The Golden Justice

VII.

A RANDOM PROPHECY.

SOMEWHAT like the notable Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, Barclay aspired also “ to grow acquainted with all who had anything unusual in their fortune or conduct.” The many foreign nationalities represented in the place appeared to him a considerable source of interest. Recollections of their scenery and traditions at home invested even the poorest of them with a touch of romance, whereas he found the common order of Americans looking down upon all alike with an ignorant prejudice and disdain.

He went to the German theatre, and an amateur play at the Bohemian Turnhalle. He passed, in his observing way, among the small, neat shops and cottages of the German quarter, tenanted by a most industrious and thrifty population. A part of this district was on the way to the factory. The sign “ English spoken here ” was sometimes seen, and pots of flowers in the cottage windows showed that humble striving after beauty amidst adverse surroundings that appeals to the kindly heart. A broom-maker had set up three crossed brooms on a post before his door, recalling the sign of that Dutch admiral who swept the seas. Next him, an ancient lightning-rod and weather-vane maker exhibited, in his small window, gilded yachts, birds, and fishes, the famous Dexter trotting at full speed, leaping stags, short-horn cows, and a profusion of other specimens of his handiwork.

Barclay, having occasion to order something connected with the lightningrods of his factory, entered this latter establishment. He found the proprietor to be a Dane, one Ole Alfsen, a garrulous old fellow, who professed to be a weather-prophet, and was much inclined to boast of his exploits of former days. A son of his, William Alfsen, came in while Barclay was there, to bid his father good-by. He was just setting off, as it appeared, for a voyage in his own sloop, the South Side Belle.

“ I have try first to make that boy a mechanic,” said the father, taking the pains incidentally to explain some traits of this son, “ but I have to give it up; he bin a natural-born sailor. It come by his mother’s family. William used to sail round with his uncle, what was a captain and brother of my wife, in the old country, when he was a small kid; and once he was a couple o’ years in one o’ them navy-yards, workin’ round the big guns.”

“ He’s a strong, manly-looking young fellow,” said Barclay. “ I trust he is successful.”

“Well, he was pooty successful at first, but not so good now. He used to go over, with a load o’ small goods, to them Fox and Manitou Islands and Boy Blank [Bois Blanc] way, and Grand Traverse Bay, and Point Betsey, you know, what got no stores on ’em, He would blow his horn when he come in, and all them folks would come down to the dock and buy everything what he bring.”

Copyright, 1886, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

“ That was an interesting business.”

“ Yes, but he lose his vessel; he went to help some other fellers, and his boat got away from him and foundered. Since then he got awful hard times. I lose my money in her, too, what I saved up, but I don’t say nothing about that.”

The next day, Barclay, being obliged to drive down towards the Polish quarter, saw the same young man walking before him, and recognized him from the peculiar impression he had made. He had not yet sailed, then?

The Polish settlement consisted of an area of yet poorer and more sparsely scattered shops and cottages than those of the Germans, which they adjoined. It was grouped around a few tall, unpainted wooden tenement-houses, containing many families each, and a solid, rather imposing ecclesiastical edifice of yellow brick, the church of St. Stanislaus, which had twin steeples, terminating in little domes covered with shining tin, in the Muscovite manner. Near the border-line, where the two nationalities overlapped, began a small ravine, with neither grading nor sidewalks, but dignified with the name of Sobieski Street. Upon this irregular site, driven to it by the stress of economy, immigrants had pitched their poor huts and cabins. Among them ran a variety of meandering paths, the right of way on which was disputed with human beings by the goats, geese, and swine. At the top of the ravine, where it joined a civilized thoroughfare again, stood a neat cottage of two stories, the lower unpainted, which gave a suggestion as of a cellar above ground, — the residence of our worthy friend Ludwig Trapschuh. Barclay chanced to see William Alfsen steal cautiously up Sobieski Street, and disappear in the neighborhood of this dwelling.

This Polish immigration, he recalled, as he drove on, was the outgrowth chiefly of the later Russian persecutions, dating from about 1864. Partly as the last arrived, and partly on account of the uncouthness of their speech, they were generally rated lower than any others in the social scale. They were for the most part but common laborers. There were to be seen pouring forth from this district, every morning, a swarm of men, who proceeded to Market Square to wait for jobs of woodcutting, or to distribute themselves on the railroads and public works of the city. They wore something like a uniform of military-looking homespun frockcoats, full in the skirts, big top-boots, round caps bordered with astrakhan, and, if it were cold, comforters and thick mittens. They had been serfs, or something very near it, at home, and still retained their thoroughly peasant-like aspect. They had constituted here, in a small way, an untrammeled new Poland : they came not from Russia alone, but from Prussia, and also that Austrian Galicia where Metternich had boasted that he had secured “ fifty years of tranquillity by three days of blood.” But the oppressors who had partitioned their country had contrived to partition their spirits as well. They were found full of violent prejudices and ancient localisms: the Warsaw man fell out with him of Cracow, and the peasant of Lithuania with the peasant of Podolia or Ukraine.

William Alfsen entered a poorer cottage than that of Ludwig Trapschuh, the rear of which it adjoined. A considerable piece of back-yard intervened between the two. He greeted there a heavy, dull-looking woman, who was Susanka Kraska, the mother of his towheaded cabin-boy, Nicodem Kraska.

“ Nick a good boy, make good sailor !” he bawled, for Susanka was deaf.

“ You don’t let it get drown ?” she bawled in return. Her English was very defective, and even at its best had to be supplemented with some words of German.

“ No, I don’t let him get drownded.” And with little more ado he went and sat down at a window which commanded the back-yard before mentioned. He presently saw appear there a person for whom he sought, — Stanislava Zelinsky. She no longer wore the trim dress in which he was wont to see her, but a linsey-woolsey petticoat and a bright handkerchief over her bosom. There rested on her shoulders a heavy wooden yoke, with a water-pail at either end, which she was going towards the well to fill.

He hurried out, and ensconced himself, as furtively as possible, behind a tall pile of wood, whence he whistled and called in a way to attract her attention. The girl discovered him.

“ I did n’t know you was here. I thought you was sailed away,” she said ; refraining, after a first startled glance, from looking towards him, so as to betray her recognition of his presence.

“ I want to see you once more, Stanislava. I got something to say with you. I make believe go off. I sail through the bridge in big style, so your father and Barney think I gone away ; then I tie up the boat down by the harbor mouth, leave Nicodem take care of her, and come here. You must come right away out and take walk.”

“ Wait till I make done my work and get good excuse. They don’t watch me now, because they think you was gone.”

They arranged to meet at the corner of a certain vacant lot, on distant Windlake Avenue. Alfsen waited patiently till she had finished her household tasks, and sallied forth ; then he stole down the ravine again, and joined her at the trysting-place. If the dull Dame Kraska regarded this manœuvre at all, possibly she thought it only a part of the necessary business of employing her lazy son Nicodem as a cabin-boy, or possibly she winked at it because she had no great love for her neighbor, Ludwig Trapschuh.

“ What happen you, Stanislava ?” asked Alfsen, at once. “ Why you wear that kind o’ dress ?”

“ I got to ; I must, all time, do housework now.”

“ And you don’t like milliner business no more ? Why you leave Morgenroth’s store ?”

“ I guess I was too sassy. When they say something against the Polanders, I say something back again, and they turn me out.”

“ Oh, no, you could n’t be too sassy, Stanislava. Was that, sure, the reason ?”

“ Well, my uncle and aunt don’t want me to do no more such work,” she admitted. “ They stop me from everything. Once, you know, I was setting types in a German paper, and once I was painting them canisters in the Stamped-Ware factory, and once” —

“ I don’t forget paintin’ them canisters. Did n’t I first see you when I used to work there, too ?” broke in the young mariner, interrupting her. “ But, Stanislava, you have that money what you get from Governor Lane to pay your board. You must not pay your board and work so like a servant, too.”

“ They got big expenses, and they was my family,” she answered, simply.

“ By jinks ! that was a swindle. I would keep that money, if it was me, or I would do what I please.”

“ How I can keep it? My uncle get it himself ; I never get it in my hands.”

“ I would tell Governor Lane, then. Or I would tell Mrs. Varemberg; you say she’s such a nice lady.”

