Front matter (continued 4)

This is one of the stories which the lawyer told her:--

"In the old days, when Father Junipero and his small band of priests and soldiers came into the wilderness of California, with the cross uplifted in one hand, the sword grasped in the other, there lived on this island where we now sit, a beautiful Indian maiden. Her name was a very long one, and its meaning in our language is the Smile of the Morning. She lived with the old chief, her father, in a wigwam, where also lived her sisters and brothers and various of her cousins and distant relatives. The old chief had many daughters, but the Smile of the Morning was his favorite child; and she it was who cooked his food for him, when he did not eat it raw, and brought him his bow and arrows when he started on a hunting party. The sisters of the favorite daughter all found mates among the sons of the tribe, but she lived alone with only the wild bird in the madrone tree for her lover. Her sisters, each of whom carried a pappoose upon her back, laughed at the Smile of the Morning, and said that she would die without a husband; but the girl did not mind them. She was taller, by a head, than any woman of the tribe; she could charm the wild birds, and draw the feathers from their tails to make head-dresses for the old chief and ornaments for herself; she could dance war-dances like one of the braves, only with more grace; and when she told the stories which the fishes in the river whispered to her, the old chieftain nodded his head wisely and patted the girl on the shoulder. She should find a husband in good time; but he must be as much taller and stronger than the other men of the tribe, as she was fairer and wiser than her sisters.

"When the missionary priests came, with their white faces and strange garments fashioned neither from the skin of any animal nor from the feathers of any bird, and made friendly overtures to the old chief, the Smile of the Morning fell upon her face in terror. The Indians would have worshipped the men with the white faces and strange tongue; but to prove to them that they too were men and adored a God, the priests held their services and kneeled to the Great Spirit whom they reverenced. When the new-comers had learned the language of the Indians, and had built themselves a house and a greater house to their God, the daughter of the chief grew to be no longer afraid of the black-robed figures. She eagerly learned the simple lessons which they set for the people; and it was because of the wonderful learning that they gave her that she studied so industriously, and not, like her brothers and sisters, to gain the daily rations of corn. When the early bell called the Indians to the church of the San Rosario Mission, the Smile of the Morning was the first to answer the summons; and when the other Indians were squabbling over their breakfast of maize, she lingered in the sanctuary, trying to fathom the strange rites which were so much holier than those of her people, looking into the painted faces in the pictures over the rude altar, and feeling curiously behind them to ascertain whether the backs also were painted.

"The soldiers who upheld the authority of the priests were encouraged by large bounties and grants of land to marry the converted squaws; and in the course of time several such unions were solemnized at the Mission. Among the stern old pioneer priests was one young man dear to the Father Junipero, whose pupil he had been, and who had followed the famous man on his great mission of converting the heathen Indians. His name was Fra Antonio. His voice was soft and low, and his eyes open and sad, with shadows in them, which the Indian maiden had never seen in other eyes,--shadows like those cast by the white clouds floating before the sun's face on hot summer afternoons. Fra Antonio was very kind to the tall beauty of the tribe, and with a never-failing patience strove to make the doctrines of his religion clear to her simple understanding. Strange were the means by which the fathers learned to expound their religion to the savages. To express the great hope of the resurrection, they put a number of insects in a vessel of water, leaving them there till they were apparently quite dead. Then the creatures were placed in a bank of hot ashes, which warmed their frozen, half-dead bodies back to life. When the gauzy wings were spread, carrying the insects up into the sunshine again, the fathers marked the words ejaculated by the Indians, and by that term they called the resurrection.

"New and beautiful were the thoughts which now possessed the mind of the Indian girl. She learned that to forgive was nobler than to avenge,--strangest of all doctrines taught by the priests to the red men. She learned that the stars, pale and fiery, were great worlds like the one in which she lived, and not the hearts of the brave chiefs placed in the heavens after death as she had always been taught. Only the simplest of the great truths which lie like jewels in the tawdry setting of the Mother Church, did Fra Antonio instil into her childish mind, which with an unquestioning faith accepted all the young priest taught. Few among the tribe--perhaps, indeed, no one of the Indians beside the Smile of the Morning--understood or believed the new doctrines taught by the priests. These were satisfied that the rites of baptism and of extreme unction were administered, and that the daily services were attended, quite conscious that their most potent weapon of conversion was the ration of atole, or prepared corn, which they served out to the lazy braves. As soon as he became a member of the church, every redskin was cared for, and a gentle slavery was the result, in which the priests exacted a certain amount of labor from the Indian, in turn feeding him and caring for his wants. The art of weaving was taught, together with civilized agriculture; and the fruit of the vines was fermented into strong, rough wine, this being reserved for the service of the altar and the table of the priests. In the eyes of the zealous missionaries the Indian was the rightful owner of the soil; and there was no thought of disputing his claim to it. It was that he might better and more wisely enjoy the fruits of his own land, and in the next life enter the happier home prepared for all true followers of the Church of Rome, that the Father Junipero and his band of soldiers and priests lived and died in the wilderness of California. How their treatment of the original inhabitants of the soil differed from that adopted by the enlightened race which now claims the country, you have seen enough, or at any rate heard enough, of our Indian policy to appreciate. Instead of improving the land for its owners, as did the brave missionary priests, we have wrested it from them, driving the children of those who for centuries have owned the Pacific coast away from the choicest spots to rocky, desolate lands which have again been taken from them by the greedy gold-hunters. But all this has happened since the time when the Smile-of the Morning lived upon this pretty island, and decked her glossy hair with a coronet of blue-jays' feathers, that she might be fair in the eyes of one whom she loved. But a year had passed since the arrival of Fra Antonio, when the old chieftain noticed that his daughter's step had grown heavy and slow; that her great eyes danced no more; that her countenance no longer merited the name of the morning's smile. He was a wise old man for an Indian; and after thinking the matter over for a week, during which time he smoked an unusual number of pipes of tobacco, he came to the conclusion that the girl had been bewitched by one of the strange priests. Calling her to him, he questioned her as to the cause of her altered behavior; and from her downcast face and embarrassed replies he quickly surmised her secret. The Smile of the Morning loved the fair young priest, and it was for his sake that her tears flowed. The old chief at first scoffed at her infatuation, and bade her take up with one of her dusky suitors. But the girl was obstinate; and finally yielding to her whim, the old chief himself offered his daughter's hand to Fra Antonio. The young priest, in holy horror, took counsel with his superiors; and it was explained to the chieftain that though the white soldiers were free to mate with the maidens of the tribe, the priests were vowed to celibacy. If the pious young priest had unwittingly mingled an unwise fervor in his exhortations to the Indian girl, he bitterly regretted his fault. As day by day he saw her elastic figure grow more feeble, and marked her hollow cheeks and her sad eyes fixed reproachfully on him whilst he served the mass or taught the new converts, a tenderness for her, which her savage health and perfections had failed to arouse, awoke in his breast. When he saw the young braves, each with his dusky partner, and the sisters of the Smile of the Morning with their children in their arms, he sometimes cursed the priestly habit which proclaimed him a thing apart from all other of God's creatures, doomed to live unmated and alone. Long vigils and heavy penances failed to ease the grief in his heart, or to set at rest its yearning toward the child who had been redeemed from barbarism, through his teaching, to live a Christian life and die in the hope of his faith.

"At last the battle between the spirit and the heart grew too terrible for him to bear; he was not strong enough; and he begged the fathers to send him to another Mission far to the northward. When the Smile of the Morning learned that Fra Antonio was to leave the Mission on the morrow, she decked herself in all her jewels, hung her long shell necklaces about her throat, wound her bead bracelets about her arms, and placed her coronet of blue-jays' feathers upon her brow. She was not to be found that night when the old chief lay down to rest; and when the sun rose on the day which should see Fra Antonio far on his long journey, her sisters found the maiden lying in the cool waters of the river which washes this island, with the little rosary the priest had given her locked in her cold fingers, and the smile upon her face that had been missing for so many weeks. They called the fathers to come and look upon her; and Fra Antonio prayed long beside her, with streaming eyes and broken voice. The kiss which his sad lips laid reverently on her brow was felt perhaps, for all those who stood near heard the sigh which came rustling through the trees near by. As she had wilfully taken her own life, the poor girl could not be buried with the ceremonies of the church to which she had been admitted; so she was interred by her people near the spot where they had found her, on this little island where we now sit. When the good fathers sat together of an evening and discussed questions spiritual and temporal touching the welfare of their little flock, Fra Antonio was often missing from their midst. Sometimes the faint sound was heard of the church bell softly struck by a tender hand, and the priests crossed themselves silently, knowing for whose soul it was that Fra Antonio solemnized the mass for the dead."

