Philip and His Wife

XXVI.

LITTLE Lyssie could not, just at first, tell even her mother of her broken engagement. There had to be hours of staggering on alone, dumbly, under her grief. She went about her daily duties on Sunday and Monday, dry-eyed and calm. She had taken off her ring, looking at it silently a long time before she put it away. She was too unconscious of self, and unfamiliar with the conventions of life, to think of sending it back to Roger. Her mother did not notice its absence from the slim, girlish hand ; Mrs. Drayton had too many cares of her own to notice such things; she “ was failing rapidly,” she told every one who came to see her. “ But perhaps it is just as well, for now Lyssie is happy, I am no longer needed,” she sighed ; and added that Alicia’s present selfish absorption in her own happiness was doubtless the Lord’s way of driving her, Mrs. Drayton, closer to Him for companionship ; which, to the curious mind, opened up interesting questions as to the propriety of the Lord’s methods.

But if Mrs. Drayton was no longer needed, she had still some needs. When Alicia began to creep out of her daze of pain, and feel tears starting in her eyes and the sob swelling in her throat, and recognize that she must have the relief of speaking, Mrs. Drayton “ needed ” her so much that it was not easy to fly to Cecil to tell her troubles, as it was her impulse to do.

“ I think I ’ll go and see Cecil, mother dear,” she said, “ and Esther will bring your dinner up. I may not be at home for dinner.”

“ Esther ? ” returned Mrs. Drayton, opening her eyes. “ Oh, Lyssie, you know how I dislike to have Esther come into the room when my nerves are so racked! ”

But Alicia, for once, thought of herself. She felt that she must be with Cecil; she must put her head on her sister’s breast, and cry, and cry, and cry. She could not come back so early as dinner time.

“ Oh, mother darling,” she entreated, “if you wouldn’t mind just this once! Oh, I must see Cecil! ” she said, in a sort of wail, and then steadied herself, her breath catching. “ I ’ll fix your tray, dear, all nicely, and then you won’t mind letting Esther bring it in ? ”

Mrs. Drayton closed her eyes. “ Oh, go, of course. Don’t mind me. But I don’t want Esther to bring in the tray. I ’ll wait, and have my dinner when you come home. I suppose you ’ll be home by tea time ? Oh, Lyssie, when I am gone, I hope you won’t remember things like this ! Remorse is very painful. But I have such a sensitive conscience ; perhaps you won’t suffer as I should.”

“ I don’t mean to be neglectful, mother, but ” —

“ Oh well, I sha’n’t allow you to stay at home now. I only spoke of your selfishness from the highest motives, — because it was my duty, not because I wanted to keep you at home. My motives are always the highest and the best. For myself, I don’t mind waiting for my dinner until it’s convenient for you. I have little enough appetite, anyhow.”

Of course Lyssie brought up the tray.

In the afternoon, as she went up the hill, she thought, almost for the first time in these two days, of Cecil’s own troubles ; and yet Cecil’s troubles only made her think of Roger’s promptitude in helping them. Compared to a broken engagement, how foolish and unreal seemed the senseless quarrels between husband and wife ! Beside, it was all right now ; Roger had said so — Roger! and the long-withheld tears rose burning to her eyes. She felt as though she could hardly wait to reach Cecil, and as she went swiftly into the house, and upstairs, she had only a word for Molly playing with her blocks in the hall.

She found Cecil’s room empty of everything but confusion. Two great trunks, half packed, took up much space ; the small pictures and photographs, the pleasant litter of books and little dainty furnishings, stood forlornly about on tables or chairs, waiting to be packed ; the curtains had been taken down, and a streak of pale sunshine fell across the carpet and into the fireplace, laying a moving finger on the busy fire, whitening the flame, and glittering on the brass andirons.

“ Oh, she’s going away ! ” thought Lyssie hopelessly. Then she went into the hall, and called her sister in a listless voice. Cecil answered from the floor above, and a moment later came downstairs. She kissed Lyssie, and shut the door, and threw herself down on the lounge.

“ I ’m tired to death ! ” she said crossly. “ I had a headache last night, and endured the torments of the very bad, and could n’t sleep ; and now today I ’ve had to see about closing the house. Shouldn’t you think, with four able-bodied women, this house could be closed without supervision ? Where have you been, Lys ? I have n’t been able to hunt you up, I’ve had so much to do.”

“You are going away ? ”

“Yes. I telegraphed Philip to come back. I’ve thought it over, and I’ve decided that — I won’t leave him. But we must get back to town.”

“ I ’m so glad everything is smooth,” Lyssie said absently. “ Cecil, I want to tell you something.” She sat down on the floor beside Cecil’s couch, twisting her fingers in the soft white rug, and seeing the pallid flames in the sunny fireplace flicker in two great tears that trembled behind her eyelids. “ Roger and I have broken our engagement, Ceci.”

Cecil sat upright, and opened her lips for a reply" ; but she was speechless. There was alarm, but amusement too, in her face. Was it possible that Roger Carey had been so absurd as to tell — But there was nothing to tell!

“Lys! Why, what do you mean? What did he say to you ? Now, Lyssie, don’t lie absurd ! Break your engagement ? He has n’t done anything that ” —

“ Of course he has n’t done anything ; it is n’t his fault. He wanted to be married right off, — next month. And I could n’t. You know I could n’t, Cecil. How could I leave mother ? And he did n’t want to wait; and so — and so” — And at last came the relief of a fit of crying, with her face on Cecil’s knees, her arms about her waist.

“ Did he— did he want to be married — right away ? ” Cecil said slowly above Lyssie’s bowed head. Was it possible that it had been so much to him as that? Oh, it was well she had sent for her husband ! She was frightened, exulting, renouncing, all at once. But mechanically she stroked Lyssie’s head, and murmured vaguely, “ It will all come right. I shall make it come right.” Oh, she was glad she had sent for Philip !

Lyssie, comforted but hopeless, clung to her, explaining it all over and over. "If I could only just die! ” the child said.

Cecil listened with angry remorse ; she put her arms about Alicia impetuously, and her voice broke with tenderness. “ There, darling, don’t cry. Lyssie, it breaks my heart to have you cry.”it came to her with a great impulse of affection that she would bring Roger Carey back to his duty. “ Now, dear, stop crying.”she said heartily. “’No man is worth so many tears. I ’ll see him in town, and I can patch it up; with no injury to your pride, of course.”

“ Pride ! Oh, Ceei, I have n’t any pride ! Why, I ’d go and kneel down before him and tell him, if I had been wrong, or if I could make him feel differently ; only, it’s the principle, don’t you see ? We should never be happy, if he could n’t feel as I do about mother.”

” Lyssie, that is absurd ; naturally he could n’t feel as you do about Mrs. Drayton.”

“ But he said — he said — Oh, I can’t tell you how he spoke of her. He does n’t love her,— I know he doesn’t.”

“ Rut good gracious, child, why should he ? He does n’t know Mrs. Drayton. Do you expect him to divine all her admirable qualities ? ”

“ Oh, but Ceci, he could n’t ever have loved me, if he feels that way about her.”

Cecil’s impatience at this did Lyssie good. Not that she thought her lover would come back to her, but it made her feel that she, too, had been to blame, a little ; that it was not all his fault.

She sat there, leaning against Cecil, talking out her aching heart, while the room darkened, and the fire glowed and brightened. Cecil said very little. Her color deepened once, suddenly, and she smiled ; then she set her teeth hard upon her lip, and drew in her breath, and looked down upon Lyssie’s bowed head.

“ Lys dear, I ’m sure he will come back; and you must forgive him.”

“You don’t understand. You don’t see how bad it is. His coming back would n’t make any difference in the question of mother.”