“ It was my uncle and my aunt,” reiterated the girl ; alleging this in a naive way, as if it were so convincing a reason that nothing could by any possibility be urged against it. “ I wonder what he give me that money for, any way ?” she added, presently.

“ Oh, he got plenty.” Alfsen was little enough troubled on this score, to which, indeed, he had never paid an instant’s attention. “ I had something very partiklar to say with you, Stanislava,” he began anew, hesitatingly. “ What I got to say is, I guess you must give me up, Stanislava.”

“ Give you up, Willie ?” she cried, as with sudden horror.

“Yes; you must get married with some smart feller what can take care of you. I got no good luck any more,— no better luck that last trip as before. So I go down the lower lakes to look for some new kind o’ job, and perhaps I stay there, and don’t never come back. What’s the use ?”

“ Willie, you must come back ! ” she exclaimed, in frightened protest. “ I don’t give you up, — you und’stand ? I don’t give you up.”

“ But if I’m no good no more ?”

“ I keep company with you, all the same,” she persisted obstinately.

Reassured by this display of constancy, he next broached, in a sheepish way, another matter he had been turning over in his mind.

“ We might get married — right away — by Pastor Freitag,” he suggested, “ and no one know nothing about it. Then if they was to treat you too bad I could stop it. I would try to take you away the soonest possible.”

The girl seemed startled this time in a different way.

“ I would n’t be married by no Pastor Freitag,” she responded, with a decided toss of the head, in spite of her recent avowal of affection. It was evident that she cherished a feminine ideal of something very much more elaborate in the way of a wedding than a clandestine ceremony by Pastor Freitag.

This was a little man, a minister of the Lutheran sect, who lived a bachelor existence — doing all his own cooking — in the basement of his chapel, on one of the minor side streets. He was very latitudinarian in his theology, and accommodating in all his views; offering, for instance, to marry a couple “ either with or without a God.” His chapel was, as it were, a local Gretna Green, and no small part of his scanty income was derived from expediting wedlock for persons disposed to be slightly informal in their arrangements.

But little further time was allowed for the discussion of Pastor Freitag or anything else. The pair, who had wandered, Jenny and Jessamy fashion, quite at their ease, and sometimes hand in hand, were suddenly confronted by a formidable apparition. It was no less than Ludwig Trapschuh. He had left his bridge, again, for one of his expeditions to see South Side aldermen, and the like, and found himself at the moment in precisely that part of the town. The sight struck consternation to their souls. His niece gave a faint, involuntary shriek, while Alfsen could only affect a dogged sort of smile.

“ Did n’t I tell you I won’t let it ?” cried Trapschuh, in a choking fury, addressing himself first to the young girl. Then, turning to Alfsen, he said, “ So-o-o you walk yourself with my niece-of-law ? If I catch it again, I guess I knock you over the heels by the head.”

Before any violence could be done, however, Paul Barclay once more appeared upon the scene. Though he was but passing by, driving homeward, his presence no doubt acted as a restraining influence. It was evident to him that a drama of some kind was in progress : the young sailor had a defiant air, Stanislava was downcast and tearful, and Ludwig Trapschuh made the most typical of stern, low - comedy fathers. Barclay unavoidably gave it his attention through his recognizing the participants. As if this were only a signal for their breaking up, the little group, immediately after, dispersed. William Alfsen hurried down to the port, this time to cast off and put to sea without further artifice ; Stanislava was dragged home by her irate guardian, and, arrived there, scolded roundly again, and all but beaten, by him and her aunt. The occurrence, however, sank deep into her recollection; Alfsen’s advice had its effect, and she manifested for the first time, shortly after, a spark of something like the true American independence. When pressed hard, she threatened to go to David Lane, say to him that she was able and anxious to earn her own living, and have the stipend stopped.

“ Don’t do it, Stanislava,”begged Trapschuh, in great alarm. “We got big expenses, and we could n’t bring you up without that money. Remember I was a poor man, and I was your uncle.”

“ You must give me freedom, then; I must do what I like.”

Her uncle was thus in some degree brought to book. She utilized her privilege by exchanging the rude, domestic drudgery in which she had been engaged for occupations more congenial to her taste. She appeared at the Stamped-Ware Works, to solicit once more the stenciling of patterns on light boxes and canisters, which she had formerly done, — a kind of work sometimes to be taken home with her, and sometimes done at the shop ; and Barclay, to whom she addressed herself, was glad enough to accede to her request. He had a pleasant word more than once for this flower of the Polish settlement, partly as Mrs. Varemberg’s protégée, and partly through the more pensive recollection, to which his mind sometimes wandered, of the association of their progenitors together in the same untimely fate.

The rigorous northern winter came on, and set its seal of ice on the navigation of the Great Lakes, not to be opened again till another spring. The last belated vessels came skurrying into port; some were embargoed at places where the sudden freezing up of the harbors found them. The storm-flag was flying almost constantly on its high perch, on the roof of the building of the Keewaydin Insurance Company. This square of vivid scarlet up in the gray sky indicated now snow-storms that blocked the railroads, now wind at forty miles an hour, and now blizzards of extreme cold that swept down into the streets, often driving all human life in-doors, and putting a stop to bisiness transactions. The windows of the shops were sometimes as thickly covered by hoar frost as if by plates of zinc. The lake, impressive in every aspect, was frozen as far as the eye could see, and no one could say how much farther. What mysterious dramas were enacting in the long, dead winter out amid the winds and currents of that great deserted sea ? Amid its roughened and broken ice could be seen here and there forbidding channels of lead-colored green or purple water. On the farther verge, as it vanished under the brooding sky, there seemed great breakers tossing, and icebergs moving in slow procession.

The South Side Belle did not return to port, even among the belated craft, but some time afterwards the boy Nick Kraska made his way homewards, and related that she had been lost off the rough upper Michigan shore. Alfsen was laid up in hospital over there with various injuries, including a broken arm. He had been injured in going back after Nicodem, — who was afraid to strike out alone, — through a heavy sea full of floating lumber; keeping thus the promise made to the mother to look after the boy’s safety.

“ The sloop was as rotten as an old pumpkin,” said a critic of the occurrence, at the Johannisberger House. “ She was loaded with a cargo of boards, and these thrashed around, broke through her sides, and scuttled her by themselves the very minute a good thumping sea set in.”

Later on, William Alfsen appeared, one day, in person, at the Stamped-Ware Works, pale and emaciated, his arm still in a sling, and accompanying Stanislava, whom he had met, on some errand connected with her work.

Foreman Akins pointed him out, and described the case to Barclay.

“ There’s a feller that used to be a smart hand to work,” said he. “ He never’d orter left; he did n’t know when he was well off.”

“ Why not give him his place back again ?”

“ That arm o’ his would n’t let him be no use now. Unless, may be, it was some light job in the packin’-room,” he added.

In due time, however, Barclay stopped, on his way up town, to offer the son of the aged weather-vane maker some light work in the packing-room. The young man was rather disposed to resent it at first, as savoring of charity, but he was made to feel that his services were really in demand.

During the interview, old Alfsen took occasion, as usual, to air his views on the weather and other topics.

“ I make predictment,” said he, “ that this is not a easy windter, but a strong, cold, and enduring one.”

Lightning-rods were the favorite subject of his discourse. It appeared that he was fond of assembling the children of the neighborhood round him to hear his stories of the mysterious element with which he had had so much to do. He would tell of the shattering of the masts of vessels by lightning. Once, he said, a great wheel of St. Elmo’s fire as large as a millstone had come rolling along the waves and pierced a ship in three places. Again, a ball of blue flame as large as a man’s fist had leaped from an electrometer and killed its operator, leaving a red mark on his forehead and his shoes burnt from his feet.

“ Some will be believing rods to be no use, because bringing down more lightning as what they can carry off,” he said, in his odd dialect, “ but I beg to differ much with the believings of said persons.”

“ Your experience has taught you differently, then ?” said Barclay, not unwilling to lead him on a little.

“ Sure ; only they must be good put up. How much power you think got one o’ them clouds ’bout ten thousand acres big, eh? All rod joints must be tight and not rusty, and the ends must be branched out in the ground, with plenty charcoals around it, else everything get tore up.”

“ You have no doubt done some very important work in that line, yourself?”

“ I was the best lightnin’-rods feller what you never see,” returned the old man boastfully. “ I did ought to put up all that big work on the city hall, too, when it was build, but I did n’t get enough politikle influence.”