A silence followed Galbraith's story, which was broken by Millicent, who said,--

"I have a sketch in an old Italian book of a beautiful young monk, Fra Antonio by name. Could it be the same, I wonder?"

"Who knows? Some of the priests were Italians. Would the dates agree?"

"The portrait was dated some time in the latter part of the last century."

"It could not have been far from that time that the Smile of the Morning met her sad fate."

"Sad,--do you call her fate sad?" queried Millicent.

"Who could think it otherwise?"

"I surely do. Was it sad to die for the man she loved?"

"It would have been happier if she could have lived for him."

"Happiness! Who spoke of happiness? Why talk about a thing so mythical? I think her lot was an enviable one. To her simple mind the thought that suicide is sinful could never have occurred. She might not follow the man she loved; she believed that the soul now prisoned in her breast might always be near him; so she opened the cage and let the bird fly."

"You speak as seriously as if you had known the Smile of the Morning and sympathized with her."

"It is the privilege of those who have greatly suffered, that the grief of others can be felt and understood by them." Millicent spoke absently, dreamily, checking her speech at the pained expression which her words brought to Galbraith's face.

Later in the afternoon the party left the island and wandered about the old bridge. Some of them climbed the high hill; others struck into the woods. By some chance Millicent found herself left alone near the mill with no one of the party near her save Ah Lam. Calling the faithful creature to her side, she made him prepare her a comfortable seat, and leaning back against the wall, she entered into a desultory conversation with her pupil. Ah Lam often told her stories in his broken English, descriptive of the power and character of the most august personages of the Chinese mythology. To-day he found an inattentive listener in his kind friend and teacher; but he had been bidden to speak, and so he talked on patiently, describing rites of death and feasts of marriages, recalling the great river fête which he had witnessed shortly before sailing from his native city. As the Chinaman paused after this last tale, Millicent heard a step approaching the door of the old mill. She looked up carelessly, expecting to see one of the gentlemen. The man who stood before her was a stranger. His face was somewhat flushed, and he looked as if he had travelled some distance.

"Second time, my lady, I've see'd yer purty face to-day."

Millicent bowed her head and turned away, looking anxiously toward the wood, where she had seen Hal disappear a few moments before.

"Sha'n't let yer off ser aisy this time. I've took a fancy to see the color of yer eyes."

The look of angry indignation with which the gray orbs were turned upon the man was enough to have abashed any sensitive person, but to this class the stranger did not belong. He was a rough-looking fellow of large stature, with a heavy animal face, crossed by a deep scar running from the chin to the forehead on the right side. In his belt he wore a pair of pistols, at which the Chinaman looked uneasily.

"Say, do yer belong in these parts?"

"Yes," answered the girl in a low voice.

"Well, I am leavin' 'em for good; we're not likely to meet again. I 'm a gentleman, and I don't want to trouble you for them rings o' yourn, but a kiss won't cost you nothin'."

Suiting the action to the word, the man threw an arm about the girl's slender waist, and quick as a thought began to drag her toward the spot where a couple of horses were tethered. With a sudden wrench, she shook herself free from his rude clasp, and sped down the path calling for help. Help was nearer to her than she had thought, and a humble friend sprang to her aid. As the insolent creature started in pursuit of the swift-footed girl, Ah Lam adroitly tripped him up, bringing him to the ground with a heavy fall. The man was somewhat bruised by his tumble, a sharp stone having struck his arm. He arose with difficulty, pouring out a volley of oaths the like of which had never before desecrated Millicent's ears. The Chinaman, knowing full well the danger which his temerity had brought upon him, ran quickly after his young mistress. The path brought them to the border of the stream, and their flight was stopped by this obstacle. By this time, the man, blind with rage, had caught up with the two fugitives; he seemed in doubt which of them to molest first. Millicent stood with flashing eyes and curling lip, her head thrown back, her arms folded across her breast, looking at him with an expression of scorn that seemed to awe him for a moment. He drew back, as if afraid to touch so beautiful and wrathful a creature, and in his rage clutched the Chinaman by the throat. In the scuffle which ensued, Ah Lam's hat was thrown off, and the long cue coiled about his head fell down. Quick as thought, the ruffian seized the braid, and drawing a sharp knife from his boot, cut it from the head of the Chinaman. With a shriek which had the despair of a double death, the Chinaman turned and implanted his finger-nails in the face of his adversary, inflicting ten long scratches on the cheeks. The crushed worm will turn at last; and the poor soul, damned for eternity by the cutting of his hair, had turned upon the ruffian. Quick as the fast-drawn breath of the terrified girl, the villain lifted his long knife and, with a horrible oath, plunged it into the side of the Chinaman. The shrieks of the victim, the horror-stricken screams of the girl, the sight of the blood, seemed to madden the wretch; for he tore the quivering knife from the wound and stabbed him again and again. At last the rage for blood seemed satiated; he threw the mutilated body, still breathing, to ebb out its life on the soil, and turned with bloody hands and seared eyes toward Millicent, who had sunk upon her knees, lifting the head of the dying Chinaman to her young breast.

The closed lids fluttered open, the dimmed eyes looked gratefully for the last time into the face of the girl who had been kinder to him than any other creature in this strange land where he had worked so faithfully, where he had been so cruelly oppressed in life, and so foully murdered; hope of Heaven being closed to him before his miserable breath had been taken. The horror of his crime must have overcome the ruffian for a moment, for he paused and silently watched the death-agonies of his victim. To that moment's feeling of horror or remorse, what might not Millicent owe? For soon, to her it seemed an eternity, the men, whose answering shouts she had not heard, appeared close at hand. The murderer saw them none too quickly for his safety, and springing upon his horse, which stood near by, clapped spurs to the flank and rode off at a hand gallop in the opposite direction.

Galbraith rushed to Millicent's side and lifted the dying creature from her breast. They placed him gently upon the bank, and Hal put his flask to his lips; but it was too late. With one last struggle Ah Lam yielded up his miserable life; and Millicent's cry of pity sounded his death-knell. Then she lifted her hands to Heaven and prayed for the soul of the poor creature who had so bravely defended her. An hour ago she had smiled at Fra Antonio's masses for the repose of the Smile of the Morning. In moments like these the strong instincts of men and women overcome the reasons and doctrines of education; Millicent prayed, believing that she should be heard.

When it became evident to the little group which had silently assembled about the spot, that poor Ah Lam was beyond human help, Maurice Galbraith and Henry Deering lifted the lifeless body and laid it in the great wagon. Millicent followed and drew over the dead face the white cloak which she had worn all that day. Pedro, climbing to his seat, touched the mules into motion; and the wagon, which had carried so merry a freight to the gray bridge that morning, returned at sunset over the same path with its ghastly burden,--a very funeral car.

Maurice Galbraith gently placed Millicent beside Barbara and her mother in the smaller carriage, which was driven back to the Ranch under the escort of Ferrara, O'Neil, and Hartley. Then the young lawyer, with Henry Deering to bear him company, started in pursuit of the murderer. He had sworn a silent oath, as he stood by the dying man, and learned that his life had been given to protect Millicent, that Ah Lam should be avenged. If there were law and justice in the broad land of California, the murderer should surfer the extreme penalty for wilful and wicked shedding of innocent blood. In pursuit rode the two young men, with stern faces; and it was well for the fugitive that he had a long start of them, for they rode as men do when time must be gained at all costs. Along the narrow bridle-path, over which the murderer had passed, they took their way, and were soon lost to the view of the three women sitting close together in troubled silence. Barbara's strong hands held the reins and plied the whip, while streams of tears coursed down her cheeks. Mrs. Deering patted her daughter's shoulder; but it was on Millicent her attention was most firmly fixed. The girl had not moved since Galbraith had placed her in the carriage. Her eyes were strained wide open, and the expression in their depths was one which the gentle woman never forgot,--a look as of an endless despair and horror. Back to the happy valley they drove silently, no joyous young voices carolling out ballads of love, songs of battle, as was their wont; in silence and grief they passed over the familiar road through the gap between the guardian hills, back to the quiet house, to herald the advent of the humble dead to those who had been his fellow-servants.

No one told Millicent that standing near the spot where the ruffian's horse had been tethered was a second steed. A strong mustang saddled and bridled was found there. A heavy leading-rein passed through the bit, and a stout rope lying over the saddle, gave a sinister significance to the fact. For whom had that horse been brought?

CHAPTER XIII.

"Abroad it rushed,

My frolic soul, for it had sight

Of something half-way, which was known

As mine at once, yet not mine own."

