Front matter (continued 6)

"Critics talk rot; why expect more of the public?" inquired Grismer. "And isn't it funny what a row they make about sex? After all, that's what the world is composed of, two sexes, with a landscape or marine background. What else is there to write about, Cleland?"

The latter laughed:

"It merely remains a matter of good taste. You sculptors have more latitude than painters; painters more than we writers. Pathology should be used sparingly in fiction—all sciences, in fact. Like a clove of garlic applied to a salad bowl, a touch of science is sufficient to flavour art; more than that makes it reek. Better cut out the art altogether if the science fascinates you, and be the author of 'works' instead of mere books."

Stephanie, watching Cleland while he was speaking, nodded:

"Yes," she said, "one could write fiction about a hospital nurse, but not about nursing. It wouldn't have any value."

Grismer said:

"We're really very limited in the world. We have land and water, sun and moon and stars, two sexes, love and hate to deal with. Everything else is merely a modification of these elemental fixtures.... It becomes tiresome, sometimes."

"Oswald! Don't talk like a silly pessimist," said Stephanie sharply.

He laughed in his easy, attractive way and sat gently swinging one long leg, which was crossed over the other.

He said:

"There is in every living and articulated thing a nerve which, if destroyed, destroys for its possessor a certain area of interest in life. People become pessimists to that extent.

"But, where all the nerves converge to form the vital ganglion, a stroke there means extermination."

"Apropos of what is this dissertation wished upon us?" asked Stephanie with an uneasy smile.

"Did you ever see a paralyzed spider, Stephanie?—alive, breathing, destined to live for weeks, perhaps, and anyway until the wasp's egg under it hatches and becomes a larva to devour it?

"Well, the old wasp required fresh meat for its young, so, with her sting, she annihilated the nerve controlling motion, laid her egg, certain that her progeny would find perfectly fresh food when born. But if she had thrust that sting of hers a little higher—at the juncture of skull and thorax—death would have taken that spider like a stroke of lightning."

He laughed:

"So I say it's better to get the stroke of Fate in the neck than to get it in any particular area and live for a while a paralyzed victim for some creature ultimately to eat alive."

There was a silence. Helen broke it with pleasant decision:

"This is not an appetizing conversation. If anybody wishes any the tea is ready."

There was enough daylight left in the studio so the lamps remained unlighted.

"Do you suppose we ought to go out somewhere?" asked Stephanie, "and leave the place to those two poor things in there? You know they may be too unhappy or too embarrassed to come out and run the gauntlet."

But Stephanie was wrong; for, as she ended, Belter appeared at the end of the studio in the fading light. His young wife came slowly forward beside him. The strain, the tension, the effort, all were visible, but the girl held herself erect and the man fairly so.

There was tea for them—no easier way to mitigate their ordeal. Conversation became carelessly general; strawberries and little cakes were tasted; a cigarette or two lighted.

Then, after a while there chanced to fall a silence; and the young wife knew that the moment belonged to her.

"I think," she said in a distinct but still little voice, "that we ought to go home. If you are ready, Harry——"

CHAPTER XXVIII

By the end of the first week in June Cleland was in a highly excited state of mind in regard to his infant novel, in which all the principals were now on the edge of catastrophe.

"I don't know how they got there," he said nervously to Badger Spink, who had dropped in to suggest himself as illustrator in case any magazine took the story for serial publication.

Spink's clever, saturnine features remained noncommittal. If Cleland turned out to be a coming man, he wished to participate and benefit; if he proved a failure he desired to remain pleasantly aloof.

For the only thing in the world that interested Badger Spink was his own success in life; and he had a horror of contaminating it by any professional association with mediocrity or failure.

"What's your story about?" he inquired with that bluntness that usually passed for the disinterested frankness of good comradeship.

"Oh, it's about a writer of stories," said Cleland, vaguely.

"He's the hero?"

"If you'd call him that. What is a hero, Spink? I never saw one in real life."

Spink squinted. It was his way of grinning.

"Well, a literary hero," he said, "is one who puts it over big on his first novel. The country goes crazy about his book, the girls go crazy over him, publishers go panting after him waving wads; editors flag him with fluttering cheques. That's one sort of hero, Cleland. But he's a myth. The real thing is a Charlie Chaplin. All the same, you'd better let your hero make a hit with his novel. If you don't, good night!"

Cleland's features became troubled:

"I suppose his book ought to make a hit to make my book popular," he said. "But as a matter of fact it doesn't. I'm afraid the character I've drawn is no hero. He's like us all, Spink; he writes a book; friends flatter; critics slam; the public buys a number of copies, and it's all over in a few weeks. A punk hero—what?"

"Very. He won't get over with the young person," said Spink. "In these days of the movie and the tango nobody becomes very much excited over novels anyway; and if you don't startle the country with your hero's first novel—make it the sort that publishers advertise as 'compelling' and 'a new force in literature'—well, you'll get the hook, I'm afraid. Listen to me: work in the 'urge'; make it plain that there's not a trace of 'sex' in your hero's book or in yours—or any 'problem' either. Cheeriness does it! That intellectual eunuch, the 'Plain Peepul,' is squatting astride of the winged broncho. His range reaches from the Western plains to the New England kitchen. The odours of the hired man and of domestic dishwater are his favourite perfume; his heroines smirk when Fate jumps upon them with hobnailed boots; his heroes are shaven as blue as any metropolitan waiter and they all are bursting out of their blue flannel shirts with muscular development and abdominal prosperity. That's the sort, Cleland, if you want to make money!" He shrugged his shoulders. "But of course if you don't, well, then, go on and transmute leaden truth with your imagination into the truer metal wrought by art. If there's a story in it, people will excuse the technical excellence; if there isn't, they won't read it. And there you are."

They remained silent for a while, and Spink regarded him shrewdly from moment to moment out of his bright, bold eyes. And he came pretty close to the conclusion that he was wasting time.

"Did you ever make any success with your stuff!" he inquired abruptly.

Cleland shook his head.

"Never heard anything from anything you've done?"

"Once," said Cleland, "a woman wrote me from a hospital that she had read a novel I published in England, when I was living in France.... She said it had made her forget pain.... It's pleasant to get a letter like that."

"Very," said Spink drily, "unless she meant your book was an anodyne." He laughed his abrupt, harsh laugh and took himself off.

Belter, who haunted the studio now toward noon, so that he could take his wife to luncheon, roared with laughter when Cleland mentioned Spink's visit.

"When there's any rumour of a new man and a new book, Spink's always certain to appear out of a cloudless sky, like a buzzard investigating smoke for possible pickings. If you make good, he'll stick to you like a burdock burr. If you don't, he's too busy to bother you. So he's been around, has he?"

"Yes."

"Watch him, Cleland. Spink is the harbinger of prosperity. He associates himself only with the famous and successful. He is clever, immensely industrious, many sided, diversely talented. He can write, rehearse and stage a play for the Ten Cent Club; he can draw acceptably in any medium; he can write sparkling stuff; his executive ability is enormous, his energy indefatigable. But—that's the man, Cleland. You'll have him at your elbow if you become famous; you'll see only the back of his bushy head if you fail."

Cleland smiled as he ran over the pile of pencilled pages on the desk before him, pausing here and there to cross out, interline, punctuate.

"When Oswald Grismer was rich and promised so well as a sculptor," said Belter, "Spink appeared as usual out of a clear sky, alighted, folded his wings, and hopped gravely beside Grismer until the poor devil came his cropper.

"Now, he's always going somewhere in a hurry when he encounters Grismer, but his 'How are you! Glad to see you!' en passant, is even more cordially effusive than before. For Badger Spink never wittingly makes an enemy, either."

"Poor Spink. He misses a lot," commented Cleland, renumbering some loose pages. "Tell me, Harry, how are things going with you?"

Belter said, naïvely:

"When a man's quite crazy about his wife, everything else goes well."

Cleland laughed:

"That sounds convincing. What a little brick she is! I suppose you're lunching with her."

"Rather!" He looked at his watch. "God knows," he added, "I don't want to bore her, but it would take a machine gun to drive me away.... I tell you, Cleland, three years of what I went through leave scars that never entirely heal.... I don't yet quite see how she could forgive me."

"Has she?"

"I'm trying to understand that she has. I know she has, because she says so. But it's hard to comprehend.... She's a very, very wonderful woman, Cleland."

"I can see that."

"And whatever she wishes, I wish. Whatever she desires to do is absolutely all right because she desires it. But, do you know, Cleland, she's sweet enough to ask my opinion? Think of it!—think of her asking my opinion!—willing to consider my wishes after what I've done to her! I tell you no man can study faithfully enough, minutely enough, the character of the girl he loves. I've had my lesson—a terrible one. I told you once that it was killing me—would end me some day. It would have if she had not held out her hand to me.... It was the finest, noblest thing any woman has ever done."

All fat men are prone to nervous emotion; Belter got up briskly, but his features were working, and he merely waved his hand in adieu and galloped off down stairs to be in time to join his wife when she emerged from her seance with the white circus horse in Helen's outer workshop.

Cleland, still lingering with fluttering solicitude over his manuscript, heard a step on the stair and Stephanie's fresh young voice in gay derision:

"You're like a fussy old hen, Jim! Let that chick alone and take me somewhere to lunch! I've had a strenuous lesson and I'm starved——"

She dodged his demonstration, eluding him with swift grace, and put the desk between them.

"No! No! I chanced, just now, to witness the meeting of the Belters, and that glimpse of conjugal respectability has stiffened my moral backbone.... Besides, I'm deeply worried about you, Jim."

"About me?"

