An Echo of Passion

IX.

IT was September now, and for two nights some invisible incendiary had been at work applying the torch of autumn to a tree or a bough, here and there. In the fresh, dewy haze of morning, the glowing foliage lit the village street and the long post-road and the green-cloaked stretches of the country on either hand with spots and spires of magical color.

When the stage drove up to the hotel, with Mrs. Eulow balanced in a desirable place on the top, there were, fortunately, not many of the remaining boarders at hand to notice that Fenn was going with her Ethel was there, nevertheless, herself soft as September, in her leaf-tinted créplisse; rosy, calm, and sweet. She bade them good-by with many good wishes, and then they drove off through the lovely and inspiring landscape. The drive to the railroad was long, but it swept them through many rich contrasts of scene, and they did not tire of it. Both were singularly buoyant. There was a stimulus of romance within them which was as exhilarating as the drive. Fenn took a peculiar and, as he thought, innocent pleasure in the idle fancy that he might be running away with this beautiful woman seated beside him. His secret impulse of yesterday, to escape with her into some distant recess of the mountains, had frightened him; but that did not assail him at present; and as long as he was not really running away with her, what harm could it do for him to pretend to himself that he was ? It was the essence of this new kind of love which he had invented to indulge such bright hallucinations. He flattered himself that he had plucked the most delicate flower of history, in learning to cherish a passion without any of that fatal turmoil which, in the earlier evolution of love, caused so many clashing and tragical incidents. If Paris had been content with coming to the court of Menelaus and falling in love with Helen, he might have even declared his position ; that at least would have been a satisfaction to both her and himself ; but if he had stopped at that point no ten years’ tragedy of the Trojan war would have trailed its length of disaster through the annals of the time. A few excursions with Helen into the country, if imaginatively treated, might have sufficed, and many lives would have been spared.

I don’t mean to say that Fenn drew this contrast quite so lightly ; but he felt the analogy that Anice was his Helen, and that he could enjoy the excitement of carrying her off without assuming the wrong.

When at last they were snugly bestowed in the train, absorbed in each other and talking in low tones, other persons in the car, he was conscious, might take them for lovers.

This fanciful recreation, however, had a curious effect. When they arrived in Boston, and he had put her into a carriage to go to her friend’s, and was walking away by himself, he found that under this thin mask of imaginary elopement his brain had automatically prepared a complete plan for flight with Anice, which now presented itself in all its details.

From that moment he was engaged in a fierce struggle with himself against the desire to propose it to her. He had promised to come and see her at the house where she was staying, and there the opportunity for broaching his treacherous scheme was offered so exactly in the nick of time that he almost yielded to the temptation. He had also to go about the city a little with Anice and her friend, the next day. It forced itself upon him continually. They were already out of the reach of observation ; there need be none of the struggle and horror of breaking away clandestinely from the spot where his wife was. Why should they not make use of the fact ? Their destiny or doom—whichever it might be called — was seemingly fixed ; sooner or later they must be united in some way, no matter what destruction might come of it. He saw that his passion, at least, was no longer a plaything ; it had become an overmastering reality.

On the third day, which was to be that of their return, Anice’s friend had left town. The widow had gone to a hotel. Fenn went there to meet her, and found her in a small parlor. They had some little time to wait before starting for their train. He was under a fatalistic impression that he would not leave the room until she had either accepted his declaration and agreed to go away with him, or else thrown him aside altogether. He had thought of Ethel ; he would arrange so that she should be cared for. He must stake all upon this issue.

He walked about nervously, speaking in short sentences and with great constraint. At last he said, with a sort of violence, “ I wish you were never going back to Tanford ! ”

“ What can you mean ? ” asked Anice. But she knew. She trembled with the knowledge.

Watching her fixedly, he observed this. “ Anice,” he said, “ give me your hand a moment.”

“ You forget, Mr. Fenn ! I am Mrs. Eulow.” Her tone was firm, but it was hardly severe enough.

“ Yes, that is what I forget,” he cried, vehemently. “ And I wish to forget it! To me you are Anice only, — the woman whose voice haunted me and drew me on, years ago, when I ought to have obeyed its spell, and put my life under its command. Do not call me back to the present; let me go on living in that time.”

The widow’s self-control was shaken. Either from mercy or some other sentiment, she could not strike him then with the cold steel of duty. “ You must not speak to me of that,” she said, with a hurrying accent of grief. “Oh, why, why do you do it ? ”

“ Did you not tell me, yourself, that you would rather think of our friendship of those days than of what has happened since? ” he returned passionately. “ I needed no urging. I have thought of it too much for my peace, and I cannot conceal any longer — I ” — His voice became constricted. He walked the room as if caged, clutching his hands together and tearing them apart roughly. Then he stopped near her again, and bent over her with such a gaze as if, half-blinded by the whirl of his emotions, he could not see her at all unless he fairly pierced her with his eyes. “ Anice,” he said, “ the fruition of your life is not yet come : you did not love Eulow as you might have ” — “ Oh, I will not hear it! ” she burst forth, tumultuously. She struggled from her place, but as she rose he caught her hand. For a second or two it seemed to relax and yield itself to his, as a bird tired of flight might have done ; but she drew it away, and crossed the floor. “ If I said anything to you about the error of my marriage, it was a trust which you must not violate.” She stood there near the embrasure of a window, panting, with mingled tears and lightnings in her eyes. He, too, stood motionless, but with a heaving breast. “ Do you know what you are doing or saying ? ” she went on. “ Is this the ideal adoration you planned ? You are ruining it all.”

“ That is not enough,” he answered, in a tone growing clear and level from the intensity of his purpose. “It was beautiful, but it must give way to something greater. It was only the mould ” — ”

“ What would you have ? ” she demanded, as if disdaining to allow any further vagueness or debate.

It seemed to Fenn as if she were within his grasp.

