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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Frances Waldeaux, by Rebecca Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Frances Waldeaux
+
+Author: Rebecca Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2008 [EBook #335]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANCES WALDEAUX ***
+
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+FRANCES WALDEAUX
+
+A Novel
+
+
+BY
+
+REBECCA HARDING DAVIS
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "DOCTOR WARRICK'S DAUGHTER"
+
+
+
+
+  A REMEMBRANCER
+  OF
+  BRITTANY
+  FOR THE BEST FELLOW-TRAVELLER
+  IN THE WORLD
+
+
+
+FRANCES WALDEAUX
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+In another minute the Kaiser Wilhelm would push off from her pier in
+Hoboken.  The last bell had rung, the last uniformed officer and
+white-jacketed steward had scurried up the gangway.  The pier was
+massed with people who had come to bid their friends good-by.  They
+were all Germans, and there had been unlimited embracing and kissing
+and sobs of "Ach! mein lieber Sckatz!" and "Gott bewahre Dick!"
+
+Now they stood looking up to the crowded decks, shouting out last fond
+words.  A band playing "The Merry Maiden and the Tar" marched on board.
+
+The passengers pressed against the rails, looking down.  Almost every
+one held flowers which had been brought to them: not costly bouquets,
+but homely bunches of marigolds or pinks.  They carried, too, little
+German or American flags, which they waved frantically.
+
+The gangways fell, and the huge ship parted from the dock.  It was but
+an inch, but the whole ocean yawned in it between those who went and
+those who stayed.  There was a sudden silence; a thousand handkerchiefs
+fluttered white on the pier and the flags and flowers were waved on the
+ship, but there was not a cry nor a sound.
+
+James Perry, one of the dozen Americans on board, was leaning over the
+rail watching it all with an amused smile.  "Hello, Watts!" he called,
+as another young man joined him.  "Going over?  Quite dramatic, isn't
+it?  It might be a German ship going out of a German port.  The other
+liners set off in as commonplace a way as a Jersey City ferryboat, but
+these North German Lloyd ships always sail with a certain ceremony and
+solemnity.  I like it."
+
+"I always cross on them," said Dr. Watts.  "I have but a month's
+vacation--two weeks on board ship, two on land.  Now you, I suppose,
+don't have to count your days?  You cross every year.  I can't see, for
+my part, what business the assistant editor of a magazine has abroad."
+
+"Oh, we make a specialty of articles from notorieties over there;
+statesmen, scientific fellows, or people with titles.  I expect to
+capture a paper from Lorne and some sketches by the Princess Beatrice
+this time."
+
+"Lorne?  It throws you into contact with that sort of folk, eh?" said
+the doctor, looking at him enviously.  "How do they strike you, Jem?"
+
+"Well," said Perry importantly, "well-bred people are the same the
+world over.  I only see them in a business way, of course, but one can
+judge.  Their voices are better than ours, but as to looks--no!  It's
+queer, but American women--the wives and daughters of saddlers or
+farmers, perhaps--have more often the patrician look than English
+duchesses.  Now there, for example," warming to the subject, "that
+woman to whom you bowed just now, the middle-aged one in blue cloth.
+Some Mrs. Smith or Pratt, probably.  A homely woman, but there is a
+distinction in her face, a certain surety of good breeding, which is
+lacking in the heavy-jawed English royalties."
+
+"Yes; that is a friend of mine," said Watts.
+
+"She is a Mrs. Waldeaux from Wier, in Delaware.  You could hardly call
+her a typical American woman.  Old French emigre family.  Probably
+better blood than the Coburgs a few generations back.  That priggish
+young fellow is her son.  Going to be an Episcopalian minister."
+
+Mr. Perry surveyed his friend's friends good-humoredly.  "Brand new
+rugs and cushions," he said.  "First voyage.  Heavens!  I wish it were
+my first voyage, and that I had their appetite for Europe."
+
+"You might as well ask for your relish of the bread and butter of your
+youth," said Watts.
+
+The two men leaned lazily against the bulwark watching the other
+passengers who were squabbling about trunks.
+
+Mr. Perry suddenly stood upright as a group of women passed.
+
+"Do you know who that girl is?" he said eagerly.  "The one who looked
+back at us over her shoulder."
+
+"No.  They are only a lot of school-girls, personally conducted.  That
+is the teacher in front." "Of course, I see that.  But the short, dark
+one--surely I know that woman."
+
+The doctor looked after her.  "She looks like a dog turning into a
+human being," he said leisurely.  "One often sees such cases of
+arrested evolution.  D'ye see?  Thick lips, coarse curls, flat
+nostrils----"
+
+Perry laughed.  "The eyes, anyhow, are quite human," he said.  "They
+challenge the whole world of men.  I can't place her!" staring after
+her, perplexed.  "I really don't believe I ever saw her before.  Yet
+her face brings up some old story of a tragedy or crime to me."
+
+"Nonsense!  The girl is not twenty.  Very fetching with all her
+vulgarity, though.  Steward, send some coffee to my stateroom.  Let's
+go down, Jem.  The fog is too chilly."
+
+Frances Waldeaux did not find the fog chilly.  She had been thinking
+for thirty years of the day when she should start to Europe--ever since
+she could think at all.
+
+This was the day.  It was like no other, now that it had come.  The
+fog, the crowd, the greasy smells of the pier, all familiar enough
+yesterday, took on a certain remoteness and mystery.  It seemed to her
+that she was doing something which nobody had ever done before.  She
+was going to discover the Old World.
+
+The New was not more tremendous or unreal before the eyes of Columbus
+when he, too, stood on the poop of his ship.
+
+Her son was arguing with the deck steward about chairs.
+
+"Now, mother," he said at last, "it's all right.  They are under cover
+so that the glare will not strain your eyes, and we can keep dry while
+we watch the storms."
+
+"How did you know about it all?  One would think you had crossed a
+dozen times, George."
+
+"Oh, I've studied the whole thing up thoroughly," George said, with a
+satisfied little nod.  "I've had time enough!  Why, when I was in
+petticoats you used to tell me you would buy a ship and we would sail
+away together.  You used to spoil all my school maps with red lines,
+drawing our routes."
+
+"Yes.  And now we're going!" said Frances to herself.
+
+He sat down beside her and they watched the unending procession of
+passengers marching around the deck.  George called her attention by a
+wink to any picturesque or queer figure that passed.  He liked to watch
+her quiet brown eyes gleam with fun.  Nobody had such a keen sense of
+the ridiculous as his mother.  Sometimes, at the mere remembrance of
+some absurd idea, she would go off into soft silent paroxysms of
+laughter until the tears would stream down her cheeks.
+
+George was fond and proud of his childish little mother.  He had never
+known any body, he thought, so young or so transparent.  It was easily
+understood.  She had married at sixteen, and had been left a widow
+little more than a year afterward.  "And I," he used to think, "was
+born with an old head on my shoulders; so we have grown up together.  I
+suppose the dear soul never had a thought in her life which she has not
+told me."
+
+As they sat together a steward brought Mrs. Waldeaux a note, which she
+read, blushing and smiling.
+
+"The captain invites us to sit at his table," she said, when the man
+was gone.
+
+"Very proper in the captain," said George complacently.  "You see,
+Madam Waldeaux, even the men who go down in ships have heard of you and
+your family!"
+
+"I don't believe the captain ever heard of me," she said, after a grave
+consideration, "nor of the Waldeaux.  It is much more likely that he
+has read your article in the Quarterly, George."
+
+"Nonsense!"  But he stiffened himself up consciously.
+
+He had sent a paper on some abstruse point of sociology to the
+Quarterly last spring, and it had aroused quite a little buzz of
+criticism.  His mother had regarded it very much as the Duchess of Kent
+did the crown when it was set upon her little girl's head.  She always
+had known that her child was born to reign, but it was satisfactory to
+see this visible sign of it.
+
+She whispered now, eagerly leaning over to him.  "There was something
+about that paper which I never told you.  I think I'll tell you now
+that the great day has come."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Why, you know--I never think of you as my son, or a man, or anything
+outside of me--not at all.  You are just ME, doing the things I should
+have done if I had not been a woman.  Well,"--she drew her breath
+quickly,--"when I was a girl it seemed as if there was something in me
+that I must say, so I tried to write poems.  No, I never told you
+before.  It had counted for so much to me I could not talk of it.  I
+always sent them to the paper anonymously, signed 'Sidney.'  Oh, it was
+long--long ago!  I've been dumb, as you might say, for years.  But when
+I read your article, George--do you know if I had written it I should
+have used just the phrases you did?  And you signed it 'Sidney'!"  She
+watched him breathlessly.  "That was more than a coincidence, don't you
+think? I AM dumb, but you speak for me now.  It is because we are just
+one.  Don't you think so, George?" She held his arm tightly.