“ And it took political influence for that, even when you were so good a workman ?”

“ I bet you it take it ; if you got no aldermans on your side, you get no job. When I was mad about it, they give me a small, little box to make, to put some papers in, in that statue ; that job did n’t amount to nothing at all. I bet you see her come down some day, and scatter them papers all round.”

“ You think the figure is not secure ?”

“ I make predictment what she come down. Yes, sir, plenty times already see I her shake in the wind.”

“ Oh, anything shakes in a high wind.”

“ Well, but I guess the lightning some time Lit her, any way. Them other fellers what put up the rods on the big dome and along that golded statue of Justice don’t know nothing about it,” he said, still cherishing his resentment of years before. “ I was the best feller for fixing up the right kind o’ rods, and if she don’t got ’em, of course she must come down.”

William Alfsen proved a faithful person in the minor duties assigned him, and an intelligent one as well, from whom Barclay gathered many useful opinions about the needs and views of the working class in which he was interesting himself. He made friends with him by degrees, and took him, more or less, as a companion and guide in what Mrs. Varemberg was pleased to call his ethnographic explorations among the different races and conditions of men.

They went together, one night, to a meeting of rabid socialists and unifiers of labor, held in the district somewhere near the factory. There was a speaker who had a strange way of perking out his chin, and appeared about to choke with each sentence, — a huge man, who made but mild suggestions. There was another, a diminutive man, in an overcoat with ragged edges, and wide pantaloons flapping over little feet like a woman’s, who proposed, in a piping voice, the most sanguinary measures. Hoolan, from the factory, was present, among others, and made a speech. Remarking Barclay in the audience, he addressed to him personally some questions intended to be posers of a very crushing sort. It was much out of Barclay’s line, but he rose, nevertheless, and answered these and some other of the dangerous fallacies he had heard. He displayed before them in a few wellchosen, forcible words some economic doctrines, of the simple elementary sort, but novel and original enough in an assembly like that, little given to considering more than one side of a question. There were groans and hisses, but Hoolan stood by him ; on the whole, they gave him fair play, and he derived from this incident a reputation for oratory, as he had already for courage.

And yet again Barclay went with Alfsen to a Polish ball, of which the latter had apprised him. It was a celebration of the military company, and was held in a rude wooden building, in a grove of leafless trees, dignified with the name of a “park,” near the southern city limits. It was on a clear winter’s night. As they drew near the place, the moon shone down upon the Polish quarter, touching with a sparkle the bright tin domes of the church of St. Stanislaus, and gleaming white on the fields of driven snow all round about it, with much such an effect as might have been presented at the same moment by an actual village of the steppes.

Within, the Sobieski Guards moved about, resplendent in their uniforms of blue and red ; and young women, with hands and wrists roughened by work, sat in rows on benches, while their hats and shawls depended from pegs behind them. Stanislava Zelinsky was there, very charming in white muslin, with blue ribbons in her hair. So jealously guarded was she by her uncle, assisted in his vigilance by the rowdy Barney, that William Alfsen could only look at her from afar with longing and disconsolate eyes. Ludwig Trapschuh, to tell the truth, cherished no peculiar prejudice against Alfsen; he would have felt the same way towards any other who threatened to take away from him his niece and source of revenue. But precautions as to others were needless, for she showed them no favor.

Barclay, however, was a visitor who was treated with august consideration by his pleasing young employee, among the rest, and he talked with her at considerable length. She could tell him something of the traditions of her country: the wolf-hunting in the Carpathians; the ancient serpent-worship in marshy Lithuania ; the tarantass with a trotting and two galloping horses harnessed abreast; the wodki, or potato brandy ; and a certain famous plum jam, made in great kettles set in the ground, and stirred about with wooden shovels. Finally, she induced the musicians to play for his especial benefit the sweet and plaintive Kalina and some other national airs.

The dancing was marked by great zest and facility.

“ Why, indeed, should it not be ?” remarked Barclay, as he went back to join his companion. “ Where, allowing for the rudeness of the company, should we expect to find more grace and spirit than here ? Do we not owe them all the modern dances ? What is Polka but the word that means ‘ a Polish woman ’? The Mazurka was the native dance of the Mazours, the Cracovienne that of Cracow, and the Varsovienne that of Warsaw.”

He paused, as he was leaving the place, to watch a waltz, in which the couples separated at a given signal, pointed mocking fingers at each other, clapped hands and stamped feet, then joined again and went on as before, all in harmonious rhythm. On the way home Alfsen deferentially confided to him his feelings about Stanislava, of which his listener had already heard something. “ Some o’ the girls gets married because they ’re tired o’ workin’, and often gets a harder time than what they had before,” said he. “ I don’t want any o’ that; I don’t want any girl what marries me to be scrubbin’ all the time at the wash-tub.” He took so dark a view of his own prospects that no one was readier to admit the justice of the opposition of Trapschuh than himself.

“ But your arm will soon be well again,” returned his employer sympathetically ; “ then you can get your old place back, earn good wages, and things will go all right with you.”

“Yes, but I don’t know if I can make good mechanic any more,” hesitatingly.

“ I ‘m better on some kind of a boat. Only when a man lose his boat — and I lose two — he don’t easy get no good place on any other one. If I could get on that revenue cutter, I like it,” he added wistfully. “ Them government jobs pay pretty good, and you ’re sure you get your pay.”

“On the Florence Lane ? What sort of a place would you want?”

“ Well, may be to watch around her, while she’s laid up for the winter ; and, after that, to work on her most any way, — I could learn all. I would n’t care much whether it was sailin’ or takin’ care o’ the guns; I understand most all that kind o’ business.”

Barclay began to speculate whether there was any reason why he should not get a deserving fellow, with a taste for the work, a government appointment on a revenue cutter. He apparently found none, for he said, —

“ I ‘11 speak to Lieutenant Gregg about it.”

But it so happened that peculiar circumstances arose to prevent his speaking to Lieutenant Gregg about it in person, and to lead him to turn the matter over to other hands, instead.

VIII.

A MEETING AT THE FOOT OF THE GOLDEN JUSTICE.

Barclay had first his popular period, then something very like an unpopular period, in the social life of Keewaydin. Looked upon as a person of exceptional distinction, he was bidden to all the usual entertainments and many especially devised in his honor. Keewaydin, like most other American towns, did not frankly engage in pleasure for pleasure’s sake; there was generally an apologetic air about it. Still, somebody coming or somebody going, a notable stranger in town, a charitable object to be furthered, furnished occasion for sufficient gayeties.

“The typical occasion, I should say,” Mrs. Varemberg explained to him, “is the visit of some young girl who was formerly school-mate, say, of a friend residing in the place. As soon as it is known that such a person has arrived, all the acquaintances of the family hasten to the house, and steps begin at once to be taken for her entertainment.”

“ This inter-visiting of school friends, now that railroad fares are cheap, and the remotest points are really but a few days apart, seems one of the great North American agencies for unifying civilization,” said Barclay, as if philosophically. “ The boarding-school ought to be set upon a lofty pedestal of honor, as a leading factor in the modification of types and the settlement of race problems. What is the frequent upshot of these visits? The young stranger, flattered and fêted, appears at her best. The young men are taken with the novelty ; some one of them asks her to marry him, and she stays. She has been blown afar and taken root, just as the seeds of exotic plants are blown by the winds to spring up on coral islands.”

“You are undoubtedly correct. But how beautifully poetical you are getting, in these late days !”

“ Oh, I have to be rather poetical, as a relaxation from the factory. Besides, I am a bit of the drift from distant shores, myself.”

“ Then we must have you follow the usual career. Who is to be the happy agent of your taking root and flowering on our coral reef ? Naturally Miss Telson, our greatest fortune, whose money will be useful to you in your philanthropic enterprises. A philanthropist, you know, can never have too much.”

Barclay objected to Miss Telson. She was the daughter of the leading capitalist of the place, — for others, in the mean time, had surpassed David Lane. She was a particularly dull, uninteresting girl ; it was said of her even now that she did not know how to spend her income.