"Certainly. It fills me with anxiety that you should so far degrade yourself as to attempt to kiss a respectable married woman——"

She dodged again, just in time, but he vaulted over the desk and she found herself imprisoned in his arms.

"I'll submit if you don't rumple me," she said. "I've such a darling gown on—be very circumspect, Jim——"

She lifted her face and met his lips, retained them with a little sigh, placing her gloved hands behind his head. They became very still, very serious; her grey eyes grew vague under his deep gaze which caressed them; her arms drew his head closer to her face. Then, very slowly, their lips parted, and she laid her hand on his shoulder and drew his arm around her waist.

In silence they paced the studio for a while, slowly, and in leisurely step with each other deeply preoccupied.

"Steve," he said, "it's the first week in June. The city will be intolerable in a fortnight. Don't you think that we ought to open Runner's Rest?"

"You are going up there with Oswald, aren't you?" she asked, raising her eyes.

"Yes, in a day or two. Don't you think we'd better try to get some servants and open the house for the summer?"

She considered the matter:

"You know I've never been there since you went abroad, Jim. I believe we would find it delightful. Don't you?"

"I do, indeed."

"But—is it going to be all right—just you and I alone there? ... You know even when we considered each other as brother and sister there was a serious question about our living together unless an older woman were installed"—she laughed—"to keep us in order. It was silly, then, but—I don't know whether it's superfluous now."

"Would Helen come?"

"Like a shot! Of course that's the solution. We can have parties, too.... I wonder what is going to happen to us."

"What!"

"To you and me, Jim.... It's becoming such a custom—your arm around me this way; and that secret and deliciously uneasy thrill I feel when I come to you alone—and all my increasing load of guilt——"

"There's only one end to it, Steve."

"Jim, I can't tell him. I'm afraid! ... Something happened once.... I was scarcely eighteen——" She suddenly clung to him, pressing her face convulsively against his shoulder. He could feel the shiver passing over her.

"Tell me," he said.

"Not now.... There doesn't seem to be any way of letting you understand.... I was not yet eighteen. I never dreamed of—of love—between you and me.... And Oswald fascinated me. He does now. He always will. There is something about him that draws me, influences me, stirs me deeply—deeply——"

She turned, looked at him, flung one arm around his neck:

"Will you let me tell you this and still understand? It's a—a different kind of affection.... But it's deep, powerful—there are bonds that hold me—that I can't break—dare not.... Always he was attractive to me—a strange, sensitive, unhappy boy.... And then—something happened."

"Will you tell me what?"

"Oh, Jim, it involves a question of honour.... I can't betray confidence.... Let me tell you something. Did you know that Oswald, ever since you and he were boys together, cared more for your good opinion than for anything else in the world?"

"That's strange."

"He is strange. He has told me that, as a boy, one of the things that most deeply hurt him was that he was never invited to your house. And I can see that the fact that dad never took any notice of his father mortified him bitterly."

"What has this to do with you and me, Steve?"

"A great deal, unhappily. The seeds of tragedy lay in the boy's soul of Oswald Grismer—a tender sensitiveness almost girlish, which he concealed by assertiveness and an apparent callous disregard of opinion; a pride so deep that in the shock of injury it became morbid.... But, Jim, deep in that unhappy boy's soul lay also nobler qualities—blind loyalty, the generosity that costs something—the tenderness that renounces.... Oh, I know—I know. I was only a girl and I didn't understand. I was fascinated by the golden, graceful youth of him—thrilled by the deeper glimpse of that mystery which attracts all women—the veiled unhappiness of a man's secret soul.... That drew me; the man, revealed, held me.... I have told you that I never dreamed there was any question about you. I was obsessed, wrapped up in this man so admired, so talented, so utterly misunderstood by all the world excepting me. It almost intoxicated me to know that I alone knew him—that I alone was qualified to understand, sympathize, advise, encourage, rebuke this strange, inexplicable golden figure about whom and whose rising talent the world of art was gossiping and guessing all around me."

After a long silence he said:

"Is that all you have to tell me?"

"Nearly all.... His father died.... My aunt died. These facts seem unrelated. But they were not.... And then—then—Oswald lost his money.... Everything.... And I—married him.... There was more than I have told you.... I think I may tell this—I had better tell you, perhaps.... Did you ever know that my aunt employed lawyers to investigate the matter concerning the money belonging to Chiltern Grismer's sister, who was my mother's mother?"

"No."

"She did. I have seen Mr. Grismer at the hospital once or twice. He came to see my aunt in regard to the investigation.... The last time he came, my aunt was ill, threatened with pneumonia. I saw him passing through the grounds. He looked frightfully haggard and ill. He came out of the infirmary where my aunt was, in about an hour, and walked slowly down the gravel path as though he were in a daze.... He died shortly afterward.... And then my aunt died.... And Oswald lost his money.... And I—married him."

"Is that all you can tell me?"

After a silence she looked up, her lip quivering:

"All except this." And she put her arms around his neck and dropped her head on his breast.

CHAPTER XXIX

In reply to a letter of hers, Cleland wrote to Stephanie the middle of June from Runner's Rest in the Berkshires:

STEVE, DEAR:

The place is charming and everything is ready for you and Helen whenever you care to come. I had the caretaker's wife and daughters here for several days' scrubbing and cleaning woodwork, windows and floors. They've put a vacuum cleaner on everything else and the house shines!

As for the new servants, they seem the usual sort, unappreciative, sure to quarrel among themselves, fairly efficient, incapable of gratitude, and likely to leave you in the lurch if the whim seizes them. They've all come to me with complaints of various sorts. The average servant detests clean, fresh quarters in the country and bitterly misses the smelly and oily animation of the metropolitan slums.

But this unpretentious old place is very beautiful, Steve. You haven't been here since you were a girl, and it will be a surprise to you to find how really lovely are this plain old house and simple grounds.

Oswald has made several sketches of the grounds, and is making others for the pool and fountain. He is anything but melancholy; he strolls about quite happily with the eternal cigarette in his mouth and an enormous rose-scented white peony in his button-hole; and in the evening he and I light a fire in the library—for the evenings are a trifle chilly still—and we read or chat or discuss men and affairs most companionably. The occult charm in this man, of which you are so conscious, I myself can perceive. There seems to be, deep within him, an inexplicable quality which appeals—something latent, indefinable—something that you suspect to be wistful, yet which is too sensitive, too self-distrustful to respond to the very sympathy it seems to draw.

Steve, I have asked him to spend July with us. He seemed quite surprised and a little disconcerted by the invitation—just as he seemed to be when I asked him to do the pool and fountain.

He said he would like to come if he could arrange it—whatever that may mean. So it was left that way.

Do you approve?

It will be wonderful to see you here, moving in the garden, standing out yonder on the lawn!—Steve, herself, in her own actual and matchless person!—Steve in the flesh, here under the green old trees of Runner's Rest.... Sometimes when I am thinking of you—and I think of practically nothing else!—I seem to see you as you were when last here—a girl in ribbons and white, dancing over the lawn with her chestnut hair flying; or down by the river at the foot of the lawn, wading bare-legged, fussing and poking about among the stones; or lying full-length on the grass under the trees, reading "Quentin Durward"—do you remember? And I used to take you trout-fishing to that mysterious Dunbar Brook up in the forest, where the rush of ice-cold waters and the spray clouding the huge round bowlders always awed you and made you the slightest bit uneasy.

And do you remember the brown pools behind those bowlders, where you cautiously dropped your line; and the sudden scurry of a black shadow in the pool—the swift tug, the jerk and spatter as you flung a speckled trout skyward in mingled joy and consternation?

Runner's Rest has not changed. House and barns need paint; the garden requires your soft white hands to caress it into charming discipline; the house needs you; the lawns are empty without you; the noise of the river rippling on the shoals sounds lonely. The whole place needs you, Steve, to make it logical. And so do I. Because all this has no meaning unless the soul of it shows through.

When I am perplexed, restless, impatient, unhappy, I try to remember that you have given me a bit of your heart; that you realize you have mine entire—every atom of my love, my devotion.... There must be some way for us.... I don't know what way, because you have thought it necessary to leave me blind. But I shall never give you up—unless you find that you care more for another man.

And now to answer what you have said concerning you and me. I suppose I ought to touch what is, theoretically, another man's. Yet, you do not belong to him. And you have begun to fall a little in love with me, haven't you? And in this incomprehensible pact it was agreed that you retain your liberty until you came to final decision within two years.

I don't understand it; I can't feel that, under the strange circumstances, I am unfair to you or to this strange and unexplained enigma named Oswald Grismer.

As for my attitude toward him, I hope I am free of the lesser jealousy and resentments. I will not allow myself to brood or cherish unworthy malice. I am trying to accept him, with all his evident and unusual qualities, as a man I've got to fight and a man I can't help liking when I let myself judge him honestly.

As for the flimsy, eccentric, meaningless, yet legal tie which links you to him, I care nothing about it. It's got to be broken ultimately—if one can break a shadow without substance.

How to do it without your aid, without knowledge of the facts, without causing you distress for some reason not explained, I don't know. But sooner or later I shall have to know. Because all this, if I brood on it, seems a nightmare—an unreal dream where I struggle, fettered, blindfolded, against the unseen and unknown, striving to win my way through to you.

That is about all I have to say, Steve.

Oswald has just come in with his drawings, to find me writing to you. He seems very cheerful. His design is delightful and quite in keeping with the simplicity of the place—just a big, circular pool made out of native stone, and in the centre a jet around which three stone trout are intertwined under a tumbling spray.

It is charming and will not clash at all with the long, low house with its shutters and dormers and loop-holes, and the little stone forts flanking it.