The stream of human passion is poured out from unseen sources like a living fire, but hardens on the top in a thin lava surface, upon which we walk in all the security of convention. It needs only a narrow seam to let the burning reality jet upward and melt away the crust we are treading. A few words had placed these two on a totally altered footing.

“ I would have a new future,” said Fenn, advancing. “ What if my life, too. has not reached its true fruition ? The world is wide. Development is the supreme law.”

But as he drew nearer to her, she looked so unprotected, it seemed so ruthless to have struck aside all the defenses of her integrity, which till then he had respected, that a sudden sense of shame assailed him. He remembered that she had come here under his escort, and he knew that he was doing his manhood wrong in taking advantage of the fact.

Yet he would probably have persisted, had it been left to him.

On her part, she saw this strong man swayed by her, — the man she had most admired of any she had known. Though the final word had not been uttered, he might be hers by the slightest motion,

— the dropping of her eyelids, the touch of a hand, — or by mere silence and passivity.

She lifted her hands to her face, to shut away the sight. “ Leave me; do not speak again,” she groaned, with an effort that might have betrayed to a calmer listener that she was doing violence to her inclination, — “or I shall hate you! ”

Fenn recoiled. The words struck a blow that riveted the shame which had already partially fettered him. There was in them the mortification attaching to a positive rejection of all that he had meant to say; for he had actually said enough for her to understand him. In her capacity of conscience to him — the only conscience that still controlled him

— she had the power thus to let in upon him a rush of humiliation at his error and remembrance of his faithlessness to Ethel; and most deeply of all he suffered from the disgrace of having risked too much with her.

She turned aside, and looked blindly out of the window; and he remained silent and stricken where he was. The minutes passed by and fell away like drops distilled from a silent and wasting grief. In a changed voice he asked, at length, “ Do you despise me ? ”

Facing him again slowly, she surveyed him for an instant. “ I cannot,

— I cannot,” she murmured in a tremulous tone. Then, recovering her resolution, she added, “ But we must not see each other again.”

Fenn bent his head, without knowing what a pang it gave her to see him do so. But, with a rallying hope, he raised his face presently. “ You will not do that ? ” he pleaded. “ It cannot be ! ” he continued, gathering determination. “ Think once more, if I merit anything so doubly bitter. Don’t decide it, now, for I must submit to whatever you compel ; but consent to think, and decide after you get to Tanford.”

“ We must go there together, of course,” she said, with the languor that follows a forced act of duty. “And then ” — She shielded her face again by looking out of the window; but decision had vanished from her attitude, and her sad white hands looked as they had done in the first meeting at Tanford.

He left her, and returned in half an hour, everything being ready for departure.

He was careful to ride in the hotel coach, while she went to the station in a carriage in which he had placed her. He did not engage a chair for himself in the drawing-room car with her, but took a seat in another part of the train, from which he came only at intervals to ask if there were anything he could do for her.

The drive from Athol back to the heights where Tanford lay was different enough from that which they had taken over the same route in coming. Then, all had been fresh and alluring, and the lucid morning had lent its spell of youthful grace to his fancies ; but now the horses toiled for the most part up dusty steeps, and the weary heat of afternoon that beat upon the top of the stage burned the reality of his disgrace and weakness into Fenn’s brain, with unremitting force. Yet he strove to maintain an air of simple friendliness with Anice, and when she spoke to him it was with a perceptible gentleness : he could see in her eyes that she was sorry for him, and had appreciated his attempt to make his presence unobtrusive during their return.

Meanwhile, after Mrs. Dadmun’s friends had discovered Fenn’s departure, and the chief of the corps herself had explained Mrs. Eulow’s absence (which Ethel had not made known) by a timely call at the farm, there was a commotion among the Institute ladies. The matter was so much discussed, and had come to be talked of so openly, that Sharon Reeves, who by virtue of his cloth had been taken into confidence, resolved to counsel Fenn so soon as he could find an opportunity.

Ethel greeted her husband with a half-childish burst of joy. “ Oh, I am so glad! ” she cried, with sparkling eyes. “ I was terribly nervous while you were away : I never felt so before. It seemed to me I could n’t bear it, and this morning such a strange thing happened ! I was reading in our room here, and something made me look up all at once, and for a minute I thought you were standing at the door, and saying good-by to me. You looked so pale! ” Fenn turned his head half away ; there was a stifling sensation in his throat. “ You don’t look well even now, Ben. You seem sad.”

“ I am tired,” he said, kindly, feeling a weight like iron on his forehead. “ But I shall soon be all right. It is you who need caring for, if you have begun seeing visions.”

“ No. All I need is you,” said Ethel, with a kind of timid longing.

He pressed her to him; but, alas, he felt that the virtue had gone out of him. He knew that he loved her ; he pitied her more than he did himself; but the warmth and tenderness that had once been so abundant within him seemed to have dwindled away into obscure crevices of his being, like water-courses dried by the sun.

X.

The next day he spent entirely with Ethel. Every moment he exerted himself to please her ; he rode with her in the afternoon, and the flush of a returning happiness stole into her face. But he scarcely noticed it; the ride had been tame and spiritless, compared with those in which Anice had been his companion ; there was a hot restlessness in his heart. He was continually wondering what Mrs. Eulow’s decision would be.

In the morning he found a note from her in the post-office, — the best way of getting it to him unnoticed. He went out to the old arbor from which he could see her roof, and opened the envelope there. There fell out of the note within two thin disks from the pod of the lunaria, or satin-flower, cultivated in old country-gardens. Wondering what it meant, he glanced at the letter, which contained but a few words. They were these : —

DEAR MR. FENN, — Bring your wife to see me soon. I have thought once more, as you asked me to, and am willing to believe that I was hasty. I shall put into this note something which I found in the garden to-day, which bears a meaning worth remembering. They are the last fragments left of a flower that blooms in early summer. You have seen others like them, in vases. When the bloom is gone and all the rest of the pod has fallen away this remains ; and the old-fashioned name is Honesty, — Common Honesty. Sincerely,

ANICE EULOW.