+
+Young Waldeaux burst into a loud laugh.  Then he took her hand in his,
+stroking it.  "You dear little woman!  What do you know of sociology?"
+he said, and then walked away to hide his amusement, muttering "Poems?
+Great Heavens!"
+
+Frances looked after him steadily.  "Oh, well!" she said to herself
+presently.
+
+She forced her mind back to the Quarterly article.  It was a beginning
+of just the kind of triumph that she always had expected for him.  He
+would soon be recognized by scientific men all over the world as their
+confrere, especially after his year's study at Oxford.
+
+When George was in his cradle she had planned that he should be a
+clergyman, just as she had planned that he should be a well-bred man,
+and she had fitted him for both roles in life, and urged him into them
+by the same unceasing soft pats and pushes.  She would be delighted
+when she saw him in white robes serving at the altar.
+
+Not that Frances had ever taken her religion quite seriously.  It was
+like her gowns, or her education, a matter of course; a trustworthy,
+agreeable part of her.  She had never once in her life shuddered at a
+glimpse of any vice in herself, or cried to God in agony, even to grant
+her a wish.
+
+But she knew that Robert Waldeaux's son would be safer in the pulpit.
+He could take rank with scholars there, too.
+
+She inspected him now anxiously, trying to see him with the eyes of
+these Oxford magnates.  Nobody would guess that he was only twenty-two.
+The bald spot on his crown and the spectacles gave him a scholastic
+air, and the finely cut features and a cold aloofness in his manner
+spoke plainly, she thought, of his good descent and high pursuits.
+
+Frances herself had a drop of vagabond blood which found comrades for
+her among every class and color.  But there was not an atom of the
+tramp in her son's well-built and fashionably clothed body.  He never
+had had a single intimate friend even when he was a boy.  "He will
+probably find his companions among the great English scholars," she
+thought complacently.  Of course she would always be his only comrade,
+his chum.  She continually met and parted with thousands of
+people--they came and went.  "But George and I will be together for all
+time," she told herself.
+
+He came up presently and sat down beside her, with an anxious,
+apologetic air.  It hurt him to think that he had laughed at her.
+"That dark haze is the Jersey shore," he said.  "How dim it grows!
+Well, we are really out now in the big world!  It is so good to be
+alone there with you," he added, touching her arm affectionately.
+"Those cynical old-men-boys at Harvard bored me."
+
+"I don't bore you, then, George?"
+
+"You!"  He was very anxious to make her forget his roughness.  "Apart
+from my affection for you, mother," he said judicially, "I LIKE you.  I
+approve of you as I never probably shall approve of another woman.
+Your peculiarities--the way your brown hair ripples back into that knot
+"--surveying her critically.  "And the way you always look as if you
+had just come out of a bath, even on a grimy train; and your gowns, so
+simple--and rich.  I confess," he said gravely, "I can't always follow
+your unsteady little ideas when you talk.  They frisk about so.  It is
+the difference probably between the man's mind and the woman's.
+Besides, we have been separated for so many years!  But I soon will
+understand you.  I know that while you keep yourself apart from all the
+world you open your heart to me."
+
+"Wrap the rug about my feet, George," she said hastily, and then sent
+him away upon an errand, looking after him uneasily.
+
+It was very pleasant to hear her boy thus formally sum up his opinion
+of her.  But when he found that it was based upon a lie?
+
+For Frances, candid enough to the world, had deceived her son ever
+since he was born.
+
+George had always believed that she had inherited a fortune from his
+father.  It gave solidity and comfort to his life to think of her in
+the stately old mansion on the shores of Delaware Bay, with nothing to
+do except to be beautiful and gracious, as befitted a well-born woman.
+It pleased him, in a lofty, generous way, that his father (whom she had
+taught him to reverence as the most chivalric of gentlemen) had left
+him wholly dependent upon her.  It was a legal fiction, of course.  He
+was the heir--the crown prince.  He had always been liberally supplied
+with money at school and at Harvard.  Her income was large.  No doubt
+the dear soul mismanaged the estates fearfully, but now he would have
+leisure to take care of them.
+
+Now, the fact was that Colonel Waldeaux had been a drunken spendthrift
+who had left nothing.  The house and farm always had belonged to his
+wife.  She had supported George by her own work all of his life.  She
+could not save money, but she had the rarer faculty of making it.  She
+had raised fine fruit and flowers for the Philadelphia market; she had
+traded in high breeds of poultry and cattle, and had invested her
+earnings shrewdly.  With these successes she had been able to provide
+George with money to spend freely at college.  She lived scantily at
+home, never expecting any luxury or great pleasure to come into her own
+life.
+
+But two years ago a queer thing had happened to her.  In an idle hour
+she wrote a comical squib and sent it to a New York paper.  As
+everybody knows, fun, even vulgar fun, sells high in the market.  Her
+fun was not vulgar, but coarse and biting enough to tickle the ears of
+the common reader.  The editor offered her a salary equal to her whole
+income for a weekly column of such fooling.
+
+She had hoarded every penny of this money.  With it she meant to pay
+her expenses in Europe and to support George in his year at Oxford.
+The work and the salary were to go on while she was gone.
+
+It was easy enough to hide all of these things from her son while he
+was in Cambridge and she in Delaware.  But now?  What if he should find
+out that his mother was the "Quigg" of the New York ----, a paper which
+he declared to be unfit for a gentleman to read?
+
+She was looking out to sea and thinking of this when her cousin, Miss
+Vance, came up to her.  Miss Vance was a fashionable teacher in New
+York, who was going to spend a year abroad with two wealthy pupils.
+She was a thin woman, quietly dressed; white hair and black brows, with
+gold eye-glasses bridging an aquiline nose, gave her a commanding,
+inquisitorial air.
+
+"Well, Frances!" she began briskly, "I have not had time before to
+attend to you.  Are your bags hung in your stateroom?"
+
+"I haven't been down yet," said Mrs. Waldeaux meekly.  "We were
+watching the fog in the sun."
+
+"Fog!  Mercy on me!  You know you may be ill any minute, and your room
+not ready!  Of course, you did not take the bromides that I sent you a
+week ago?
+
+"No, Clara."
+
+Miss Vance glanced at her.  "Well, just as you please.  I've done what
+I could.  Let me look at your itinerary.  You will be too ill for me to
+advise you about it later."
+
+"Oh, we made none!" said George gayly, coming up to his mother's aid.
+"We are going to be vagabonds, and have no plans.  Mother's soul draws
+us to York Cathedral, and mine to the National Gallery.  That is all we
+know."
+
+"I thought you had given up that whim of being an artist?" said Miss
+Vance, sharply facing on him.
+
+Young Waldeaux reddened.  "Yes, I have given it up.  I know as well as
+you do that I have no talent.  I am going to study my profession at
+Oxford, and earn my bread by it."
+
+"Quite right.  You never would earn it by art," she said decisively.
+"How long do you stay in York, Frances?"
+
+"Oh, a day, or a month--or--years, as we please," said Frances, lazily
+turning her head away.  She wanted to set Clara Vance down in her
+proper place.  Mrs. Waldeaux abhorred cousinly intimates--people who
+run into your back door to pry into the state of your larder or your
+income.  But Miss Vance, as Frances knew, unfortunately held a key to
+her back door.  She knew of George's wretched daubs, and his insane
+desire, when he was a boy, to study art.  He gave it up years ago.  Why
+should she nag him now about it?  By virtue of her relationship she
+knew, too, all of Mrs. Waldeaux's secrets.  It was most unfortunate
+that she should have chosen to sail on this vessel.
+
+"Well, mother," George said, uneasy to get away, "no doubt Miss Vance
+is right.  We should set things in order.  I am going now to give my
+letter of credit to the purser to lock up; shall I take yours?"
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux did not reply at once.  "No," she said at last.  "I like
+to carry my own purse."