Telegraph me what day and what train. And tell Helen you and she may bring your maid-of-all-work.

JAMES CLELAND, in love with you.

There was no need of a fire in the library that evening at Runner's Rest. The night was mild; a mist bordered the rushing river and stars glimmered high above it.

Every great tree loomed huge and dark and still, the foliage piled up fantastically against the sky-line. There was an odour of iris in the night; and silence, save for the dull stamping of horses in the stable.

Cleland, deep in an arm-chair on the porch, became aware of Grismer's tall shape materializing from the fog about him.

"It's a wonderful place, Cleland," he said with a graceful, inclusive gesture. "All this sweet, vague mystery—this delicate grey dark appeals to me—satisfies, rests me.... As though this were the abode of the Blessed Shades, and I were of them.... And the rest were ended."

He seated himself near the other and gazed toward the mist out of which the river's muffled roar came to them in ceaseless, ghostly melody.

"Charon waits at every river, they say," he remarked, lighting a cigarette. "I fancy he must employ a canoe down there."

"The Iroquois once did. The war trail crossed there. When they burned Old Deerfield they came this way."

"The name of your quaint and squatty old house is unusual," said Grismer.

"Runner's Rest? Yes, in the Indian wars before the Revolution, the Forest Runners could find food and shelter here. The stone forts defended it and it was never burned."

"You inherited it?"

"Yes. It belonged to a Captain Cleland in those remote days."

There was a long silence. The delicately fresh odour of grey iris became more apparent—a perfume that, somehow, Cleland associated with Stephanie.

Grismer said in a pleasant, listless voice:

"You are a happy man, Cleland."

"Y-yes."

"Here, under the foliage of your forefathers," mused Grismer aloud, "you should rest contented that the honour of an honourable line lies secure in your keeping."

Cleland laughed:

"I don't know how honourable they were, but I've never heard of any actual criminals among them."

"That's a great deal." He dropped one lean, well-shaped hand on the arm of his chair. The cigarette burned between his pendant fingers, spicing the air with its aromatic scent.

"It's a great deal to have a clean family record," he said again. "It is the greatest thing in the world—the most desirable.... The other makes existence superfluous."

"You mean dishonour?"

"Yes. The stain spreads. You can't stop it. It taints the generations that follow. They can't escape."

"That's nonsense," said Cleland. "Because a man had a crook for a forebear he isn't a crook himself."

"No. But the stain is in his heart and brain."

"That's morbid!"

"Maybe.... But, Cleland, there are people whose most intense desire is to be respectable. It is a ruling passion, inherent, unreasoning, vital to their happiness and peace of mind. Did you know that?"

"I suppose I can imagine such a person."

"Yes. I suppose such a person is not normal. In them, hurt pride is more serious than a wound of the flesh. And pride, mortally wounded, means to them mental and finally physical death."

"Such a person is abnormal and predestined to unhappiness," said Cleland impatiently.

"Predestined," repeated Grismer in his pleasant, even voice. "Yes, there's something wrong with them. But they are born so. Nobody knows what a mental hell they endure. Things that others would scarcely notice they shrink from. Their souls are raw, quivering things within them that agonize over a careless slight, that wither under disapproval, that become paralyzed under an affront.

"Their fiercest, deepest, most vital desire is to be welcomed, approved, respected. Without kindness they become deformed; and crippled pride does strange, perverse things to their brain and tongue.

"There are such people, Cleland.... Predestined ... to suffering and to annihilation.... Weaklings ... all heart and unprotected nerves ... passing their brief lives in desperate and grotesque attempts to conceal what they are.... Superfluous people, undesirable ... foredoomed."

He dropped his cigarette upon the drenched grass, whore it glimmered an instant and went out.

"Cleland," he said in a singularly gentle voice, "I once told you that I wished you well. You did not understand. Let me put it a little plainer.... Is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything I can refrain from doing which might add to your contentment?"

"That's an odd thing to ask," returned the other.

"No. It is merely friendship speaking—a very deep friendship, if you can understand it."

"You're very kind, Grismer.... I don't know quite how to take it—or how to answer. There is nothing that you can do for me—nothing one man could ask of another——"

"Ask it, all the same."

"I can't."

"Then I'll offer it.... I give up—Stephanie—to you."

The silence lasted a long time. Neither man stirred. Finally Cleland said in an altered voice:

"I can't ask it—unless she does, too. I don't know what to say to you, Grismer, except that no man ever spoke more nobly——"

"That is enough. If you really think it, that means everything, Cleland.... And this is my chance to tell you that when I—married her—I never dreamed that it could ever be a question of you.... I don't believe she did, either.... But it has become so. That is the question, now.... And so I—step out."

"I—I tell you I can't accept—that way—unless she asks it, too," stammered Cleland.... "After all, it's got to be on a basis of her happiness.... I am not sure that her happiness lies in my keeping. I do not know how much she cares for you—how deeply you are engaged in her heart.... I can't find out.... I'm like a blind man involved in a maze!"

"She cares for me," said Grismer in his low, pleasant voice. "We have been intimate in mind—close and responsive, intellectually.... Sentimentally, too. On her part a passionless loyalty to whatever in me she believed appealed to her intelligence and imagination; an emotional solicitude for what she discovered in me that aroused her sympathy——"

He turned and looked at Cleland in the darkness:

"Hers is a tender heart, Cleland. Impulse carries it to extremes. Injustice to another provokes quick action from her; and nothing so sways her as her intense sense of gratitude, unless it be her fear of wounding others.

"I shall have to tell you more, some day. If I do, it will be more than I would do for anybody else alive—the ultimate sacrifice of pride."

He rose and stood gazing out across the mist at a far star above it, glimmering with dimmed brilliancy all alone.

"It couldn't have been," he said, half to himself. "I always knew it. Not that the thought of you ever crossed my mind. I knew it would come somehow. It simply couldn't be."

He turned to Cleland with a sudden laugh that sounded light and natural:

"This is to be no tragedy. It will disentangle itself easily and simply. I am very sure that she is in love with you. Tell her what I have said to you.... And—good night, old chap."

CHAPTER XXX

Stephanie and Helen arrived, bringing a mountain of baggage and the studio cat—an animal evidently unacquainted with the larger freedom of outdoors, and having no cosmic urge, for when deposited upon the lawn it fled distracted, and remained all day upon a heap of coal in the cellar, glaring immovably upon blandishment.

"Oh!" cried Stephanie, standing on the lawn and quite enchanted by the old place. "It is simply too lovely! It's like a charming doll's house—it's so much smaller than I remember it! Helen, did you ever see such trees! And isn't the garden a dear! Listen to the noise of the river! Did you ever hear anything as refreshing as that endless rippling? Where is Oswald, Jim?"

"He went back to town this morning."

"How mean of him!"

"I tried to keep him," said Cleland, "but he insisted that it was really a matter of business. And, of course, I had nothing more to say."

"Did he have a good time here?" asked Stephanie in a guileless voice. But she looked sideways at him.

"I think so, Steve. He seemed carefree and vastly contented to rove over the place. I planned to go with him after trout, but he preferred to prowl about the lawn or smoke on the porch.... I am glad he came. I have learned to like him very much."

"You're a dear!" she murmured under her breath, her grey eyes fixed on him and full of a gay tenderness tinged with humour. "You always do the right thing, Jim; you are right, that's the reason. Do you wonder that I'm quite mad about you?—I, who am all wrong."

"Who says you are all wrong?" he demanded, starting toward her. But she deftly avoided him, putting the sun dial between them. And, leaning on it with both elbows, her face framed in her hands, she let her eyes look gay defiance into his.

"I'm all wrong," she said. "You don't know it, but I am."

"Do you want to be punished?"

She laughed tormentingly, feeling delightfully secure from his demonstrations there on the sunny lawn, with Helen wandering about inspecting the flowers in the garden, and the hired man unloading the luggage at the side-door.

"Come on, Helen!" she called gaily. "We can have a bath; there's plumbing in the house, you know. Where do you suppose that poor cat is hidden?"

Helen came from the garden with a blue pansy between her lips, which she presently drew through Cleland's lapel.

"A bribe, dear friend. I wish to go fishing," she said. "Stephanie has been telling me about her girlhood days here with you, and how you took her on several sacred occasions to a mysterious, dashing stream full of huge bowlders—somewhere deep in the primeval woods——"

"The Dunbar brook, Jim," smiled Stephanie. "Shall we go fishing in the morning? I'm not going to spend all my time fussing with domestic problems."

"The cares of housekeeping sit lightly on her," remarked Helen, as they all strolled toward the porch. "What if the new servants are slack and wasteful? Being a man you wouldn't know; being Steve, she doesn't worry. I see that it's going to devolve on me. Is it possible to run two baths in this house at the same time?"

"Is it?" inquired Stephanie of Cleland. "I forget."

"Yes," he replied, "if you don't draw too much hot water."

"Take yours first, Helen," she said. "I'll sit in this cool library and gossip with Jim for a while."

She unpinned her hat and flung it on a sofa, untied a large box of bonbons, and careless of her charmingly disordered hair, vaulted to a seat on the massive centre table—a favourite perch of hers when a young girl.

Helen lingered to raid the bonbons; Cleland immediately began his pet theme:

"Why do Americans eat candy? Because the nation doesn't know how to cook! The French don't stuff themselves with candy. There isn't, in Paris, a candy-shop to the linear mile! That's because French stomachs, being properly fed with properly and deliciously cooked food, don't crave candy. But in a country noted for its wretched and detestable bread——"

"Oh, you always say that," remarked Stephanie. "Some day I'll go over and find out how much truth there is in your tirades. Meanwhile, I shall consume candy."