“ Miss Shadwell, then,” said Mrs. Varemberg. This young woman, a granddaughter of Shadwell of the Navigation Company, and probably the second in the list of fortunes, was a little midget scarcely out of her teens, with a face that already resembled a withered apple. She had a rather terrific reputation ; she was a law unto herself, and was in the habit of making very pert and mischievous remarks. A Miss Minford, who came third in the trio of heiresses, mistakenly endeavored to render herself attractive by an elegant fragility; she thought it charming to profess to be utterly unable to do about everything anybody would have liked to have her do.

“ No,” said Barclay decisively, “ I should not take kindly to so much invalidism. I could not quite sink out of sight my ideal of blooming health.”

“ You do not like invalids, then?” said Mrs. Varemberg, with sadness in her voice.

“ Not the amateur kind; all my sympathy and admiration are reserved for the real article,” he returned, with cheerful promptness, endeavoring to atone for his stupid slip of the tongue.

“ Ah, I see your desideratum is beauty, not money,” she rattled on, when she had recovered from this shock, or hidden her feeling. She affected to survey the field next from this point of view.

She pretended many times thereafter, in a teasing way, to consider him a person who was sagely and maturely deliberating upon the choice of a wife from among the eligible candidates. She would affect to send him forth as a champion to the fray, to equip him with her best counsels, comfort him in his disappointments, and the like. She represented his heart as wavering in the direction now of this fascinating fair one, now of that. But when, after a considerable time, no results appeared from the campaign, she accused him of phlegmatic insensibility. She said he had a heart made in compartments, like those of an ocean steamer; one or more of them might be broken with impunity, leaving the organ practically as good as ever.

“ You will find a great deal of good blood in Keewaydin,” said Mrs. Clinton, taking her part also in his social education. “ Many young men of the best families of New York and New England came here, in the early times, to better their circumstances or benefit their health. My brother was one of them. You naturally belong to this congenial element, and I would advise you to confine your acquaintanceship as much as possible within it. Of course we know your father’s name well, but your mother was a Ridgewood. The moment I heard your mother’s name was Ridgewood, I knew all about you.”

“ We are very remarkable on the mother’s side, also,” said Mrs. Varemberg. “ We are Bushwicks. The Bushwicks — let me see: they all married and had large families. Oh, yes, they were very extraordinary. There is a book about them ; I am going to read it some time.”

“ Florence !” protested Mrs. Clinton severely.

“ Well, we shall not let Mr. Barclay have all the glory.”

“I hardly supposed such distinctions much obtained here,” said Barclay.

“ They do not,” insisted Mrs. Varemberg. “ There are really none except those of the pocket-book. Whoever has made his fortune is given a little time, it is true, to wash off the dust of the conflict, but he is not kept out of any of the rewards of it.” Again the aunt protested.

“ You two are such a pair of radicals and scoffers,” said she, classing them together. But to be classed with Mrs. Varemberg in any category was subtly grateful to Barclay.

There proved to be quite distinctions enough, however, of one sort and another. To supplement the rest, the sectional divisions of East and West Sides and the like were carried into social life ; each assumed to be all but sufficient to itself, and representatives of the one went to the other only on the occasion of some notable funeral or wedding.

A “ society paper ” and “ society columns ” in the regular papers recorded the doings of a Shakespeare Club, — a highly accomplished one, devoted to private theatricals. Clubs for the cultivation of music of many varieties especially flourished. The inspiration seemed to come in the first place from the large German population, so gifted in this art; and it might have been remarked that it was through a common interest in music that the two races began to overcome their early estrangement, and to intermingle and marry. The leading troupes of performers of all kinds, on their travels, were wont to play a night or two at the Grand Opera House or the Academy of Music. Neither theatre was quite so grand as its name. Barclay went to some houses where were played “ rhyming crambo ” and like games, in a half-romping way, often pleasanter than the more set entertainments. There were many interiors fitted up with charming taste, and these had inmates who showed themselves nervously anxious to keep at the level of the latest acquirements in literature, art, and general culture. They lamented their small advantages as compared with the favored denizens of the metropolis, but they often have given the best of these latter, who are apt to be distracted from reading, study, and most that is useful by too great a whirl of affairs, in their complex life, a wholesome lesson, instead.

Barclay had the simplest, most unostentatious of manners, wherever he moved, and it was by no means his own fault if he became a centre of attraction. The young women were perhaps a little overawed at first by his unusual eligibility, accomplishments, and good looks. Even the more reserved had their sweetest blandishments for him, while others threw themselves daringly at his head. All alike proved without avail; they found him impervious, and, after what was deemed a sufficient attempt, they drew off in despair.

Justine DeBow assumed, on the strength of their early acquaintance, a closer intimacy with him than most of the others, — an assumption which he, to a certain extent, conceded. “ Are you never coming to see me ?” she had asked him, more than once. He made short visits of ceremony and “ party calls,” visiting large, handsome houses, where the young hostesses — for it was the young, for the most part, who conducted all these matters — came down to receive him. They sat with hands crossed in their laps, talked of Wachtel’s concert, Ristori, their European tours, and their trips to New York and to the Eastern seaboard in summer, liking to compare with his own. In time he dropped in at Justine DeBow’s, among the rest. She lived in a large wooden house, nearly square, painted in brownish tones. In the low fence, surrounding its door-yard, was a gate swinging both ways, which clicked complacently to itself for some time after one had passed through.

Barclay courteously asked after her mother, and received the reply that she would have come down, but her health was far from good, and she rarely saw visitors.

“ What are your impressions of Keewaydin now ?” his young entertainer asked him, hastening to change the subject.

“ I still find it highly interesting.”

“ My idea of an interesting place would be something very different,” she returned, with an almost offended air. “ It would be a long way off, for one thing, and it would furnish rather more to keep one from dying of utter stagnation.”

“ I have not stagnated yet, with all my Germans and miscellaneous foreigners to explore. I’ve been round the world a second time, as it were, since my arrival. But perhaps I am still too much in my first enthusiasm to advance any opinions of consequence.”

She looked at him in surprise. “ We don’t see anything of the Germans,” she said. “ Some of the young men go to the Germania Society, though, I believe, on Sunday nights, to see the beautiful Jewess, Rosa Blumenthal — I would, if I were they; I would do most anything to keep alive.”

In this mood she was not at all like the formal little person he had first met on the steamer.

“ She is pretty, as we have agreed,” said Barclay, reporting the visit afterwards to Mrs. Varemberg, “ but I have not often seen a greater budget of discontent in so small a compass.”

“ Which means that she interests you. I recollect an unusual character or situation was always sure to do it.”

“ Ah, well, my interests are so vast and varied nowadays that some of them will have to be neglected.”

The verdict that Barclay was indifferent, and even incorrigible, in the sentimental way, was first rendered at St. Bartholomew’s Guild, a charitable association of select young ladies of the place, and was confirmed at the Saturday Morning Club, a society, after the Boston model, devoted to their intellectual improvement.

“ Oh, he is fastidiously polite, and all that; no one could be more so. He looks at you in an appreciative way, and gives the most careful attention to all you say,” pronounced a fair speaker, more frank than the rest, at the Guild, removing a score of pins from her mouth, to be the more untrammeled in the expression of her opinion. “ But what does it all amount to? You feel, somehow, always kept at a distance. He is thoroughly cold ; it is probably constitutional.”

“I could never conceive of his falling in love,” said another; “he is the kind of man to whom it would be impossible.”

It was measurably certain that he had not fallen in love with any of them, and yet Justine DeBow held her peace. Neither was this authoritative judgment pronounced till forbearance had, as it were, ceased to be a virtue. Ample time had been allowed for revision of judgment, and the decision, coming from such a source, might be considered final.

Paul Barclay also ran the gauntlet, with like imperturbability, of a “ married set,” which had lately introduced, as something of a novelty in Keewaydin, certain “fast” practices of enjoying life, derived from New York and foreign models, and carried into effect, as is often apt to be the case with imitations, in even exaggerated form. Barclay had seen the world, and was considered amply eligible for this set, which was inclined to look upon him as a marked acquisition, and made him gracious overtures. It was noted for dashing little suppers with plenty of champagne ; the calling of one another, by the members, by their first names ; and the dancing of attendance upon the wives of others by gallant cavaliers, while the husbands showed the most agreeable complaisance in the world. A certain Mrs. Rycraft, a siren of the buxom sort, by no means without good looks, took the lead in the overtures to Barclay. Perhaps in order to be beforehand with the others, she carried them to notable lengths. She talked in a pensive way of the unsatisfactoriness of life, and confided to him that, gay as she seemed, she was often oppressed by moods of melancholy. He found her woes but a curious parody of the real and poignant ones of Mrs. Varemberg.