+
+He smiled indulgently as on a child.  "Of course, dear.  It IS your
+own.  My father was wise in that.  But, on this journey, I can act as
+your paymaster, can't I?  I have studied foreign money----"
+
+"We shall see.  I can keep it as safe as any purser now," she said,
+obstinately shaking her head.
+
+He laughed and walked away.
+
+"You have not told him, then?" demanded Clara.
+
+"No.  And I never will.  I will not hurt the boy by letting him know
+that his mother has supported him, and remember, Clara, that he can
+only hear it through you.  Nobody knows that I am 'Quigg' but you."
+
+Miss Vance lifted her eyebrows.  "Nothing can need a lie," she quoted
+calmly.  Presently she said earnestly, "Frances, you are making a
+mistake.  Somebody ought to tell you the truth.  There is no reason why
+your whole being should be buried in that man.  He should stand on his
+own feet, now.  You can be all that he needs as a mother, and yet live
+out your own life.  It is broader than his will ever be.  At your age,
+and with your capabilities, you should marry again.  Think of the many
+long years that are before you."
+
+"I have thought of them," said Mrs. Waldeaux slowly.  "I have had
+lovers who came close to me as friends, but I never for a moment was
+tempted to marry one of them.  No, Clara.  When the devil drove my
+father to hand me over--innocent child as I was--to a man like Robert
+Waldeaux, he killed in me the capacity for that kind of love.  It is
+not in me."  She turned her strenuous face to the sea and was silent.
+"It is not in me," she repeated after a while.  "I have but one
+feeling, and that is for my boy.  It is growing on me absurdly, too."
+She laughed nervously.  "I used to be conscious of other people in the
+world, but now, if I see a boy or man, I see only what George was or
+will be at his age; if I read a book, it only suggests what George will
+say of it.  I am like one of those plants that have lost their own sap
+and color, and suck in their life from another.  It scares me
+sometimes."
+
+Miss Vance smiled with polite contempt.  No doubt Frances had a shrewd
+business faculty, but in other matters she was not ten years old.
+
+"And George will marry some time," she said curtly.
+
+"Oh, I hope so!  And soon.  Then I shall have a daughter.  I know just
+the kind of a wife George will choose," she chattered on eagerly.  "I
+understand him so thoroughly that I can understand her.  But where
+could he find her?  He is so absurdly fastidious!"
+
+Miss Vance was silent and thoughtful a moment.  Then she came closer.
+"I will tell you where to find her," she said, in a low voice.  "I have
+thought of it for a long time.  It seems to me that Providence actually
+made Lucy Dunbar for George."
+
+"Really?"  Mrs. Waldeaux drew her self up stiffly.
+
+"Wait, Frances.  Lucy has been with me for three years.  I know her.
+She is a sincere, modest, happy little thing.  Not too clever.  She is
+an heiress, too.  And her family is good; and all underground, which is
+another advantage.  You can mould her as you choose.  She loves you
+already."
+
+"Or is it that she----?"
+
+"You have no right to ask that!" said Miss Vance quickly.
+
+"No, I am ashamed of myself."  Mrs. Waldeaux reddened.
+
+A group of girls came up the deck.  Both women scanned the foremost one
+critically.  "I like that wholesome, candid look of her," said Miss
+Vance.
+
+"Oh, she is well enough," said Frances.  "But I am sure George does not
+like yellow hair.  Nothing but an absolutely beautiful woman will
+attract him."
+
+"An artist," said Miss Vance hastily, "would tell you her features were
+perfect.  And her flesh tints----"
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Clara, don't dissect the child.  Who is that girl
+with the red cravat?  Your maid?"
+
+"It is not a cravat, it's an Indian scarf.  If it only were clean----"
+Miss Vance looked uneasy and perplexed.  "She is not my maid.  She is
+Fraulein Arpent.  The Ewalts brought her as governess from Paris, don't
+you remember?  They sent the girls to Bryn Mawr last week and turned
+her adrift, almost penniless.  She wished to go back to France.  I
+engaged her as assistant chaperone for the season."
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux's eyebrows went up significantly.  She never commented in
+words on the affairs of others, but her face always was indiscreet.
+George, who had come up in time to hear the last words, was not so
+scrupulous.  He surveyed the young woman through his spectacles as she
+passed again, with cold disapproval.
+
+"French or German?" he asked.
+
+"I really don't know.  She has a singular facility in tongues," said
+Miss Vance.
+
+"Well, that is not the companion _I_ should have chosen for those
+innocent little girls," he said authoritatively, glad to be
+disagreeable to his cousin.  "She looks like a hawk among doves."
+
+"The woman is harmless enough," said Miss Vance tartly.  "She speaks
+exquisite French."
+
+"But what does she say in it?" persisted George.  "She is vulgar from
+her red pompon to her boots.  She has the swagger of a soubrette and
+she has left a trail of perfume behind her--pah!  I confess I am
+surprised at you, Miss Vance.  You do not often slip in your judgment."
+
+"Don't make yourself unpleasant, George," said his mother gently.  Miss
+Vance smiled icily, and as the girls came near again, stopped them and
+stood talking to Mlle.  Arpent with an aggressive show of familiarity.
+
+"Why do you worry Clara?" said Mrs. Waldeaux.  "She knows she has made
+a mistake.  What do you think of that little blonde girl?" she asked
+presently, watching him anxiously.  "She has remarkable beauty,
+certainly; but there is something finical--precise----"
+
+"Take care.  She will hear you," said George.  "Beauty, eh?  Oh, I
+don't know," indifferently.  "She is passably pretty.  I have never
+seen a woman yet whose beauty satisfied ME."
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux leaned back with a comfortable little laugh.  "But you
+must not be so hard to please, my son.  You must bring me my daughter
+soon," she said.
+
+"Not very soon.  I have some thing else to think of than marriage for
+the next ten years."
+
+Just then Dr. Watts came up and asked leave to present his friend
+Perry.  The doctor, like all young men who knew Mrs. Waldeaux, had
+succumbed to her peculiar charm, which was only that of a woman past
+her youth who had strong personal magnetism and not a spark of
+coquetry.  George's friends all were sure that they would fall in love
+with a woman just like her--but not a man of them ever thought of
+falling in love with her.
+
+Young Perry, in twenty minutes, decided that she was the most brilliant
+and agreeable of companions.  He had talked, and she had spoken only
+with her listening, sympathetic eyes.  He was always apt to be voluble.
+On this occasion he was too voluble.  "You are from Weir, I think, in
+Delaware, Mrs. Waldeaux?" he asked.  "I must have seen the name of the
+town with yours on the list of passengers, for the story of a woman who
+once lived there has been haunting me all day.  I have not seen nor
+thought of her for years, and I could not account for my sudden
+remembrance of her."
+
+"Who was she?" asked George, trying to save his mother from Perry, who
+threatened to be a bore.
+
+"Her name was Pauline Felix.  You have heard her story, Mrs. Waldeaux?"
+
+"Yes" said Frances coldly.  "I have heard her story.  Can you find my
+shawl, George?"
+
+But Perry was conscious of no rebuff, and turned cheerfully to George.
+"It was one of those dramas of real life, too unlikely to put into a
+novel.  She was the daughter of a poor clergyman in Weir, a devout,
+good man, I believe.  She had marvellous beauty and a devilish
+disposition.  She ran away, lived a wild life in Paris, and became the
+mistress of a Russian Grand Duke.  Her death----"
+
+He could not have told why he stopped.  Mrs. Waldeaux still watched
+him, attentive, but the sympathetic smile had frozen into icy civility.
+She had the old-fashioned modesty of her generation.  What right had
+this young man to speak of "mistresses" to her?  Clara's girls within
+hearing too!  She rose when he paused, bowed, and hurried to them, like
+a hen fluttering to protect her chicks.
+
+"He was talking to me of a woman," she said excitedly to Clara, "who is
+never mentioned by decent people."
+
+"Yes, I heard him," said Miss Vance.  "Poor Pauline!  Her career was
+always a mystery to me. I was at school with her, and she was the most
+generous, lovable girl!  Yet she came to a wretched end," turning to
+her flock, her tone growing didactic. "One is never safe, you see.  One
+must always be on guard."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" cried Frances impatiently.  "You surely don't mean to
+class these girls and me with Pauline Felix!  Come, come!"
+
+"None of us is safe," repeated Clara stiffly.  "Somebody says there is
+a possible vice in the purest soul, and it may lie perdu there until
+old age.  But it will break out some day."