"When you go over," he said, "you'll go with me." His voice was low. Helen had strolled into the "best room" and was standing there with a bitter chocolate between her fingers, contemplating the old-time furniture.

"When I go over to Paris," said Stephanie airily, "I shall invite whom I choose."

"Who will it be?"

"Oh, some agreeable young man who isn't too bossy," she returned airily. "Somebody who doesn't try to place me in a day nursery while he goes about and has his fling. But, of course, that doesn't mean you. You've had your fling, haven't you?"

"Not too violently," he said.

"That is your story. But I think I'll investigate it when I go over, and tell you what I've found out when I return."

Helen finished her chocolate and came back. "Where the dickens is that unhappy cat, do you suppose?" she inquired.

"Oh, she'll turn up at dinner-time," Cleland reassured her. "Do you know where your room is, Helen?"

"How should I?" returned that young lady, "—never having been in the house before——"

"Dear, forgive me!" cried Stephanie, jumping from her perch and passing one arm around Helen's shoulders.

They went away together, the former waving a saucy adieu to Cleland behind her back, without turning. She did not return.

So he concluded to get himself into fresh flannels, the late afternoon having grown very warm and promising a close and humid evening.

But when he descended again from his room, he found nobody except the cat, who, sadly disfigured by coal-dust, advanced toward him with amiable intention.

"Very fine, old girl," he said, "but you need a bath, too." So he rang and sent for some butter, dabbed a little on the cat's nose; and in ten seconds she had begun a thorough and minute toilet, greatly to Cleland's edification.

"Keep it up," he said, much interested, watching the pink tongue travelling over the fur, and the velvet paw scrubbing away industriously. "Good old cat! Go to it! Take the whole course—massage, shampoo, manicure, whiskers ironed! By Jove, you're coming out brand new!"

The cat paused to blink at him, sniff for a moment some faint perfume of distant cooking, unnoticed by his less delicate nostrils, then she settled down to the business in hand. And when a cat does that she feels that she is entirely at home.

Not until a maid announced dinner did the two girls appear, both arrayed in that filmy and dainty flyaway apparel suitable only to youth and freshness.

"We had naps," remarked Stephanie shamelessly, and with a slightly malicious humour in her smile, for she knew that Cleland had expected her to return for the ten-minutes' gossip she had suggested.

He shrugged:

"You should see your cat! She's polished within an inch of her life——"

A loud mew by his chair announced the regenerated animal's advent.

Stephanie fed it with odd morsels from time to time, and cautioned the waitress to prepare a banquet for it after dinner.

It was still daylight when they strolled out into the garden. The tree-clad eastern ridge was all ruddy in the rays of a declining sun; the river dull silver save in pools where pearl and pink tints tinged the stiller water. Birds were very noisy, robins gallantly attacking a gay carol which they always found impossible to vary or bring to any convincing musical conclusion; song sparrows sweetly monotonous; an exquisite burst of melody from a rose-grosbeak high on a balsam-tip above the stream; the rushing twitter of chimney swifts sweeping by, mounting, fluttering, sheering through the sunset sky.

Helen, pausing by the sun-dial, read aloud what was chiselled there, black with encrusted lichens.

"Who wrote this?" she asked curiously.

"Some bandit of the back-woods, some wilderness fur trader or ruthless forest runner—with murder on his soul, perhaps. I don't remember now. But my father made a note of the story."

She read the straggling lines again, slowly:

"But for ye Sunne no one would heed Me—

A senseless Stone;

But for ye Sunne no one could rede Me

Save God alone.

I and my comrade Sunne, together,

Print here ye hours

In praise of Love and pleasant weather

And Youth and flowers."

"How odd and quaint," she mused, "—and what straggling, primitive, illiterate letters these are, chiselled here in this black basalt. Fancy that gaunt, grim, buck-skinned runner emerging from the wilderness into this solitary settlement, finding shelter and refreshment; and, in his brief hour of rest and idleness, labouring to leave his record on this old stone!"

"His was a poet's soul," said Cleland, "—but he probably took an Iroquois scalp when unobserved, and skinned living and dead impartially in his fur transactions."

"Some degenerate son of honest English stock, I suppose," nodded Helen. "Yet, he had the simplicity of the Cavalier verse-makers in his gracious heart.... Well, for his sake——"

She laid a June rose on the weather-ravaged dial. "God rest him, anyway!" she added lightly. "There's a devil in every one of us."

"Not in you, darling," cooed Stephanie, enlacing her waist. "If there ever was, he's dead."

"I wonder." ... She glanced deliberately at Cleland, then smiled:

"There was a bully romance I read in extreme youth, in which an old swashbuckler was always exclaiming: 'Courage! The devil is dead!' And since I have realized that I, also, harboured a devil, the memory of that cheery war-cry always puts me on my mettle to slay him.... It's a good fight, Jim," she added, serenely. "But a really good fight is never finished, you know. And it's better to end the story with, 'so they lived to fight happily ever after,' than to announce that the problem is solved, the romance ended for eternity."

In the pink dusk she picked her way over the dewy grass toward the porch, saying carelessly that her ancient bones resented dampness.

Stephanie, resting against the sun-dial, inhaled the sweetness of the iris and spoke of it.

"The flowers are lilac-grey, like your eyes," he said. "The scent expresses you to me—faintly sweet—a young, fresh, delicate odour—you—in terms of perfume."

"Such a poet! ... But you know one never should touch the petals of an iris.... The indiscreet imprint remains."

"Have I left any imprint?"

"I should say you had! Do you suppose my mind isn't busy most of the time remembering your—imprints?"

"Is it?"

"Does it comfort you to know it? Nobody else ever pawed me."

"A nice way to put it!" he remarked.

She shrugged:

"I don't know how it was I first permitted it—came to endure it——" She lifted her grey eyes deliberately, "—invited it ... because I came to expect it—wish for it——" She bit her lip and made a quick gesture with clenched hand. "Oh, Jim, I'm no good! Here I am married, and as nonchalantly unfaithful to my vows as you care to make me——"

She turned abruptly and walked across the lawn toward the willows that fringed the stream, moving leisurely, pensively, her hands linked behind her back. He rejoined her at the willows and they slowly entered the misty belt of trees together.

"If you knew," she said, "what a futile, irresolute, irresponsible creature I am, you wouldn't waste real love on me. There's nothing to me except feminine restlessness, mental and physical, and it urges, urges, urges me to wander frivolously in pursuit of God knows what—I don't! But always my mind is a traveller impatient to go a-gypsying, and my feet beat the devil's tattoo——"

She sprang from the pebbles to a flat river stone projecting from the shore and stood poised, looking out across the rushing water at the mist curling there along the crests of little hurrying waves. A firefly drifted through it; above, unseen, night-hawks called persistently. She turned her head toward him expectantly.

There was room enough on the rock and he stepped to her side.

"I'm like that water," she said, "making a futile noise in the world, dashing and rippling along without any plan of my own, any destination. When I'm honest with myself, I know that it isn't the intellectual desire for self-expression that keeps me restless; it's merely and solely the instinct to ripple and bubble and dance and flow out under the stars and sunsets and dawns—and go sparkling and swirling and glimmering purposelessly away out into the world at random.... And that's all there is to Stephanie Quest!—if you really desire to know—you very romantic and foolish boy, who think yourself in love with her!"

She looked up and laughed at his sober face.

"Dear novelist," she said, "it's common realism, not romantic fiction, that has us in its clutches. We're caught by the commonplace. If life were only like one of your novels, with some definite beginning, an artistic plot full of action running toward a properly planned climax!—but it isn't! It begins in the middle and ends nowhere. And here's another trouble with real life; there aren't any villains. And that's fatal to me as your heroine, Jim, for I can't be one unless I'm furnished with a foil."

"Steve," he said, "if you are not everything that my mind and heart believe you to be, the time is past when it makes any difference to me what you are."

She laughed:

"Oh, Jim, is it really as serious as that? Can you stand for a mindless, purposeless girl of unmoral and nomadic proclivities who really hasn't a single gift—no self to express, no creative or interpretive talent—with nothing but an inordinate, unquiet curiosity to find out everything there is to find out—a mental gypsy, lazy, self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, irresponsible——"

He began to laugh:

"All that is covered by one word—'intelligent,'" he said. "You're just human, with a healthy intellect and normal inclinations."

"Oh, dear, you're so dreadfully wrong. I'm a fraud—nice to look at and to stroll with——"

She turned and stepped across to the pebbled shore. He followed. She bent her head and, not looking at him, drew his arm around her waist and held it there with one hand across his.

"I'm desperately in love," she said, "but I'm a sham—agreeable to caress, pliant, an apt pupil—pretty material for a sweetheart, Jim—but for nothing more important." ... They walked slowly along the shore path down stream under the silver willows, his arm enlacing her supple figure, her slow, deliberate steps in rhythm with his.

After a while he said in a low voice:

"Dear, you and I have already come a long way on the blossoming path together. I believe it is written that we travel it together to the end. Don't you want me always, Steve?"

"Yes," she sighed, pressing her hand over his at her waist. "I do want you, always.... But, Jim—I'm not what you think me. I ran rather wild while you were away. Liberty went to my empty head. I didn't seem to care what I did. The very devils seemed to be in my heels and they carried me everywhere at random——"

"Nonsense!"

"Oh, they did! They landed me in a dreadful pickle. You know they did. And now here I am, married, and falling more desperately in love every minute with the other man. You can't really love such a fool of a girl!"

"It makes no difference," he said, "I can't go on alone, now."

She pressed her cheek against his shoulder:

"You need not. You can always have me when you wish."