It was early in the morning for Millicent, usually a late sleeper, to be in the garden among the flowers. There Graham found her, white as the gown she wore, standing with her arms filled with dark-red roses,--standing with the sunlight touching her pretty hair, and shining in her cool gray eyes. He stared at her, as at one risen from the dead; he touched her hand before he spoke to her, to make sure that it was really she, alive, with softly heaving breast and warm, clinging fingers. Alive, and not as he had pictured her a thousand times during that terrible ride,--cold and dead, with the stain which had dyed her kerchief, on brow and bosom. For a long time they stood silently looking into each other's faces; and then the man laid her hand gently on his arm, and together they passed down the orchard road, across a space of sunburnt meadow, to a spot they both knew,--Millicent's boudoir, hanging over the narrow stream, walled by six tall redwoods grown from the seeds of some giant predecessor, carpeted with thick green moss, furnished with two rough seats. Here they rested silently for a time,--Graham drawing long breaths of the morning air to relax his tired lungs; Millicent resting her wearied heart with looking at him, all her soul shining through her eyes. Graham first broke the silence with questions of all that had happened since they had parted. She told him of her danger, and of the murder of the Chinaman, in a low voice, full of awe. It had been her first knowledge of death; and the chill reality, the only certain thing which men look forward to, had first been known by her now that she was a woman grown, and could fully understand its dreadful significance. Hitherto, death had been a phrase only; a thing which must come to all creatures, as a matter of course. That she should sometime die she knew, but only by tradition; it had meant nothing to her. Now she understood it all, and the terrible knowledge had chilled her life-blood. Could she ever again think of anything but that dead face? One stronger than the King of Terrors was driving it from her thoughts: love was swiftly painting out the grim picture from her memory.

Step by step they went over the ground of their mutual experiences since the time when they had parted: the picnic, and its tragic ending; the night which Graham had passed in the cabin with Ah Lam's murderer,--for there could be no doubt it was he who had dropped Millicent's handkerchief in the hut. Of the little journal Graham spoke sadly, gently, without anger, as if it were a thing which concerned neither of them. Then Millicent brokenly told the story which the written words had simply indicated. She told it with a sense of thankfulness that the weight of the secret rested no longer on her heart alone; that its pain was shared, and that at last her lover understood and saw her absolutely as she was. No reservation did she make, but bared to him the inmost chambers of her heart, sure of no misunderstanding, and upheld by a sympathy she had never before known. Then her confidence was returned, and Graham spoke to her of many things of which he had never spoken before; of the hopes and aspirations which had sometimes made his life glorious; of the quicksands and hidden rocks which had often made his way dangerous.

A wonderful confession,--solemn as those first confessions made by men and women who at maturity join the Roman Catholic Church, and unflinchingly reveal to the confessor every temptation to which they have yielded in the course of their lives. To no mumbling, inattentive priest, with store of penances and absolutions in his pocket, was the confession made; in no stifling confessional, with throng of penitents outside, grudging every moment of delay. Each spoke to a tender human heart, that filled out the broken sentences, and echoed the deep sighs. The roof of their temple swayed in the light breeze, and the wild birds chanted the hymn of praise which consecrated it.

As Millicent at last sat silent, not knowing whether her lover still spoke to her in words, or if that finer language of the spirit made his thoughts clear to her, came at once a strange consciousness that she was no longer a creature of this earth, with material senses and shape. The last words which she had spoken she remembered as one dimly recalls what has happened in another life. They were these:--

"Are you sorry for me?"

There had been no answer in words or in looks; for the power of sight had been left behind with the outer case, now shaken off for the first time since life upon the earth had begun. She was a thing apart no longer; her existence had become merged in that of a stronger soul, to which she was an all-important part. Folded in this spirit-embrace time was not, nor past nor future; nothing but the perfect ecstasy of a union which eternity should consecrate. Floating on a celestial ether, the double soul mounted ever higher and higher. Was it toward eternal bliss that it was wafted? Was the long waiting at an end?

Again she saw the sunlight; again she heard the ripple of the water; again she felt the earthly tenement closing about the divine spirit. Before her, framed in the green leaves, was a face dear indeed, the face of her lover. With solemn eyes they looked at each other; and a broken voice whispered to her,--

"Dear, what is it?"

She answered softly,--

"I have never been so near to you before."

Then a flood of feeling swept over her, and she would have knelt to him, her other self; but he was already at her feet, moved by that same instinct to do homage to the human form which held his counter soul, and on her white feet he laid a reverent embrace.

Strengthened and uplifted by that mystic union whose memory should never leave her, whose bonds should ever bind her, was Millicent. In every existence comes one supreme, all-important moment, which thenceforth is the landmark by which life is measured; the climacteric point to which the past merely served to lead, the future availing only to enshrine its memory. To some men and women the significance of that moment is known only when it has long passed; to Millicent, the knowledge that her whole after life should be controlled by that hour was not wanting. And her lover,--would he be faithful to that unspoken vow? The thought never crossed her mind; she was irrevocably bound to him; priest and rite could but make a poor, earthy contract between what was mortal in them both; the spiritual union was not for this world, and might not be broken by either.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."

It was a pitiful story which the little journal had made known to John Graham,--the story of a woman grievously wronged, cruelly deceived.

Millicent Almsford's life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste, simply locking up the livres defendus of his library, and telling her English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie's. The young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died; and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life. Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and her friendship with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind, that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own. Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the color of an exaggerated cynicism, which was sometimes strongly shaken by the inner spirit which still slept under the untouched heart. Platonics, where the man is of the world wise, and the woman foolish with the innocence of childhood, are dangerous things, as he knew full well, and she did not. In pointing out the forces which mould the lives of men and women, what theme is so often upon the lips of two life students of opposite sexes as that of love? To the girl it seemed a strange, rather interesting force, whose power it would not be unpleasant to test; and when one day her mentor confessed to her that she had bound him irrevocably by those bonds which he had taught her were but ropes of sand, she smiled half sadly, but in her heart laughed with childish merriment. She now should see the actual workings of that strange hallucination; she should learn something of what love was. She was as unfeeling as a young lioness, and learned the lesson of making him turn pale and red by turns, as quickly as she had learned the knack of touching the chords of her mandolin. She looked upon her quondam friend in the light of an invalid, suffering from a dangerous but non-contagious malady. And so things went on; the man gaining every day a firmer hold over the girl, intoxicated by the new power in herself and a growing consciousness of her beauty and charms. During the long mornings at the Palazzo Fortunio, the two friends read and talked together, while the Italian governess, understanding no word of their intercourse, sat sewing patiently beside them. In the cool afternoons, when they were rowed by the strong-armed gondolier, Girolomo, out into the glory of the sunset, the same stolid companion always accompanied them. One day, Mr. Almsford, selfish old epicurean, perceived for the first time that his daughter had grown to a tall and fair womanhood. His attention had, perhaps, been first called to the fact by the increasing size of the half-yearly coffer which found its way from Fashion's capital to the Fortunio Palace, and by the proportionate lengthening of the account which accompanied it. Yes, Millicent was certainly grown to be a young lady. They were beginning to send her little, demure bonnets, and close-fitting, simple woollen dresses, made with more of an idea of displaying her graceful figure than heretofore. The girl was heiress to her mother's fortune; and it behooved him to see about finding a suitable husband for her. Whom should he consult in this matter, but their most intimate friend; the man who seemed at once his contemporary and hers; the handsome, clever fellow-countryman, who had been on the most intimate footing in his house for the last ten years? Edward Holworthy had started unaccountably when, in the midst of one of the solemn pauses of their game of chess, Mr. Almsford had propounded the unexpected question to him:--

"How shall I find Millicent a husband?"

The elder gentleman, for the first time in many months, checkmated his adversary in two moves, and won the game in an unprecedentedly short space of time.

Holworthy's advice was given after a week's deliberation. It was in favor of sending Miss Almsford to her father's sister, who lived in London, in order that she might be presented at court and introduced to English society. Mr. Almsford thought over the advice, which appeared to him wise. He consulted Millicent, who eagerly accepted the chance to see something of the world; and finally, after six months' exchange of letters upon the subject, the girl was taken to London by her father, and comfortably established, with her aunt, in a pretty Kensington villa, for which her poorly circumstanced relative gladly forsook a small house in an unfashionable quarter of the town. Having married a younger son of a great house, with no portion but debts on his part and beauty on hers, Millicent's aunt, with the matchless tact of our countrywomen, had secured herself a prominent and agreeable position in London society. In mere worldly advantages the young girl could have had no better chaperone than the pretty young woman, still occupied with bets, beaux, and bon-bons. She took her niece to all the best houses; and soon Millicent's extreme beauty, and the widely noised, somewhat exaggerated accounts of her worldly goods, brought her scores of invitations and admirers on her own account.