She permitted herself a good deal of sympathy, she said, for men who are sometimes spoken of as bad men; they were often very much maligned, and they had many redeeming traits. She thought men ought not to marry; if she were a man, she would never think of it.

“ But perhaps you make too little allowance for the human nature and the weakness of the masculine heart,” said Barclay, affecting to humor her.

“ Oh, he should fall in love. I would not put any countermand upon that,” she rejoined, as in a kind of consternation.

“ Nothing is easier — as I have heard — than to fall in love a little with each successive pretty woman; but in falling in love, as some philosopher says, the first thing to do is to foresee the end. Perhaps it is not always so easy to get out of it. Have you any recipe to cover that?”

“ Oh, don’t ask me for recipes. You must find the right person, and then you will not want to get out.” And she left it a transparent mystery who the right one was.

Not long after this, he received a very agitated-looking note, signed only with an initial. It was couched somewhat in these terms : —

“ Such a strange, unaccountable feeling has taken possession of me. It is so pleasant to think of your being here — How dare I write this ? — I will not send it — yes, I will. But you must forget that it was ever written. Never speak of it, never think of it, I adjure you.”

Paul Barclay extricated himself from this entanglement with all the discretion possible, though perhaps no amount of discretion is ever sufficient, in such cases, to avoid making an enemy, — who has but the greater power for harm, the more consideration, that is used.

After a varied collection of such small experiences, he inclined to withdraw himself altogether from the social arena. But for the frigid atmosphere created by her father, he would have gone more and more often to Mrs. Varemberg’s. Even as it was, his visits began to attract comment. Why had those two so much to say to each other ? Did they hold themselves aloof in assumed superiority ? the gossips asked. And this Barclay, had he none of the natural impulses of his youth, that he showed no eyes and ears for the conceded beauties of the place ? There were some, in truth, to win an anchorite, but they failed to attract him.

As to all this, even the young man was often sorely puzzled at his own state of mind. A warm and impulsive blood really ran in his veins; few had a quicker eye than he for any beauty of face or form, a readier appreciation of all the attractions that go to make up the surpassing feminine charm. But, in some strange way, all virtue seemed to have gone out of him now. It pleased him to associate only with this weak and crippled existence ; all other women had grown hardly more than tolerable to him.

“ Am I not,” he would ask himself, in trying to account for it, “ the widower of buried hopes, and is not my past of such a sort that I have no right to the ordinary present, and the future is no longer open to me ?” And, “ Why should I not use what is left to me as I choose?” he added.

A chivalrous ideal of remaining always at her side, without hope of change or reward, began to frame itself vaguely in his mind. Why might he not make a career of such disinterested friendship ? He would let no word or act of his trouble her peace of mind; the most perfect prudence should guard her against any aspersion by evil tongues ; he would only wait, wait indefinitely, and offer such poor solace as his presence might afford.

“ Do you never go to see any people ? Do you take no part in these festivities at all ?” he was moved to ask her, after a time.

“ I? How can I? How should I act if I did? If I were gay, the malicious would say I did not appreciate the gravity of my situation; if I were sad, that I was posing for their sympathy, — or, worse yet, some of the kind-hearted would give it to me, and that I could not endure.”

“ Not even that of your Radbrooks, of whose life you have given me such attractive accounts? I have seen something of them myself, by the way, and think you are right. Only, after all, another person’s happiness seems a tame affair, compared to what one pictures for himself.”

“ To such places I can go least of all ; they bring the tears to my eyes. Shall I confess to you that it is one of my peculiarities to weep at the sight of happiness? I cannot bear it. I have often turned away from happy couples, out-of-doors, and taken a different street to avoid them. You will laugh at a person so weak and ridiculous, will you not ?”

But Barclay was far indeed from any disposition to merriment. At this rare admission that her suffering was mental as well as physical, he had no little pains to disguise his own emotion, which brought a decided lump into his throat. Yet, as there seemed nothing of permanent avail to be done, it became his rôle to save her in some way from herself, to aid her to pass her days more cheerfully. He sometimes tried a raillery like her own. As she had called him Wat Tyler and Gracchus, he dubbed her the Exile, the Prisoner of the Lake, the Captive, and by many similar highsounding titles.

“ You must watch some spider, day by day, spinning its web in a corner of your cell; some little flower peeping up through a joint in the paving-stones, for your comfort, — like various of your illustrious prototypes,” he said.

“ As to the cobweb,” she returned, “ I hardly think our tidy Swedish housemaids will have left one, but the conservatory is the most likely place for the flowers. Let us go and look.”

Perhaps the prismatic glitter of all these conservatories did more than any other feature to give the ordinary passer-by his idea of the magnificence of David Lane and the unclouded happiness that must necessarily prevail in so splendid an establishment. But the ordinary passer-by, unfortunately, is not an accurate judge of the realities of things from their appearance; he does not always know sufficient of the wants of him who appears to want the least, and how, after all the needs of the body are gratified, there may yet remain the even more imperious needs of the heart and mind.

Mrs. Varemberg, pretending to seek the proper flower, culled one here and there, and then formed them all into a bouquet for her companion. How charming, he thought, was the touch of her light, deliberate hand upon them; how privileged the object, inanimate or animate, that might receive the benison of her caress!

“ All this is rather my father’s taste than my own, — the room for orchids, particularly,” said she. “A conservatory is not greatly to my liking.”

“ Nor to mine either, to tell the truth. This heaven of glass instead of the blue sky, this tepid, enervating atmosphere instead of the free air of nature, are but poor substitutes for the originals.”

“ The plants, in their artificial existence, so carefully screened from every draught and inequality, remind me too much of my own. They too have a cowed and disconsolate air.”

“ You must give me some of the bolder of them, when I begin my landscapegardening, to see what they will do outof-doors.”

“ Your landscape-gardening ?”

“ Yes ; I have been waiting to break it to you. Barclay’s Island is going to be ‘ a bower of roses by Bendermeer’s stream.’ And the planing-mill ‘ sings round it all the day long,’ he added. Oh, I assure you, you won’t know it.”

He outlined for her some of his proposed innovations: he meant to paint the buildings, let in the honest light of day at the windows unimpeded by the time-honored cobwebs and grime, put up an ornamental stone gateway at the entrance to the grounds, clear away all the rubbish, and replace the slag and cinders by grass-plats varied with some few flower-beds, — about all that could be done without tearing down the whole establishment.

“ You will be the most original of manufacturers.”

“ Oh, no ; they do these things in Mexico and Central America,” he responded. “ It is charming, the way they have of caressing their industrial establishments which are the source of their wealth, down there. A man is no more ashamed to live alongside his cotton-mill or foundry than if it were a model stock-farm with us. As you ride along, you come, all at once, upon some imposing, castellated affair, with its gardens, terraces, fountains, statues, and mediæval-looking chapel, and find it to be simply a sugarrefinery or ore-reducing works, with the proprietor’s residence added.”

“And you propose to introduce all this here ?”

“ Oh, we can’t expect to equal the Central Americans all at once, but we shall probably work up to it by degrees.”

“ But — Paul, you know — and an island, and such a paradise,” broke in his companion, as if struck by a sudden reflection, “ it is quite idyllic. You ought to have some sort of a Virginia, also. You must find some beautiful maiden of the island, who will go about clad in coarse stuffs of Bengal, and Paul must bring her bird’s-nests, and shelter her from the rain under a huge banana leaf.”

“ And we must tell the seasons only by their fruits and flowers, and the hours of the day only by the shadows passing over,” added Barclay, readily entering into the spirit of it. “ Will you not deign to be our Virginia, for the time being ?”

He drew down over her head the leaf of a large plantain they chanced to be in close proximity to at the moment, after the manner of the well-known picture.