"You mean—just this way?"

"Yes.... How else——" She looked up at him; he suddenly stopped in the path, her next step brought her around facing him, where she halted, encircled by his arm. After a moment's silence, she rested her clasped hands on his shoulder, looking very seriously into his eyes.

"How else?" she repeated in a half-whisper.

"Divorce."

"No, dear."

"Either that or—we can go away somewhere—together——"

The dryness of his throat checked him, and her clear eyes looked him through and through.

"Either you or I," he said, "have got to tell Oswald how matters——"

"We can't, Jim."

"Tell him," he continued, "that we are in love with each other and need to marry——"

"Oh, Jim—my dear—dearest, I can't do that!"

"It's true, isn't it?" he demanded.

She did not answer for a while. Then she unclasped his hands, which had been resting on his shoulder, and slipped one arm around his neck:

"Yes, it is true; I want to marry you. But I can't.... So—so won't this way do?" she said. "You can always have me this way."

He kissed her lifted lips.

"No, it won't do, Steve. I want all that you are, all that you have to give the man you love and marry, all that the future holds of beauty and of mystery for us both.... I want a home with you, Steve; I want every minute of life with you, waking and sleeping.... I love you, Steve.... And because I do love you I dare tell you that I am falling in love with our future, too—in love with the very thought of—your children, Steve.... Dear, I think that I am like my father. I love only once. And once in love, there is nothing else for me; no other woman, no recompense if you fail me, no cure for me."

They both were deadly serious now; his face was quiet but set in firm and sober lines; she had lost much of her colour, so that the grey eyes with their dark lashes seemed unusually large.

"I can't marry you," she said, drawing his head nearer. "Do you think for one moment that I would deny you anything you asked of me if it were in my power to give?"

"Will you not tell me why?"

"I'm not free to tell you.... Oh, Jim! I adore you—I do love you so—so deeply. I'm married. I'm sorry I'm married. But I can't help it—I can't get out of it—it scares me even to think of trying——"

"What hold has that man——"

"No hold. There's something else—something sad, terrible——"

"I'll take you, anyway," he said in a low, tense voice. "He will have his remedy."

"How, Jim? Do you mean that you wish me to defy opinion with you? You wouldn't let me do that, would you, dear? I'd do it if you asked, but you wouldn't let me, would you?"

"No." He had lost his head for a moment; that was all; and the ugly threat had been wrenched out of him in the confusion of a tortured mind struggling against it knew not what.

"Jim," she asked under her breath, "would you really let me?"

"No," he said savagely.

"I knew you wouldn't."

Her arm slipped from his neck and again she clasped both slender hands, rested them on his shoulder, and laid her cheek against them.

"It wouldn't help me out of this pickle if we misbehaved," she said thoughtfully. "It wouldn't solve the problem.... I suppose you've taken me seriously as an apostle of that new liberty which ignores irregularities—doesn't admit them to be irregular. That's why you said what you did say, I fancy. I've talked enough modern foolishness to have you think me quite emancipated—quite indifferent to the old social order, the old code of morals, the old dogmas, the ancient and orthodox laws of community and individual conduct.... Haven't you supposed me quite capable of sauntering away unconventionally with the man I love, after the ironical and casual spectacle of marriage which I have afforded you?"

"I don't know," he said bitterly. "I don't know what I have thought.... There will never be anybody except you. If I lose you I lose the world. But between you and me there is a deeper tie than anything less than marriage could sanction. We couldn't ever do that, Steve—let the world go hang while we gave it an extra kick for each other's sakes."

"Because," she whispered, "dad's roof was ours. For his honour, if not for our own, we could not affront the world, dear.... Not that I don't love you enough!" she added almost fiercely. "I do love you enough! I don't care whether you know it. Nothing would matter—if there were no other way—and if I were free to take the only way that offered. Do you suppose I'd hesitate if it lay between taking that way and losing you?"

She turned and began to pace the path excitedly, cheeks flushed and hands clenching and unclenching.

"What do I care about myself!" she said. She snapped her fingers: "I don't care that, Jim, when your happiness is at stake! I'd go to you, go with you, love you, face the world undaunted. I care nothing about myself. I know myself! What am I? You know!"

She came up close to him, her face afire, her grey eyes brilliant.

"You know what I am," she repeated. "You and dad did everything to make me like yourselves. You took me out of the gutter——"

"Steve!"

"You took me out of the gutter!" she repeated excitedly. "You cleaned the filth from me, gave me shelter, love;—you educated me, made me possible, strove to eradicate the unworthy instincts and inclinations which I might have inherited. My aunt told me. I know what dad did for me! Why shouldn't I adore the memory of your father? Why shouldn't I love his son? I do. I always have. I didn't dream that you ever could offer me a greater love. But when I understood that it was true—when I realized that it was really love, then I stepped into your arms because you held them out to me—because you were your father's son whom I had loved passionately all my life in one way, and was willing to learn to love in any way you asked of me—Jim!—my brother—my lover——"

She flung herself into his arms, choking, clinging to him, struggling to control her voice:

"I am nothing—I am nothing," she sobbed passionately. "Why should not all my gratitude and loyalty be for your father's son? What is so terrible to me is that I can't give myself! That I can't throw myself at your feet for life. To marry you would be too heavenly wonderful! Or, to snap my fingers in the world's face for your sake—dearest—that would be so little to do for you—so easy.

"But I can't. Your father—dad—would know it. And then the world would blame him for ever harbouring a gutter-waif——"

"Steve, dearest——"

"Oh, Jim," she stammered, "I haven't even told you how those inherited traits have raised the deuce with me. I've got in me all the low instincts, all the indolence, the selfish laziness, the haphazard, irresponsible, devil-may-care traits of the man who was my own father!"

"Steve——!"

"Let me tell you! I've got to tell you. I can't keep it any longer. It was something in Oswald that appealed to that gypsy side of me—awoke it, I think. The first time I ever saw him, as a boy, and under disagreeable circumstances, I felt an odd inclination for him. He was like me, and I sensed it! I told you that once. It's true. Something in him appealed to the vagabond recklessness and irresponsibility latent in me—the tendency to wander, the indolent desire to drift and explore pleasant places.... After you went abroad I met him. I wrote you about it. I liked him. He fascinated me. There was something in common—something common in common between us.... I went to his studio, at first with Helen, and also when others were there. Then I went alone. I didn't care, knowing there was really no harm in going, and also being at the age when defiance of convention is more or less attractive to every girl.

"He was fascinating. He was plainly in love with me. But that means nothing to a girl except the subtle excitement and flattery of the fact. But he was what I wanted—a fellow vagabond!

"Every time I came into town I went to his studio. My aunt had no idea what I was up to. And we did have such good times, Jim!—you see he was successful then, and he had a wonderful studio—and a car—and we ran out into the country and then returned to take tea in his studio.... And, Jim, it was all right—but it was not good for me."

She clasped his arm with both of hers and rested her head on his shoulder; and went on talking in a steadier and more subdued voice:

"I didn't write you about it; I was very sure you wouldn't approve. And my head was stuffed full of modernism and liberty and urge and the necessity for self-expression. I felt that I had a perfect right to enjoy myself.... And then came trouble. It always does.... Oswald's father, Chiltern Grismer, came to the hospital one day, terribly wrought up and looking ghastly.

"My aunt had gone to New York to consult a specialist, but he asked for me, and I came down to the private reception room. I was a graduate nurse then. Oh, Jim!—it was quite dreadful. He seemed to be scared until he saw that I was. Then he was fearfully harsh with me. He told me that my aunt was about to begin suit against him to recover some money—a great deal of money—which my aunt pretended I should have inherited from my grandmother, Mr. Grismer's sister.

"He said we were two adventuresses and that he would expose me and my unhappy origin—all that horror of my childhood——"

A sob checked her; she rested in his arms, breathing fast and irregularly; then, recovering self-control:

"I was bewildered. I told him I didn't want his money. But there was in his eyes a terror which I could see there even when he was upbraiding and threatening me most violently. I didn't know what to do; I wanted to go back to my ward, but he followed me and held the door closed, and I had to listen to the terrible, shameful things he said about my mother's mother and my own mother and myself.... Well—just as he was about to leave, my aunt entered.... I was in tears, and Mr. Grismer's face was all twisted and contorted with rage, as I thought; but it remained so, white and distorted, as though something had broken and he couldn't recover the mobility of his features. I heard what my aunt said to him—I didn't want to hear it. I cried out, protesting that I didn't wish any of his money.... He went away with his face all twisted...."

"What did your aunt say to him?"

"I can't tell you, dear. I am not at liberty to tell you.... And after all, it doesn't matter.... He died—suddenly—a week later.... My aunt was ill at the time and I was with her.... A letter was handed to her by an orderly. It was from Mr. Grismer.... From a dead man! What she read in it seemed to be a terrific shock to her. She was sick and weak, but she got out of bed and telephoned to her attorneys in New York.... I was frightened.... It was a most dreadful night for us both.... And ... and my aunt died of it, I think—the shock and her illness combined.... She died a week later.... I took our studio with Helen.... I saw Oswald every day. He had inherited a great deal of money. We went about.... And, Jim, the very devil was in me to roam everywhere with him and see things and explore the part of the world we could cover in his touring car. All the gypsy instinct born in me, all the tendency to irresponsible wandering and idle pleasure suddenly seemed to develop and demand satisfaction.... Oswald was a dear. He was in love with me; I knew it. He didn't want to go on those escapades with me; but I bullied him into it.... And it got to a point beyond all bounds; the more recklessly we went about the keener my delight in risking everything for the sake of unconventional amusement. Twice we were caught out so far from New York that he had to drive all night to get into town. And then, what was to be expected happened: our car broke down when it meant a night away from the studio with Oswald. And the very deuce was to pay, too, for in the Ten Eyck Hotel at Albany we ran into friends—girls I knew in school and their parents—friends of dad's!