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux looked, laughing, at the eager, blushing faces around
+her.  "It is not likely to break out in us, girls, eh!  Really, Clara,"
+she said, in a lower tone, "that seems to me like wasted morality.
+Women of our class are in no more danger of temptation to commit great
+crimes than they are of finding tigers in their drawing-rooms.  Pauline
+Felix was born vicious.  No woman could fall as she did, who was not
+rotten to the core."
+
+A sudden shrill laugh burst from the French woman, who had been looking
+at Mrs. Waldeaux with insolent, bold eyes.  But as she laughed, her
+head fell forward and she swung from side to side.
+
+"It is nothing," she cried, "I am only a little faint.  I must go
+below."
+
+The ship was now crossing short, choppy waves.  The passengers
+scattered rapidly.  George took his mother to her stateroom, and there
+she stayed until land was sighted on the Irish coast.  Clara and her
+companions also were forced to keep to their berths.
+
+During the speechless misery of the first days Mrs. Waldeaux was
+conscious that George was hanging over her, tender as a mother with a
+baby.  She commanded him to stay on deck, for each day she saw that he,
+too, grew more haggard.  "Let me fight it out alone," she would beg of
+him.  "My worst trouble is that I cannot take care of you."
+
+He obeyed her at last, and would come down but once during the day, and
+then for only a few hurried minutes.  His mother was alarmed at the
+ghastliness of his face and the expression of anxious wretchedness new
+to it.  "His eye avoids mine craftily, like that of an insane man," she
+told herself, and when the doctor came, she asked him whether
+sea-sickness affected the brain.
+
+On the last day of the voyage the breeze was from land, and with the
+first breath of it Frances found her vigor suddenly return.  She rose
+and dressed herself.  George had not been near her that day.  "He must
+be very ill," she thought, and hurried out.  "Is Mr. Waldeaux in his
+stateroom?" she asked the steward.
+
+"No, madam.  He is on deck.  All the passengers are on deck," the man
+added, smiling.  "Land is in sight."
+
+Land!  And George had not come to tell her!  He must be desperately ill!
+
+She groped up the steps, holding by the brass rail.  "I will give him a
+fine surprise!" she said to herself.  "I can take care of him, now.
+To-night we shall be on shore and this misery all over.  And then the
+great joy will begin!"
+
+She came out on deck.  The sunshine and cold pure wind met her.  She
+looked along the crowded deck for her invalid.  Every-body was in
+holiday clothes, every-body was smiling and talking at once.  Ah! there
+he was!
+
+He was leaning over Frances' steamer chair, on which a woman lay
+indolently.  He was in rude health, laughing, his face flushed, his
+eyes sparkling.
+
+Looking up, he saw his mother and came hastily to meet her.  The laugh
+was gone.  "So you came up?" he said impatiently.  "I would have called
+you in time.  I----  Mother!"  He caught her by the arm.  "Wait, I must
+see you alone for a minute."  Urged by the amazed fright in her face,
+he went on desperately, "I have something to tell you.  I intended to
+break it to you.  I don't want to hurt you, God knows.  But I have not
+been idle in these days.  I have found your daughter.  She is here."
+
+He led her up to the chair.  The girl's head was wrapped in a veil and
+turned from her.
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux held out her hands.  "Lucy!  Lucy Dunbar!" she heard
+herself say.
+
+"Mais non!  Cest moi!" said a shrill voice, and Mlle.  Arpent, turning
+her head lazily, looked at her, smiling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Clara Vance had her faults, but nobody could deny that, in this crisis,
+she acted with feeling and tact.  She ignored mademoiselle and her
+lover, whose bliss was in evidence on deck all day, and took possession
+of Mrs. Waldeaux, caring for her as tenderly as if she had been some
+poor wretch sentenced to death.  "She has no intellect left except her
+ideas about George," she told herself, "and if he turns his back on her
+for life in this way----  She never was too sane!" shaking her head
+ominously.
+
+She thought it best to talk frankly of the matter to little Lucy
+Dunbar, and was relieved to find her ready to joke and laugh at it.
+"No bruise in that tender heart!" thought Clara, who was anxious as a
+mother for her girls.
+
+"We all worshipped Mr. George," said Lucy saucily.  "I, most of all.
+He is so cold, so exalted and ah--h, so good-looking!  Like a Greek
+god.  But he never gave a look to poor little me!  The fraulein came on
+deck as soon as we all went down with sea-sickness, and bewitched him
+with her eyes.  It must have been her eyes; they are yellow--witch's
+eyes.  Or maybe that cheap smell about her is a love-philter!  Or was
+it just soul calling to soul?  I should have said the fraulein had the
+soul of a milliner.  She put great ideas into the hat that she altered
+for me," Lucy added, with an unsteady laugh.
+
+"I care nothing for them or their souls," said Miss Vance crossly.  "It
+is his mother that I think of."
+
+"But really," said Lucy, "mademoiselle is quite raw material.  No
+ideas--no manners whatever.  Mrs. Waldeaux may mould her into something
+good and fine."
+
+"She will not try.  She will never accept that creature as a daughter."
+
+"She seems to me to be indifferent," said Lucy.  "She does not see how
+terrible it is.  She was leaning over the bulwark just now, laughing at
+the queer gossoons selling their shillalahs."
+
+"Oh, she will laugh at Death himself when he comes to fetch her, and
+see something 'queer'in him," said Clara.
+
+But her little confidence with Lucy had relieved her.  The child cared
+nothing for George, that was plain.
+
+Mademoiselle, watching Mrs. Waldeaux closely all day, was not deceived
+by her laugh.  "The old lady, your mother," she said to George, "is
+what you men call 'game.'  She has blood and breeding.  More than you,
+monsieur.  That keeps her up.  I did not count on that," said the young
+woman thoughtfully.
+
+George took off his glasses and rubbed them nervously as he talked.  "I
+don't understand my mother at all!  She has always been very
+considerate and kind.  I never thought that she would receive my wife,
+when I brought her to her, with calm civility.  Not a kiss nor a
+blessing!"
+
+"A kiss?  A blessing for me?"  Lisa laughed and nodded meaningly to the
+sea and world at large.  "She could hardly have blessed a woman lolling
+full length in her chair," she thought.  "It IS her chair.  And I have
+unseated her for life curling herself up in the rugs."
+
+Yet she had a twinge of pity for the old lady.  Even the wild boar has
+its affections and moments of gentleness.  A week ago Lisa could have
+trampled the life out of this woman who had slandered her dead mother,
+with the fury of any wild beast.  For she was Pauline Felix's daughter.
+It was her mother's name that Mrs. Waldeaux had said could not be
+spoken by any decent woman.  Lisa had been but a child, but she had
+held her mother's head close to her stout little heart as she lay
+dying--that awful mysterious death of which the young man had tried to
+make a telling story.  The girl crossed herself now and closed her
+tired eyes as she thought of it.  She had been a wicked child and a
+wicked woman, but she knew certainly that the Virgin and her Son had
+come near to her that day, and had helped her.
+
+George, who was poring fondly on her face, exclaimed: "Your eyes are
+wet.  You are in trouble!"
+
+"I was thinking of my mother," she said gently, holding out her hand to
+him.
+
+He took it and said presently, "Will you not talk to me about her,
+Lisa?  You have not told me any thing of your people, my darling.  Nor
+of yourself.  Why, I don't even know whether you are French or German."
+
+"Oh, you shall hear the whole story when we are married," she replied
+softly, a wicked glitter in her eyes.  "Some of the noblest blood in
+Europe is in my veins.  I will give you my genealogical tree to hang up
+in that old homestead of yours.  It will interest the people of
+Weir--and please your mother."
+
+"It is good in you to think of her," he said, tenderly looking down at
+her.
+
+He was not blind.  He saw the muddy skin, the thick lips, the soiled,
+ragged lace.  They would have disgusted him in another woman.
+
+But this was--Lisa.  There was no more to be said.
+
+These outside trifles would fall off when she came into his life.  Even
+with them she was the breath and soul of it.
+
+She saw the difference between them more sharply than he did.  She had
+been cast for a low part in the play, and knew it.  Sometimes she had
+earned the food which kept her alive in ways of which this untempted
+young priest had never even heard.  There was something in this clean
+past of his, in his cold patrician face and luxurious habits new to
+her, and she had a greedy relish for it all.