David Lane had entered his conservatory, to walk briefly, as he was given to doing, among his orchids, that poised their curious shapes of butterfly and bird in the air like living things, and was a witness of this scene. It seemed to him to show a peculiarly intimate relationship between the pair. It was at last time for him to act, unless he would abandon all without a struggle. He scowled darkly by himself, but when they came up to him made a lame pretense of civility. When Barclay had gone, he took his daughter aside, and, without any reference to his real motive, spoke to her earnestly of her health, and strongly advised her to go at once on a visit to New York that had been before proposed. He himself would go with her. Her physicians had recommended it, for the benefit of the change, even if it should be only a short one. Her inertia was at last overcome. It is supposable, too, that the absence may, for certain reasons, have appealed to the better judgment of Mrs. Varemberg as desirable. Those two, accordingly, soon departed.

There came about, however, a friendly correspondence, of a desultory sort, during the separation. It was sometimes grave, sometimes gay. The little fiction of Paul and Virginia, originating as described, was further continued. Mrs. Varemberg had a ready gift in the humorous way with her pencil, and she drew in the corners of her notes little caricatures, to which Barclay — more rudely — responded in kind as best he could. She showed the island, with its palms and plantains, always standing in the conventional conservatory tubs; Paul as a barefoot little urchin, with a very wise and knowing look, surrounded by his storks and turtles; old Fahnenstock as the faithful negro Domingo; and Virginia a most demure and innocent little maiden in a striped cotton gown. Barclay, on the other hand, in his sketches, endeavored to make her something of an arrant little coquette.

The thousand miles of distance intervening between them seemed to make the expression of certain sentiments easier ; they sometimes wrote more freely than they had talked.

“ I want to say to you.” wrote Barclay, “ that your friendship, your intelligent sympathy with my plans, have been a great assistance and happiness to me. I do not know what I should have done without you. I think it has been more your kind encouragement than anything else that has made me go on.”

In one letter he described to her a new plan for a pension fund for his workmen that he was endeavoring to put into practice. The fund was to be made up of a small sum reserved from the earnings of each week, supplemented by a beneficent provision arranged by the management. Then, when a man had completed his labors, he would have something to take care of him in his old age. “ But these are mere fag ends and side issues,” he complained. “ Why am I not thoughtful ? Why do I not make the grand discovery that will produce for all a robust and plentiful happiness ? You will think so poorly of a person who can do no better than this. You will cross him off your books in disgust.”

“ Were your achievements greater than those of Wilberforce, or Adam Smith, or Peter Cooper, — I don’t know but I am making up a rather mixed catalogue,” — she replied, “ I shall always like the man better than the philanthropist. It seems to me already a great discovery that you have found out how a master can add to the comfort of individuals under him — But perhaps these are only the simple ideas of the poor, untutored mind of —

“ VIRGINIA.”

She wrote him once from New York of meeting his sisters at a reception.

“ They opened on me with quite a fire of questions about you,” she said. “ Is it possible that you have told me more of your affairs than you have them ? I am, naturally, much flattered at the suggestion. I was prepared to preserve your confidence as much as possible, but we were dragged apart by the crowd, — and meantime, if I meet them again, what am I to tell them?”

“ Do not tell them anything, too ingenuous Virginia,” he wrote back in alarm. “ The fact is, they are of rather an interfering turn. I will tell them, myself, as much as is for their good, when I get around to it.”

He sent once a rude sketch as of Virginia, in this new life, surrounded by admirers, who vied for the honor of holding their respective banana leaves above her head, while Paul sulked on the island, with his own trailing idly beside him, and the tortoises and flamingoes looking on in sympathy at his dejection.

David Lane, in this absence, would have had her be gay, amused, as different as possible from her usual self. It would have pleased him to see her accept the small attentions of new admirers. As to his own objection to her divorce, to tell the truth, it would have been by no means insuperable, could he have been sure that, after her release, she would marry any other than Paul Barclay. His wish was but poorly gratified. She was offered dinners, flowers, opera boxes, by old friends and new. “ But what humor am I in for all this ?” she asked. She could not adapt herself to distractions. Her depression was increased, too, by some fresh news concerning her husband from an authentic quarter. Under the immediate influence of this, she poured herself out to Barclay with a poignant sadness (and yet with an effort at self-repression) that wrung his heart with compassion for her sufferings.

“ I am glad I am not with you, to heap the burden of my sorrows on you, in my selfish way, even more heavily,” her words ran. “ Oh, I was made for happiness, and cannot reconcile myself to life without it. I must have been wrong from the first; why have I not tried to be good instead of to be happy?” Thus she accused herself, — she whom he thought the best of human beings in every thought and impulse. “ I suppose such as I are needed as an example to the others of the evils of illassorted marriage, just as the helots of Sparta were made drunk and shown to the patrician youth, as a warning against intemperance.”

She had heard that Varemberg had gone — sometimes under assumed names, sometimes retaining his own — to Algiers, South Africa, Tonquin, and finally the Pacific Islands, and carried with him everywhere his reckless and abandoned courses. She seemed afflicted at length with something almost like nostalgia; it was evident that her sojourn was doing her no good, and David Lane, having no excuse for detaining her away indefinitely, brought her home.

Barclay was privileged to see her almost immediately on her return. Three days later he saw her again, under peculiar circumstances. A break had occurred in the machinery at the factory, and while this was being repaired he was not in active demand, and set out, one morning, to gratify a curiosity he had long felt to penetrate to the interior of the city hall, opposite, climb to the dome, — a favorite point of view with strangers,—and visit the Golden Justice at close quarters. The mysterious green weather-doors of the city hall were continually on the swing. They admitted a motley group of officials, attorneys, hangers-on about all the departments, teachers to see the superintendent of schools, citizens to pay or protest against their taxes, aldermen with their characteristic air of importance, and, once a month, the county supervisors, who left their rusty-looking wagons, with rusty buffalo-robes thrown over the seats, at the curb-stones, all day long; and this movement was in progress to-day as usual.

There had been a day and night of successive rain, hail, thaw, renewed freezing, and then a light snow-fall. It was one of those occasions when Nature has produced from her simplest materials effects of dazzling splendor that surpass the fable of Aladdin’s cave, or any bowers of enchantment whatever. The trees, encased in a panoply of ice to their most infinitesimal twigs, were woven together in exquisite traceries, as of crystal, pearl, and silver. A sky of pure, deep blue stretched overhead its canopy, in rich harmony with the rest. A brief truce had been struck with the rigors of winter, and the atmosphere was of an almost balmy mildness.

Within the square, on the diagonal path crossing it, Barclay suddenly met with Mrs. Varemberg. She, too, had been drawn forth by the fascination of the morning, and was taking a short walk for exercise. Barclay involuntarily noted her elegantly simple raiment of dark cloth, fitted close to her figure, and a small bonnet of like material, a pompon at the side of which supplied the only touch of bright color. She was cut out sharply against the carpet of snow behind her. The air and exercise, with perhaps also the excitement of the unexpected meeting, gave her cheek an unwonted color, her spirits an unusual animation. An extraordinary change was already manifest, in the short interval since her return. It impressed Barclay somewhat as when the light is suddenly kindled in one of those oriental lanterns that, without illumination, are dull and opaque. The fountain in the centre of the square, standing by, frozen in the natural shapes of its running water, assisted at their conference, like some afrite out of a fairy tale. Broken icicles, fallen from the trees, crackled under the small heels of the approaching friend. Barclay asked her gallantly, referring to these, —

“ Are you the princess who scattered from her lips a shower of the most valuable brilliants, as often as she spoke and wherever she moved ?”

“ Can you doubt it ? I have been talking to myself as I came along,” she rejoined, laughing. “ But these are only a poor affair: had I known the prince, in person, would be abroad this morning, there should have been some far more worthy of him.”

“ The prince was about to explore the city hall and mount to the dome, — a point of view much recommended to novices in the sights of Keewaydin, I hear. Will you not go up, too, and chatter a little there, for the benefit of your subjects, and to keep the Golden Justice in countenance? It must be long since you have seen each other.”

“ I feel quite capable of it on such a glorious morning, but I — think it would hardly do. Besides, I was on my way to my father’s office.”

“ Then perhaps the prince may go, too, as far as your father’s office.”

“ No,” she objected hesitatingly. “ I fear it would be rather conspicuous, our walking together in the public streets. To speak frankly, — it is naturally not at all an agreeable subject to talk about, — some unpleasant comments have been made. I heard them even before I went away. They come principally, I believe, from a Mrs. Rycraft, the pleasure of whose acquaintance I do not possess.”