Six months after her departure, Millicent Almsford returned to the Palazzo Fortunio, where the report of her great social success had preceded her and tickled the ears of her parent, proud of the child for whose sake he had never sacrificed a whim of his own. Edward Holworthy, who had accompanied the father and daughter to London, and remained there during the period of the latter's stay, did not return to Venice, but sailed for Australia, from whence he never returned either to his native or to his adopted country. The change which her half year's absence had wrought in Millicent, her father attributed to her social experience. She had left him half a child, with a thousand absurd, whimsical ways, which had amused him, and endeared her to him more than any other trait in her character. Few things diverted him; and he counted every laugh which Millicent provoked from him as a positive good, which he set down to her credit in their joint account. Her stay in London had given Millicent a certain poise and manner which suited her marvellously well; but all the sparkle and freshness seemed to have left her. She was like a fresh, white lily which has been broken and wilted by a violent storm of wind and rain. For months she never smiled. Her life seemed to have come to a standstill; she suffered dumbly, hopelessly, with sad, deep eyes, made more beautiful by the trouble in them. A sceptic and a materialist, she found nothing in this world worth suffering for, and smiled incredulously when the old curé, her Latin teacher, tried to help her from the slough of earthly despair by promises of a glorious future, for whose attainment the life-battle should be bravely fought. She was conscious of no ethereal essence which should outlive the graceful body, whose beauty she sometimes cursed. Did it not reduce her to the level of all hunted creatures? Was she not a thing to be pursued by men, like a tall deer or a fleet, timid hare?

"Something had come to the Signorina," said Girolomo, the gondolier; "and the Signor Holworthy, where was he?" And he shook his head gravely, the wise old creature, guessing, as did no other soul, that Edward Holworthy was in some way connected with Millicent's changed face and listless demeanor.

Something had come to her; but she never confided to priest or friend the trouble which robbed her young face of its childish curves, which killed the youth in her, and made her a woman in grief, while she was still a child in years. Only one confidant had she,--the little journal; the gold-clasped tome which all those years after had fallen into John Graham's hands. The story of the first passion she had ever roused, read by the only man she had ever loved.

It was the pitiful story of a grievous wrong which had darkened more than one life. The miserable consequences of a wicked act are infinite; its influence spreads wider and wider every day, like the broadening rings which circle on the surface of a still pool disturbed by a stone which a careless hand has tossed. The black deed may be hidden from the sight of men, but its baleful effects are felt afar off in the lives of those who have known nought of its perpetration. Let not the sinner comfort himself in that his soul alone is damned for his crime. It darkens innocent lives with its evil; and in sinning against himself he sins against mankind.

In the strange country whither Millicent had gone, Holworthy was the only link which bound her to her home, the one being who understood and cared for her. The dominion which he had always held over her was now strengthened into a powerful magnetic force. The little journal told how that influence had been exerted in compelling her to a secret marriage against her own will and judgment. She had been tricked into an elopement,--it might better be called an abduction,--and all unwillingly became his wife. Then all too soon, ere a week had passed, came the terrible discovery that the marriage was no marriage. For then came to her the mother of the man whom she was striving to love with wifely duty, an old woman, bowed with grief and years. She had come very far, across half a continent, to break to the girl whose name she had heard linked with that of her only son, the news that he was not free to marry, that she must give him up. When the tall girl with the childish, flower face fell stricken to the earth like a broken lily, at the feet of the older woman, she had made no cry; in the hours that followed, she said no word. When the man who had wrecked her life came and knelt beside her, prayed her to be patient and her wrongs should be righted, spoke of his remorse, told her of his terrible mad wife from whom the law would set him free, and make him really hers, prayed, besought, and worshipped at her feet, she answered him with one terrible word only. She rose and stood before him white and cruel in her agony, relentless as Fate.

"Go!" was the one syllable which her frozen lips uttered; and with a gesture of command, majestic and beautiful, she had banished him from her presence. The secret was kept, even from the old woman, grown more sorrowful at the sight of the girl's dumb agony and of her son's grief, which she could not soothe. The secret was kept; and that very night Millicent's face, pale and clouded, shone out amidst a group of fair women who sat languidly chatting through the music of Faust at the opera. He kept her secret, poor wretch, and shielded her as best he might, forcing her to speak to him and see him before others, that no sudden breaking of their relations might be remarked. Save in the world, she never saw him again. That one word of command was the last syllable which he ever heard her speak to him directly. Not without a struggle did he give her up, but she was implacable. She yielded to him, and played her part in the little comedy which the world thought it understood. The beautiful Miss Almsford had found Holworthy a pleasant admirer, but her delicate American beauty and her solid American fortune would certainly win her a higher place in the world than that of the wife of Mr. Edward Holworthy, her countryman and old friend.

Youth and health are great physicians; and as the years passed, Millicent recovered something of her old spring and elasticity. She was infinitely more interesting, if something colder and harder, than she had been in the old days. Her unquenchable vigor of temperament came to her help, and gave her a keen pleasure in her studies and in the work and thought of the people about her. Always self-reliant, she grew to live entirely without support from man or woman. She was a friend to many people, but was herself friendless. The Palazzo Fortunio, under her reign, grew to be the centre of a charming social circle. Musicians and painters were made welcome by the young hostess. At once an artist and a patron of the arts, she stood in a peculiar relation to the men who frequented her salon. If she had been without fortune she would have made music her profession. As it was, she studied it as faithfully as if self-support had been her aim; and she claimed that sympathy from her artistic friends which a mere connoisseur, be he ever so enthusiastic, can never arouse. To her small world she was all-important. Her sympathy helped many a timid debutante, and her counsel cheered the black days of more than one disheartened artist. Always gracious and kind, she had drawn about her a group of people, to all of whom she was a sort of exalted fellow-worker, who knew but the poetry of art, and helped them to forget its prose. Her heart was quite empty, but her mind was keenly interested and fully occupied by the men and women among whom she lived. Happiness she had forgotten to look for, but in enjoyment her days were not wanting. It was a terrible blow to her when this pleasant, quiet life was suddenly broken up by her father's marriage. To her imperious nature the presence of the inferior woman whom Mr. Almsford had brought home to the Palazzo was intolerable. Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt the power which her fortune gave her. She could establish herself wherever she liked. Her father's sister proposed a repetition of their joint establishment in London, but at the very mention of her returning to England Millicent's face blanched. She would never again set foot in that country. It was while she was in a state of doubt concerning her future movements that her half-brother wrote her a long and affectionate letter, urging her to come and dwell for a time among his people, to visit her mother's country before she decided the important question of where she should establish herself for life. The idea seemed a just one to her; and acting on a tender impulse roused by the loving words of her unknown brother, she had telegraphed her departure, and forthwith started on her long journey accompanied by her capable French maid. The Abigail discharged her trust faithfully, as far as San Francisco, from which city she turned her face on the very day of her arrival, unwilling to remain longer in what she called "le plus triste pays du monde." If the truth could have been known, Millicent would have signed away ten years of her life to have gone back with the woman to the Old World, the only home she had ever known.

Graham had not been mistaken when he predicted to Millicent that she would grow more in sympathy with the race from which she drew her inheritance of character and temperament than at first seemed possible. Nature is stronger than habit, well called second nature; and as the surface roughness became familiar to her, she began to feel the strong life and vigor of the young Western land quickening her pulses and stimulating her whole being. The poverty of intellectual intercourse was more than compensated by the tremendous power of work, the electrical force which accomplishes so rapidly in this new land what in other countries has been the slow growth of centuries.

An answering glow of enthusiasm flushed her with hope, with a keener, fuller, more intense life than she had ever known before. She had clung at first to her traditions, and fought against the tide which seemed to be sweeping this people on and on and ever on. But nature was too strong for habit; her upright, fearless mind acknowledged kinship with these hard-working men and women, to whom pleasure is not save in toil, whose whole life is one long unconscious sacrifice to their country. On the eastern margins of our land the austere simplicity and purity have become infested with plague-spots brought--ay, imported with care and expense--from the Old World, and fostered like exotics on the clean soil. But from the great Western prairie comes a fresh, strong breeze which sweetens all the foulness of the Atlantic cities, and makes the breath of Columbia still pure and fragrant.

With this new sentiment for her new-found country came the first passionate love to the heart of the beautiful and unhappy young woman. She had breathed the spicy air of the Californian forests, bracing and sweet, and her cheek had grown fuller and fairer in the perfect climate. Her empty, hollow heart was filled by a great love and strength, all-sustaining and soothing.