“The ‘question of mother’ will settle itself,”Cecil declared, and paused, listening. “ That is the stage ! ” she said, in a low voice. She put her hands up to her eyes a moment. “ Philip has come, Lys.”

“ Oh, I ’ll go! ” Alicia said quickly.

Cecil made no effort to detain her. She was impatient to be through with what she had to say to her husband.

Philip, however, was in no haste to see his wife; he was hungry and thirsty for his child.

Molly was in the nursery, and when he opened the door she flew towards him with a shriek of delight.

“ Oh, Molly, let me fasten your dress,” Rosa expostulated.

Philip took the child in his arms passionately. “ I ’ll finish dressing her. Say to Mrs. Shore that I have come. I ’ll bring Molly down to dinner.”

He sat down, and Molly, standing between his knees, demanded eagerly, “ Father, what did you bring me for a present? ”

“ Why, you don’t say you wanted a present! ” cried Philip, with a great show of dismay. At which Molly joyously flung herself upon him and hunted for his pockets.

“ I wish you’d have your pockets hung on the outside,” she informed him, rummaging through his coat.

“ You can’t have presents until you are dressed, her father declared, trying to button her frock down her little hack. But his hands were trembling. “How does tins thing go, Polly ? ”

“ You put the holes over the buttons,” Molly instructed him. “Hurry, father! I want my present. Oh, father, that feels queer ; it pulls. I don’t think Rosa fastens it that way.”

“ It looks queer,” Philip admitted anxiously. “ Have n’t you got anything easier to put on than this ? ” And between them they took off the somewhat elaborate frock, and Molly frisked about before the fire, in her petticoat. Philip got her on his knee, and cuddled her inside his coat to keep her warm, and told her a marvelous tale of gnomes and fairies. He rested his cheek upon her soft, straight hair, and felt her little warm body against his heart, and gathered her swinging foot into his hand. Once his voice shook so that Molly noticed it.

“ Father, why did you laugh?” she said reproachfully, for it chanced to be at an affecting point in the tale.

“I didn’t laugh,” Philip told her, truthfully enough. “ Now let’s find an easy dress to put on, and then look for presents ! ”

The toilet accomplished, the presents were discovered to have been left on a chair outside the nursery door. Molly, quivering with excitement and happiness, tore off the wrappers, and uttered a succession of shrieks as each new joy revealed itself, — a tin steamboat, a picture book, a little bow and arrow. At last, fairly tired out with pleasure, she gathered her treasures in the skirt of her dress, with a long, happy sigh.

“ I’m going to put ’em in my trunk. Do you think I can shoot my bow and arrow on the ship ? ”

Philip’s exclamation made her look up; but he said nothing of the ship. He told her that he had an idea there was a small box in his waistcoat pocket; did she care to look ? Her eager eyes showed how much she cared. The box found and opened, a little ring revealed itself,—a tiny thread of gold clasping a small dark garnet shaped like a heart. Philip’s hand was unsteady as he slipped it on her finger, but his words were gay enough, and he gave her a kiss, and perched her on his shoulder in the way in which he always ended their frolics.

But his face was ghastly when they reached the dining-room.

Cecil met her husband with an affectation of carelessness. He was very good to have come so promptly, she said. She found a good deal of fault with the dinner; she spoke sharply to Molly once or twice; she told John, in a low voice, that his silver was disgracefully dull, and the man blushed to his ears ; she looked at her husband across the table, sometimes, with a cold dislike in her eyes, very different from the old good-natured contempt.

“ I wish you’d come into the library, Philip, when you’ve finished your cigar,” she said, when dinner was over.

He rose at once. “ No, Polly; run upstairs to Rosa, darling,” he told Molly, who demurred, but obeyed.

Philip could scarcely wait to close the library door before be burst out: “ I shall not consent to Molly’s going to Europe ! Neither you nor I have the right to take her where the other can’t see her.”

“ Will you please wait until Europe has been mentioned ? ” Cecil said. She was standing by the fire, her hand resting on the mantelpiece, and one foot upon the brass fender. “ I don’t mean to take Molly abroad. I don’t mean to go myself.”

“I — I beg your pardon,” Philip stammered.

“ No,” she went on, without turning her head, “no; I am not going anywhere except to town, as soon as I can possibly get there. These idiots of ours apparently want weeks to pack up in ! But I think I can get off on Friday.”

“ Why did n’t you send for me sooner ? I could have hurried things. I suppose you’ve sent word to town, and the house will be in order for you ? ”

“ Oh yes; I telegraphed when — when I decided. You did n’t share your legal information with me, Philip,” she said, over her shoulder, and laughed ; then she turned round and faced him, her eyes full of hate. “ I suppose you were afraid I would take advantage of you ? You see I have had some legal information. I know that Molly belongs to me.”

“ So far as any legal question goes,” he answered coldly, “ we both knew the probabilities when I went away. There seemed to be no reason why I should communicate with you until you had decided what you wished to do at present. As for Molly ” — he paused — “ you know my wishes. Her time must be divided between us.”

“ If I agree ! ” she reminded him, with strident malice in her tone. “ Suppose, for the sake of argument, I don’t agree: of course you know she would be given to me? But I want to ask you one question, devoted father. Granting that I do agree to divide her time, do you think my influence over her is good ? Oh, pray don’t hesitate, on any grounds of politeness, from expressing your opinion, — I know what it is ; but I just want to understand why you are willing to resign her to the tender mercies of the wicked for six months in every year.”

“I have no choice,” said Philip Shore grimly.

“ Oh yes, you had a choice,” she assured him. “You could have given up being so good, could n’t you, and stayed with her ? But I did n’t mean to discuss it. I only asked out of curiosity. It does n’t really matter. The fact is, this is all nonsense, Philip. I sent for you just to tell you that it is nonsense.”

“ What is nonsense ? ”

“ Oh, this plan of ours. Come, now, you ought to be flattered ! I can’t tear myself away from you. I’ve decided not to leave you.”

It seemed to Philip Shore as though the ground moved suddenly under his feet. He grew white, and did not speak.

Cecil looked at him. “ See here, Philip,” she said kindly. “ I quite understand that this takes you by surprise ; but things need n’t be changed, really. You can go abroad, if you want to, for a while. Only, I’ve decided not to do anything public.” She sat down wearily, and reached over for the paper cutter, playing with it restlessly, as she had done on that other night when she had consented to Philip’s proposition. She bent the broad tortoise-shell blade back and forth against the palm of her hand, and then held it up between her eyes and the lamp, and yawned slightly. “ This winter I shall go out a great deal. You can put Molly to bed every night, if you want to, in intervals of ‘learning to be an artist,’ as Mrs. Drayton says.”

She was so perfectly matter of course that Philip’s astounded questions died upon his lips. He said quietly, “What are your reasons for changing your mind ? ”

“ Reasons ? Oh, as Molly says about step-grandmothers, ‘they don’t count.’ I don’t want to talk about reasons. It is convenient; that "s enough. I’m willing to go back. I’m willing to let things he as they were. That s all. But don’t, for Heaven’s sake, talk about it! ”

She was feverishly anxious to get through and to be alone. She wanted to think. She had not dared to face the fact that Roger Carey was free until she had made herself a prisoner again. But now, having taken up her chains, she wanted to think the whole thing out; to realize what his desire for a speedy marriage meant; to give free rein to that fierce satisfaction of conquest, which in such a woman has an almost masculine intensity, but which, it must be admitted, is not, confined to such women. The very good can experience it — if the opportunity is afforded them.

“We’ve got to talk about it. You seem to forget that the principle underlying this idea of separation transcends any mere personal convenience.”