"Oh, Jim, I was panic-stricken. We had to stay there, too. I—there was nothing to do but present Oswald as my husband.... That was a terrible night. We had two rooms and a connecting parlour. We talked it over; I cried most of the time. Then I wrote out that cablegram to you.... Oh, Jim, he is a dear. You don't know him as I do. He knew I didn't love him and he was in love with me.... Well, we had to do something.

"He went out to the Fort Orange Club and got a man he knew. Then, with this man as witness, we told each other that we'd marry each other.... Then Oswald went away with his friend and I didn't see him again until next day, when he called for me with the car.... And that is all there was of my marriage.... And now," she sobbed, "I'm in love with you and I—I——" She broke down hopelessly. He drew her close to him, holding her tightly.

"There is m-more," she faltered, "but I c-can't tell it. It's c-confidential—a matter of honour. I want to be what dad and you expect of me. I do want to be honourable. That is why I can't tell you another person's secret.... It would be dishonourable. And even if I told you, I'd be afraid to ask him for my freedom——"

"You mean he would not let you divorce him?"

"Oh, no, I don't mean that! That is the terrible part of it! He would give me my freedom. But I don't want it—that way—not on the—not on such terms——"

They walked slowly toward the house together, she leaning on him as though very tired. Ahead of them a few fireflies sparkled. The rushing roar of the river was in their ears all the way to the house.

Helen had retired, leaving a note for them on the library table:

Forgive me, but I've yawned my head off—not because you two lunatics are out star-gazing, but because I'm in my right mind and healthily fatigued. Put the cat out before you lock up!

H.

Stephanie laughed, and they hunted up the cat, discovered her asleep in the best room, and bore her out to the veranda. Then Cleland locked up while Stephanie waited for him. Her tears had dried. She was a trifle pale and languid in her movements, but so lovely that Cleland, already hopelessly in love with her, fell deeper as he looked at her in this pale and unfamiliar phase.

Her grey eyes returned his adoration sweetly, pensively humourous:

"I'm in rags, emotionally," she said. "This loving a young man is a disturbing business to a girl who's just learned how.... Are you coming upstairs?"

"I suppose so."

"You'll sleep, of course?"

"Probably not a wink, Steve."

"I wonder if I shall."

They ascended the old staircase together in silence. At her door she held out her hand; he kissed it, released the fingers, but they closed around his and she drew him to her.

"What shall I do?" she said. "Tell me?"

"I don't know, dearest. There seems to be nothing you can do for us."

She bent her head thoughtfully.

"Anything that dishonours me would dishonour you and dad, wouldn't it, Jim?"

"Yes."

She nodded.

"You understand, don't you? I count myself as nothing. Only you count, Jim. But I can't marry you. And I can't go to you otherwise without betraying both dad and you. It isn't a question of my being married and of loving you enough to disregard it. I do. But you and dad require more than that of the girl you made one of your own race. I am loyal to what you both expect of me.... Good night, dear.... There doesn't seem to be any way I can make you happy. The only way I can show my love and gratitude to dad and you is to retain your respect ... by being unkind—Jim—my dearest—dearest——"

She closed her eyes and gave him her lips, slipped swiftly out of his arms and into her room.

"Oh, I'm desperately in love," she said, shaking her head at him as she slowly closed the door. "I'm going to get very, very little sleep, I fear.... Jim?"

"Yes."

"You know," she said, "Helen is a charming, clever, talented, beautiful girl. If you are afraid my behaviour is going to make you unhappy——"

"Steve, are you crazy?"

"Couldn't you fall in love with her?"

"Do you want me to try?"

There was a silence, then Stephanie shook her head and gently closed her door.

CHAPTER XXXI

In July Stephanie asked Harry Belter and his wife to spend a week at Runner's Rest. They arrived, the husband a vastly modified edition of his former boisterous, careless, assertive self—a subdued young man now, who haunted his wife with edifying assiduity, moving when she moved, sitting when she sat, tagging faithfully at her dainty heels as though a common mind originated their every inclination.

Philip Grayson, who had been asked with them, told Helen that the Belters had bored him horribly on the journey up.

"You know," he said, "Harry Belter used to be at least amusing, and Marie Cliff was certainly a sparkling companion. But they seem to have no conversation except for each other, no interests outside of each other, and if a fellow ventures to make a remark they either don't listen or they politely make an effort to notice him."

"You can't blame them," smiled Helen, "after three years of estrangement, and in love with each other all the while."

She was seated under a tree on the edge of the woods, half way up the western slope behind Runner's Rest. Grayson lay among the ferns at her feet. The day had turned hot, but up there in the transparent green shadows of the woods a slight breeze was stirring.

"Estranged all that time, and yet in love," repeated Helen, sentimentally, spreading out a fern frond on her knees and smoothing it. "Do you wonder that they lose no time together?"

Grayson, sprawling on his stomach, his handsome face framed in both hands, emitted a scornful laugh.

"You're very tender-hearted, theoretically," he said.

The girl looked up, smiled:

"Theoretically?" she inquired. "What do you mean, Phil?"

"What I say. Theoretically you are tender-hearted, sympathetic, susceptible. But practically——" His short laugh was ironical.

"Practically—what?" demanded the girl, flushing.

"Practically, you're just practical, Helen. You're nice to everybody, impartially; you go about your sculpture with the cheerful certainty of genius; nothing ever disconcerts you; you are always the cool, freshly gowned, charmingly poised embodiment of everything lovely and desirable—wonderful to look at, engaging and winsome to talk to—and—and all marble inside!"

"Phil! You unpleasant wretch!"

"Therefore," he said deliberately, "when you sentimentalize over the Belters and how they loved each other madly for several years after having bounced each other, your enthusiasm leaves me incredulous."

"The trouble with every man is this," she said; "any girl who doesn't fall in love with him is heartless—all marble inside—merely because she doesn't flop when he expects it. He gives that girl no credit for warm humanity unless she lavishes it on him. If she doesn't, she's an iceberg and he sticks that label on her for life."

Grayson sat up among the ferns and gathered his legs under him:

"It isn't because you don't care for me," he said, "but I tell you, Helen, you're too complete in yourself to fall in love."

"Self-satisfied? Thanks!" But she still did not believe he meant it.

"You are conscious of your self-sufficiency," he said coolly. "You are beautiful to look at, but your mind controls your heart; you do with your heart what you choose to do." He added, half to himself: "It would be wonderful if you ever let it go. But you're far too practical and complacent to do that."

"Let what go?"

"Your heart. You really have one, you know."

The pink tint of rising indignation still lingered on her cheeks; she looked at this presumptuous young man with speculative brown eyes, realizing that for the first time in his three years' sweet-tempered courtship he had said something unpleasantly blunt and virile to her—unacceptable because of the raw truth in it.

This was not like Phil Grayson—this sweet-tempered, gentle, good-looking writer of a literature which might be included under the term of belles lettres—this ornamental young fellow whose agreeable devotion she had come to take for granted—whose rare poems pleased her critical taste and flattered it when she saw them printed in the most exclusive of periodicals and hailed effusively by the subtlest of critics.

"Phil," she said, her brown eyes resting on him with a curiosity not free from irritation, "is this really what you think I am—after all these years of friendship?"

"It really is, Helen."

Into her hurt face came the pink tint of wrath again; but she sat quite still, her head lowered, pulling fronds from the fern on her lap.

"I'm sorry if you're offended," he said cheerfully, and lighted a cigarette.

Helen's troubled face cooled; she tore tiny shreds of living green from the fern; her remote eyes rested on him, on the blue hills across the valley, on the river below them, sparkling under the July sun.

Down there, Marie Belter, with her red parasol, was sauntering across the pasture, and Harry paddled faithfully beside her, fanning his features with his straw hat.

"There goes Marie and Fido," said Grayson, laughing. "Good Lord! After all, it's a dog's life at any angle you care to view it."

"What is a dog's life?" inquired Helen crisply.

"Marriage, dear child."

"OK. Do you view it that way?"

"I do.... But we dogs were invented for it. After all, I suppose we prefer to live our dogs' lives to any other—we human Fidos——"

"Phil! You never before gave me any reason to believe you a cynical materialist. And you have been very unjust and disagreeable to me. Do you know it?"

"I'm tired of running at your heels, I suppose.... A dog knows when he's welcome.... After a while the lack of mutual sympathy gets on his nerves, and he strays by the roadside.... And sometimes, if lonely, the owner of another pair of heels will look behind her and find him paddling along.... That's the life of the dog, Helen—with exceptions like that cur of Bill Sykes. But the great majority of pups won't stay where they're lonely for such love as they offer. For your dog must have love.... The love of the human god he worships. Or of some other god."

He laughed lightly:

"And I, who worship a goddess for her divine genius and her loveliness—I have trotted at her heels a long, long time, Helen, and I'm just beginning to understand, in my dog's heart, that my divinity does not want me."

"I—I do want you!"

"No, you don't. You haven't enough emotion in you to want anybody. You're too complete, too self-satisfied, too intellectual, too clever to understand a heart's desire—the swift, unselfish, unfeigned, uncalculated passion that makes us human. There's nothing to you but intellect and beauty. And I'm fed up!"

The girl rose, flushed and disconcerted by his brutality. Grayson got up, bland, imperturbable, accepting her departure pleasantly.