When Graham had first seen her lying in the fire-light, with cool, deep eyes, before the light of love had dawned in her flower face, she had seemed to him like a perfect white rose. Then the rose flushed palely, as the love-light trembled to a flame; and he brought her flowers of the color of the sea-shells, and she wore them in her hair. Last of all, he laid at her feet deep-red damask rosebuds; and these she placed on her white breast, where they bloomed and died in a single night. He had painted her by the waves, as he had once seen her on that strange day when death had seemed so near and life so beautiful. He had painted her standing at the sea edge with pallid roses in her little hands, her graceful head set about with the same soft-hued flowers, and a single crimson rose lying lightly over her heart. He had hung the sketch against the wall where the sunlight fell upon it early in the morning; and Millicent had bade him remember, while he slept or waked, that she was near him.

CHAPTER XV.

"It cannot be that love so deep as mine

Could fail to stay you like ethereal wine."

When he first understood the full import of the dreadful story, John Graham had been dazed with grief. He had sought distraction from his torturing thoughts in action, and had spent that first day in wandering through the forest. When he lay down to sleep that night in the lodge, his heart was burdened with the double weight of Millicent's secret and Millicent's deceit. He said to himself that they had put an insuperable bar between her and himself. He could have pardoned the disgrace which had befallen her, and was not her fault, but he could never forgive her deceit toward him. The finding of her kerchief the next morning, and the terrible apprehension which the blood-stain had aroused in him, swept away the anger and sorrow from his heart, leaving nothing there but an agonizing fear. This had been, in turn, banished by the joy of finding her alive and unharmed, waiting for him amidst the roses. The great fear had softened the anger in his heart; the sudden happiness exalted his soul from the hell of anguish in which it had dwelt, into a perfect and pure peace. Pride, anger, and resentment were swept away, and love swayed him with its mastery. He knew her now, faulty as she was; and his higher nature forgave her, because of her great love, because of her great wrong. But in his stormy breast the tide of feeling flowed and ebbed; pride had reigned there so long that love could not all at once claim undisputed sway. He could not learn in an instant that pride is born of hell, while love is breathed from heaven. In that strange moment when their two beings had seemed etherealized, he had forgiven her all; but in the days that followed, pride, doubt, and prejudice came forward one by one to do combat with victorious love. It might be that they would conquer in the struggle; it might even be that pride, being selfish, should make him doubt and finally even forget love, which is unselfish. But he had pardoned her, and loved her with all her sins; he had acknowledged that bond of spirit which made them one; he had knelt before her and kissed her feet in a passionless embrace full of reverence. No matter what griefs should fall upon her, no matter what deed or word of his might put them apart in this world, she should carry through her life, and beyond it, the knowledge that what was highest in him had leapt to meet her love, and acknowledged that they belonged each to other for eternity.

John Graham awoke one morning to find himself possessed of a picture. He had seen it between waking and sleeping, in the early hours of the night, and it had haunted his dreams till sunrise. He heard the wondrous carolling of the birds just before dawn, with a joy greater than was his wont, for it heralded the day which should bring light for his work. French John, coming in with his breakfast, for the first time in his life entered and left the tower without word or look of greeting from the artist, who, with bent brow and serious face, was sketching in the first lines of his picture with a bit of white chalk. The half-finished portrait of Mrs. Patrick Shallop looked at him with one reproachful eye from the easel; but Graham paid no heed to the neglected portrait; he was deeply engrossed in pursuing his thought and preserving it in a tangible shape. It is a rare thing, in this age of the worship of the golden calf, for the artist even to be absorbed in the love of his profession. Of old, it seems that the sages and the sculptors wrought and thought for the sake of art and learning, the spur of ambition being all that was necessary to urge them forward. To-day the goal toward which such men strive is a golden one, and the worship of money is more in vogue than the pursuit of glory.

When artists sell their souls, brains, and talents to dealers, engaging to deliver so many works of art in so many months, on such and such a class of subjects, bargaining by the wholesale for the work which they shall produce during the coming twelve-month, what wonder that the cry of the connoisseur is, Too much technique, too little sentiment! "What is sentiment?" one would ask such a babbler; is it a thing to be measured off by the yard, or sold in canvases to suit traders, who feel the pulse of the public, and if it is feverish give more stimulant, or if it is fainting prescribe an anodyne? To such prostitution do these men strive to degrade the arts, but in vain. Apollo's voice is still stronger than the chink of doubloons; and there are those whose ears are ever strained to catch his mystic music. The art trade, the literary trade, may flourish luxuriantly, growing like weeds, with a rank prodigality; but the flowers of art and literature, for all that, stand serenely strong in the garden of our fair young world, growing day by day in beauty and strength. Their blossoming may be rare in this day and generation, but the plants are sound and full of a mighty sap.

Though John Graham was a man of the world, there was no taint of worldliness about him; he knew the world, because he had lived somewhat in it, but more, perhaps, because he had studied the lives of the world's people. The painting of a picture was to him of more importance than its sale; the conception of a work more than its accomplishment. His enthusiasm was apt to wane as his picture neared completion. The great glow with which the idea came to him kept him warm and interested through all the stages of the crystallization of his thought; but when the work was finished he ceased to prize it, and either threw himself into a new composition, or patiently labored at uninteresting mechanical work until he was again inspired. It was with difficulty that he could be induced to sell his pictures; he would sometimes keep them before him for years, waiting to alter some detail or to remedy some defect. His friends, knowing his reluctance to part with them, were wont to wait till they knew the artist to be in absolute need of funds, and then quietly to walk away with the coveted picture, forcing him to accept its price. A few people only in California understood or cared for his landscapes, or the rare works of imagination which he produced; and it was through his portraits that he was chiefly known. He felt in himself an unfitness for this line of work; and had it not been for the sake of his beloved mother, partially dependent on him, it is not likely that he would ever have followed it. The reason was not far to seek why. Graham did not succeed in that important branch of art: the individual had little interest for him; men and women absorbed him less than nature. Every tree and brooklet, dead forest leaf or purpled thunder-cloud, held for him a lesson. Men and women seen from a distance were more likely to interest him than those with whom he was thrown in close contact. When their lives and actions were viewed in an impersonal perspective, he understood them better, and often theorized about them. His thoughts were oftener occupied with people of whom he knew little than with his friends and intimates. To seek truth first and beauty second, was his creed; but his life was not always guided by that high rule; and the jack-o'-lantern beauty sometimes tempted him from the pursuit of truth, leading him on long rambles over smiling meads and into flower-hedged swamp lands. There would he lie undone, angry and smarting from the thorns through which beauty had led him; and then, turning his back upon her, would trudge earnestly along the road which leads truthward. Millicent had once whispered to him that he mistook two loving sisters for dread rivals, and that truth and beauty, when truly seen, are found together; whereat Graham had looked full into her eyes, long and steadily, and kissing her hand, with a sigh, had spoken of other things.

Lying beside him on the floor, as he worked upon his newly imagined picture, was a painting nearly finished, on which he had been working the previous day. A wooden panel, on which was represented the ever-new subject, fairest of themes to artist and poet,--two lovers, standing together in the rosy dawn of love, ere the scorching sun of passion has deepened their cool morning into a fervid midday. The man's figure was strong and graceful, his attitude one of protection; the girl's rounded and delicate body swayed toward her lover, whose arm enfolded her. His face was turned away, the eyes looking far, as if into the future; while her delicate features were turned toward him, her glance trustfully fastened on his face. The color of the warm woodland background was mellow and rich, bringing out the deeper tones of the figures. The resemblance of the girl to Millicent Almsford could hardly have been unintentional, one who knew her well would have said; and yet Graham was only half-conscious that the face and figure recalled her chief traits. He had thought of her as he worked; and beneath his brush her bronze hair and luminous face had been shadowed out more distinctly every day. A rare picture, full of beauty and sentiment; but thrown aside to-day for the new inspiration which had seized upon the artist. The subject to be treated was the entrance of the Poet to the abode of the Muses. He sketched the Poet, mounted on his winged horse, just crossing the narrow, defile which led to the sacred spot. With knit brows and earnest face, Graham worked at the sketch all day; only leaving his tower when the daylight failed him. As he wandered through the dim forest aisles, he thought of Millicent for the first time, remembering that he had agreed to ride with her in the afternoon at three o'clock; it was now past six. Without the slightest feeling of remorse at his failure to keep the engagement, he determined to ride over to the house and see her. Millicent received him rather coolly, having spent the afternoon crying with worry and disappointment at his non-appearance; and he, only half noticing her mood, failed to understand it. He was dimly aware that her society was not as agreeable as usual, and consequently he devoted himself to Mrs. Deering during the evening. At first Miss Almsford kept aloof from the conversation; but later, when her lover began to talk brilliantly, she drew near to where he sat and listened to his words with downcast eyes. Graham was in wonderful vein that night; his every gesture spoke of a strong under-current of excitement. His eyes shone, and his deep voice had a thrill of enthusiasm which stirred the pulses of the calm-browed girl, sitting near by with softly folded hands and parted, breathless lips. But it was neither for Millicent, nor because of Millicent, that the young man talked so brilliantly. A more stimulating influence than hers had touched him, and he was beyond the reach of her sympathy; exalted by the wings of his genius to that clear, cool, lonely communion with the immortals which only such as he experience. Dismayed, and yet full of reverence for this new phase of his nature, Millicent was filled with a great pain. She was left behind; she could follow but not accompany the flight of his fancy; and a sense of lonely desolation chilled the hot heart-blood with a depression the like of which she had never before known. The ethereal quality of her being recognized and did honor to his bold up-winging; but the personal, selfish side rebelled at the neglect to which she was subjected. The struggle in her breast was at that time unintelligible to herself; in after days, when the baser nature had been overcome, she realized it all, and knew that the long death-struggle of self began that night when Graham's eyes looked beyond her for inspiration, up to the blue-starred empyrean over both their heads.