“Ah, but Philip, you forget; I have no principles. I tell you I can’t tear myself away from you. Is n’t that enough?”

“ What are your reasons ? ”

“ They are my own, at least,” she said contemptuously, and rose. “ I don’t think we need talk about this any more. I simply am not willing to carry out an arrangement which would have been (there is no use choosing words) a very great relief to me ” — She stopped, and then turned upon him with a sudden furious look. “ See here ! Did it ever occur to you that I — that I am human ? that I am flesh and blood? Did it ever occur to you that all these years may have made me hate you ? that — that — perhaps if — Oh, my God! why did I marry you ! ” She stood facing him, panting, her teeth set in a passion that turned her white.

Philip’s eyes narrowed. “ We never were — married,” he said, with deliberate and deadly meaning.

“ Oh, don’t be such a fool ! You don’t, know what I was talking about. I feel like saying, ‘ Get thee to a nunnery,’ whenever I look at you ! ”

“ And still you propose to remain with me ? ” he said, stung beyond endurance.

“ I propose not to make a fool of myself. The amount of it is, Philip, that you and I have been acting as though we were the only people in the world to be considered ; well, I’ve come to my senses, — that’s all. I have n’t any reasons to proclaim or to discuss. I merely tell you I ’m willing to let things be as they were.”

“ But I am not.”

She flung up her head as though he had struck her. “You ! ”

“It isn’t as though there were any possibility of your loving me, of ” —

Cecil broke in with furious candor. “Love you? I?”

Then Philip Shore spoke his mind. He told her first, very clearly, their position in the eye of the law in regard to Molly ; then he went over the arguments which were burned into his conscience for the ending of a false relation, — a relation only less base, he said, than those other loveless marriages where the wife is her husband’s mistress. “For that’s wliat it amounts to,” he ended, beside himself with his sincere and brutal panic for personal safety. The protest which he and she would make by separating was for the honor of marriage. He was convinced, he declared, that this preservation of their individual integrity would in the end, by its effect upon her character, more than compensate Molly for the pain and embarrassment which must cloud her life.

Cecil did not speak.

“ You do not tell me your reasons, but these are mine. I give them to you because I cannot do otherwise in view of what you have said. Nevertheless, if, after hearing them, you insist that we must go on living as we have been living, I must submit.”

“ Live with you ?” she said, in a low, vibrating voice. “I would not live in the same world with you if I could help it ! ”

They stood facing one another in this dreadful duel of souls; stabbing each other with naked words; and one of them, at least, struggling spiritually with the same ferocious selfishness with which, ages ago, his ancestors of caves and forests struggled physically. Then it was as though he suddenly threw down his sword.

“ Oh, can’t we put self out of it ? ” Philip said hoarsely. “Can’t it be because it is right ? ” A wave of agitation moved in his face. “ Oh, Cecil, this is the end. If you will ” —

But she threw herself forward, flinging out her arm, and striking him full on the mouth with the hack of her hand.

“It is the beginning ! ”

Alas for the smoking flax, the bruised reed!

XXVII.

It was not until nearly a fortnight later that Old Chester woke to its privileges in the way of gossip : two great and exciting events to discuss, — a broken engagement and a divorce. A week before, the village had found food for conversation in the infelicities of the poor Todds, for Job had “ burst out ” again, as Miss Susan expressed it. He had flung his eldest child, a delicate boy of eight, down the cellar stairs. The child’s spine was terribly injured. And now Job was getting sober, getting very sober indeed, in the jail in Mercer. All this had been an excitement and an interest to Old Chester, but of course these other two affairs were much more exciting and interesting. There are people, no doubt, who do not consider the breaking of a girl’s engagement a very important matter, but that only goes to show that they never lived in Old Chester; and there may be some to whom marital quarrels are commonplace, but such a point of view merely reflects upon their own characters.

Alicia’s disappointment stirred the whole village ; in fact, only such a matter as Philip and Cecil’s separation could take precedence of it. As a topic of conversation, the Todds were almost forgotten.

Each of the great sensations had been characteristically announced.

Mrs. Shore had mentioned to Mrs. Drayton, in answer to some trivial question as to Philip’s plans, that she did not know anything about Philip’s plans. “ We have separated, Mrs. Drayton ; so, naturally, I don’t trouble myself with Philip’s affairs. I have enough to do to attend to my own,” she said.

An hour later, through the medium of Mrs. Pendleton, Cecil’s shocked and distressed stepmother had informed Old Chester of what she called her “affliction.” "Of course you won’t speak of it: I only tell you, to unburden my mind,” she declared, with tears. “ I assure you I ’ve always loved Cecil as though she were my own child. Why, my dear, when she was little, people did not even know which was my own child, Cecil or Lyssie ! I think that shows how 1 have treated her,” said Mrs. Drayton, much affected.

The news of Alicia’s broken engagement was given to the world with all decent accessories of feeling and reserve, but still characteristically; for Mrs, Drayton confided it to four persons, with the caution to each that it was not to be spoken of.

“ There’s no use talking about such a sad thing,” she told Susan Carr, shaking her head.

Miss Susan, however, had no wish to speak of it; sorry as she was for Lyssie, the greater matter was heavy upon her heart. Philip, after the dreadful scene in his library, had come to her, ghastly white, with a smear of blood where his wife’s rings had cut his lip, and had asked her to take him in for the night.

“ Cecil and I are going to live apart,” he told her briefly.

Susan Carr loved him so truly that she asked not a single question. “ Come up to your room, my darling,” she said ; and brought him a glass of wine, and kissed him, and left him. The next day she heard it all. Philip was very quiet and direct as he talked to her ; but once, as he spoke of Molly, he got up and paced the floor, and she could see that his hands were clenched upon each other until the knuckles were white. He told her of the long estrangement in thought and motive and principle. He said that gradual irritation had culminated in absolute dislike, with its inevitable differences and quarreling, — a state of things revolting to both Cecil and himself, and horrible for Molly. Ami then he explained, gently, that under such circumstances he believed marriage to be morally annulled.

“Are you going to be divorced, Philip ? ” Miss Susan asked, in a frightened voice.

“ Real divorce takes place without a decree,” he answered.

There was something in his face that terrified and silenced her; yet his arguments did not convince her. For a moment it seemed to Susan Carr that his own righteousness was more to him than his child’s welfare, and infinitely more than Cecil’s welfare. But she would not allow herself to think that.

What that talk was to Philip, agonized to a point where physical endurance wavered, she, dear soul, could never know. He went away from her with the courage which comes to a man who, in the midst of stress and storm, has laid his head upon his mother’s breast. That Miss Susan did not understand him, that she did not approve of him, was nothing. She loved him.

In spite of Mrs. Drayton’s cautious confidences, by the Thursday that the Sewing Society met, everybody looked pitifully or critically at Lyssie, as chanced to be their disposition ; and sighed or shook their heads, and said,

“ Is n’t it dreadful about Cecil ? Oh, it’s a great grief to us all! ”

But Old Chester went to the Sewing Society with an eagerness which the preparation of the wardrobe of a missionary’s wife had never called out before. It was Mrs. Drayton’s turn to receive the society, and there was a little anxiety among the ladies to know if Alicia would be present; they hoped not, and they explained their hope by saying that it would be awkward for the child to see them. “ Though of course nobody will speak of Mr. Carey,” said one lady to another; “ but I do want to ask Frances about poor Cecil, and it would be scarcely proper to speak on such a subject before Alicia.”

“ ‘ Poor Cecil ’ ? ” repeated old Mrs. Dale. “ Wicked Cecil, I say ! When a married woman talks about leaving her husband, it shows that there is something radically wrong in her.”

“ But is n’t it possible,” protested the other, who never chanced to have had a husband, “ that sometimes it’s the man’s fault?”