She meant to go back all alone down the hillside; that was evident in her manner, in her furious calmness, in her ignoring the tiny handkerchief which he recovered from the moss and presented.

She was far too angry to speak. He stood under the trees and watched her as she descended the hillside toward the house, just visible below.

Down she went through the heated wild grass and ferns, stepping daintily over gulleys, avoiding jutting rocks, down, ever down hill, receding farther and farther from his view until, a long way below him, he saw her halt, a tiny, distant figure shining white and motionless in the sun.

He waited for her to move on again out of sight. She did not.

After a long while he saw her lift one arm and beckon him.

"Am I a Fido?" he asked himself. "Damn it, I believe I am." And he started leisurely down hill.

When he joined her where she stood waiting, her brown eyes avoided his glance and the colour in her cheeks grew brighter.

"If you believe," she said, "that my mind controls my heart, why don't you make it an intellectual argument with me? Why not appeal to my reason? Because I—I am intelligent enough to be open to conviction—if your logic proves sounder than—mine."

"I can't make love to you logically. Love doesn't admit of it."

"Love is logical—or it's piffle!"

"I don't know how to make intellectual love."

"You'd better learn."

"Could you give me a tip?" he asked timidly.

Then Helen threw back her pretty head and began to laugh with that irresponsible, unfeigned, full-throated and human laughter that characterized the primitive girl when her naïve sense of humour was stirred to response by her lover of the cave.

For Helen had caught a glimpse of this modern young caveman's intellectual brutality and bad temper for the first time in her life, and it was a vital revelation to the girl.

He had whacked her, verbally, violently, until, in her infuriated astonishment, it was made plain to her that there was much more to him than she had ever reckoned with. He had hurt her pride, dreadfully, he had banged her character about without mercy—handled her with a disdainful vigour and virility that opened her complacent brown eyes to a new vision and a new interpretation of man.

"Phil," she murmured, "do you realize that you were positively common in what you said to me up on that hill?"

"I know I was."

"You told me——" a slight shudder passed over her and he felt it in the shoulder that touched his—"you told me that you—you were 'fed up!'"

"I was!"

"And you, a poet—a man with an almost divine facility of language——"

"Sure," he said, grinning; "I'm artist enough to know the value of vulgarity. It gives a wonderful punch, Helen—once in a lifetime."

"Oh, Phil! You horrify me. I didn't understand that you are just a plain, every-day, bad-tempered, brutal, selfish and violent man——"

"Dearest, I am! And thank God you are woman enough to stand for it.... Are you?"

They had reached the house and were standing on the porch now, her hands restlessly twisting in his sun-browned grasp, her pretty head averted, refusing to meet his eyes.

"Are you?" he repeated sternly.

"Am I, what? Oh, Phil, you hurt me—my rings hurt——"

"Then don't twist your fingers. And answer me; are you woman enough to stand for the sort of everyday human man that you say I am? Are you?"

She said something under her breath.

"Did you say yes?" he demanded.

She nodded, not looking at him.

Before he could kiss her she slid out of his grasp with a low exclamation of warning, and, looking around, he beheld the Belters, arm-in-arm, approaching across the lawn.

"Fido!" he muttered, "damn!" And he followed his divinity into the house.

CHAPTER XXXII

Helen kept her own council as long as the Belters remained at Runner's Rest, but as soon as they had departed she went to Stephanie's room and made a clean breast of it.

"What on earth do you suppose has happened to me, Steve?" she demanded, standing by the day-bed on which Stephanie was stretched out reading a novel and absorbing chocolates.

"What?" asked Stephanie, lifting her grey eyes.

"Well, there's the very deuce to pay with Phil Grayson. He isn't a bit nice to me. He isn't like himself. He bullies me."

"Why do you let him?"

"I—don't know. I resent it. He's entirely too bossy. He's taken possession of me and he behaves abominably."

"Sentimentally?"

"Yes."

"But you don't have to endure it!" exclaimed Stephanie, astonished.

"If I don't submit," said Helen, "I shall lose him. He'll go away. He says he will."

"Well, do you care what Phil Grayson does?" demanded Stephanie, amazed.

Then that intellectual, capable, intelligent and superbly healthy girl flopped down on her knees by Stephanie's day-bed and, laying her lovely head on the pillow, began to whimper.

"I—I don't know what's the matter with me," she stammered, "but my mind is full of that wretched man every minute of the day and half of the night. He is absolutely shameless; he makes love to me t-tyranically. It's impossible for a girl to keep her reserve—her d-dignity with a m-man who takes her into his arms and k-kisses her whenever he chooses——"

"What!" cried Stephanie, sitting bolt upright and staring at her friend. "Do you mean to tell me that Phil is that sort of man?"

"I didn't think so, either," explained Helen. "I've known him for ages. He's been so considerate and attentive and sweet to me—so gentle and self-effacing. I thought I could c-count on him. But a girl can't tell anything about a man—even when he's been an old and trusted friend of years."

"What are you going to do about it?" asked Stephanie, blankly.

"Do? I suppose I'll go on doing what he wishes. I suppose I'll marry him. It looks that way. I don't seem to have any will power.... It's such an odd sensation to be bullied."

"Are you in love with him?"

"I don't know. I suppose I am. It makes me simply furious.... But I guess I am, Steve.... If he'd behaved as agreeably and pleasantly as he always had behaved I should never have cared for him except in a friendly way. He always has paid his courtship to me in the nicest way.... It was quite ideal, not disturbing, and we exchanged intellectual views quite happily and contentedly.... And then, suddenly he—he flew into a most frightful temper and he told me that he was 'fed up!' My dear, can you imagine my rage and amazement? ... And then he told me what he thought of me—oh, Steve!—the most horrid things ever said about a girl he said to me! I was breathless! I felt as though he had beaten me and dragged me about by my hair.... And then—I don't know how it happened—but I w-waited for him, and we walked home together, and I understood him to say that I'd got to love him if I were a human girl.... And I am.... So—it's that way now with us.... And when I think about it I am still bewildered and furious with him.... But I don't dare let him go.... There are other girls, you know."

Stephanie lay very still. Helen rose presently, turned and walked slowly to the door. There she paused for a moment, then turned. And Stephanie saw in her brown eyes an expression entirely new to her.

"Helen! You are in love with him!" she said.

"I'm afraid I am.... Anyway, I shall not let him go until I am quite certain.... It's abominable that he should have made of me a thing with which I never have had any patience—a girl whose heart has run away with her senses. And that's what he has done to me, I'm afraid."

Stephanie suddenly flushed:

"If he has," she said, "you ought to be glad! You are free to marry him if you love him, and you ought to thank God for the privilege."

"Yes. But what is marriage going to do to my work? I never meant to marry. I've been afraid to. What happens to a girl's creative work if her heart is full of something else—full of her lover—her husband—children, perhaps—new duties, new cares! ... I didn't want to love this man. I loved my work. It took all of me. It's the very devil to have a thing like this happen. It scares me. I can't think of my work now. It bores me to recollect it. My mind and heart are full of this man!—there's no room in it for anything else.... What is this going to do to my career? That's what frightens me to think about.... And I can't give up sculpture, and I won't give up Phil! Oh, Steve, it's the very deuce of a mess—it really is. And you lie there eating chocolates and reading piffle, and you calmly tell me to thank God that I am free to marry!"

Stephanie's clear grey eyes regarded her:

"If you're any good," she said, "your career will begin from the moment you fell in love. Love clears the mind wonderfully. You learn a lot about yourself when you fall in love.... I learned that I had no talent, nothing to express. That's what love has done for me. But you will learn what genius really means."

Helen came slowly back to where the girl was lying.

"You are in love, then," she said gently. "I was afraid."

"I am afraid, too."

They looked at each other in silence.

"Do you ever mean to live with Oswald?" asked Helen.

"Not if I can avoid it."

"Can you not?"

"Yes, I can avoid it—unless the price of immunity is too heavy."

"I don't understand."

"I know you don't. Neither does Jim. It's a rather ghastly situation."

"You are not at liberty to explain it, are you?"

"No."

Helen bent and laid her hand on Stephanie's hair:

"I'm sorry. I knew you were falling in love. There seemed to be no help for either of you."

"No, no help. One can't help one's heart's inclinations. The only thing we can control is our behaviour."

"Steve, are you unhappy?"

"I'm beginning to be.... I didn't think I would be—it's so wonderful.... But the seriousness of love reveals itself sooner or later.... A girl begins to understand.... All we want is to give, if we're in love.... It's tragic when we can't." She turned her face abruptly and laid one arm across her eyes.

Helen sank to her knees again and laid her cool face against Stephanie's flushed cheek.

"Darling," she said, "there must be some way for you."

"No honourable way."

"But that marriage is a farce."

"Yes. I made it so.... But Oswald cares for me."

"Still?"

"Yes.... He is a very wonderful, generous, unhappy man; proud, deeply sensitive, tender-hearted, and loyal. I can not sacrifice him. He has done too much for my sake.... And I promised——"

"What?"

"I promised him to give myself as long a time as he wished to learn whether I could ever come to love him."

"Does he know you are in love?"

"No."

"What would he do if he knew?"

Stephanie began to tremble:

"I—don't know," she stammered, "—he must never think that I am in love with Jim..... It would be—dreadful—terrible——"

She sat up, covering her face with both hands:

"Don't ask me! Don't talk about it! There are things I can't tell you—things I can't do, no matter what happens to me—no matter whether I am unhappy—whether Jim is——"

"Don't cry, darling. I didn't mean to hurt you——"

"Oh, Helen! Helen! There's something that happened which I can't ever forget. It terrifies me. There's no way out of this marriage for me—there's no way! No way!" she repeated desolately.... "And I'm so deeply in love—so deeply—deeply——"

She flung herself on her face and buried her head in her arms.