More from habit than because he needed her society, her lover asked her to step for a moment upon the piazza before he left. As they stood side by side, he absently took her firm, small hand in his and kissed the pink fingers one by one, as if she had been a child. All at once he perceived that she was weeping, her slender form shaken by a storm of sobs.

"Millicent, my child, what is it? Are you ill?" he asked, tenderly stroking her hair.

"No, only unhappy. Graham, why did you not come for me to-day? I waited for you all the afternoon."

"Did I not tell you, dear, that I was very busy? I have begun a new picture. I quite forgot my engagement with you,--I am very sorry," he answered, puzzled at her emotion.

"Then it is your picture that is my rival. I hate it, I hate it! I never want to see it!

"Millicent, what do you mean?"

Her only answer was to lay her aching head upon his breast, to twine her arms about him, and to sob out incoherent words of love and grief, all of which puzzled and wearied him. He soothed her tenderly; and when they parted there was a smile upon her lips, though her breast still trembled with the slow after-waves of a grief which shook her whole being. Graham, unnerved by the tempest which he had all unwittingly aroused, reached his tower in an excited and irritable frame of mind. The first thing that met his eyes was the picture of the lovers lying at the foot of the easel. He picked it up, placed it on the table before him, and long and critically surveyed his work.

"I painted better than I knew," he sighed. "Yes, thus it is that we stand toward each other, man and woman, and ever shall stand,--the man looking out beyond, above, the woman, and she finding her utmost limit of self-projection in him. Alas and alas!" He placed the painting with its face toward the wall, and with a moody brow turned to his new sketch.

"Bah, I can do nothing, see nothing in that picture; I have been too rudely summoned back to earth, to the little griefs of humanity, by a woman's tears. I was never meant for it, I cannot bear it." So ran his thoughts impatiently. He had been living in the passionless perfection of art, and had been suddenly recalled by a little creature, full of small human feelings, to this narrow world. Nettled and unstrung, he threw himself upon his hard bed, to dream of Millicent,--a happy dream, in which she knelt before him, acknowledging her fault, pleading his forgiveness; a dream of sweet reconciliation, wherein was memory of that hour among the redwoods, of that mystic soul-embrace but once known to him his whole life through. He awoke refreshed and strengthened, with a love-song on his lips tender as that of the mourning dove. Sundown showed him again at his easel after a long day's work; but that evening Millicent listened in vain for the patter of Tasso's hoofs among the softly rustling autumn leaves.

In the week which followed Graham did not venture to see Millicent again, fearing her disturbing influence on his work. He sent her every day by his faithful henchman some little memento. One morning it was a quick sketch of the sunset of the previous night. Another day it was a bunch of pretty brown quails, the result of an hour's shooting. Once she found hung upon her window-ledge a garland of dewy red roses; and easily guessed what strong, light figure had swung itself up the piazza post, and over the trellis-work, to lay this offering before her curtained window.

Henry Deering, passing by the piazza on the night the lovers had parted, heard the sound of weeping. In the days that followed, he noticed Millicent's reddened eyes and restless mood. He felt sure that some misunderstanding had arisen between them; and as the days passed, and Graham failed to appear, he began to believe that the breach was a serious one. In the old days he had loved Graham as a brother; but in the last months his affection had grown cold, and held a weak place in his heart, from whence jealousy was fast banishing it. Now that he believed his old friend to have grieved the woman they both loved, a feeling of antipathy and an undefined distrust possessed him.

After the long day's work it was his custom to sit for an hour or so upon the piazza beneath Millicent's window, watching the beam of light which shone through her closed blinds until it was extinguished. One night, as he sat alone, the drowsy humming of the insects soothed him into a light sleep. When he awoke with a start, the moon, which had not before been visible, was high in the heavens. As he was about to go in-doors he heard a footstep on the path outside the house. He remained motionless in his chair, resolved to see who was abroad so late. The footsteps were uncertain and stealthy. The person first approached the house, and then retreated to the turf, where the steps were hardly audible. Deering stepped lightly to the edge of the piazza and peered through the honeysuckle screen. At a distance of twenty feet from him stood a man looking up at the house, at Millicent's window. His face was hidden by a muffler and a broad hat pulled low over the brows. Deering drew his revolver and cocked it. The click of the lock evidently reached the intruder's ears, for he turned and fled toward the orchard. Deering sprang from the piazza, and shouting, "Who are you? Stop, or I 'll fire!" ran down the path. The fugitive neither answered nor slackened his pace. Deering fired, aiming low down; but the ball whistled by the man and buried itself in the heart of a peach-tree. In the close shrubbery which surrounded the orchard Deering missed his man; and three minutes later he heard the swift tramp of a pair of horses on the path which led to the high-road. He ran to the stable. Nothing there but the mules and old Sphinx; his own fleet mare and Millicent's thorough-bred were grazing in the pasture. He slipped a bridle over the old mustang's head, and sprang on his back without waiting for a saddle. By the time he reached the highway the riders were out of sight, and the echo of the distant hoof-beats reached his ears. Pursuit was useless; they were well mounted; and Sphinx had gone dead lame the day before. The young man listened to the faint sound of the hoofs until it died in the silent night. Then he dismounted and examined the road. There were the traces of two horses. As he looked closely at the impressions left on the thick dust, he saw that only one of the horses had carried a rider; the other had been led.

When he returned to the house he found the family aroused. Barbara met him on the piazza, asking anxiously what had happened. The report of the revolver had awakened her.

"It was a bear, Barbara," said her brother. "It is a shame to have roused you all, and for nothing, too. I thought I had a sure shot, and that we should have bear-steak for dinner to-morrow."

"A bear, Hal? How strange! Why, this is the first time one ever came so near the house, is n't it?"

"No; Ralph killed two long ago, before you can remember. Go to bed now, and get the house quiet, for heaven's sake!"

The young man kept his own counsel, and the next morning made a careful examination of the grounds near the house. On the farther side of the orchard there were traces of a pair of horses having been tethered.

Two more days went by, and still Graham did not come. Millicent was distressed and puzzled at his long absence; and finally, after thoughtful deliberation, she decided to write to him, telling him how grieved she was at her own unreasonable behavior.

Graham found a letter early one morning folded in an embroidered kerchief, and laid before the door of his tower. That heavy unpainted barrier could have told a tale like that of Tennyson's talking oak, had it been given the power of speech. Trembling lips had pressed timid kisses upon its weather-beaten panels. Strange old door of the tower, roughly fashioned by the Mission priests a century ago, what secrets have you not shut in; what hopes have you not seen pass out between your time-rusted lintels!

It was the first letter Millicent had ever written him; he had but once before seen her handwriting. The girlish, weak hand which had traced the words in the little journal was greatly altered. It was now a graceful, flowing chirography, full of that individuality which stamped everything appertaining to her. Graham studied the superscription carefully before he broke the golden seal, with its device of Psyche with new-found wings. It ran as follows:--

BELOVED,--Forgive me! forgive me if you will, for I cannot forgive myself. I was wrong to grudge you the time passed with your work. It was weak and selfish of me; but now that I know my fault, be not afraid. Believe that I am strong enough to overcome it. For the red roses at my window I thank you; and for the fair picture and the graceful couplet, for all the tender thoughts which prompted you to send me these tokens, bless you a hundred times. But oh! my lover, come to me; and let me read in your strange eyes, that are now bright and cold as ocean deeps, and again burning with Promethean fire, that I am forgiven. Not rose nor picture, not poem nor sweet garland, can tell me as can they that you love me.

MILLICENT.