“When it is, there’s another woman at the root of it,” answered Mrs. Dale severely ; “ men would be very good if it were n’t for women.” She glared at her gentler companion, but said no more, for they had reached Mrs. Drayton’s door, and Lyssie, a little pale, a little older, stood smiling in the hall, ready to help them take off their wraps before they went into the parlor, where Mrs, Drayton, in her wheeled chair, was waiting to receive them.

Mrs. Drayton was full of subdued excitement, but her manner had a marked hesitation. One moment she showed grief and dismay for Cecil, and a “proper pride ” that Lyssie had broken her engagement; the next, rabid curiosity concerning her step-daughter, and heartbroken acceptance of Alicia’s disappointment. The fact was, it was all so new, so hurried, that she had not yet chosen her rôle, and skipped from one state of mind to the other, in a way bewildering even to herself. Cecil’s affairs, naturally, could never he more to her than an interest; and so far Alicia’s broken engagement was only an interest, too. Mrs. Drayton had not reached that flat and tasteless moment of discovering that poor little Lyssie had robbed her of a grievance ; a cruel theft, and one which our best friends, with well-meant, stupid efforts to make life better for us, are forever committing !

Mrs. Drayton’s chair was close to the hearth, and she wore a white shoulder shawl, for the day was chilly. She looked very pretty and frail. She had on a plum-colored silk with some gray fur around the throat and wrists, and she wore a cap with blond tabs resting on her shoulders ; a miniature of Mr. Drayton hung by a slender gold chain around her neck, and she was apt to lift it and look at it as she conversed, which sometimes made her a little absent in manner ; but she always came back with a start, and apologized with a faint sigh. She sighed a good deal that afternoon, and looked at the picture very often.

“ Oh, this is all very sad ! ” she said to Mrs. Dove ; “ it makes me feel my loneliness doubly. If it were not selfish, I should long to have my dear husband come back to help me bear it all ; and he would know what to do about Cecil. She came and confided in me at once, and I did all I could, — all any mother could. But Mr. Drayton would know what to say to Philip.”

“ But what does Philip say ? ” cried Mrs. Wright, a plump, anxious-looking matron. “ If it is not an improper question, Fanny, what does Philip say ? ”

The fact was that, so far, Philip had said nothing to his mother-in-law, so Mrs. Drayton was only truthful when she replied, a little stiffly, “ Ah, I think I cannot tell you that. He does not want to say anything severe about Cecil, but — poor, dear Cecil !”

Mrs. Drayton might perhaps have been more explicit, but at that moment Alicia came in to ask some question about tea, and said under her breath, “ Oh, mother, don’t talk about Cecil! ”

Mrs. Drayton frowned, and motioned her away. “ Lyssie is a most sensitive child,” she told Mrs. Pendleton, — "so different from poor Cecil, who is just like her own mother; she can’t bear to have me talk about this sad affair. But it is very foolish in her, for, in my position, I can understand and defend Cecil better than anybody else. It has been a great blow to me, in my weak state ; still, I do defend her, for of course she did not stop to think how it would upset me.”

“ How unselfish you are ! ” murmured Mrs. Pendleton.

“ All no, no ; I fall short of my ideal! I had a high ideal of a stepmother’s duties, and I never quite reached it. I think one ought to have one’s ideal just out of reach, don’t you ? Still, some one once said to Susy Carr, — you remember, don’t you, Susy ?—some one said, ‘ Which ’ ” — But Mrs. Drayton was talking to empty air, for Mrs. Pendleton was listening to Mrs. Dove’s gentle assurance in her other ear that Cecil had fine qualities, “very fine ; and so has Philip. I sometimes think it is only because they can’t understand each other.”

“ Well,” Mrs. Pendleton answered, hesitating, and looking down at her sewing, “perhaps there’s more in this than appears ? Perhaps Mr. Shore has some motive that — that it would not be quite delicate to speak of. There may be some other woman ? ”

Mrs. Dove’s horrified look and little gesture of drawing away made Mrs. Pendleton hasten to retrace her steps; for Mrs. Pendleton always kept pace with her companion’s thoughts.

“ Not that I think so, but that is what people will say. But ” — she dropped her little, smiling, deprecating face, and looked sidewise at Mrs. Dove, as though to see how far she might safely go — “I do feel that Cecil is — strange; and in the matter of my cousin Mr. Carey (family traits are so apt to be repeated, though Lyssie seems a nice girl), perhaps it’s just as well.” Then, her eyes on Mrs* Dove’s face, she slid into the assurance that it was too bad, and she did n’t know where the fault lay; and she added that, after all, young people did not know much about love. “ I don’t believe in early marriages; young people have n’t experience enough to appreciate what affection means,” she said, sighing.

Mrs. Dove agreed with her with so much earnestness that Mrs. Pendleton felt she had redeemed herself in the eyes of this elderly lady who had made so lamentable a mésalliance.

Mrs. Pendleton looked very meek and mild and sympathetic as she sat there in the Sewing Society that afternoon, always ready to listen to the two sides of every story, and showing such sympathy with each that she endeared herself to both.

And there were distinctly two sides to this story of Philip and Cecil. Everybody said that Philip was an exemplary young man ; everybody knew that Cecil had been Old Chester’s black sheep : so, on the one hand, it was no wonder poor Philip wanted to leave her ; but, on the other hand, marriage was marriage, and Philip had made his bed, and ought to lie in it.

Lyssie, coming in sometimes, and finding the buzz of conversation drop at her innocent footsteps, and hearing it rise eagerly as she left the room, knew, with heartbroken helplessness, that all the dear old ladies were “ talking about Cecil.” “ Why do they want to talk about it ?" the child thought, being a child, and not knowing the vulture delight of scandal latent, one often thinks, in the kindest soul.

“ Frances, you had better tell us all about it,”commanded Mrs. Dale, looking at her hostess over her glasses. “ Alicia is out of the room, and of course we are interested to hear; though I must say I am mortified that such a thing should happen in Old Chester.”

There was a murmur of assent, and a sighing comment or two. “ It’s all so sad.” “ It is n’t just curiosity that makes us ask about it, — we are so attached to poor Philip.”

“ Curiosity ? Of course it’s curiosity ! ” said Mrs. Dale. “I am curious to know how these two misguided people defend themselves. Has James Lavendar reasoned with them, do you know, Frances ? ”

“ He went to see Cecil at once,” Mrs. Drayton began ; “ but she sent word she was ‘not at home,’ and she was sitting upstairs reading a novel the whole time! ”

“ I don’t think she meant to be untruthful,” Jane Dove protested, in her timid voice ; “ it is quite customary ” —

“Not in Old Chester!” interrupted Mrs. Dale ; “ and if Cecil did such a thing as that to me, I should feel it my duty to give her a piece of my mind. James Lavendar is culpably mild in such matters. Well, go on, Frances.”

Mrs. Drayton looked at the miniature of Mr. Drayton and pressed it to her lips ; then, with a start, seemed to remember that she was not alone. “ I am so saddened, you know, by all this, I quite forget where I am, sometimes. I can only think of my dear husband, and pray that it may come right in the end. Well, as I understand it, they’ve been very unhappy ever since Molly was born. Maybe Philip wanted a boy. I can’t think of anything else. Cecil is very extravagant; that may have had something to do with it. And she is very impolite, too ! ” Mrs. Drayton’s voice trembled and her thin face flushed, as she said that. “ I never knew any one so impolite as Cecil, though I ’m sure I tried to bring her up well! ”

“ Yes, but she did n’t come to you until she was seven,” Mrs. Pendleton murmured, “and the early years are the impressionable ones, I am told.”