Fenn let his hand fall, with the note in it, and gazed straight before him. Then he stooped and picked up the singular lustrous-fibred disks. His first thought was that no other woman could have met the emergency in so delicate yet trenchant a way ; and his admiration for her was even heightened. For an instant following, the rebuke of the symbol she had sent cut him. But after that, he began to he elated.

Reduced to plain terms, were not the decision and the note which it prompted in the nature of a victory for him ? Was it wholly mercy that dictated them? In proportion as the supposed certainty that she loved him returned, his misery and remorse grew less. His mind retraced the Boston episode with a new elasticity, and he was not long in proving to his satisfaction that he had been exposed to a great temptation, and had come out of it unscathed ; for, as a matter of fact, it had been the knowledge that Anice was for the time under his protection that restrained him, and not anything which she had said or done. Hence, it was clear that he had shown self-command : he could trust himself, and all could go on safely, as he had conceived that it might.

So when the Rev. Sharon Reeves met him, on his reëntering the hotel, and proposed a little secular expedition in search of fish, he accepted the idea with a good-humored contempt for it. Mr. Reeves seldom caught fish, and he scorned to buy them ; but Fenn might go and catch them for him. It was agreeable, also, to test his power of staying away from Anice for a while.

Ethel was glad to have him go. “ Are you going to try the brook in Tom’s Swamp ? ” she asked.

“Yes; but it’s no use going after trout till afternoon, and, besides, we can only get small ones at this season.”

“That’s just the thing for Mr. Reeves,” she laughed. “ He’s so small himself that he can’t manage a very big fish, I should say: at least, they seem to think so, and don’t even give him the chance of trying.”

They went, without waiting for afternoon ; but when they had come to the neighborhood of the favorable pools and bends in the brook, Fenn repeated to the clergyman what he had said to Ethel about the season.

“ Dear me,” cried Reeves, “ I never thought of that! I believe we have no right to take them now.” He pulled from an inner pocket a narrow pamphlet containing the fish and game laws. “ It ’s so, he remarked, after scanning the pages. “ It would be against the law. We ought to have gone over to the mill for ‘ horn-paout,’ as they call them here.”

“ A cast or two won’t matter,” answered Fenn ; “and now that we have come so far, I must get something out of it.” He approached the stream cautiously, and tossed his hook into a promising place.

The young clergyman looked on sadly. “ It is a part of his inborn lawlessness,” he said to himself, contemplating this breach of a legislative enactment.

Fenn found nothing in the spot where he had made his first cast, and as he drew away from the bank, in order to cut across and work noiselessly up to another bend, “ I,” said Reeves, “ sha’n’t fish.”

“ I dare say it is n’t worth the trouble,” Fenn agreed, halting.

“ How long are you going to keep at it, then ? ” asked his companion, with a degree of solemnity.

“ Oh, I don’t know. If I once taste blood, I shall follow the thing up all day, very likely.”

“ But it’s against the law,” reiterated the clerical sportsman, in a tone of rebuke.

“ I know it, my dear fellow ; but no one obeys that law until a little later. The inertia of freedom to fish can’t be overcome at once, and I believe even the local fish commissioners allow themselves some latitude.”

Reeves grounded his rod with an air of resolution. “ Mr. Fenn,” said he, “ I have something I ought to say to you and I think it might as well be said now.”

“ It seems from your manner,” remarked the other, casually, “to be disagreeable. Is it ? ”

“ Not necessarily, — that is, not altogether. To begin with, you must remember the obligations of my calling; and, in the second place, that I ’m trying to do you a service.”

“ Well, I ’m ready. Go ahead.”

“ There has been a great deal of unpleasant gossip about you at the hotel, for some time past,” began Reeves, steadily.

“ And do you think you will do me a service by repeating it?” Fenn inquired, not very well pleased. “ Let me tell you in advance that I think that idea is one of the two or three radical errors by which the human race has been so infernally warped out of happiness ; and that I don’t care to hear a word of your gossip.”

“ It is n’t mine,” said the little man, gallantly sticking to his point. “ It’s a great deal more yours, because your conduct has been sufficient cause for it.”

“ Hullo ! ” cried Fenn, angrily ; “ you wish to do me a service, and yet you have condemned me in advance, eh ? ”

Mr. Sharon Reeves set his face sternly against the offender. “ Yes,” he retorted, “ I do condemn ” —

“ That is reason enough for refusing to hear you,” interrupted the chemist. “ But even on general grounds I wish you to understand that I won’t listen to a word of this tittle-tattle, whatever it is.”

“ I condemn the conduct of a man who exposes himself and his wife,” Reeves proceeded, without heeding him, — “ exposes himself and his wife to injurious criticism, by paying such extraordinary attentions to another lady as you have been doing to Mrs. Eulow.”

By this time, Fenn was furious. “ Mrs. Eulow,” said he, “ is an old friend of mine, whom it is presumption in you to mention in such a way. As to Mrs. Fenn and myself, we attend to our own affairs. You, sir, are an entire stranger; but as you invited me to come fishing, and have decided to give that up, I will now say good-morning.”

Whereupon he strode off towards the stream, entirely forgetting the usual elaborate approaches of a trout-fisher.

Reeves stared after him for a moment, in honest distress; but, seeing that it was useless to go further, and reflecting that he had at least forced one point of bis discourse upon him, he decided to retrace his steps, and go over to his favorite saw-mill.