Barclay raged inwardly at this evidence of the lurking malice of Mrs. Rycraft. “ But life is too short,” he exclaimed, “ to let our conduct be regulated by nonentities and busybodies. They have no rewards, worth the having, to bestow, even if we conform ; not one of them would step out of his way a hair’s breadth for one’s real pleasure or benefit. It is simply that if we do not conform, their energy is actively devoted to trying to make us uncomfortable.

“ Even a sentiment founded on so unreasonable a basis, I suppose, ought to be more or less deferred to,” his hearer replied. " ‘ A man ought to know how to defy opinion, a woman to submit to it.’ It is the old problem, mooted in Delphine, you know.”

“ Bah !” ejaculated Barclay, at first; but he soon endeavored to check the expression of his discontent, for in his heart he knew she was right.

Mrs. Varemberg — though this too was perhaps rather conspicuous — let him stroll with her to the posts at the corner where the path took its exit upon the public streets.

“ How lovely it all is !” she broke off in a rhapsody. “ It is as if Nature had powdered her hair, in the Pompadour fashion, — you see I must use feminine comparisons, — and put on all her laces and diamonds.”

“ And you, too, — it makes you look so well, so strong and blooming, one entirely forgets ” —

“ I will not be told I look well,” she interrupted saucily ; “ that implies that at some former time I have not looked so well, and no self-respecting princess who drops jewels from her lips can be expected to admit that.”

“ At any rate, I shall always find it difficult hereafter to believe that there is anything really serious in your illness.”

“ It is only coming home,” she said more seriously. “ It is only a little temporary rally. Even my exile here somehow seems now preferable to anything else; the captive hugs her chains. Traveling tired me ; I seemed to get all of its discomforts and none of its pleasures. You must know I have had flattering doctors tell me I might even get well, if I were at peace with myself, at rest within. But that is a very practical recipe, is it not ? They might as well recommend me to get the moon.”

“ And you wear your life out in this cruel way for what? It makes me think of the millions spent to maintain the great standing armies in peace, especially if they never come to a conflict.” But he discreetly checked with this his far-off reference to a form of relief he had once before proposed to her.

“ I am reliably informed,” said Mrs. Varemberg, as they parted, “ that you have been a misanthrope and recluse during my absence. You do not go near the people who have been polite to you. This will never do ; I shall be held partly responsible for it. We must put a stop to it.”

“ The reproach shall be no longer deserved ; a proper consideration for the feelings of Mrs. Rycraft alone demands it,” responded Barclay. With that his charming companion went on, smiling at his sarcasm, which she did not look upon as severe, while he disappeared within the echoing, marble-paved corridors of the city hall.

Its two principal corridors crossed each other at right angles, and their junction was a rotunda, open to the dome above, from which it was somewhat too obscurely lighted. Over the first door encountered in the rotunda, to the right, was to be read the sign, “ Mayor’s Office.” Through open doors down the long halls were seen the officials nonchalantly at work, or idle. The comptroller came out, in his shirt - sleeves, with a budget of vouchers, and entered the office of the county clerk, — for the county, also, had its share in the costly building. A knot of contractors were gathered about the door of the Board of Public Works, discussing a disagreeable circumstance, and Barclay heard, in passing, some part of their discourse. It seemed that Keewaydin was a city that had enacted a prohibition against the increase of its municipal indebtedness beyond a certain per cent. of its total property valuation, and it had been suddenly discovered that this limit was already reached. A paralyzing doubt had been set afloat by the press, whether further expenditure of any kind would be lawful till another year’s taxes were in.

Ives Wilson now came out of the city attorney’s office, and gave Barclay his hand, in his bustling way, as he cheerfully accosted the waiting group.

“There’ll be no letting of contracts to-day, boys,” said he. “ You may as well go home, and make yourselves comfortable. I have it from the mayor and the city attorney ; they ’ll tell you themselves presently. There’s no money in the treasury, and there is n’t going to be any, so you’ll have to get your healths without it.” He seemed to have a familiar acquaintance with all these men, Irish, German, or American, as the case might be, and to be as much at home in this stratum of society as any other.

“ But we heard that Lane, or Jim DeBow, or some o’ them rich fellers, would put up the money till the next taxes was in,” said the German contractor, Klauserman, eagerly.

“ So they have. David Lane offered to do it, but Jim DeBow got in ahead of him. But that is to be used for necessary expenses ; without it we might have had to turn off the gas and water, discharge the police, and shut up the public schools. There ’s no telling whether he ’ll ever get his money back, either.”

“ It’s yeer paper, so it was, that sprung it on us, and made all the hullabaloo!” cried one Donlan, emphatically. “ If yez had left it alone, nobody would have known the limit was up.”

“ Of course it was,” assented the journalist gleefully. “ When you want the news, come to the Index. The rest of them will give you your ancient history and dead languages. The Index deals in facts of the present day.”

“ Stop my paper, ye divil!” said Donlan, a contractor of leading importance.

“ We couldn’t think of it, John. We would n’t let you do yourself a damage you‘d never recover from.”

The circle, though indignant, remained perhaps but the more imbued with the mysterious reverence with which the common mind invests the newspaper profession. Ives Wilson and his Index — which were, besides, clearly in the right of it in the present case — were by no means to be judged by common rules.

Barclay had sent to the janitor for the key, but now learned that it was already in use. It had been taken by some other visitor or visitors, who had preceded him to the dome. He set out, therefore, on his climb up the broad, principal iron staircase. He reached first the story of the handsome council chamber, the county court, where one Moses Levy was on trial for the firing of his store, to get the insurance money ; and the circuit court of coördinate jurisdiction, where a recess was being taken to procure the attendance of a witness. He had to ascend next a narrower, more winding staircase, of iron also. He passed through a great attic, where the ribs and braces of the construction plainly showed, and, opening, finally, a small door, stepped out into a sudden glare of light, and to a narrow balcony and promenade extending around the dome.

When he had recovered his eyesight and taken his bearings a little, he was disappointed to find himself still so far remote from the Golden Justice. He had not been able to estimate its height while climbing, and this level, to which the general public were restricted, was at a long remove even from the lowest part of her pedestal. He looked down at the view, and again upward to catch some clearer glimpse of the details of the figure. Passing slowly round the promenade in this way, he came upon a figure leaning on the railing, with that musing air of a superior intelligence that a figure in a balcony always tends to assume, and recognized, with a start, David Lane.

But the elder man was far more startled than he, and wore almost a detected, guilty air. Barclay had never seen him quite thus before. His presence here was extraordinary ; a person of his sort would by no means be expected to bring up hither the weight of his age and infirmities, and at such a season of the year, for his own pleasure. Yet strange as it was, the wonderment of Barclay was not so extreme as to give it its impressiveness ; it was the trouble in his own guilty conscience.

They two were alone on the dome, with but small probability of being interrupted by any others. David Lane aimed to recover his usual composure, but, even when he had done so, to reassume his ordinary churlishness was out of the question.

“ I had some business with the mayor on this financial imbroglio, and when that was over the notion took me, for once in a way, to come up here, for — for the benefit of the exercise. I am not beyond the need of a bit of exercise yet,” he explained.

It was thus he endeavored to disguise the promptings of an uneasy mind that sometimes drew him to the place, as the murderer is drawn to revisit the scene of his crime. He had been, too, if Barclay did but know it, to a very much higher level than this at which they now stood ; he had climbed by a steep and recondite way, with many a gasp and breathing spell, to see that the lower fastenings of the Golden Justice seemed, at least, still secure.

“ The financial difficulty you speak of has interested me very much,” said Barclay affably, puzzled by, yet trying to ignore, the apparent confusion of the other. “ I have come to realize, I think for the first time, that there may be over-sanguine, improvident, bankrupt cities, as well as people.”

“ Yes, there are many of them in the West, and I believe they are not unknown in the East. There is a notable instance in this vicinity of a town so mortgaged to railroads (that have never been built, by the way) that it has for years been subject to be sold out under the hammer, only no legal body could be found to serve the papers on. As soon as there is any move of the sort the city council disbands, or holds its meetings in hiding.”

“ And was it some flagrant piece of corruption that caused Keewaydin to adopt its present provision ?”