Mrs. Drayton protested politely, but with a simper. “ Maria Drayton did her best, I’ve no doubt, but I fear Cecil was born with a bad temper. She has quarreled constantly with Philip. Oh dear, the idea of a husband and wife quarreling is so shocking to me! I ’m sure she never saw it in her own home.”

Only Susan Carr smiled at that, thinking of William Drayton’s intelligent absences ; everybody else was too interested,

“ I am sure,” continued Mrs. Drayton, growing shrill and wiping her eyes, “ if Cecil has talked to Philip as she has to me, I can excuse him ; but I believe that what has made the present trouble is that she wants to live abroad, and Philip doesn’t want to; which I think is so strange in Philip, for he could learn to be an artist again. But they had a dreadful quarrel about it, and then they decided to part. That’s the whole story. And I never knew anything so distressing ! I suppose Cecil gets her terrible temper from her mother; it does n’t come from her father or me.”

“ I don’t know how it could, unless by example,” Susan Carr thought; but was discreetly silent.

“ Well, it is perfectly incomprehensible,” said Mrs. Dale solemnly. “ A girl brought up in Old Chester! If Philip had any bad habits, I could understand that she might have the impulse to leave him,— but only the impulse.” A curiously uplifted look came into her stern face for a moment.

“ Poor Eben Dale ! ” the ladies of the Sewing Society thought; and there was a little embarrassed pause, and then Mrs. Wright said quickly, “ But what’s going to become of Molly ? Which one of them will have Molly ? ”

“Oh, Cecil, I suppose. Poor Molly ! ” Mrs. Drayton answered mournfully.

“ Well, I don’t see how Philip can make up his mind to part with her,”said Mrs. Wright indignantly, “especially if he thinks Cecil does n’t bring her up well. It looks to me as if he cared more for himself than for his child.”

Then Susan Carr broke through the silence which she had set upon her lips that whole afternoon : “Philip wants to divide Molly’s time between himself and Cecil. She won’t consent to that, and she ’s going to keep the child ; but Philip is to see her as often as he wants to.”

“ Well,” said Mrs. Pendleton mildly, “ Mrs. Dove and I were just saying, we wondered whether it would not be best that the real reason for this most regrettable affair should be known ? One fancies — anything ! Why, I have no doubt that there are people who would say — I quite hesitate to repeat such a thing,” and she glanced at Mrs. Dove — “ who would say, ‘ Who is the woman in the case ? ’ ”

“Why, Jane Temple!” cried Miss Carr angrily. “ Why, I would n’t have believed — you know Philip, and ” —

“ But I did n’t mean — I did n’t say” — protested poor Mrs. Dove. But the conversation swept past her before she could explain or deny.

Miss Susan, her face flushed and agitated, declared that, rather than have such things said, she would say what she knew of the matter. Philip and Cecil did not love each other any longer : that was the whole story. They had long ago parted in everything but word. “ It ’s nothing worse than just not loving each other.”

“Not love each other ? ”

“ You mean they quarrel? ”

“ I never heard anything so absurd ! ”

“ So wicked, I say ! ” old Mrs. Dale proclaimed.

“ Let them try to love each other,” Mrs. Wright said emphatically; “and dear me, what have they got to complain of? Philip is n’t a religions man, I ’m afraid, but he’s always very polite. And Cecil is the best housekeeper I know. Do you remember how she taught her cook to broil grouse, and then put that jelly and stuff all around it ? Cecil makes him very comfortable. Gracious ! I could keep my husband good natured from one year’s end to another, if I could have a table like Cecil’s ! ”

“ I fear Cecil is one of those persons to whom St. Paul refers in the third chapter of Philippians, who make a god of their belly,” said Mrs. Dale, in a deep voice, fixing her eyes upon Mrs. Wright, whose face immediately grew very red.

Susan Carr, listening, felt helplessly that all those things which Philip had said to her of honor and purity could not be repeated here. They would not be understood. “ When people don’t love each other,” she began, “ it does seem not — not nice for them to go on living together ” — But severe voices interrupted her.

“ Susan Carr, when you’ve lived as long as I have, you ’ll know that duty is a form of love,” Mrs. Dale rebuked her.

“Well, I think that a nice, feminine, ladylike person always does love her husband,” Mrs. Pendleton observed, with great gentility ; and added to Mrs. Drayton, in a low voice, that sometimes dear Susan Carr was almost indelicate.

Miss Susan sighed, and accepted the various reproofs meekly enough. No doubt the ladies were right, she said ; only sometimes, just for a moment, it did seem wrong to insist that two people who quarreled like — like cats and dogs should go on living together. But still, of course the ladies were right. And certainly Philip and Cecil were wrong. She had told Philip so.

“ Well, what is Philip going to live on ? — that ‘s what I’d like to know,” some one said ; and then the Sewing Society looked at Miss Susan.

“ I don’t know what he ’ll do. But he ’ll find something. I’m not afraid for Philip,” she answered proudly.

“ Well, I suppose Cecil will give him something for managing her money for her ? ” some one suggested. But Miss Susan shook her head.

“ Cecil is going to ask ” —she dropped her voice, and glanced toward the door — “ to ask Mr. Carey to do that. Oh dear, I do hope and pray the young man will advise them, and tell them both how wrong they are ; and perhaps he can reconcile them ! ”

“Oh, then very likely he ’ll come down to Old Chester to see Cecil about it! ” said the Sewing Society; and the possibility of a reconciliation between Alicia and her lover struck these kindly women at once, and for a little while the greater and more interesting subject dropped. But Lyssie, coming along the hall with some plates and napkins, stopped, trembling, at that mention of Roger’s return.

“ Though it’s nothing to me,” she thought, very pallid and breathless.

Tea, and Alicia, put an end to all interesting conversation. The ladies rolled up their work neatly, and chattered about the missionary’s wife, and looked with quick, sidelong glances at Lyssie, as she stepped, smiling, about, handing the cake, or the little tray that held the decanter and glasses.

“ She looks pale,” they said aside to one another, and dipped up their chocolate custard from tall glasses, and broke off crumbling bits from their slices of cake. Only Mrs. Dove showed the pity in her heart: she took Lyssie’s hand, as the girl passed her, and patted it without speaking. But tears came to the child’s eyes.

Susan Carr, as she went home, hoped nervously that she had not been indiscreet in what she had told the Sewing Society. “ I could not have those things said about Philip ! ” she thought, Her mind was full of Philip; and yet, that night, as she sat by the round centre table in her parlor, sometimes reading, but oftener thinking of this dreadful affair, her newspaper slipped once into her lap, and she looked absently over the top of her glasses, and smiled a little, and sighed.

“ I wonder if Joseph will try again?” Her face grew as conscious as a girl’s. “Of course I mustn’t let him; but if he does ” —

XXVIII.

In spite of Alicia’s assurance, Roger Carey’s return to Old Chester could not but be something to her. It meant the instant thought on waking, “ Will he be here to-day ? ” and the last ache of pain at night fading into a dream that he had come. It meant staying indoors lest he might have arrived, and she should have the pain of meeting him in the street; it meant long, aimless walks for the chance of seeing him, and the start at every tall figure in the distance. To be sure, she might have ended the uncertainty By asking Cecil when he was coming. But she could not ask any one. She could not speak his name.

Over and over, in her mind, she enacted possible meetings ; especially that scene so dear to youth, of her own deathbed, and a beautiful and satisfying reconciliation. If she should be going to die, — and it seemed to Lyssie that she should not live long, — why then she would tell them to send for Roger. And he would come, — oh yes, she was sure he would come when he should hear that she was going to die ; and he would he so unhappy, — her eyes always filled and her lip quivered at the thought of his repentance and grief, — but she would try to comfort him; she would tell him it was n’t his fault, — it was just fate !