“It was an outrage,” the chemist said to himself, when he turned his back. And as he trudged along mechanically through the alder-brake, now plunging into a wet bole among the tall grass and sinking over his shoes, now forcing his way through a barrier of twigs with his pole at a “ carry,” he muttered angrily, “ Little jackanapes ! ” “ Simply because he wears a coat of a particular cut,” and similar phrases. The fact that his relations with Anice Eulow had been made the theme of impertinent comment was new to him ; for a full comprehension of what people are saying about us — thanks to the pleasant padding of self-esteem with which nature provides the humblest of us — is the most difficult thing for us to grasp in daily life, always. When he had gone some distance and had recovered the true fishing instinct, tins fact began to thrust itself upon him more distinctly. It increased his indignation. Now that he was cooler, be was willing to admit that, although the Reverend Sharon had displayed a fatal want of tact, he had shown a praiseworthy conception of duty; and he was even willing to respect him, which he had never done till then. But the meddling attempt of idle people at the hotel to take charge of his welfare and his wife’s galled him intolerably. He had but just got rid of the humiliation which had hung about him on the way back from Boston, and to have to contemplate this outside criticism revived it. He became defiant. He did not care what happened. Being convinced of his strength, he resolved that he would show it, expressly to discomfit the scandal-mongers to whom Reeves had alluded.

Two or three young trout took his bait, but he threw them back into the water. Midday came, and he went out to the road, where lie succeeded in getting some milk and brown bread at one of the lost farm-houses he had so often noticed. The soft gloom of the woods, the wimpling brook, the swaying of grasses, soothed him, and he returned to his sport with new zeal, securing towards evening a respectable string of dark, pink-spotted fish, with which he returned to the Institute in time to have them cooked for supper. He was willing to make amends for his sharpness towards Reeves by sending him some of the fried trout; but the clergyman’s strict obedience to constituted authority forced him to decline the offering.

XI.

Little opportunity offered for Fenn to throw out challenges to his gossiping enemies by any new overt act of daring. He took Ethel with him in going to see Anice for the first time since their return, and the widow afterward avoided that free habit of wandering about in pairs which had previously been indulged in. There were driving parties, in which Mr. Evans — who had now got around to the autumnal topics of ensilage and winter feed for cattle — was included; and all the gazings at sunsets and other pastoral amusements of the place were carried on in groups. Kingsmill had not yet gone, and had come to look, by reason of his flannel shirts and the deeper tan on his face, increasingly piratical. Ethel had been scrupulous in letting him see almost nothing of her during the short time that her husband had been away; but Kingsmill was pleased with the changed condition of things, because he perceived that she was much happier as a consequence of it. For some days everything went on peacefully, and without furnishing material for Mrs. Dadmun, who finally took her leave, with a conviction that she would not be needed for any terrible Crisis.

But Fenn was still irritated and defiant ; and it must be added that when the old confidence and safety seemed to have been restored to them Ethel became less pensive, less haunted by thoughts of a possible sacrifice, and their usual abrupt collisions of ideas began again.

They went with Mr. Evans and Anice, one Sunday evening, to the Orthodox church. A wave of warmer weather had reached these Massachusetts hills from the central furnace of the west, and the night had more of midsummer than of autumn in it. Fenn sat lazily observing the interior of the meetinghouse, with its empty walls, its pews filled with a straggling congregation, among whom were young women of the neighborhood, marked by a singular variation in degrees of style as to costume ; and elder people, in all stages of weather-beaten vicissitude; with here and there a hearty farmer in his prime, and a few youths in uneasy black suits. The shuttered windows made dark spaces on the walls, in the dim light of a few oillamps ; but the sashes being raised, the hot, unquiet chirring of the grass insects could be heard from without. Two long stove-pipes, black and bony, with numerous elbows, made their way on either side from the front wall of the church to the rear one, and suddenly dived into it near the pulpit, —as if the serpent of sin had been making plunges at the minister, and had been effectually trapped by accidentally sticking his fangs into the lath and plaster, beyond hope of withdrawing them. On a table just below the pulpit were a few additional hand-lamps, and a very bent old man with a cane obtained one of them, which he carried back into the central body of the pews, where it irradiated his hymn-book and several ancient faces near his own with a ghastly shine. The whole scene struck Fenn as unnecessarily dismal; and when the minister had risen and read out the first hymn, there was a long pause, no music being provided. At last the grayhaired preacher appealed from the silence.

“ Will some one lead the tune ? ” he requested.

Another pause, worse than the first, ensued; but, just as Fenn was struggling to repress a desire to laugh, Anice’s voice rose, easily and with measured volume, giving the quaint melody. Fenn was annoyed at his own boyish levity, and in a moment followed her with a clear but not very forcible baritone. Ethel joined, too; but from all around them there was heard an odd jangling of inharmonious notes, like the twanging of disordered piano-strings. There were a few good singers, nearly lost in the lagging mass of false tones. The old bent man with the lamp supplied a deep bass, which he exercised with bold originality. He avoided all the needless difficulties of counterpoint by striking at once the note next to the lowest in his register (if he had a register), and remaining steadily poised upon it, except when a whim of genius prompted him to descend for a moment to the note which was absolutely his lowest.

Notwithstanding these choral peculiarities, Fenn was exalted by the song. Anice’s voice rose and fell without perturbation from the stumbling efforts of the congregation : it was full of peace, and though she carefully reserved its power it seemed to take the melody to itself involuntarily, gathering up all that was best in the chant from different parts of the room, and incorporating these strains with its own resonance. The bleak and sordid interior no longer obtruded itself on Fenn. The place settled itself into propriety before his eyes, under the influence of Anice’s singing.

The preacher came to his sermon. He was a hard-headed, practical man, accustomed to the exactions of a shrewd farming population, and had a bargaining way of putting things to his hearers. He held his chin slightly forward, and nodded his head in a sharp manner when he made his chief points, as if dickering. “ He evidently thinks,” was Fenn’s inward commentary, “ that if he is to make any of us sharers in the kingdom of heaven it must be done on close trading principles.” It will be seen that he was not profoundly moved by the divine; and under the influence of the sermon, the meeting-house rapidly resumed its unbeautiful aspect, and the smell of kerosene from the lamps became painfully noticeable.