Graham read the letter through twice, and folded it away, with a sigh. "Do I love her? Does she love me?" he queried; and all that day the doubt tormented him. While he worked, while he took his afternoon ramble through the woods, while he sat at his solitary supper, it rankled in his mind. He could not solve it; could she? It were best at least to ask her. It was only right that she should know of his doubts of her and of himself. He found her flushed with pleasure at the sight of him. She had anticipated his coming, and was dressed in soft colors which he approved, and fair with a hundred little efforts of coquetry to please him. Her bronze hair seemed to the man but a mesh to snare him. He turned his eyes impatiently from the pretty, bare arms, and the cool, snowy shoulders shining through transparent draperies. His judgment should not be turned aside by her loveliness. He greeted her coolly, barely touching her outstretched hand; and then stood looking gloomily into the distance, not knowing what to say, uncertain of the truth, doubting her. The woman, quick to see his trouble, spoke to him tenderly, with a low, soothing voice, thanking him for coming to her, telling him how long the time had seemed since they had met.

"And tell me all about your new picture."

"I cannot, Millicent; your letter spoiled my day's work. I have done nothing since I read it."

"Dear, what can you mean?"

"This, Millicent,--that my work must always be first to me. I had thought that you would help me in it, but it is not so." After a pause, "Millicent, I think we have made a mistake, you and I. We cannot help each other, and therefore we hinder one another. You dazzle me with your beauty, and send me back to my work unfitted for it; while I only make you unhappy, and fear I can never do anything else."

"Graham, you kill me." She looked indeed as if a blow had been planted in her breast, as she reeled, all white and trembling, to a seat. Her words seemed to deepen the nervous agitation which possessed him, for he said impatiently,--

"What can I do? It is not my fault that you have neither the best love to give me, nor the power to arouse it in me. I tell you, child, that we have been mistaken, and that it is time for this thing to end."

"No, no, Graham; you are angry, you know not what you say. In mercy speak no more." She had sunk upon her knees, her clasped hands stretched toward him in an agony of fear.

"Do not kneel to me, but listen; for I am right. If things had been different, it might have been; but as they are, we have been mad to think of it. There is no help for it, my girl; we must kiss and part. You never loved me as you should, Millicent, because you could not. A woman can love but once, and that is the first time."

"It is not true. You, who are a man, say it. What woman ever said it? It is a lie, a lie! You shall not say it, you must not think it. You would make us creatures without souls indeed. Are they right, then, the Easterns? If when we women are sold, or stolen, or entrapped, we must love, and only then, you deny us other life than that of the earth. Of what man would you hold this doctrine to be true? It is utterly false! it is wicked! it is unworthy of you!" She moaned where she had fallen on the ground, and tried to speak again; but the man continued with a pitiless stream of words, sincere, earnest, spoken for her good as well as his own.

"We have been loitering together for a time, child, on life's way, and have chased the golden butterfly of pleasure which men oft mistake for love. Before we are too deeply entangled in the briers, we must turn from the chase, we must forget each other. We can be of no good, one to the other; and I will be no more harm to you than I have been."

He could not see her face now; it was hidden on her arm as she crouched where his words had thrown her. The pathos of the attitude touched him; he gently lifted one of the tightly clinched hands, and loosened the fingers which so fiercely bit the delicate palm. He was in a strange mood, when heart and soul seemed absent from him, and only the clear, strong brain prompted his words. Her passionate grief hardened rather than softened the look in his eyes. This girl, who had been as wax in his fingers,--glad when he smiled, weeping when he sighed, swayed invariably by the mood which possessed him,--now denied by piteous word and gesture the words which he was speaking. Her hand, unlocked by him, would have clasped his stronger palm; but at the caress he dropped her arm and turned his eyes from her.

"I cannot give you up," she murmured; "you must not leave me so. Oh, my love, you wrong me, you wrong yourself! I love you, Graham, with all my soul; I love you as I never thought to love before! Cruel--cruel! It is not with lips and eyes that I have loved you, for you could lose that, and yet miss nothing from your life. Turn not from me, if you would not leave that which is best worth having by the roadside, and press on to find that goal towards which your ambition spurs you, empty and void without me at your side! It is your worse nature which doubts mine. Graham, Graham! what matters it if hand and eyes have been another's? My soul is only yours, wakened first when your strong spirit called it from the sleep begun before it was vested in this body, ere it was divided from your own."

The last words, faintly whispered, hardly reached his ears. To-day their import could not have been felt by him. In other times he understood, and sufferingly admitted the truth of those incoherent words, which died on the air as soon as they were breathed, and yet whose memory abode with him his life through. He had come to Millicent not knowing what he should say, and the words seemed to have spoken themselves. He was sorry, as is the surgeon for the pain which he inflicts; but, like the physician, he felt that mercy lay in mercilessness. As she lay weeping at his feet, a strong tide of emotion swept over him, leaving him pale and trembling. He lifted her with eager hands, and on shoulder, brow, and pallid mouth he pressed cruel, parting kisses, which carried no balm to her broken heart, and brought no ease to his fevered spirit. Then he broke from her with a mighty effort, passion and pride wasting him with a terrible warring, and fleeing through the night left her there cold and nerveless, like a broken lily amidst the dews and damps.

In the days which followed, Barbara watched with tender solicitude Millicent's changed face and nerveless step. Only through her sympathetic perceptions did she know of the girl's trouble; of what nature it was she surmised, not incorrectly. Lovers' quarrels are usually looked upon with a tolerant amusement by intimate friends and relatives; and when they are of short duration, it is usually considered advisable to ignore them altogether. But as weeks passed, and Barbara learned that Graham was in San Francisco, she redoubled her little attentions, and shielded Millicent as best she could from her mother's anxious questions.

Angry and rebellious was Millicent in these days, with that terrible under-feeling of anguish which must outlive anger and rebellion; that fainting of the soul, when all that has supported it seems to have sunk away, and it is left absolutely without power to resist an all-devouring despair. Her happiness had been so short-lived; her misery was so terrible, so unending! Her young life, which had been balked of its natural joyousness and youth, had suddenly been illumined with the pure and perfect light of the love which passeth all understanding, and now she was in darkness blacker than she had ever known. The anguish of that great love was not wanting, and she suffered with a new sense of her capacity for pain. In her dumb grief she knew that the agony was not undeserved; this was the bitterest drop in the cup of tears. She had not told him her sad secret; she had deceived him! She had meant to tell him of the blot upon her name, before their lives had become irrevocably joined; but she had put off the dreaded moment until it was too late: he knew all now, and not by her confession. Would she ever have had the courage to tell him? She almost doubted herself. Was she deceitful by nature? she asked herself a hundred times, questioning her deep eyes in the mirror's depth. No, she knew that her frank, sincere character had been warped and distorted by the evil influence of the man whose name she would have cursed, had not the grave closed over him, burying his sins and her reproaches in the cold earth. Poor child, poor women all, the weaker creatures in this remorseless world! When they are bruised and broken by the force of their masters, is it strange, is it unpardonable, that the weapon of the weak tempts them? Who forged that weapon for them, who forced them to use it? If there were no unjust oppression among men, no brutal abuse of a superior force, would women be driven to deceit, that refuge of the weak?

In this sophistry she wrapped herself, but was not satisfied. She had been tried and found wanting. This it was that had lost to her the lover for whom she had faced death. He might not know it; he had never said it; but she recognized what had driven him from her side,--the fault was hers. Was it unpardonable? Could he never forgive her? Must their lives be separated, now that spirit had kissed soul? Must the long waiting last until time should be ended for them both, and Eternity begun?

Of all cruel gifts, is not that which lingered in Pandora's box the one through which men suffer most fiercely? O Hope! if thou hadst escaped along with the rest of the heathen god's blessings, how many tortured souls would now be at rest in a fixed and accepted grief which struggles not, neither rebels at the decrees of destiny! Unquenchable art thou, robbing sad mortals of all repose; even in death shall they not find rest; thou troublest the dying with thy visions of a future! With resolute hands sorrowing women seize upon thee, and would stifle thee in their breasts; but though thou dost sometimes simulate death, when the watchful hands loosen their hold thou springest up stronger and more cruel than before, and tormentest the sufferer with thy struggles!

"If it would only die--if it would only die!" moaned Millicent, as she paced her room, her hands crossed heavily upon her breast, as if to stifle some tangible spark with their weight. A thousand times she submitted to the rest of a despair which was all too quickly routed by the fever of a hope which could not die.

CHAPTER XVI.

"If we should part and pass to separate ways

With stifled sigh, averted head,

Within a land where centuries are as days

Our love shall live though flesh and wrong lie dead."