+
+She had been loved before, caressed as men caress a dog, kicking it off
+when it becomes troublesome.  George's boyish shyness, his reverent awe
+of her, startled her.
+
+"He thinks Lisa Arpent a jeune fille--like these others.  A little
+white rose!" she thought, and laughed.  She would not tell him why she
+laughed, and muttered an oath when he stupidly insisted on knowing.
+
+He was the first lover who had ever believed in her.
+
+She had begun this affair simply to punish the "old woman"; the man in
+it had counted for nothing.  But now, as they crossed the gangway, she
+looked up at him with eyes that for the moment were honest and true as
+a child's, and her firm hand suddenly trembled in his.
+
+
+Three weeks later Mrs. Waldeaux came into Miss Vance's little parlor on
+Half Moon Street.  Her face was red from the wind, her eyes sparkled,
+and she hummed some gay air which an organ ground outside.  Clara laid
+down her pen.
+
+"Where have you been, Frances?  It is a week since I saw you."
+
+"Oh, everywhere!  George has been showing me London!" She sat down
+before the fire with a gurgle of comfort and dropped her bonnet and
+gloves on the floor beside her.  "Yesterday we spent at the Museum.
+George explained the Elgin marbles to me.  I don't suppose any body in
+London has studied their history so thoroughly.  I did wish you could
+have heard him.  And the day before I was at the House--in the ladies'
+gallery.  I can't imagine how he got admission for me.  He IS so
+clever!"
+
+"We are going down to Canterbury for a couple of days," said Clara.
+"We start at noon.  Will you go with us?"
+
+"No, I think not.  George does not seem to care for cathedrals.  And he
+has plans for me, no doubt."
+
+Miss Vance brushed the bonnet and carefully rolled up the strings.
+"Are you satisfied?  Is London the London you have been thinking of
+these twenty years?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, a thousand times more!  And George has been with me every
+day--every day!"
+
+Miss Vance picked up the gloves, looking impatiently at the poor lady's
+happy face.  "Now she has gone off into one of her silly transports of
+delight, and for no earthly reason!"
+
+"I noticed that George has seen very little of Lisa lately," she said
+tentatively.  "If he really means to marry her----"
+
+"Marry her!  Clara!  You surely never feared THAT?"
+
+"He certainly told us plainly enough that he would do it," said Miss
+Vance testily.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand him!  You have had so little to do with young
+men.  They are all liable to attacks like that--as to measles and
+scarlet fever.  But they pass off.  Now, George is not as susceptible
+as most of them.  But," lowering her voice, "he was madly in love with
+the butcher's Kate when he was ten, and five years afterward offered to
+marry the widow Potts.  I thought he had outgrown the disease.  There
+has been nothing of the kind since, until this fancy.  It is passing
+off.  Of course it is mortifying enough to think that such a poor
+creature as that could attract him for an hour."
+
+"I was to blame," Miss Vance said, with an effort.  "I brought her in
+his way.  But how was I to know that she was such a cat, and he
+such----  If he should marry her----"
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux laughed angrily.  "You are too absurd, Clara.  A
+flirtation with such a woman was degrading enough, but George is not
+quite mad.  He has not even spoken of her for days.  Oh, here he comes!
+That is his step on the stairs."  She ran to the door.  "He found that
+I was out and has followed me.  He is the most ridiculous mother's boy!
+Well, George, here I am!  Have you thought of some thing new for me to
+see?"  She glanced at Miss Vance, well pleased that she should see the
+lad's foolish fondness for her.
+
+George forced a smile.  He looked worn and jaded.  Miss Vance noticed
+that his usually neat cravat was awry and his hands were gloveless.
+"Yes," he said.  "It is a little church.  The oldest in London.  I want
+to show it to you."
+
+Miss Vance tied on Mrs. Waldeaux's bonnet, smoothing her hair
+affectionately.  "There are too many gray hairs here for your age,
+Frances," she said.  "George, you should keep your mother from worry
+and work.  Don't let her hair grow gray so soon."
+
+George bowed.  "I hope I shall do my duty," he said, with dignity.
+"Come, mother."
+
+As they drove down Piccadilly Mrs. Waldeaux chattered eagerly to her
+son.  She could not pour out her teeming fancies about this new world
+to any body else, but she could not talk fast enough to him.  Had they
+not both been waiting for a lifetime to see this London?
+
+"The thing," she said earnestly, as she settled herself beside him,
+"the thing that has impressed me most, I think, were those great
+Ninevite gods yesterday.  I sat for hours before them while you were
+gone.  There they sit, their hands on their knees, and stare out of
+their awful silence at the London fog, just as they stared at the
+desert before Christ was born.  I felt so miserably young and sham!"
+
+George adjusted his cravat impatiently.  "I'm afraid I don't quite
+follow you, mother.  These little flights of yours----  They belong to
+your generation, I suppose.  It was a more sentimental one than mine.
+You are not very young.  And you certainly are not a sham.  The statues
+are interesting, but I fail to see why they should have had such an
+effect upon you."
+
+"Oh!" said Frances.  "But you did not stay alone with them as long as I
+did, or you would have felt it too.  Now I am sure that the debates in
+Parliament impressed you just as they did me?"
+
+George said nothing, but she went on eagerly.  It never occurred to her
+that he could be bored by her impressions in these greatest days of her
+life.  "To see a half-dozen well-groomed young men settle the affairs
+of India and Australia in a short, indifferent colloquy!  How shy and
+awkward they were, too!  They actually stuttered out their sentences in
+their fear of posing or seeming pretentious.  So English!  Don't you
+think it was very English, George?"
+
+"I really did not think about it at all.  I have had very different
+things to occupy me," said George, coldly superior to all mothers and
+Parliaments.  "This is the church."
+
+The cab stopped before an iron door between two shops in the most
+thronged part of Bishopsgate Street.  He pushed it open, and they
+passed suddenly out of the hurrying crowd into the solemn silence of an
+ancient dingy building.  A dim light fell through a noble window of the
+thirteenth century upon cheap wooden pews.  The church was empty, and
+had that curious significance and half-spoken message of its own which
+belongs to a vacant house.
+
+"I remember," whispered Frances, awestruck.  "This was built by the
+first Christian convert, St. Ethelburga."
+
+"You believe every thing, mother!" said George irritably.  She wandered
+about, looking at the sombre walls and inscriptions, and then back
+uneasily, to his moody face.
+
+Suddenly she came up to him as he stood leaning against a pillar.
+"Something has happened!" she said.  "You did not bring me here to look
+at the church.  You have something to tell me."
+
+The young man looked at her and turned away.  "Yes, I have.  It isn't a
+death," he said, with a nervous laugh.  "You need not look in that way.
+It is--something very different.  I--I was married in this church
+yesterday to Lisa Arpent."
+
+Frances did not at first comprehend the great disaster that bulked
+black across her whole life, but, woman-like, grasped at a fragment of
+it.
+
+"You were married and I was not there!  Yesterday!  My boy was married
+and he forgot me!"
+
+"Mother!  Don't look like that!  Here, sit down," grabbing her
+helplessly by the arms.  "I didn't want to hurt you.  I brought you
+here to tell you quietly.  Cry!  Why don't you cry if you're worried!
+Oh! I believe she's dying!" he shouted, staring around the empty church.
+
+She spoke at last.
+
+"You were married and I couldn't say God bless you!  You forgot me!  I
+never forgot you, George, for one minute since you were born."
+
+"Mother, what fool talk is that?  I only didn't want a scene.  I kept
+away from Lisa for weeks so as not to vex you.  Forget you!  I think I
+have been very considerate of you under the circumstances.  You have a
+dislike to Lisa, a most groundless dislike----"
+
+"Oh, what is Lisa?" said Frances haughtily.  "It is that you have
+turned away from me.  She has nothing to do with the relation between
+you and me.  How can any woman come between me and my son?"  She held
+up her hands.  "Why, you are my boy, Georgy.  You are all I have!"
+
+He looked at the face, curiously pinched and drawn as if by death, that
+was turned up to his, and shrugged his shoulders impatiently.  "Now
+this is exactly what I tried to escape yesterday.  Am I never to be a
+man, nor have the rights of a man?  You must accept the situation,
+mother.  Lisa is my wife, and dearer to me than all the world beside."