Once more that impression was removed, when another hymn was sung. This time the melody bore him away in thought to the church at Little Falls.

It was a strange thing that the voices of these three persons — Ethel, Anice, and Fenn — should be blended in a religious chant. It would have seemed still stranger, had it been known to those who heard them that Fenn was at that moment thinking of the time when he had sat with Anice and her father in another house of prayer, listening to the warm breeze in the horse-chestnuts; that time when he had been strongly moved to place himself at her feet as a lover.

Another echo from that past ! It swept over him with conquering sadness and unrest.

XII.

“ We shall probably stay until some time in October,”said Mr. Evans, as they walked along the street together, after the service. “ But as Mr. Fenn says you return to town before many days, Ipropose to get up some special excursion or picnic, by way of ‘ closing the season.’ What do you say ? ”

“ It’s a charming idea ! ” cried Ethel.

“ Do you hear, Ben ? It really seems so mournful, giving up this lazy outdoor life, and going back to the driving city.”

“ What sort of thing had you in mind, father ? ” asked Mrs. Eulow.

“ Well, what do you say to an afternoon tea at Temple Lake?”

There was a reactionary silence. This scheme was not strikingly novel. But Anice suddenly suggested, “ And return by moonlight ? ” which met with prompt approval from Ethel and Fenn.

“ The moon rises early now,” said the chemist.

“ I don’t know about the wisdom of that,” Mr. Evans rejoined, growing prudent. “ I ’m afraid you will all catch colds.” He was thinking it highly probable that he should catch cold himself.

But the moonshine having once got into the project could not be got out again, and he was compelled to submit.

Arrangements were made the next day, and as the moon would soon have changed its hour of rising, they determined to go that afternoon. The Pincotts, Kingsmill, Miss Ibbit and Miss Hamill, and a number of others were invited, making nearly twenty in all. Mr. Evans had copious hampers prepared, into which most of his remaining champagne was put, and there was much hurly-burly in effecting a distribution of the merry-makers among the several equipages. Kingsmill, Anice, and Fenn found it best that they should ride, but Ethel thought the trip too long for her to take in the saddle.

They started early, and the whole thing passed off successfully. Some of the young men entered into an impromptu boat-race on the lake ; then Pincott hastily organized a dramatic troupe, and gave a small charade entertainment under the trees, with costumes improvised from variegated wraps, and a curtain of thick-leaved boughs held up by his two boys between the trunks of two trees. And lastly they sat down by the lake-beach, lit some small fires on the sand, and sang in chorus, while the moon rose and gradually wrought a mysterious change on them and everything around them ; so that it might have been imagined they were not the same people who had come from the Institute, but had imperceptibly altered into a more romantic sort, existing in a world of dusk-dimmed silver.

“ I think we may as well start on,” said Fenn to Anice, when they were all getting ready to go back. The carriages were being packed, and this process was tedious to the equestrians, whose horses were restive.

“ Very well. Where is Mr. Kingsmill ? ”

“ Here I am,” said the heir, trotting up from behind the carriages. “ Some of them are going back by the other road,— around by the old tannery, you know. Would n’t that be better ? ”

“ It is much farther,” objected Anice.

“ Well, I must leave you, then. I promised them.” Kingsmill moved away on his horse.

Anice had begun to follow.

“ You will be tired out, if you go by that road,” said Fenn, coming up beside her. “ Let us go on.” He thought she was reluctant for a moment; but in the next she turned Star’s head without debate. Ethel was to drive with Mr. Evans : Fenn rode up and ascertained that they were coming by the usual road; then Anice and he set off.

Was that transformation of the moonlight something more than a fantasy ? As they flew forward under the moon, with large stars waiting for them in advance, just above the sweep of the hills, Fenn was imbued with a kind of illusion that they had been released for the time being from their ordinary selves, and were gliding into some other phase less sharply defined, and not hedged around with too many stubborn realities. Yet he thought of how soon he must cease to see Anice, and this lent a poignancy to the pleasure of the ride. It recalled him to himself, and quickened into more acute pain the dull heart-ache into which the wrath that followed Reeves’s attack had soon subsided.

When they rode more slowly, they talked of the beauty of the night and of incidents at the picnic. The memories of both, however, were busy with that day when they had first ridden over this road ; and through the unseen agency that was always at work between them each was aware that the other’s thoughts were taking tins direction.

“ We are getting very far ahead of the rest,” said Anice, as they ascended one of the many rises they had to traverse. “ Let’s stop a moment and listen.”

They reined in, and gazed back over the lower ground. The road was empty ; the moonlight looked as if it had lain forever on the woods and passive earth, and as if it would never go away. Transient as it is, there is more of eternity in this calm illumination than in the swift and stimulating light of the sun. Fenn thought, “ What if we two were to be stricken by some lasting change, here in this pale light, and kept together forever in it, —dead, or mute and blind, — yet conscious of our companionship ! ” It was an unearthly fancy, but his heart throbbed warmly and fiercely under it. He felt an insatiable desire for some isolating fate which should separate them from everybody else. Yet there was a something within him that remonstrated against this desire: for an instant, he even felt the despair of a drowning man, and struggled within himself for something to hold by and keep himself from being drawn under. In vain !

Such silence was in the air that they could hear the whistle of a locomotive at some great distance, — so far that it was hardly louder than the coo of a bird. But nearer and slighter sounds from the road they had been traveling, as is sometimes the case, did not reach them.

“ It is strange,” said Fenn, in a dry tone that gave no hint of what was going on in his mind, “ that we don’t hear them coming.”

“ Very,” said Anice. “ How fresh and sweet it is here ! ”

Their voices sounded cold, in the moonlight.

“ Ah, what was that ? Is n’t it the carriages ? ”

A faint rumbling of the vehicles could be detected. “ Yes ; that’s they at last,” assented Fenn, and immediately touched his horse.