And her lover, where was he? In the heart of the city, working in a garret on his great picture, for the sake of which he had forsaken the woman he loved. Intolerant of opposition was Graham; and when once an idea had been accepted by him, it was next to an impossibility for him to give it up. He had become convinced that his love for Millicent would make him faithless to his work; that the love of woman was not compatible with the highest devotion to art. Her fond dependence on him would drain his strength. Without his work he could neither be satisfied nor satisfy her. The closer she clung to him the more did he recoil from her. In the strength of his genius, he laughed at the idea that a loving companionship was necessary to him; and yet hours came, at the end of a long day's work, in the quiet watches of the night when the city slept about him, in which all his theories were overset, in a terrible longing for the girl whose sad eyes haunted him. To see her and to touch her; to hear her low, deep voice; to forget all the grievous striving of his life, in the restful warmth of hers! He thought of her always as he had first seen her, lying before the fire, her slender figure robed in white, her head supported in the hands which he had so often caressed. Waiting for him, she seemed to have been then. Waiting for him, he loved to fancy her always. These tender thoughts drifted through his mind in the soft twilight, or before the dawn. In the fervid daylight he only remembered her as she had been on that last evening, rebellious and close-clinging, desperate, beautiful, and full of unrest.

The city tired him with its everlasting sounds of traffic. The tread of dray horses and the rumbling of carts sounded in his ears from earliest dawn till late night. There was no peace here amongst his fellow-men. He longed for the solitude of his tower, for his forest neighbors, for the sound of the woods, the wide arch of blue sky, seen now through one narrow slit between the opposing houses.

One morning he determined to take a day of rest; and, after making a light breakfast at a coffee-house near by, he started for the San Rosario Ranch, with a lighter heart than he had carried in his bosom for many days. It was a bright morning; the air was crisped with a prediction of winter weather, genial enough in this region at its worst. As he passed through the familiar country he traced some likeness to Millicent Almsford in every object on which his eyes lighted. Now it was the golden-brown of her hair seen in the shiny coat of a sleek filly frolicking in a pasture; now it was her graceful movements traced in the trembling branches of a straight young sapling; again, her gray eyes smiled in his face from under the brows of a fair child playing by the roadside. The harsh voice of the wheels thundering over the steel rails seemed to be repeating her name; and his heart kept time with the refrain, beating out the syllables rhythmically,--Millicent, Millicent, Millicent! He was weary of reasoning with himself. For six days in the week his work was all-sufficing, and he needed no other companionship; but on the seventh day he longed for rest; he needed beauty, he needed love. He knew that it was weak in him to waver in his resolution not to see Millicent again; he knew that it was a wrong to her, and that he would bitterly regret it in after days. And yet he yielded to that exquisite golden haze which seemed to have dropped about him, flooding his life with a passionate delight, an ecstasy of expectation.

He alighted at the station, and stood watching the receding train with strained eyes. He wished now that he had not come. He walked up and down the narrow platform, flushed and unnerved with the tumult in his breast. On his right lay the dusty carriage-road which led to the house; on his left a narrow bridle-path pierced the woods, over which he must pass to reach his tower. Which should it be,--a day passed with the creatures of the forest, under the blue sky and murmuring trees; or an hour of the soft delight which Millicent's voice, Millicent's eyes, Millicent's lightest finger-touch, wrapped about him? He realized now how he had cheated himself. He had said that it was the wood-birds whose voices wooed him from the city! He knew now that beneath that longing for the free air of his forest home lay the deeper desire which had tempted him to leave his picture half finished, his palette half set.

Which road should he take? Not more unstable was the blue ring of smoke which the breeze carried from his lips, tossing it hither and thither in a cloudy wreath upon the white air, than was this man between the opposing influences which divided his nature. At last he tossed his cigarette upon the platform, carefully quenching its spark with his foot, and with a light, fleet step ran down the wide carriage-road which led to the house--which would bring him to Millicent. He had known all along, with that inner consciousness which decides with lightning rapidity a question which the intellect debates long and seriously, that his feet would follow that pleasant, open road rather than the dark wood-trail; and yet the train had sped twenty miles further on its journey before he turned his face toward the happy valley. So clumsy is reason compared to instinct; so tedious are the modes of thought to the working of the feelings; so useless is the grave gate of wisdom to check the tumultuous torrent of feeling.

He found the wide piazza deserted, the front door fast closed, the blinds of the library and dining-room tightly drawn. The hospitable house was silent and deserted. His imperative summons was finally answered by a domestic, the successor of poor Ah Lam, who in his ridiculous vernacular informed the visitor that "Alley folk go waly." Which, being translated into English, signified that no one was at home.

Graham felt as if a flood of cold water had been dashed into his face. He shivered, as he turned from the door and descended the steps; and yet before he had walked two miles in the familiar road which led to his tower, he gave a profound sigh of relief. It was better so! The exercise had cooled his fevered blood; the crisp forest air had brought reason back to his passion-tossed breast. It was better that he had not seen her. Something of the fatalist was there about this strong-brained rationalist. He half fancied that it was not chance alone which had decreed that Millicent should be absent from the Ranch that day. But he sang no more as he had done on his way to the house; and his serious face lost that smile of hope which had lighted the eyes and touched the mouth into an unaccustomed softness. If he was silent, the wild birds were melodious, and he walked between choirs of invisible songsters; while the whirring of a partridge, the fleet step of a wild fox in the thicket, gave him the assurance that he was not alone in the mysterious wood. At last the distance was accomplished; and at high noon, when the shadows had all shrunk back into the tall trees before the ardent heat of the sun, he reached the ruin of the old church. He leaned against the fragment of a pillar which stood at the foot of the staircase, and looked up at the square gray tower with its close-clinging pall of moss and yellow lichens. From a rift in the wall burst a blaze of color,--a clump of wallflowers stretching its flame of blossoms upward toward his window. He noticed that the casement was open; and as he looked he saw the fluttering of a bit of drapery over the edge of the sill. It must have been the curtain, of course; but the sight of it gave him a strange sensation, not unlike one that he had experienced before on that spot, when he had been tricked by the moonlight into fancying that there was a woman straying in the aisles of the old church. He remembered that night and what it had revealed to him; and at the black thought the sky seemed to have darkened over his head. He had stood dreaming at the tower foot for fifteen minutes, and in that time the sky had become overcast, a cold wind had sprung up and now blew into his face, carrying a host of big drops with it. The rain had come at last! After the long spring and summer unmarred by clouded skies or rude gusts, the first rain had come. With a rough tenderness it dashed itself against the parched land and shook the tall trees till they murmured a delighted welcome. The dusty ferns growing low down about the knees of the great trees caught the happy news, and uncurled their tender fernlings that they might feel the welcome touch of the rain-drops, as they filtered through the greedy leaves and raced down the straight stems to reach the myriads of thirsty mouths yearning for their balm. The rain had come; and the languid stream, which had pined and shrunk to a pitiful thread of water, leaped joyously down its rocky bed. It would grow strong and young and beautiful again; its banks would bloom with flowers; its course would no longer run painfully over heated stones, between seared brown edges,--the rain had come!

On the narrow stairway Graham paused, near the top. Something shining lay on the step before him. The object proved to be a small silver arrow, tipped with a feather of brilliants. He picked up the jewelled toy, which he had once before held in his hand,--one evening when he had withdrawn it from the soft tresses which it caught together behind a small white ear. His hand trembled as he remembered the soft rushing of silken curls over his arm, the fragrance which had floated about him, the look of loving reproach which had punished his audacity. Wondering how the arrow had found its way to the threshold of his tower, Graham tried to open the heavy door with his key. To his surprise it refused to yield; the bolt was drawn on the inside. Some one was in his tower. Thinking that the Frenchman, in whose care his room had been left, might be at work, he lifted the heavy brass dolphin which served for a knocker, and rapped loudly. There was no answer. The rain by this time was falling in torrents. He was entirely without shelter; and he knocked a second time, calling out to know who was inside the room. He heard a light step approach the door, and a hand was laid upon the lock. The old wood-cutter could never have walked with that musical footstep; the soft rustle of garments could not have been made by him. Graham's heart leaped from its quiet beating into a very tumult of pulsations, as the bolt was gradually drawn and the heavy door swung slowly open. On the threshold of his lonely tower stood Millicent, with downcast eyes and pale face. For a moment he was silent, looking at her, doubting his own vision; fearing to move lest she should vanish from before his eager eyes as she did in his dreams. Could this beautiful, colorless creature, with marble cheeks and fallen lids, with sombre garments and nerveless, pallid hands crossed upon the breast, be Millicent Almsford? He stepped nearer with outstretched hands to touch her, to feel that it was in verity the woman who had lain weeping at his feet that night among the roses. He would have folded her to his breast, but the white lids flashed open, the sad, tear-worn eyes looked into his own with an expression which made him draw back; and the girl, without a word, passed out of the doorway and stood unprotected in the driving storm.