+
+He saw her lips move.  "Dearer?  Dearer than me!" She sat quite still
+after that, and did not seem to hear when he spoke.  Something in her
+silence frightened him.  She certainly had been a fond, indulgent
+mother, and he perhaps had been abrupt in cutting the tie between them.
+It must be cut.  He had promised Lisa the whole matter should be
+settled to-day.  But his mother certainly was a weak woman, and he must
+be patient with her.  Secretly he approved the manliness of his
+patience.
+
+"The cab is waiting, dear," he said.  She rose and walked to the
+street, standing helpless there while the crowd jostled her.  Was she
+blind and deaf?  He put her into the cab and sat down opposite to her.
+"Half Moon Street," he called to the driver.
+
+"Mother," touching her on the knee.
+
+"Yes, George."
+
+"I told him to drive to Half Moon Street.  I will take you to Clara
+Vance.  We may as well arrange things now, finally.  You do not like my
+wife.  That is clear.  For the present, therefore, it is better that we
+should separate.  I have consulted with Lisa, and she has suggested
+that you shall join Clara Vance's party while we go our own way."
+
+She stared at him.  "Do you mean that you and I are not to see London
+together?  Not to travel through Europe together?"
+
+He pitied her a little, and, leaning forward, kissed her clammy lips.
+"The thing will seem clearer to you to-morrow, no doubt.  I must leave
+you now.  Go to Clara and her girls.  They all like to pet and make
+much of you.  I will bring Lisa in the morning, to talk business a
+little.  She has an uncommonly clear head for business.  Good-by,
+dear!"  He stopped the cab, jumped out, and walked briskly to the
+corner where his wife was waiting for him.
+
+"You have told her?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+"Yes.  It's over."
+
+"That we must separate?"
+
+"Yes, yes.  I told her you thought it best."
+
+"And she was not willing?"
+
+"Well, she did not approve very cordially," said George, evading her
+eye.
+
+"But she shall approve!" hanging upon his arm, her burning eyes close
+to his face.  "You are mine, George!  I love you.  I will share you
+with nobody!" She whistled shrilly, and a hansom stopped.
+
+"What are you going to do, darling?"
+
+"Follow her.  I will tell her something that will make her willing to
+separate.  Get in, get in!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Frances, when in trouble, went out of doors among the trees as
+naturally as other women take to their beds.  Lisa's sharp eyes saw her
+sitting in the Green Park as they passed.  The mist, which was heavy as
+rain, hung in drops on the stretches of sward and filled the far aisles
+of trees with a soft gray vapor.  The park was deserted but for an old
+man who asked Mrs. Waldeaux for the penny's hire for her chair.  As he
+hobbled away, he looked back at her curiously.
+
+"She gave him a shilling!" exclaimed Lisa, as he passed them.  "I told
+you she was not fit to take care of money."
+
+"But why not wait until to-morrow to talk of business?  She is hurt and
+unnerved just now, and she--she does not like you, Lisa."
+
+"I am not afraid.  She will be civil.  She is like Chesterfield. 'Even
+death cannot kill the courtesy in her.'  You don't seem to know the
+woman, George.  Come."
+
+But George hung back and loitered among the trees.  He was an honest
+fellow, though slow of wit; he loved his mother and was penetrated to
+the quick just now by a passionate fondness for his wife.  Two such
+good, clever women!  Why couldn't they hit it off together?
+
+"George?" said Frances, hearing his steps.
+
+Lisa came up to her.  She rose, and smiled to her son's wife, and after
+a moment held out her hand.
+
+But the courtesy which Lisa had expected suddenly enraged her.  "No!
+There need be no pretence between us," she said.  "You are not glad to
+see me.  There is no pretence in me. I am honest.  I did not come here
+to make compliments, but to talk business."
+
+"George said to-morrow.  Can it not wait until to-morrow?"
+
+"No.  What is to do--do it!  That is my motto.  George, come here!
+Tell your mother what we have decided.  Oh, very well, if you prefer
+that I should speak.  We go to Paris at once, Mrs. Waldeaux, and will
+take apartments there.  You will remain with Miss Vance."
+
+"Yes, I know.  I am to remain----"  Frances passed her hand once or
+twice over her mouth irresolutely.  "But Oxford, George?" she said.
+"You forget your examinations?"
+
+George took off his spectacles and wiped them.
+
+"Speak!  Have you no mind of your own?" his wife whispered.  "I will
+tell you, then, madam.  He has done with that silly whim!  A priest,
+indeed!  I am Catholic, and priests do not marry.  He goes to Paris to
+study art.  I see a great future for him, in art."
+
+Frances stared at him, and then sat down, dully.  What did it matter?
+Paris or Oxford?  She would not be there.  What did it matter?
+
+Lisa waited a moment for some comment, and then began sharply, "Now, we
+come to affaires!  Listen, if you please.  I am a woman of business.
+Plain speaking is always best, to my idea."
+
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux drew herself together and turned her eyes on her with
+sudden apprehension, as she would on a snapping dog.  The woman's tones
+threatened attack.
+
+"To live in Paris, to work effectively, your son must have money.  I
+brought him no dot, alas!  Except"--with a burlesque courtesy--"my
+beauty and my blood.  I must know how much money we shall have before I
+design the menage."
+
+"George has his income," said his mother hastily.
+
+"Ah!  You are alarmed, madam!  You do not like plain words about the
+affaires?  George tells me that although he is long ago of age, he has
+as yet received no portion of his father's estates."
+
+"Lisa!  You do not understand!  Mother, I did not complain.  You have
+always given me my share of the income from the property.  I have no
+doubt it was a fair share--as much as if my father had left me my
+portion, according to custom."
+
+"Yes, it was a fair share," said Frances.
+
+"Ah! you smile, madam!" interrupted Lisa.  "I am told it is a vast
+property, a grand chateau--many securities!  M.  Waldeaux pere made a
+will, on dit, incredibly foolish, with no mention of his son.  But now
+that this son comes to marry, to become the head of the house, if you
+were a French mother, if you were just, you would----  You appear to be
+amused, madam?"
+
+For Mrs. Waldeaux was laughing.  She could not speak for a moment.  The
+tears stood in her eyes.
+
+"The matter has somewhat of droll to you?"
+
+"It has its humorous side," said Frances.  "I quite understand, George,
+that you will need more money to support a wife.  I will double your
+allowance.  It shall be paid quarterly."
+
+"You would prefer to do that?" hesitated George.  "Rather than to make
+over a son's share of the property to me absolutely?  Some of the
+landed estate or securities?  I have probably a shrewder business
+talent than yours, and if I had control could make my property more
+profitable."
+
+"I should prefer to pay your income as before--yes," said Frances
+quietly.
+
+"Well, as you choose.  It is yours to give, of course." George coughed
+and shuffled to conquer his disappointment.  Then he said, "Have it
+your own way." He put his hand affectionately on her shoulder.  "And
+when you have had your little outing and go home to Weir, you will be
+glad to have us come to you, for a visit--won't you, mother?  You
+haven't said so."
+
+"Why should I say so?  It is your home, George, yours and your wife's."
+She caught his hand and held it to her lips.
+
+But Lisa had not so easily conquered her disappointment.  This woman
+was coolly robbing George of his rights and was going instead to kill
+for him a miserable little fatted calf!  Bah!  This woman, who had
+maligned her dead mother!
+
+She should have her punishment now.  In one blow, straight from the
+shoulder.
+
+"But you should know, madam," she said gently, "who it is your son has
+married before you take her home.  I assure you that you can present me
+to the society in Weir with pride.  I have royal blood----" "Lisa!"
+George caught her arm.  "It is not necessary.  You forget----"
+
+"Oh, I forget nothing!  I said royal blood.  My father, madam, was the
+brother of the Czar, and my mother was Pauline Felix.  You don't seem
+to understand----" after a moment's pause.  "It was my mother whose
+name you said should not cross any decent woman's lips--my mother----"
+She broke down into wild sobs.
+
+"When I said it I did not know that you----  I am sorry." Frances
+suddenly walked away, pulling open her collar.  It seemed to her that
+there was no breath in the world.  George followed her.  "Did you know
+this?" she said at last, in a hoarse whisper.  "And you are--married to
+her?  There is no way of being rid of her?"
+
+"No, there is no way," said Waldeaux stoutly.  "And if there were, I
+should not look for it.  I am sorry that there is any smirch on Lisa's
+birth.  But even her mother, I fancy, was not altogether a bad lot.