They did not wait again, and when they entered the village they were far in advance. As they came up the hill to the junction of roads which formed an irregular square among the houses, some men moving across this space, with their legs very black against the moonlight, presented a queer appearance.

Up so far above us, they look like insects crawling on the top of the hill,” Fenn observed ; and Anice laughed. They tried to put themselves at ease, with trifles of this sort.

He accompanied her at a light trot to the farm-house, where Star was housed by the man, and Fenn’s gray hitched in the barn. " I shall wait here,” Fenn had explained, “ until Mr. Evans comes. I don’t like to leave you quite alone.”

“ Let us go around into the garden,

then,” said Anice. “ There are some seats, and it will be pleasanter there.” She was nervous at being thus thrown passively alone with him, and fancied that going into the house would increase her constraint.

The garden lay in an angle between the house and the bank formed by the cutting of the hillside. There were trees here and there, among them one that was dead ; and their shadows fell with soft abundance on the brightly flooded paths and beds.

This is where you found those flower-pods that you sent me ? ” he asked. It was the first allusion he had made to them.

“ Yes,” she replied, her voice coming much fainter than she wished. She would have offered some remark to divert him, but her wit failed her.

Fenn stopped abruptly. They were under the shadow of the dead tree.

“ I cannot be bound by that symbol,” he declared, with resistless impetuosity. “ I have thrown those skeletons of flowers away, for my honesty is more than a common one ; and before I go I must speak.” She drew back, terrified ; but he went on, crying, “ No, no ! Anice — Anice! —don’t judge me as you would other men. There is some fate upon me; I don’t know what; I cannot resist it. Oh, I have tried ! But the passion that was beginning and never had free play, when I knew you so long ago, has come again, and will not be stilled. I love you, Anice! You cannot tell me of faiths and duties. I only know this one thing, and it is truer than all others.”

“ This is cowardly,” she gasped, when she could. “ It is unworthy of you.”

“No, it is not cowardly,” he answered, pale and determined. “It is braver than to keep a lying face. Have you not seen, have we not both known for weeks what was growing up around us ? And is it better to part, with that knowledge smouldering in us, than to face it and speak of it faithfully ? ”

She collected all her force, and said coldly, “ If you knew this, you should have gone away long ago, never to see me on earth again. And will you tell me what you think is to be gained by declaring to me now a love that dishonors us all ? It is a sin against yourself, and an unpardonable wrong to me.”

He looked at her in rigid silence. “You may deceive yourself,” he said; “ but you cannot me. You know well, — very well, — the power you have had over me. I fancied it was a thing that could be turned into some new kind of devotion, like that we talked of. But you saw how it was overcoming me, and you forbade me to see you again. Why do you accuse me, when you had it all in your hands, and allowed our acquaintance to continue ? ”

“ Because I trusted you and wished you well,” Anice returned, with less firmness. Then, seeing that the only hope was in an immediate parting, she added, “ I shall not leave this garden, Mr. Fenn. It is for you to go ! ” She pointed commandingly towards the entrance by which they had come in.

For an instant, all his strength forsook him. Then he burst into a fierce, broken laugh.

“ I understand at last,” he said, with a bitter intensity she had never even dreamed of. “ You have taken a terrific and skillful vengeance. Out of resentment for a clumsy, boyish mistake, you have deliberately ruined a man’s heart, and made him put his honor in the dust before you. Yes, I’ll go.” He turned, so dizzy that he could hardly see the path, and began to move away.

There was a moment of passionate effort on her part to repress the storm within herself ; but as she beheld him receding she yielded, and made a detaining gesture. He saw it, and came back rapidly.

“Am I wrong?” he cried, searching her face. “ You felt more than that; you — you loved ! Tell me it was so.”

She tried to steady herself by putting her hands out into the air. Then she gasped, “No — no ! ”

“ You did not ? ” he repeated.

But she could no longer reply. She was on the point of falling; and with an instinct of protection he stretched out his arms, almost enfolding her in them. As they stood thus for an instant, the shadow of the dead tree lay motionless upon them, and the icy moonlight around gave visible bounds to that isolation for which he had so lately wished.

She had confessed nothing; but at that instant Fenn felt that all had been confessed between them. He saw, with a pity that wrung his heart, what her struggle had been; and remorse struck through him like a sword for his own sin against Ethel, and for the attitude into which he had forced this woman who stood with him here. Was this the joy of liberation he had looked forward to ?

Anice recovered herself at once. She drew away from his contact, and held on to the bench near at haud. “ This will kill me!” she was moaning, like one only half conscious. “All these years — No ; oh, no ! You must leave me instantly. For Ethel’s sake go; go ! Tell her all you have said, — everything.”

“ Thank God, Anice, you are nobler than I ! ” Uttering these words with lips that seemed chilled by a frost, he fled.

XIII.

Up the bank and through the fields saturated with a cold dew he hurried, flying and stumbling, forgetting the horse he had left tied in the barn ; and only when he reached the old arbor, with its early - flaming woodbines looking ashen in the light of the moon, he paused, and strove to collect his senses.

When he came into the hotel, those who saw him wondered at the breathless and exhausted appearance about his face, ordinarily so strong and composed and glowing with healthy color ; but they attributed it to anxiety, for his first words were an inquiry about his wife.

“ No, she has n’t come back,” answered one of the ladies of the lake party, who had returned, as he stood with his hand on the stair-rail, about to go up and look for her in their room.

“ That’s strange. What road did you come by, — the tannery ? ” he asked her.

“ No ; the usual one.”

“ And you did n’t see her, driving with Mr. Evans ? ”

“ No. They were behind us, I think.”

Fenn went on into the empty sittingroom, where the over-fatigued piano stood, with its cover thrown back as usual, and exposing the perpetual grin of its white keys. He was at a loss to understand Ethel’s failure to arrive. Time enough had passed, he thought, for them to make up the distance by which Anice and he had outstripped them, and Mr. Evans would naturally bring Ethel to the Institute, first.