“ No, it was mainly a piece of prudent forethought, derived from the experience of others. I do not think Keewaydin has ever been a very corrupt place. The many rival elements keep too strict a watch on each other for that. We have our talk of ‘rings’ and ‘bosses,’ it is true, but I sometimes fancy our papers only borrow the terms from others, and even use them with a certain pride, to give us a more metropolitan air.”

They were now looking down on the city, and they exchanged some few comments about it. Its masses looked smaller than usual, reduced to their lowest terms, as it were, by being cut out against the interspaces of snow. The telegraph wires connected all parts of it together, like the exposed nerves of some living organism. From the white streets the faint jingle of sleigh-bells came up to them; on the afternoon of such a day all the world would be on runners. Barclay could contemplate his own lodgings in the square below ; at a distance could be discerned the chimneys of his factory, and elsewhere David Lane’s house. The mysterious lake spread its expanse afar, with here and there some bank of mist or low-lying cloud upon it, out of which came an occasional twinkle of the ice, as if a celestial lance had shivered in the midst of it.

“ And you,” said David Lane, — “ what brings you up so high, if one may ask ?”

“ This view, which alone repays one, but still more, to speak frankly, the Golden Justice. She had allured me from a distance, and I had just been saying to myself, when I met you, how disappointed I was not to find myself nearer; I had hoped to come out at her very foot.”

Oh, fatality! to see the Golden Justice ? Alas, that he should be met with here on such an errand !

This is as high as one can get,” said David Lane coldly. “ A special permit is needed to go further, and even that is of no avail. It is a painful climb, and there is no egress but by a trapdoor, nor any means of approaching the statue, after that, unless one should use a scaling ladder.”

In secret, no one knew better than he whereof he spoke.

“ And why has the Golden Justice allured you ?” he went on to ask.

“ I have an eye for the decorative, and she appealed to me as a pleasing object, shining so golden yellow against her field of deep blue ; but when I heard that the features were those of Mrs. Varemberg I found my interest at last fully accounted for.”

Barclay was not averse to bringing on an explanation of the anomalous condition of affairs, since the time and circumstances were favorable for it. David Lane seemed to incline in the same direction.

“ Mrs. Varemberg still much occupies your thoughts, then ?” he asked, gravely attentive.

“ You know how much she once occupied me. Well, all that is past and gone; destiny was opposed to it, and, with time, my views have changed. Since she honors me with her friendship, I trust there is nothing in what has passed to make me withhold from her the tribute of my most respectful esteem, admiration, and sympathy, and my desire to be of service to her in any or all the troubles with which she may meet.”

Barclay dwelt with emphasis on the high-minded, disinterested character of his regard, hoping to vindicate himself from suspicions that he sometimes thought might be at the bottom of the opposition of David Lane. Possibly the latter knew him better than, at this time, he knew himself.

“Yes, the features are those of my daughter Florence,” said the ex-governor. “ We did not know, and were not wholly pleased with the resemblance at first; it was the artist’s eccentric way of paying us a compliment.” He answered soberly, but not resentfully. He was in fact in a sort of daze, and made no offer to continue the conversation. An awkward pause ensued.

Barclay looked up again at the huge bulk of the figure, from the drapery of which broad reflected rays glinted down into their eyes.

“ It seems she was utilized somewhat like a corner-stone,” said he, in the most cursory way. “ I have been told that some documents were sealed up in her.”

Lane was as if thunderstruck. He fell to trembling, with an agitation such as even he had rarely known, and to hide it he altered his position, moving a little further along by the railing.

“ It is a curious instance; I don’t know that I ever heard of one before,” pursued Barclay, in the same easy tone. “ It seems reserved for Keewaydin to do original things, in a number of ways. The whole matter of deposits in cornerstones sometimes impresses one curiously. We leave dispatch-boxes along the roadside, as it were, to be opened by those who come after us, to give them news of us and our times. It is a little odd, however, considering all the cornerstones that are dedicated, how rarely you hear of one being opened. Is it because it is too soon yet for our buildings to have begun to tumble down, flimsy as so many of them are ? Or is there really no interest in the contents, these being so very trite when reached ?”

“ No doubt it is due to the comparative unimportance of the matters generally on deposit,” replied David Lane, in a voice scarcely audible, struggling manfully to retain the mastery of himself.

“ It would be more considerate, though, if one generation would arrange little surprises for the next. What was it, for instance, you put into the Golden Justice ?”

Oh, fatality! fatality! Was it not enough that this young man, of all others in the world, should have found them out in Europe, and become a suitor for his daughter’s hand ? Was it not enough that avoidance of this should have precipitated such lamentable unhappiness ? No, he must follow them here, establish himself in the place, even interest himself in the statue, mount to the dome, and be met with today under its very ægis. Nor this alone ; for now at last, with an innocence that but made it the more startling, he must put the finger of speculation on the very box and its contents, on the confession itself. To what but one fatal result could all this concentration of events, all these successive approaches, this remorseless narrowing of the circle, be tending ? The utmost efforts had availed to hinder no single step of its progress.

“It was a very long time ago,” replied David Lane. " At this distance of time it is not easy to remember,— reports, statistics, the newspapers, I suppose ; they could hardly have been anything of great moment.”

“ Alfsen, an old weather-prophet in my vicinity, told me about the box, the other day, and predicted that the Golden Justice would come down, and I should see the deposit scattered about my feet. I shall naturally be on the lookout for it with interest.”

“ He predicts that the Golden Justice will fall ?” repeated the elder man in horror. He involuntarily cast another glance up at the mammoth figure towering above them. She was certainly secure enough at present.

“ Oh, a piece of garrulous nonsense. He keeps up some old grudge for not having been allowed to do all the work he wanted to on the city hall. Even prophecy, it appears, cannot free itself from the bias of personal injury.”

David Lane made something like a half circuit of the short promenade, then turned back upon his track, with a very altered bearing: as well as one so much troubled in mind and so reserved by recent habit could do so, he assumed towards the young man an open and friendly demeanor.

“ I am glad to have met you here,” he began. “ This situation, apart by ourselves, and free from danger of interruption, gives me, almost for the first time, an opportunity of welcoming you to the place. I seem to have seen far too little of you since your arrival. I trust it is not too late to express the real interest I feel in you and your affairs, and to ask if there is any way in which I can be of service.”

“ I confess I had sometimes thought your feelings towards me were quite of an opposite sort,” returned Barclay, much surprised.

“ Oh, no ; why should you think so ? Why should it be so ? You are a young man, and I an old one. I have often many cares and troubles, and perhaps, sometimes, an unfortunate manner.”

Had Barclay desired to justify his opinion, he would have cited the rejection of his suit together with a long course of marked coldness. But of what avail ? And what warrant had he, after all, for questioning a father’s disposition of his daughter’s hand, in the supposed interest of her happiness, even at the expense of a certain subterfuge ? To re-open the subject, furthermore, he feared might arouse distrust anew, and defeat the greater freedom of action that seemed promised him.

“ Will you tell me about your enterprise and your present prospects ?” asked David Lane.

Barclay, thus encouraged, proceeded to give a brief, orderly account of the whole, from the first. This statement added to Lane’s sense as of an inevitable fatality pursuing him. It impressed him as an investment such as might have commended itself to the judgment of any shrewd cool-headed man of business. It was no mere pretext for remaining, and the circumstances were such that, given Barclay’s peculiar requirements, it would have been almost reprehensible not to have entered into it.

They descended the stairs together. Lane offered Barclay his hand, at parting, with a cordiality in which, however, was an indescribable shrinking. He wished him to come and dine, but it happened that day that Barclay could not. Thereafter, for a considerable time, it was not alone Mrs. Varemberg’s invitations and friendly offices he accepted, but her father’s as well. The two men were seen amicably together on the street and on ’Change, and the wise business head of David Lane even offered counsels that brought profit to the StampedWare Works.

And what did it all mean ? Why, simply this : that when the hapless Montezuma knew that the invading Spaniards, the Children of the Sun, destined to be the destroyers of himself and his people, had landed on his coasts, he sent costly presents, to endeavor to turn them aside from their march to his capital. So David Lane haplessly aimed to propitiate the messenger by means of whom Destiny seemed stretching forth a long arm for his destruction. It was not that he was more reconciled to his fate than before, or saw clearly, as yet, the means of its accomplishment; but in the mood in which he found himself for the time being, further struggle, further resistance, seemed useless.

William Henry Bishop.