+Bygones must be bygones.  I love my wife, mother.  She's worth loving,
+as you'd find if you would take the trouble to know her.  Her dead
+mother shall not come between her and me."
+
+"She's like her, George!" said Mrs. Waldeaux, with white, trembling
+lips.  "I ought to have seen it at first.  Those luring, terrible eyes.
+It is Pauline Felix's heart that is in her.  Rotten to the
+core--rotten----"
+
+"I don't care.  I'll stand by her."  But George's face, too, began to
+lose its color.  He shook himself uncomfortably.  "The thing's done
+now," he muttered.
+
+"Certainly, certainly," Frances repeated mechanically.  "Tell her that
+I am sorry I spoke of her mother before her.  It was rude--brutal.  I
+ask her pardon."
+
+"Oh, she'll soon forget that!  Lisa has a warm heart, if you take her
+right.  There's lots of hearty fun in her too.  You'll like that.  Are
+you going now?  Good-by, dear.  We will come and see you in the
+morning.  The thing will not seem half so bad when you have slept on
+it."
+
+He paused uncertainly, as she still stood motionless.  She was facing
+the grim walls of Stafford House, looming dimly through the mist, her
+eyes fixed as if she were studying the sky line.
+
+"George," she said. "You don't understand.  You will come to me always.
+But that woman never shall cross my threshold." "Mother!  Do you mean
+what you say?"
+
+It was a man, not a shuffling boy that spoke now.  "Do you mean that we
+are not to go to you to-morrow?  Not to go home in October?  Never----"
+
+"Your home is open to you.  But Pauline Felix's child is no more to me
+than a wild beast--or a snake in the grass, and never can be."  She
+faced him steadily now.
+
+"There she is," said Frances, looking at the little black figure under
+the trees, "and here am I.  You can choose between us."
+
+"Those whom God hath joined together," muttered George.  "You know
+that."
+
+"You have known her for three weeks," cried Frances vehemently.  "I
+gave you life.  I have been your slave every hour since you were born.
+I have lived but for you.  Which of us has God joined together?"
+
+"Mother, you're damnably unreasonable!  It is the course of nature for
+a man to leave his parents and cleave to his wife."
+
+"Yes, I know," she said slowly.  "You can keep that foul thing in your
+life, but it never shall come into mine."
+
+"Then neither will I.  I will stand by my wife."
+
+"That is the end, then?"
+
+She waited, her eyes on his.
+
+He did not speak.
+
+She turned and left him, disappearing slowly in the rain and mist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Two days later Mr. Perry met Miss Vance in Canterbury and told her of
+the marriage.  She hurried back to London.  She could not hide her
+distress and dismay from the two girls.
+
+"How did she force him into it?  One is almost driven to believe in
+hypnotism," she cried.
+
+Lucy Dunbar had no joke to make about it to-day.  The merry little girl
+was silent, having, she said, a headache.
+
+"You've had too much cathedral!" said Miss Hassard.  "And the whole
+church is wretchedly out of drawing!"
+
+Jean Hassard had studied art at Pond City in Dakota, and her soul's
+hope had been to follow Marie Bashkirtseff's career in Paris.  But her
+father had morally handcuffed her and put her into Clara's custody for
+a year.  It was hard!  To be led about to old churches, respectable as
+her grandmother, when she might have been studying the nude in a mixed
+class!  She rattled her chains disagreeably at every step.
+
+"The mesalliance is on the other side," she told Lucy privately.  "A
+woman of the world who knew life, to marry that bloodless, finical
+priest!"
+
+"He was not bloodless.  He loved her."
+
+Mr. Perry came up with them from Canterbury, being secretly alarmed
+about Miss Dunbar's headache.  Nobody took proper care of that lovely
+child!  He had attached himself to Miss Vance's party in England; he
+dropped in every evening to tell of his interviews with Gladstone or
+Mrs. Oliphant or an artist or a duke.  It was delightful to the girls
+to come so close to these unknown great folks.  They felt quite like
+peris, just outside the court of heaven, with the gate a little bit
+ajar.  This evening Mr. Perry promised it should open for them.  He was
+going to bring a real prince, whom he familiarly dubbed "a jolly
+fellow," to call upon Miss Vance.
+
+"Who is the man?" said Clara irritably.  "Be careful, Mr. Perry.  I
+have had enough of foreign adventurers."
+
+"Oh, the Hof Kalender will post you as to Prince Wolfburgh.  I looked
+him up in it.  He is head of one of the great mediatized families.
+Would have been reigning now if old Kaiser Wilhelm had not played
+Aaron's serpent and gobbled up all the little kings.  Wolfburgh has
+kept all his land and castles, however."
+
+"Very well.  Let us see what the man is like," Miss Vance said loftily.
+
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux was not in the house when they arrived.  Every day she
+went early in the morning to the Green Park, where she had seen George
+last, and wandered about until night fell.  She thought that he had
+gone to Paris, and that she was alone in London.  But somehow she came
+nearer to him there.
+
+When she found that Clara had arrived, she knew that she would be full
+of pity for her.  She came down to dinner in full dress, told some
+funny stories, and laughed incessantly.
+
+No.  She had not missed them.  The days had gone merry as a marriage
+bell with her even after her son and his wife had run away to Paris.
+
+Mr. Perry congratulated her warmly on the match.  "The lady is very
+fetching, indeed," he said.  "I remarked that the first day on
+ship-board.  Oh, yes, I know a diamond when I see it.  But your son
+picks it up.  Lucky fellow!  He picks it up!"  He told Miss Vance that
+there was a curious attraction about her friend, "who, by the way,
+should always wear brown velvet and lace."
+
+Miss Vance drew little Lucy aside after dinner.  "Do you see," she
+said, "the tears in her eyes?  It wrenches my heart.  She has become an
+old woman in a day.  I feel as if Frances were dead, and that was her
+ghost joking and laughing."
+
+Lucy said nothing, but she went to Frances and sat beside her all
+evening.  When the prince arrived and was presented, going on his
+triumphant way through the room, she nestled closer, whispering, "What
+do you think of him?"
+
+"He looks very like our little fat Dutch baker in Weir--he has the same
+air of patronage," said Frances coldly.  She was offended that Lucy
+should notice the man at all.  Was it not she whom George should have
+married?  How happy they would have been--her boy and this sweet, neat
+little girl!  And already Lucy was curious about so-called princes!
+
+When his Highness came back to them she rose hastily and went to her
+own room.
+
+Late that night Miss Vance found her there in the dark, sitting bolt
+upright in her chair, still robed in velvet and lace.  Clara regarded
+her sternly, feeling that it was time to take her in hand.
+
+"You have not forgiven George?" she said abruptly.
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux looked up, but said nothing.
+
+"Is he coming back soon?"
+
+"He never shall come back while that woman is with him."
+
+Miss Vance put her lamp on the table and sat down.  "Frances," she said
+deliberately, "I know what this is to you.  It would have been better
+for you that George had died."
+
+"Much better."
+
+"But he didn't die.  He married Lisa Arpent.  Now it is your duty to
+accept it.  Make the best of it."
+
+"If a lizard crawls into my house will you tell me to accept it?  Make
+the best of it?  Oh, my God!  The slimy vile creature!"
+
+"She is not vile!  I tell you there are lovable qualities in Lisa.  And
+even if she were as wicked as her mother, what right have you----  You,
+too, are a sinner before God."
+
+"No," said Mrs. Waldeaux gravely, "I am not.  I have lived a good
+Christian life.  I may have been tempted to commit sin, but I cannot
+remember that I ever did it."
+
+Miss Vance looked at her aghast.  "But surely your religion teaches
+you----  Why, you are sinning now, when you hate this girl!"
+
+"I do not hate her.  God made her as he made the lizard.  I simply will
+not allow her to cross my path.  What has religion to do with it?  I am
+clean and she is vile.  That is all there is to say."
+
+Both women were silent.  Mrs. Waldeaux got up at last and caught Clara
+by the arm.  She was trembling violently.  "No, I'm not ill.  I'm well
+enough.  But you don't understand!  That woman has killed George.  I
+spent twenty years in making him what he is.  I worked--there was
+nothing but him for me in the world.  I didn't spare myself.  To make
+him a gentleman--a Christian.  And in a month she turns him into a
+thing like herself.  He is following her vulgar courses.  I saw the
+difference after he had lived with her for one day.  He is tainted."