Some newspapers were lying on a side-table, and he picked up one, thinking to allay his feverishness and divert a growing anxiety about his wife. The first paragraph that took his notice was one which recorded with business-like vigor the pursuit and arrest of a man who had abandoned his wife and attempted an elopement. He threw the sheet down in disgust. “ Great heaven, what have I not been saved from ! ” he muttered, as he went out. he knew, from the shock of remorse that had pierced him there in the garden, what a frightful deception he had subjected himself to. He had not intended, at the worst, to do what this man in the newspaper was guilty of ; his original plan of flight, which he had been on the point of broaching to-night, had conformed to a species of propriety. Anice and he were to disappear separately; they were to wait till he could obtain a release from his legal ties; or, he had even said to himself that if he could ouly offer her his devotion unrestrainedly and live near to her, seeing her each day, no other step should be taken. But now all this plausible refinement settled down, in his view, to the vulgar level of the criminal he had just read about. His limbs shook with the horror in which he held himself, at recognizing what he had been drifting to. He wished that he might be torn in pieces, annihilated. But he saw that his punishment was worse than that: it lay in continuing to breathe and being forced to contemplate himself.

One of the young men sitting in the colonnade suggested that perhaps Mr. Evans had changed his mind after starting, and had turned off on to the tannery road. This afforded Fenn a slight relief; but he went on pacing up and down, his mind busy with possible catastrophes, — an attack by tramps, a runaway, a broken bridge, or something else that he could not imagine. It occurred to him to go back for his horse and ride out along the regular road, to meet the belated team ; but the bare possibility that Mr. Evans might have taken the other route overruled this plan. He had come to the point when to have Ethel arrive while he should be out searching for her would be an additional distress, of which he did not want to run the risk. By a considerable effort, however, he decided to go over to Pincott’s, and ask questions there.

“ Oh, they must have gone the other way,” the artist’s wife said, confidently. “ Don’t look so worried, Mr. Fenn. I don’t believe anything has happened.”

He thanked her, and went back to the hotel, saying that it was likely she was there even now. But she had not come. It was growing late, and the boarders who had not retired gave all their attention to the source of his alarm.

“ Miss Hamill has just gone upstairs,” the Same young man informed him who had before offered a hint. “ She came by the tannery, and says Mr. Kingsmill left them, and trotted back to join Mr. Evans’s carriage ; and he has n’t come back yet. So it must be all right.”

“ Oh,” said Fenn, with an air of being obliged. But the news excited still more apprehension in his mind.

Thinking that he was giving his nervousness too much prominence, he went out into the road, and walked quickly towards the point where the carriage must enter the village if it had not followed in the course he had taken with Anice. Kingsmill’s absence filled him with a sickening dream of what his condition might have been if this rich young man had drawn Ethel into any such insane bewilderment as that in which he himself had so lately stood with Anice. Fortunately, that had not happened, and Mr. Evans’s being with Ethel prevented his conjuring up any phantasm of jealousy; but he felt a vague, unreasoning anger against Kings-

mill for being away with Ethel at this crisis.

He stood still in the street, and noticed all at once that the moonlight had nearly waned, —the weird illumination which, an hour or two before, had seemed so permanent. It gave him a bitter satisfaction to think how his madness had crumbled and slipped away with it. A huge field of cloud was rising, and had swallowed half the stars.

“ Oh, my God ! If I should never see Ethel again ! What if some accident has happened, from which she will die ? ” This was the cry in his heart.

A horse and rider, springing out of the feeble light a little way off, and dashing by, roused him. It had been but a flash, but the face of Kingsmill seemed to be printed on the night air, and to be lingering behind like a vision, while the rider swept on.

Fenn ran after him towards the hotel, at his greatest speed. The young man was there already, dismounted, quivering with excitement, and talking to a little dusky group of men.

“What is it?” cried Fenn, with an awful fear, as the others fell back before him.

“ There has been an accident,” said Kingsmill, rapidly.

“ Where ? Tell me where ! ”

“ The railroad crossing ” —

“ Is she killed ? ” The words burst from Fenn like the red drops that spurt from a knife-thrust.

“ She was not badly hurt,” said Kingsmill. “ The cars struck them just as they had got over, and they were thrown out. But some people are taking care of them.”

“ I must go! ” cried Fenn, wildly rushing to get Kingsmill’s horse, which was being led away.

“ Not that one ! ” exclaimed the owner. “ I have a fresh one in the stable.”

There was a sharp scurry to saddle the fresh steed, and just as Fenn put his foot in the stirrup the farmer from Mr. Evans’s came up with the tired gray and a message from Anice, who had also become alarmed.

“ For God’s sake, go and tell her, Kingsmill! ” shouted Fenn, mounting.

The next instant his horse had shot away, under spur, for the tannery road.

It was a solemn group that wound up the highway from the railroad crossing, coming back.

By the time the wagon that had been obtained was ready to start, Anice, also, had arrived on horseback ; and the two mounted figures moved at a funereal pace beside the cart. Ethel had fainted at first, but was restored ; and, unless she had suffered internal hurt, was judged to be the worse only for a few bruises. Mr. Evans had not come off so well, He had a broken arm, and was prostrated by the shock he had sustained. His light carriage was left behind, a partial wreck, and the borrowed wagon had to proceed slowly, in order to avoid possible injury to the sufferer.

Fenn and Anice did not exchange a word, but both were lost in wondering at the chance that had thus brought them together again on this same night, under such altered conditions. From time to time Fenn, bringing his horse close to the wheels on Ethel’s side, spoke some low word of inquiry or soothing, as indistinguishable to any but her ear as the murmur of the night breeze in the pines. Sometimes, when he fell back and watched the muffled forms reclining in the wagon, a picture presented itself to him in which he saw Ethel as she might have been, motionless and darkly covered and insensible to the jolting of the springs, — a picture of the dead being brought home silently from the place of her death ; and then he would turn away and curse himself, in the midst of a mute thanksgiving.

