well, here I am with her.”

“And you don’t know how she appreciates it. She rang me up as soon as you got back this morning. She’s overcome by your generosity in going down to the Drovers’ after what had taken place between you—after her putting herself so completely in the wrong.” He paused again, as if weighing his next words. “You know I’m not any keener than you are about this marriage; but, my dear, I believe it had to be.”

“Had to be?”

His capacious forehead crimsoned with the effort to explain. “Well, Anne’s a young woman of considerable violence of feeling ... of ... of.... In short, there’s no knowing what she might have ended by doing if we’d all backed you up in opposing her. And I confess I didn’t feel sure enough of the young man to count on his not taking advantage of her ... her impetuosity, as it were, if he thought there was no other chance.... You understand?”

She understood. What he was trying to say was that, on the whole, given the girl’s self-will, and taking into account her ... well, her peculiar heredity ... taking into account, in fact, Kate Clephane herself ... the family had probably adopted the safest course in accepting the situation.

“Not that I mean to imply—of course not! Only the young people nowadays settle most questions for themselves, don’t they? And in this case ... Well, all’s well that ends well. We all know that some of the most successful marriages have had ... er ... rather risky preliminaries.”

Kate Clephane sat listening in a state of acquiescent lassitude. She felt as if she had been given a drug which had left her intelligence clear but paralyzed her will. What was the use of arguing, discussing, opposing? Later, of course, if everything else failed, Fred Landers was after all the person she would have to turn to, to whom her avowal would have to be made; but for the moment he was of no more use to her than any of the others. The game she had resolved to play must be played between herself and Chris Fenno; everything else was the vainest expenditure of breath.

“You do agree, don’t you?” she heard Landers rather nervously insisting; and: “Oh, I daresay you’re right,” she assented.

“And the great thing, you know, is that Anne shouldn’t lose you, or you lose Anne, because of this. All the rest will arrange itself somehow. Life generally does arrange things. And if it shouldn’t—”

He stood up rather awkwardly, and she was aware of his advancing toward her. His face had grown long and solemn, and his broad bulk seemed to have narrowed to the proportions of the lank youth suffused with blushes who had taken shelter behind his mother when old Mrs. Landers had offered a bridal banquet to the John Clephanes.

“If it doesn’t work out for you as we hope ... there’s my house ... that’s been waiting for you for ever so long ... though I shouldn’t ever have ventured to suggest it....”

“Oh—” she faltered out, the clutch of pain relaxing a little about her heart.

“Well, well,” her visitor stammered, rubbing his hands together deprecatingly, “I only suggest it as a sort of last expedient ... a forlorn hope....” His nervous laugh tried to give the words a humorous turn, but his eyes were still grave. Kate rose and put her hand in his.

“You’re awfully good to me,” was all she found to say. Inwardly she was thinking, with a fresh thrill of anguish: “And now I shall never be able to tell him—never!”

He had caught the note of dismissal in her voice, and was trying to gather up the scattered fragments of his self-possession. “Of course, at our age ... my age, I mean ... all that kind of thing is rather.... But there: I didn’t want you to feel there was no one you could turn to. That’s all. You won’t bear me a grudge, though? Now then; that’s all right. And you’ll see: this other business will shake down in time. Bound to, you know. I daresay the young man has merits that you and I don’t see. And you’ll let me go on dropping in as usual? After all, I’m Anne’s guardian!” he ended with his clumsy laugh.

“I shall want you more than ever, Fred,” Mrs. Clephane said simply.

The next evening, as she looked down the long dinner-table from her seat at its head, she was fantastically reminded of the first family dinner over which she had presided after her marriage.

The background was the same; the faces were the same, or so like that they seemed merely rejuvenated issues of the same coinage. Hendrik Drover sat in his brother-in-law’s place; but even that change was not marked enough to disturb the illusion. Hendrik Drover’s heavy good-natured face belonged to the same type as John Clephane’s; one saw that the two had gone to the same schools and the same University, frequented the same clubs, fished the same salmon rivers; Hendrik Drover might have been the ghost of John Clephane revisiting the scene of his earthly trials in a mood softened by celestial influences. And as for herself—Kate Clephane—if she had conformed to the plan of life prepared for her, instead of turning from it and denying it, might she not reasonably have hoped to reappear on the scene in the form of Enid Drover?

These grotesque fancies had begun to weave their spirals through her brain only after a first impact had emptied it of everything else, swept it suddenly clear of all meaning and all reason. That moment had come when Chris Fenno had entered in the wake of the other guests; when she had heard his name announced like that of any other member of the family; had seen him advance across the interminable length of the room, all the lights in it converging upon him as she felt that all the eyes in it converged on her; when she had seen Anne at his side, felt her presence between them, heard the girl’s voice, imperious, beseeching: “Mother—here’s Chris,” and felt her hand drop into that other hand with the awful plunge that the heart makes when a sudden shock flings it from its seat.