"Just let me alone," she sobbed. "I can't talk about it. I—I'm glad you're happy, dear. But please go out, now!"

Helen rose and stood for a moment looking down at the slender figure in its jewelled kimono and its tumbled splendour of chestnut hair. Then she went out very quietly.

On the porch her audacious young man and Cleland were smoking and consulting time-tables, and she gave the former a swift glance which questioned his intentions. He seemed to comprehend, for he said:

"It's Jim. He's been talking to Oswald on the long distance wire, and he's going down to town to see the model that Oswald has made."

"Are you going, too?" she asked.

"Not until you do," he said boldly.

Helen blushed furiously and glanced at Cleland, but he had not paid them any attention, apparently, for he rose with an absent air and went into the house.

"Steve!" he called from the foot of the stairs. "I'm going to town to-night, if you don't mind."

There was no answer. He ran lightly up the stairs and glanced through her door, which was partly open. Then he went in.

She did not hear him, nor was she aware of his presence until she felt his questioning hand on her tumbled hair. Then she turned over, looked up into his anxious face, stretched out her arms to him in a sudden passion of loneliness and longing, and drew him convulsively to her breast with a little sob of surrender. And the next instant she had slipped through his arms to the floor, sprung to her feet, and now stood breathing fast and unevenly as he rose, half dazed, to confront her.

"Jim," she said unsteadily, "I had better go back. I'm losing my head here with you—here under dad's roof. Do you hear what I say? I can't trust myself. I can't remain here and tear dad's honour to shreds just because I've gone mad about you.... I'm going back."

"Where?"

"To Oswald."

"What!"

"It's the only safety for us. There's no use. No hope, either. And it's too dangerous—with no outlook, no possible chance that waiting may help us. There's not a ghost of a chance that we ever can marry. That is the real peril for us.... So—I'll play the game.... I'll go to him now—before it's too late,—before you and I have made each other wretched for life—and before I have something still worse on my conscience!"

"What?"

"My husband's death! He'll kill himself if I let you take me away somewhere."

After a silence he said in a low voice:

"Is that what you have been afraid of?"

"Yes."

"You believe he will kill himself if you divorce him?"

"I—I am certain of it."

"Why are you certain?"

"I can't tell you why."

He said coolly:

"Men don't do that sort of thing as a rule. Weak intellects seek that refuge from trouble; but his is not a weak character."

"I won't talk about it," she said. "I've told you more than I ever meant to. Now you know where I stand, what I fear—his death!—if I dishonour dad's memory and go away with you. And if I ask divorce, he will give it to me—and then kill himself. Do you think I could accept even you on such terms as these?"

"No," he said.

He looked at her intently. She stood there very white, now, her grey eyes and the masses of chestnut hair accentuating her pallour.

"All right," he said, "I'll take you to town."

"You need not."

"Won't you let me?"

"Yes, if you wish.... When you go downstairs, tell them to send up my trunks. Tell one of the maids to come."

"You can't go off this way, to-night. You've two guests here," he said in a dull voice.

"You will be here."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Oswald called me on the long distance wire an hour ago. He has asked me to go to town and look at the sketch he has made for the fountain. I said I'd go."

She dropped to the couch and sat there with grey eyes remote, her shoulders, in their jewelled kimono, huddled under her heavy mass of hair.

"Stay here for a while, anyway," he said. "There's no use taking such action until you have thought it over. And such action is not necessary, Steve."

"It is."

"No. There is a much simpler solution for us both. I shall go abroad."

"What!" she exclaimed sharply, lifting her head.

"Of course. Why should you be driven into the arms of a husband you do not love just because you are afraid of what you and I might do? That would be a senseless proceeding, Steve. The thing to do is to rid yourself of me and live your life as you choose."

She laid her head on her hands, pressing her forehead against her clenched fingers.

"That's the only thing to do, I guess," he said in his curiously colourless voice. "I came too late. I'm paying for it. I'll go back to Paris and stay for a while. Time does things to people."

She nodded her bowed head.

"Time," he said, "forges an armour on us all.... I'll wait until mine is well riveted before I return. You're quite right, Steve.... You and I can't go on this way. There would come a time when the intense strain would break us both—break down our resolution and our sense of honour—and we'd go away together—or make each other wretched here.... Because there's no real happiness for you and me without honour, Steve. Some people can do without it. We can't.

"We might come to think we could. We might take the chance. We might repeat the stale old phrase and try to 'count the world well lost.' But there would be no happiness for you and me, Steve. For, to people of our race, happiness is composite. Honesty is part of it; loyalty to ideals is another; the world's respect, the approval of our own hearts, the recognition of our responsibility to the civilization that depends on such as we—all these are part of the only kind of happiness that you and I can understand and experience.... So we must give it up.... And the best way is the way I offer.... Let me go out of your life for a while.... Live your own life as you care to live it.... Time must do whatever else is to be done."

The girl lifted her dishevelled head and looked at him.

"Are you going to-night?"

"Yes."

"You are not coming back?"

"No, dear."

She dropped her head again.

There was a train at four that afternoon. He took a gay and casual leave of Helen and Grayson, where he found them reading together in the library.

"Will you be back to-morrow?" inquired the latter.

"I'm not sure. I may be detained for some time," said Cleland carelessly. And went upstairs.

Stephanie, frightfully pale, came to her door. Her hair was dressed and she was gowned for the afternoon. She tried to speak but no sound came from her colourless lips; and she laid her hands on his shoulders in silence. Their lips scarcely touched before they parted; but their eyes clung desperately.

"Good-bye, dear."

"Good-bye," she whispered.

"You know I love you. You know I shall never love another woman?"

"Try to—forget me, Jim."

"I can't."

"I can't forget you, either.... I'm sorry, dear. I wish you had me.... I'd give you anything, Jim—anything. Don't you know it?"

"Yes."

She laid her head on his breast, rested a moment, then lifted it, not looking at him, and turned slowly back into her room.

It was dark when he arrived in New York. The flaring streets of the city seemed horrible to him.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Washington Square seemed to him a little cooler than the streets to the northward; the white arch, the trees, the splash of water made a difference. But beyond, southward, narrow streets and lanes were heavy with the close, hot odours of the slums—a sickening smell of over-ripe fruit piled on push-carts, the reek of raw fish, of sour malt from saloons—a subtler taint of opium from blind alleys where Chinese signs hung from rusting iron balconies.

Through cracks between drawn curtains behind the window of Grismer's basement studio, light glimmered; and when Cleland pulled the bell-wire in the area he could hear the crazy, cracked bell jangling inside.

Grismer came.

For a second he hesitated behind the iron area gate, then recognizing her visitor opened for him.

They shook hands with a pleasant, commonplace word or two of civility, and walked together through the dark, hot passageway into the lighted basement.

"It's devilish hot," said Grismer. "There's probably a storm brewing over Staten Island."

He looked colourless and worn. There was a dew of perspiration on his forehead, which dampened the thick amber-gold hair. He wore only a gauze undershirt, trousers and slippers, under which his supple, graceful figure was apparent.

"Grismer," said Cleland uneasily, "this cellar is hell in July. Why won't you come up to Runner's Rest for the hot period? You can't do anything here. You can't stand it."

Grismer fished a siphon out of his ice-box and looked around with a questioning smile. "I've some orange juice. Would you like some?"

Cleland nodded and walked over to a revolving table on which the wax model of his fountain stood. Grismer presently came up beside him with both glasses, and he took his with an absent nod, but continued to examine the model in silence.

"Probably you don't care for it," suggested Grismer.

Cleland said slowly:

"You gave me a different idea. I didn't know you were going to do anything like this."

"I'm afraid you are disappointed."

"No.... It's beautiful, Grismer. I hadn't thought that a figure would be possible, considering the character of the place and the very simple and primitive surroundings. But this is in perfect taste and amazingly in accord with everything."

He looked at the slim, naked, sinuous figure—an Indian girl of fifteen drinking out of cupped hands. Wild strawberry vines in full fruit bound her hair, which fell in two clubbed braids to her shoulders. A narrow breadth of faun-skin fell from a wampum girdle to her knees. And, from the thin metal forehead-fillet, the head of a snake reared, displaying every fang.

"It's the Lake-Serpent, isn't it?—the young Oneida girl of the Iroquois legend?" inquired Cleland.

Grismer nodded.

"That's your country," he said. "The Iroquois war-trail passed through your valley and down the river to Charlemont and Old Deerfield. I read up on it. The story of the Lake-Serpent and the Eight Thunders fascinated me. I thought the thing might be done."

"You've done it. It's stunning."

"The water," explained Grismer, "flows out of her hollowed hands, out of the serpent's throat and down each braid of hair, dripping on her shoulders. Her entire body will appear to be all glimmering with a thin skin of running water. I shall use the 'serpent spot' on her forehead like a caste-mark, I think. And what I want to get is an effect from a fine cloud of spray which will steam up from the basin at her feet like the 'cloud on the water' which the legend speaks of. I can get it by an arrangement of very minute orifices through which spray will rush and hang over the water in a sort of rainbow mist. Do you think that would be all right?"

"Of course. It's a masterpiece, Grismer," said the other quietly.

Into Grismer's pale face a slow colour came and spread.

"That's worth living for," he said.

"What?"

"I said that I'm glad I have lived to hear you speak that way of anything I have done," said Grismer with a smile.

"I don't understand why you should care about my opinion," returned Cleland, turning an amused and questioning gaze on the sculptor. "I'm no critic, you know."