The chemist sat by his wife all night, and watched while she slept, after many vain attempts. In the morning, the physician who had been telegraphed for from a distance arrived, and pronounced with some confidence that she had no unseen injuries.

It was late in the afternoon that Fenn knelt by his wife’s bed, while a soft light from the fading west pervaded the room. Seeing that she was strong and recovered, he spoke : “ Ethel, I cannot put off any longer the confession I must make of the wrong that has been in my heart these last few weeks.”

“ I have been afraid,” she answered calmly. “ Oh, yes, I knew ; ” and the tears rose in her eyes. “ But I must not hear it. I cannot.”

The blood mounted to his face. “ How despicable I am!” he groaned. “ But you don’t know all, Ethel. You cannot know that I told her” —

She covered her face with her hands, crying, “ Oh, why must I believe this ! Why can’t I forget it all, pretend that I did not see ? ” Then, with a hot beating in her temples, she took away her hands, and said with forced deliberation, “ Never tell me any more. I cannot promise to be the same to you or to hold you so ; but I will hear nothing. Only tell me, — did you mean to do me a wrong? Are you true to me? ”

“ The wrong,” he replied, “ was a madness, an infatuation. That was all. But I am not fit, now, even to say I am true to you.” He lifted his eyes to hers.

She looked into them with a calm, just scrutiny ; and Fenn thought that he knew what the light in the recording angel’s eyes must be like. But it was only the glance of a tender woman possessing deep intuitions. She said at length, “ I will believe in you.”

Ethel put her hand upon his head, with a touch so simple and gentle that it was the best of benedictions.

He had held, once, that there was a peculiar mystery about Anice, and the belief had made her the more dangerously fascinating. Ethel was transparent enough, exteriorly ; but the mystery of her nature lay deeper down, and he was only just beginning to apprehend it. The quality in Anice served merely as a unit of measure for its larger presence in Ethel. Kneeling here before his wife, with too much humility in him even to put his lips to hers, Fenn saw that he was touching the mystery which is profounder than intellectual choice ; which diffuses itself through earth and heaven, and solves all but explains nothing, — pure love.

They went on living. That is generally the way with people.

If we were constructing an ideal drama from their lives, it might be said that Fenn’s punishment was too light; but we do not altogether know what that punishment was ; and the justice of the heart should leave a chance for improvement, which could hardly be were the chastisement too heavy. Fenn and Ethel not only went on living; they were also better, though I will not say happier. For, in opposition to formal moralists, I maintain that people often grow less happy as they grow better. The opinions of these two were not identical, after this experience, any more than they had been thitherto; and they sometimes had little quarrels. But both of them were better, I think, than they had been. Something, indeed, had gone from their lives, which would never come again ; but they lived with a sad hope of something just beyond. Eth el’s great love and generosity restored Fenn’s self-respect as far as anything could restore it; but who could exorcise the hidden grief, brighten the tarnished memory ? Not even she. The highest that remained to him was so to live every day as to become worthier of her love. And as for her, having once reached a great height, her endeavor was not to fall often, or for long, below it.

Mr. Evans was supposed to have recovered from the accident; but it kept him in bed for a few days, and this gave Anice an excuse for not seeing the Fenns when they came to say good-by, — as, in view of the old gentleman’s ignorance of the situation, they felt bound to do. Within a year he died; but he had written several times to Fenn, chiefly on the topic of agricultural chemistry, and in his last letter he said : “ I have come to the conclusion that the chemist’s analysis of soils is almost useless to the farmer. The man who has to take the growth from the laud, whatever it may be, knows more about the nature of th’e soil than the most careful scientific deduction can teach him.”

Fenn took this patiently, because he was convinced that something similar could be said with truth about analysis of the moral deposits of character.

Three years after the summer at Tanford, when he had prospered and become part owner in some profitable chemical works, Ethel and he, being in New York, unexpectedly encountered Mrs. Eulow at a crowded evening reception.

“ Does she sing as beautifully as ever ? ” Mrs. Fenn asked their hostess.

“ More beautifully than ever, I believe,” was the answer. “ But she can never be induced to let us hear her ; at least, not in companies. There are a few ladies to whom she has sung, and she will take part in a charity concert very rarely. But if you want to hear her, you must go to some of the homes for poor children. She has regular days which she gives to them, and there she will pour out her voice for an hour or two at a time.”

“ How singular ! ”

“ Yes, it is very eccentric. But since her father died she spends more of her time here, and has been devoted to good works. She has entered into benefaction as a sort of career, I fancy. Some of us predicted, when she began, that she would be a failure, — she was not the sort of person. But we were wrong. She seems to be completely in earnest, and does a great deal of good.”

When Fenn heard this, he remembered what had been said by Anice so long ago, — that she wanted him to put purpose into her life, and that to have a career she must make a sacrifice. Her sacrifice had been the relinquishing of her destructive power over him. Her purpose ? It gave him a very strange feeling to reflect that in this, too, he had aided, without his will; for her devotion to merciful deeds certainly implied a memory of him which shut out for her any further seeking after personal happiness.

He stood a little way from Ethel, and when Mrs. Eulow came by, simply dressed in black, she bowed to him in passing. In her eyes there was a light of conquest, but it was of conquest over herself. To Ethel, also, she bowed. “ I am just going,” she said, with a slight quivering in the tone, and the glance with which she accompanied this was one of melancholy and appeal; yet it was trustful. Ethel Fenn saw in it something which meant, " You at least are a woman who can forgive a woman, and you understand me.”

Then, as the figure in black turned away, Ethel responded gravely and sweetly, in a way that satisfied the widow’s appeal, “ Good-by ! ”

George Parsons Lathrop.