She had lived through all that; she and he had faced each other; had exchanged greetings, she supposed; had even, perhaps, said something to each other about Anne, and about their future relation. She did not know what; she judged only, from the undisturbed faces about them, that there had been nothing alarming, nothing to scandalize or grieve; that it had all, to the tribal eye, passed off decently and what they called “suitably”. Her past training had served her—his boundless assurance had served him. It was what the French called “a moment to pass”; they had passed it. And in that mad world beyond the abyss, where she now found herself, here they all were with the old faces, saying the same old things with the same old complacency, eating their way through the same Clephane courses, expressing the same approval of the Clephane cellar (“It was Hendrik, you know, who advised John to lay down that ninety-five Clicquot,” she caught Enid Drover breathing across the bubbles to her son-in-law). It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to—this.

And, in the mad phantasmagoria, there was Chris himself, symbolizing what she had flown to in her wild escape; representing, in some horrible duality, at once her sin and its harvest, her flight and her return. At the thought, her brain began to spin again, and she saw her own youth embodied before her in Anne, with Anne’s uncompromising scorns and scruples, Anne’s confident forward-looking gaze.

“Ah, well,” she heard Hendrik Drover say as they rose from the table, “these occasions will come round from time to time in the best-regulated families, and I suppose we all feel—” while, at the other side of the table, Enid Drover, pink and melting from a last libation, sighed to Horace Maclew: “I only wish dear mother and John could have been here with us!” and Lilla, overhearing her, bracketed the observation in an ironic laugh.

It had all gone off wonderfully; thanks to Anne’s tact the meeting between her mother and her betrothed had been thickly swaddled in layer on layer of non-conducting, non-explosive “family”. A sense of mutual congratulation was in the air as the groups formed themselves again in the drawing-room. The girl herself moved from one to another, pale, vigilant, radiant; Chris Fenno, in a distant corner, was settled with coffee-cup and cigarette at Lilla Maclew’s side; Mrs. Clephane found herself barricaded behind Hendrik Drover and one of the older Tresseltons. They were the very two men, she remembered, between whom she had spent her evening after that first family dinner in which this one was so hallucinatingly merged.

Not until the party was breaking up, and farewells filled the hall, did she suddenly find herself—she knew not how—isolated in the inner drawing-room with Chris Fenno. He stood there before her, and she seemed to hear his voice for the first time.

“I want to thank you....” He appeared to feel it was a bad beginning, and tried again. “Shan’t I have the chance, some day soon, of finding you—for a word or two, quietly?” he asked.

She faced him, erect and unflinching; she dragged her eyes up to his.

“A chance? But as soon as you like—as many chances as you like! You’ll always find me—I shall always be here. I’m never going to leave Anne,” she announced.

It had been almost worth the agony she had bought it with to see the look in his eyes when he heard that.

XXIII.

EXTREME exhaustion—the sense of having reached the last limit of endurable emotion—plunged Kate Clephane, that night, into a dreamless sleep. It was months and months since she had reached those nethermost levels below sound or image or any mental movement; and she rose from them revived, renewed—and then suddenly understood that they had been only a grief-drugged mockery.

The return to reality was as painful as that of a traveller who has fallen asleep in the snow. One by one she had to readjust all her frozen faculties to the unchanged and intolerable situation; and she felt weaker, less able to contend with it. The thought that that very day she might have to face Chris Fenno paralyzed her. He had asked to see her alone—and she lay there, in the desolate dawn, rehearsing to herself all the cruel things he would find to say; for his ways of being cruel were innumerable. The day before she had felt almost light-heartedly confident of being able to outface, to outlast him; of her power of making the situation even more intolerable to him than he could make it to her. Now, in the merciless morning light, she had a new view of their respective situations. Who had suffered most the previous evening, he or she? Whose wakening that morning was most oppressed by fears? He had proposed to have a talk with her; he had had the courage to do that; and she felt that by having that courage he had already gained another point in their silent struggle.

Slowly the days dragged by; their hours were filled, for mother and daughter, by the crowding obligations and preoccupations natural to such times. Mrs. Clephane was helping her daughter with the wedding preparations; a spectacle to charm and edify the rest of the family.

Chris Fenno, two or three days after the announcement of the engagement, had returned to Baltimore, where he had accepted a temporary job on a newspaper, and where he had that, and other matters, to wind up before his marriage. During his stay in New York, Mrs. Clephane had had but two or three brief glimpses of him, and always in the presence of others. It was natural that he should wish to devote the greater part of his time to his betrothed. He and Anne went off in the early afternoon, and when they returned were, on each evening, engaged to dine with some member of the family. It was easy for Mrs. Clephane to excuse herself from these entertainments. The fact of her having presided at the dinner at which the engagement was announced had sealed it with her approval; and at the little dinners organized by Nollie Tresselton and the other cousins her presence was hardly expected, and readily dispensed with.