Sometimes she thought that instead of summoning him to her deathbed she would leave a letter for him, “ explaining ” everything ; and she even went so far as to write, “ Dear Roger, I want you to know that I don’t blame you “ — But she stopped there, for the date of her letter must not be too far in advance of her demise, and no mortal disease had as yet declared itself.

She knew no better, poor child, than to read over and over the letters she had received from Roger Carey during their short engagement, and she suffered accordingly. For very exquisite pain, there is nothing which may be more highly commended than the reading of old love letters after love has died. It is like touching something dead, and the scent of corruption enters into the very soul. Alicia read, and remembered, and suffered. She went through those weary alternations of excusing and condemning herself ; those wearier moments of realizing that the whole difficulty lay in something far deeper than circumstances which might be either excused or condemned, — the radical and hopeless difficulty of a conscientious difference in the point of view.

Those were dark days for Lyssie Drayton ; but she made no public moan of sickness or of neglected work. In her simple way, she was glad of the silent friendship of pity, which she knew was all about her; and she cried a little sometimes at the disapproval which went hand in hand with pity, — for the disapproval of her elders was grief to Lyssie. She knew that Mrs. Pendleton thought her a jilt, and Dr. Lavendar was disappointed in her, and even kind Miss Susan was surprised and sorry. But she made no explanation or excuse for the broken engagement. Why give any one cause to blame her mother? Why give her mother the pain which comes to one who accepts the sacrifice, even the necessary sacrifice, of another’s life ?

Mrs. Drayton, after the first delight of hearing that she was to have her child forever,” had grown a little impatient with Lyssie’s quiet; later, a half-sullen indifference fell upon her, until that moment when she recognized that Alicia had deprived her of a grievance; then she was frankly cross.

Alicia for once did not try to understand her mother’s moods. It was hard for her to try to understand or to be interested in anything. Even her dismay and grief for her sister came with a sense of effort.

Cecil gave her no information beyond the fact that she and Philip, on thinking it over, had decided it was best to part.

Cecil was cruel to her little sister in those autumn days: she seemed uneasy in Alicia’s presence; she snubbed her violently; she said things about Mrs. Drayton that brought the angry color into the girl’s cheek. Perhaps that was why Lyssie never asked her when Roger was coming to Old Chester. And Cecil did not volunteer the information.

But she had referred Philip’s lawyer to Roger Carey, who would, she said, take charge of her affairs. “ Why not? ” she asked herself angrily. “He is free, and I am free — or I shall be ; and there’s no reason why he should n’t look after things for me.” Yet it was some days after this decision that she wrote to him ; and meantime Roger Carey’s first intimation of the temptation before him had come in legal form : —

DEAR SIR, — I have been consulted by Mr. Philip Shore in relation to certain family matters, and I am advised by Mrs. Shore, whom I have seen in this same connection, that you will represent her interests. Kindly let me know when it will be convenient for you to meet me.

Very truly yours,

GIFFORD WOODHOUSE.

Roger was sitting gloomily before a cluttered desk; his feet were supported by the yielding edge of his waste basket, a pipe warmed the hollow of his left hand, while with his right he was making aimless marks and dashes on his blotting paper. He had been thinking of Lyssie. He had thought much of Lyssie in these weeks that had passed since the engagement had been broken. He went over and over in his mind her unreasonableness, her foolishness, her unkindness. He did not think much of his own. He sucked away at his pipe, and looked at the red glow brightening and fading in the brierwood bowl, and assured himself that it was far better that the engagement was broken. “ Confound an unreasonable woman ! ” said Roger Carey ; he could stand anything but unreasonableness, he told himself angrily.

He had never been so much in love with Lyssie before ; but he did not know it. All he knew was, that he recognized, in a half-sneaking way, that he had not been very much in love with her when he proposed to her.

He nestled the hot howl of his pipe down into the palm of his hand, and set bis teeth, and said that unreasonableness was the only thing he had no patience with. And then he thought how much he should like to talk the matter over with Mrs. Shore. She was a reasonable woman. She would see how preposterous Lyssie’s conduct had been, and how fair was his demand. “ I offered to wait six months,” he justified himself. Mrs. Shore would appreciate all that; though sbe would not see the fear which had lurked behind his entreaties to Alicia. In that fear, he admitted, he had been unreasonable.

“ Yes, I ’d like to talk it over with her,”he thought, an absent look softening his eyes.

Now, Roger Carey was not that objectionable sort of man who, when he is in any difficulty, must needs run crying to some woman’s knee for sympathy; so, when he felt the impulse to tell Cecil his woes, he might well have mistrusted it. But Roger was not given to analyzing his impulses.

Sitting here in his office, in the darkening November afternoon, with love for Lyssie tugging at his heart, with his pulse quickening at the remembered look and touch of another woman, he put his hand out listlessly for a letter a messenger brought into his office.

When he had read it, he got up breathlessly and walked the length of the room; and came back, and stood by his desk, and read it again. “ Shore’s a fool! ” he said, and struck the letter across his hand sharply; his face was alert and vivid.

He stood there a moment, and then he flung his office door open. “ Here, you! Johnny! come and light the gas; why don’t you attend to your business ? ”

Yet when his boy came in, stumbling with haste, Roger Carey did no more than pull down the cover of his desk with a bang, and fling himself out of the door. He would go and take a walk, he said to himself.

In his mind two thoughts were struggling for control: an intellectual appreciation of Philip Shore’s purpose; and, beating the appreciation down, a rude and brutal wonder, a fierce joy, an exulting contempt. “ He’s a damned fool! ” he said again.

In aimless, irritated haste, he walked on, under a low and melancholy sky, far out into the country. His mind was in a tumult, but the situation, so far as the Shores were concerned, seemed perfectly patent to him. He had, of course, no idea of that last quarrel. He supposed that Mrs. Shore had refused to give up any part of Molly’s time, and the result was that Philip was going to bring the matter to a legal issue. “ But be has n’t any case : he has n’t a leg to stand on ! What’s Woodhouse thinking of to let him push it?” he thought, frowning. He was not surprised that Mrs. Shore wished him to represent her ; and he said to himself, with entire sincerity, that he had no doubt Philip wished it, also. “ It’s better that it should be a friend of Shore’s as well as hers,” he declared, and struck out with his stick at a dead mullein stalk standing by the roadside. His mind leaped ahead to all sorts of possibilities. When it was settled, where would she go ? What would she do ? Live abroad, probably, after the fashion of the déclassée American woman. “ She has a gorgeous sort of nature,” he reflected. How curious it would be to lose sight of her! In these few months she had impressed her individuality profoundly upon him, — "in a perfectly impersonal way,” he reminded himself.

“ This whole row is as unreal as the theatre, but it’s mighty interesting to the observer,” he thought. He overlooked the fact that one who observes the play from the flies, awaiting his own cue to rush upon the stage, feels a different interest from one who sits before the footlights.

He tramped home in the mud and darkness, still too absorbed to know that he was a great fool to have walked six miles in a rainy fog. Now, a man who does not, upon viewing his boots after such an excursion, call himself a fool is certainly not in the “impersonal ” stage.

The next day came Cecil Shore’s letter ; a brief and somewhat ill-tempered summons that he should come and advise her about the necessary steps in the divorce suit which she proposed to bring.

“ Divorce !” said Roger Carey contemptuously. ” She does n’t know what she’s talking about; she can’t get a divorce in any decent way ; and I would n’t let her, if she could.”

But so it came that he went down to Old Chester.

He went to receive instructions from his client; he went to advise her to the best of his ability : he went because the devil, masquerading as professional duty, beckoned him from the white page of the lawyer’s letter. And before he went he looked up the Dakota divorce laws.

And here was a strange thing: under all his anger which refused to recognize it, he loved Alicia Drayton. But this phase of his experience was as remote from that love as is the hunger with which an artist, falls upon his bread and cheese remote from his passion before his canvas. One does not contradict the other.

That journey to Old Chester was a crisis in Roger’s life. He went as far as Mercer in company with a friend, and had no time to think about himself, in their talk of the political situation and the recent election. Not that Roger cared the snap of his finger about the election. “ They might have elected the devil, if they ’d wanted to ; I should n’t have cared ! ” he swore softly under his breath, driven to the verge of madness by his companion’s earnestness. But conversation upon the high theme of the moral purpose in government served to shut out connected thought on other purposes not moral. And when, at last, he climbed up on the box seat of the coach at Mercer, it was with the profound relief of a man who can get his mental breath, who can think and reason and decide.

Yet, in spite of such an opportunity, Roger seemed to find nothing particular to think about: the off leader had an ugly way of throwing his head; the whiffletree was obviously cracked ; how strange it would seem to be in Old Chester merely on business! Then the driver got on the box and gathered up his reins, and there was the tug and pull, the sagging pitch forward, and a rush of memories to Roger Carey’s mind that hurt him like lashes. He wanted, with the mere impatience of pain, to forget them,— to forget that first journey across these rolling Pennsylvania hills, brown now, and swept by a bitter wind. He could not endure the remembrance of his arrival, six months ago, in Old Chester: the stately house, with its garden and orchards up on the hillside ; Philip opening the stage door; a young girl, with serious, pleasant eyes, standing, smiling, on the steps, leaf shadows from the great locusttrees moving across her face and hair. The difference between that journey and this was intolerable.

He made spasmodic efforts at conversation with the driver. He observed that Jonas ought to cure the leader of throwing his head back that way. “ I ’d put a martingale on him,” he said; and added that he thought the off mare was spavined.

“ She cast her shoe first, and went lame,” Jonas jolted out.

“ And she’s been lame ever since, I suppose ? ” Roger said absently, bending forward to watch the twist and give of the mare’s leg. He was reflecting upon the truth, which is inspiring or depressing as one looks at it, that, after passing through a great experience, a man cannot remain what he was ; he must either be better or worse. "Yes,” he was saying to himself doggedly, “ better or worse. Well, I’m worse ; and,” he added meanly, after the oldest fashion of his sex, “ it’s Lyssic’s fault! ”

It seemed as though always his thoughts came back to Lyssie. He was angry at her because it gave him such pain to think of her. Nor would he allow himself to think of Mrs. Shore save as the commonplace business reason for his taking this journey. He never once looked behind the professional need there was for him to come; he never uncovered the shame lurking under his well-turned phrases. “ I’m glad to be of any assistance, but it’s beastly to have to come to Old Chester. I wish she had sent for somebody else. Still, it would have been unfriendly to Philip as well as to her to have refused to come.”

Then he began to speculate upon the divorce laws of Dakota; but started, to see beneath the veil he stretched between his inner and outer self a glimpse of the real and shameful meaning of his thoughts. After that, for some time he talked resolutely to Jonas.

Yet as the stage turned from the road, and went down to ford the creek so that the horses might drink, Roger found this suggestion of divorce again leering up at him from under the flimsy pretense of being an impersonal comment: "She could bring suit for desertion.” He looked over the wheel at the shallow, racing little stream, and heard the pebbles grate against the tire. The horses, steaming a little, drank, and shook their necks in their heavy collars. There was the clash and rattle of buckles and trace-chains. Roger listlessly followed with his eyes the course of the brook which, from far up across the fields, came chattering down to the ford, whirling itself into foam around a big stone that broke its path before it slipped under the bridge and was off into the woods.

“Yes, she can go out to Dakota; it can easily be arranged.”

It came dully to his mind, — the instinct, perhaps, of the gentleman, an instinct which at such moments seems artificial, or at least acquired, — it came to his mind that such a proceeding was not for Cecil’s honor. But a fierce selfishness leaped up and choked this refinement of civilization, and left her in his thought merely the woman, himself merely the man.

Then again, angrily, he insisted that he was considering only the legal possibilities ; that it was nothing to him one way or the other.

When at last, in the early November dusk, the stage drew up at the tavern, he was fatigued in body and soul by this wrestling with a vague, elusive, nay, a denied temptation. If he had been willing to face it for what it was, if he had summoned the devil out from behind his phrases, he could have fought him like a man, and found a certain vigor in the conflict. But he waited, as, strangely enough, most of us wait, allowing the temptation to gain its full strength before meeting it with deliberate and desperate resistance.

Even as he walked up the hill to Cecil’s house, that night, he kept on lying to himself. He was only “ doing his duty ” in coming. Suppose he had had that moment of emotion in Mrs. Shore’s presence ? He must come when she summoned him. He “hadn’t any choice.” Indeed, so low had he fallen, in the swift descent of this one day, that he could say, “ I’ve lost Lyssie, but the least I can do is to be helpful to her sister in this unfortunate affair.”

There he touched his lowest level. No actual sin could compare with such degradation of the mind.

XXIX.

Afterwards, alone in his room in the tavern, while midnight whitened into dawn, the supreme words scorched themselves into Roger Carey’s mind ; it was as though a flaming finger wrote them upon his bare soul. They crashed and clamored in his ears ; he could hear nothing else because of them. He found himself repeating them over and over as he walked back and forth, back and forth, across the bare and meagre bedroom of the tavern.

Years afterwards, Roger could see every detail of that room, yet at the time he did not know that he was aware of anything in it. He was absorbed in seeing again Cecil’s Shore’s face, in feeling her hair against his lips, in listening in horror to those words his own lips spoke; but all the while he was following the pattern on the thin red and black carpet, Studying the landscape upon the green paper window-shades, counting his footsteps from the door to the fireplace, the last step ending on a sunken brick in the hearth. He looked at a bunch of pallid wax flowers under a glass shade on the mantelpiece ; he saw the blue wool mat under the lamp on the corner of the bureau; he examined two faded and yellowing photographs in black walnut frames hanging near the ceiling. He stood before one of these for a long time, staring up at the dull face and the big hands hanging limply between the knees, — staring at them, but seeing only a room half lighted by the glow of a fire and by the gleam of candles high on the walls; seeing a bowl of violets that spread a delicate perfume through the warm air; seeing the glitter of a silver dagger between the uncut pages of a book ; and seeing himself, leaning forward, holding a strong, beautiful hand between his own, pressing it to his lips, once, twice, fiercely; then, still holding it in a grip that made the rings cut into the white flesh, leaning nearer, nearer ; kneeling —

He began to pace the floor once more. Each time that he stepped upon a certain board the bureau shook, and then the lamp flared. Eight steps from the sunken brick to the door, sagging a little in its old frame ; eight steps back again. Had anybody ever lifted that brick ? he wondered. He stopped once and thrust a bit of wood under the casterless corner of the bureau, adjusting the clumsy piece of furniture with careful precision, and looking to see that it was straight.

“But I love you! Good God , I love you ! Do you hear me ? I love you ! ”

“ Yes.”

“ Do you care, you cruel woman,— is it anything to you!”

“ Yes.”

Then silence ; the small flicker of the fire on the hearth, the little pulling burst of flame ; but silence — silence.

“ May I kiss your face ? May I kiss your lips? ”

“ Kiss me.”

Then what ? He could not seem to remember. Had he pushed her aside ? Had he run for his soul?

Here he was, pacing up and down, up and down: eight steps from the door to the sunken brick ; eight steps back again. The latch of the door was brass, with the thumb-piece worn thin, and with little black specks in it; it clattered faintly under the jar of his steps; a screweye and a hook answered for a bolt: not much protection should the landlord of fiction wish to break in and murder the sleeping traveler, and then bury his plunder under the sunken brick. The fire on the hearth brightened suddenly, as a stick, smouldering under a film of white ashes, broke in two, and a shower of sparks flew up into the thick soot.

Yes, he had pushed her away from him, brutally, breathlessly.

“When you are free. When you are free. Not till then.”

That he should have said that, that he could have said it, that he had been able to repulse her, yielding, soft-breathed, glowing, filled him with astonishment that had in it something of awe. What had thrust his arm out, turned his head away, defended him from himself ? It was not his own will, not his own desire. No ; the habit of integrity had driven him into mechanical virtue ; had pushed him, raging against it, from her presence ; had dragged him here, at midnight, and set him pacing back and forth, up and down ; all his body summoning him to her side, all his decent past holding him in this room. Roger Carey, caught by the fetter of the habit of honor, was saying to himself that he had been a fool to leave her. What difference would it have made to have caught her in his arms for a mad instant, and kissed her face, her throat, her mouth, before the carrying out of the plan bound up in that single utterance, “ When you are free,” — a plan founded upon the convenient, soul-destroying variance of the divorce laws in the different States? What difference would it have made ? Truly none, in the soul and spirit of things. Nevertheless, the letter which killeth had for the moment saved him. He beat against it; he set his teeth in shame at his schoolboy scruples; but he still paced back and forth, up and down. He wondered how early the next morning he could go back to her, and put into tender words, words that might fit an honest love, the outrageous proposition that, when the sham righteousness of obeying the law should have invested her with a sham respectability, he and she should marry.

A mouse nibbled in the wall, but stopped at the creak of the loose board under his foot.

Put I love you ! Good God. I love you ! Do you hear me? I love you! ” “ Yes.”

“ Do you care , you cruel woman,— is it anything to you ?”

“ Yes.”

She had leaned her head against his arm ; the warm, white hollow of her throat was under his eyes, under his lips —

Yet here he was, counting his steps, studying the landscape on the green window-shades !

“ Fool! fool ! fool ! ” he said to himself. He thought he knew how this scruple looked to her ; the idea of her contemptuous amusement made him loathe himself; how she must have laughed when, after his theatrical protest, he had gone ! It made him hate her, — a hate which stamped his love for what it was. But Roger Carey did not stop to think of that.

All of a sudden, the room, with its tawdry furnishings, its faint light, seemed insupportable to him. He must get out of doors; he must move about; he must walk. He lifted the little clattering latch, and went stealthily down the narrow staircase. He felt the oppression of sleep all about him, and the brush against his face of the lifeless air, with its wandering scents of the closed house. In the office there was still a faint glow from the open door of the stove, and he could see upon the wells flaring notices of horse fairs and mowing machines ; a cat moved in the seat of one of the chairs that were standing about the square of zinc under the stove; she yawned, and sharpened her claws on the brittle splints, and watched him suspiciously as he opened the door and stepped out into the darkness. It was good to draw a full, cold breath, and let the silence of the strong world dull for a moment the clamor of those terrible words.

He walked aimlessly out into the road, and turned to go up the street, but stopped sharply. No, not that way, not that way ; not past — Lyssie’s house, He would go down the river road to the bridge. He heard his steps ringing on the frosty ground ; and then he felt a cool touch upon his cheek, and looked up to see that there were small, wandering flakes of snow in the air.

“ The winter is pretty tough in Dakota,” he thought; "she must get in the ninety days’ residence early in the autumn.” It was lucky that he was a lawyer ; he knew how to arrange things. No one need be consulted ; they could manage their own business; he knew just how to plan the easy iniquity of compliance with law. He smiled to himself at the bad humor of the situation, and he observed, with curious, impersonal interest, how, since he had spoken those words to his friend’s wife, his mind refused any longer to be hoodwinked by words; he was seeing straight and thinking clear; being a lawyer, he knew just how to cover Lust with the decent cloak of Law.

“ She’s got to prove a year’s desertion. Well, that’s easy enough. Fortunately, those three months in Dakota are included in the year. Still, at best it will be next November before ” —

It was very dark down on the bridge, but far uj) behind the hills there was the faint lightening of dawn.

Yes ; she should be divorced, and they would marry. He remembered that he had said that he did not believe in divorce; what a fool he had been! Why, without it crime must inevitably exist; for human nature was human nature. He even used, for the sake of illustration, that old, fallacious, pitiful argument that divorce must be permitted to prevent sin, even to put an end to sin if it has begun, — as though the legalization of an immoral relation made it moral! This young man, who had felt the stern passion for his profession that a priest may feel for his, was ready to urge that Law, majestic and relentless, the expression of the human creature’s best, should degrade herself by pandering to vice, by abetting crime, by making lust legal. The time had been when all this had been clear enough to his eyes; but how different it looked now! He said to himself that divorce was necessary to the moral life of the community. His old argument that the one must suffer for the many was forgotten — because he was the one.

He had not come to this opinion without a struggle ; he had held to his belief as a man holds to some last chance of life, only dropping it at the lick of flame across his hands. The fire of selfishness seared Roger Carey’s very soul; he flung over his belief, and fell. Yet he remembered that before those dreadful words were said he had told her what he thought of divorce ; had pleaded with her as a man may plead for his own life, — for he knew what her freedom would mean to him. Later, when this was of no avail, he had told her that if she insisted upon carrying out this deplorable plan, at least Molly should be spared.

“ You are no fit woman to bring up a child ; she ought to be with her father,” he said. Then, as it were, he made her prove the truth of his assertion by those answers to his mad words.

But instead of thinking again of those words he listened to the river, and suddenly, cringing at the memory, he heard others, spoken one summer night, with the splash of oars and the brush of lily pads against a little rocking skiff.

The river and the bridge grew intolerable. He went back into the village and up the street, his breath catching in an oath that was almost a sob. He could not bear such memories. He drove his mind back to that firelit, perfumed room ; he felt once more her panting breath upon his cheek ; he saw the mad surrender in her eyes. “ I must see her, I must see her!” he said frantically, as though answering some silent Forbidder in his soul. How many hours must pass before he could go back to her ? But he wished he could blot out the day, and find it night again; the thought of taking up that midnight scene, with the bald, cold daylight staring in her face and his, gave him a shock that turned him sick. “ But I will see her! ” he said, with the panic of the man who finds himself helpless in the grasp of an unsought repentance.

It was very still; the frozen furrows of the road were beginning to fill with feathery white; the cold, pale dawn spread itself behind the hills; there was hoar frost on the leafless twigs of the hedge that lay, in the darkness, like a band of furry black along the edge of Mrs. Drayton’s whitening lawn. Far off, from some distant farm, came a weak crow; and then a dog barked.

In that hour Satan desired to have him. And he desired Satan.

He did not know why he should have come to stand thus under Alicia Drayton’s window. How dark and cold the house looked ! She must be asleep now. Oh, if he could speak to her, if he could see her! It was not the desire of the lover; it was the human need of help.

“ Lyssie ! ” he called out sharply, and started, and stepped back into the shadows. “ What am I thinking of ! ” he said, and held his breath lest she might have heard him. There was no sound except the faint rustle of the flakes in the dead leaves of the oak above his head.

Scorched and blackened as he was by the fires of these last hours, he knew she would not shrink from him ; she would not shrink from any soul in trouble. She might not understand, — that made no difference ; she would take care of him.

He stood there a long time.

When he went away, he did not know whether he loved Alicia or not; he did not think of that. He only knew that he would not see that other woman again.

Margaret Deland.