+She stood staring into the dull lamp.  "She may not live long, though,"
+she said.  "She doesn't look strong----"
+
+"Frances!  For God's sake!"
+
+"Well, what of it?  Why shouldn't I wish her gone?  The harm--the harm!
+Do you remember that Swedish maid I had--a great fair woman?  One day
+she was stung by a green fly, and in a week she was dead, her whole
+body a mass of corruption!  Oh, God lets such things be done!  Nothing
+but a green fly----"  She shook off Clara's hold, drawing her breath
+with difficulty.  "That is Lisa.  It is George that is being poisoned,
+body and soul.  It's a pity to see my boy killed by a thing like
+that--it's a pity----"
+
+Miss Vance was too frightened to argue with her.  She brought her
+wrapper, loosened her hair, soothing her in little womanish ways.  But
+her burning curiosity drove her presently to ask one question.
+
+"How can they live?"
+
+"I have doubled his allowance."
+
+"Frances!  You will work harder to make money for Lisa Arpent?"
+
+"Oh, what is money!" cried Frances, pushing her away impatiently.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Miss Vance persuaded Mrs. Waldeaux to go with her to Scotland.  During
+the weeks that followed Frances always found Lucy Dunbar at her side in
+the trains or on the coaches.
+
+"She is a very companionable child," she told Clara.  "I often forget
+that I am any older than she.  She never tires of hearing stories of
+George's scrapes or his queer sayings when he was a child.  Such
+stories, I think, are usually tedious, but George was a peculiar boy."
+
+Mr. Perry's search for notorieties took him also to Scotland, and,
+oddly enough, Prince Wolfburgh's search for amusement led him in the
+same direction.  They met him and his cousin, Captain Odo Wolfburgh, at
+Oban, and again on the ramparts of Stirling Castle, and the very day
+that they arrived in Edinburgh, there, in Holyrood, in Queen Mary's
+chamber, stood the pursy little man, curling his mustache before her
+mirror.
+
+Mr. Perry fell into the background with Miss Hassard.  "His Highness is
+becoming monotonous!" he grumbled.  "These foreigners never know when
+they are superfluous in society."
+
+"Is he superfluous?" Jean glanced to the corner where the prince and
+Lucy were eagerly searching for the blood of Rizzio upon the steps.
+
+"Decidedly," said Perry.  "I wished to show you and Miss Dunbar a live
+prince, and I did it.  That is done and over with.  He has been seen
+and heard.  There is no reason why he should pop up here and there all
+over Great Britain like a Jack-in-the-box.  He's becoming a bore."
+
+"You suspect him to be an impostor?" said Jean quickly.
+
+"No. He's genuine enough.  But we don't want any foreigners in our
+caravan," stroking his red beard complacently.
+
+"No.  What do you suppose is his object?" asked Jean, with one of her
+quick, furtive glances.
+
+Mr. Perry's jaws grew red as his beard.  "How can I tell?" he said
+gruffly.  He went on irritably, a moment later:  "Of course you see it.
+The fellow has no delicacy.  He makes no more secret of his plans than
+if he were going to run down a rabbit.  Last night at Stirling, over
+his beer, he held forth upon the dimples on Miss Dunbar's pink elbows,
+and asked me if her hair were all her own.  I said, at last, that
+American men did not value women like sheep by their flesh and fleece
+and the money they were rated at in the market.  I hit him square that
+time, prince or no prince!"
+
+"Yes, you did, indeed," said Jean vaguely.  Her keen eyes followed Lucy
+and the prince, who were loitering through the gallery, pausing before
+the faded portraits.  "You think it is only her money that draws him
+after us?"
+
+"Why, of course!  A fellow like that could not appreciate Miss Dunbar's
+beauty and wit."
+
+"You think Lucy witty?" said Jean dryly.  "And you think she would not
+marry for a title?"
+
+
+"I don't believe any pure American girl would sell herself, like a
+sheep in the shambles!  And she is pure!  A lamb, a lily! cried Perry,
+growing incoherent in his heat.
+
+"She would not if her heart were preoccupied," said Jean thoughtfully.
+
+"And you think----" he said breathlessly.
+
+But Jean only laughed, and said no more.
+
+The guide had been paying profound deference to Prince Wolfburgh,
+keeping close to his heels.  Now he swung open a door.  "If your
+Highnesses will come this way?" he said, bowing profoundly to Lucy.
+
+The little girl started and hurried back to Miss Vance.  Her face was
+scarlet, and she laughed nervously.  Prince Wolfburgh also laughed,
+loudly and meaningly.  He swore at the old man and went out into the
+cloister where his cousin stood smoking.
+
+"Had enough of the old barracks?" said the captain.
+
+"I found I was making too fast running in there," said the prince
+uneasily; "I'll waken up and find that girl married to me some day."
+
+"Not so bad a dream," puffed his cousin.
+
+"I'll take a train somewhere," said the prince.  "But no matter where I
+go, I'll find an American old woman with a girl to marry.  They all
+carry the Hof Kalender in their pockets, and know every bachelor in
+Germany."
+
+The captain watched him attentively.  "I don't believe those women
+inside mean to drive any marriage bargain with you, Hugo," he said
+gruffly.  "I doubt whether the little mees would marry you if you asked
+her.  Her dot, I hear, is e-normous!" waving his hand upward as if to
+mountain heights.  "And as for beauty, she is a wild rose!"
+
+Now, there were reasons why the captain should rejoice when Hugo allied
+himself to the little mees.  On the day when he would take these hills
+of gold and wild rose to himself, the captain would become the head of
+the house of Wolfburgh.  It was, perhaps, a mean, ungilded throne, but
+by German law no nameless Yankee woman could sit upon it.
+
+The prince looked at Captain Odo.  "You cannot put me into a gallop
+when I choose to walk," he said.  "She's a pretty girl, and a good
+girl, and some time I may marry her, but not now."
+
+Odo laughed good-humoredly, and they sauntered down the path together.
+
+The prince had offered to dine with Miss Vance that evening, but sent a
+note to say that he was summoned to the Highlands unexpectedly.
+
+"It is adieu, not auf wiedersehen, I fear, with his Highness," Miss
+Vance said, folding the note pensively.  She had not meant to drive a
+marriage bargain, and yet--to have placed a pupil upon even such a
+bric-a-brac throne as that of Wolfburgh!  She looked thoughtfully at
+Lucy's chubby cheeks.  A princess?  The man was not objectionable in
+himself, either--a kindly, overgrown boy.  "He told me," said Jean,
+"that he was going to a house party at Inverary Castle."
+
+"Whose house is that, Jean?" asked Lucy.
+
+"It is the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Argyll."
+
+"Oh!" Lucy gave a little sigh.  Prince Hugo was undeniably fat and very
+slow to catch a joke, but there was certainly a different flavor in
+this talk of dukes and ancestral seats to the gossip about the Whites
+and Greens at home.
+
+Indeed, the whole party, including even Mr. Perry, experienced a
+sensation of sudden vacancy and flatness when his Highness left them.
+It was as though they had been sheltering a royal eagle that was used
+to dwelling in sunlit heights unknown to them, and now they were left
+on flat ground to consort with common poultry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Miss Vance led her party slowly through Scotland and down again to
+London.  Mrs. Waldeaux went with them.  The girls secretly laughed
+together at her fine indomitable politeness, and her violent passion
+for the Stuarts, and hate of the Roundheads.  But Mr. Perry was bored
+by her.
+
+"What is it to us," he said, "that Queen Mary paddled over this lake,
+or Cromwell's soldiers whitewashed that fresco?  Give me a clean, new
+American church, anyhow, before all of your mouldy, tomby cathedrals.
+These things are so many cancelled cheques to me.  I have nothing to
+pay on them.  It is live issues that draw on my heart.  You American
+girls ought to be at home looking into the negro problem, or Tammany,
+or the Sugar Trust, instead of nosing into Rembrandts, or miracles at
+Lourdes, or palaces.  These are all back numbers.  Write n. g. on them
+and bury them.  So, by the way, is your Mrs. Waldeaux a back number.
+My own opinion is that all men and women at fifty ought to go willingly
+and be shut up in the room where the world keeps its second-hand
+lumber!"
+
+"Yet nobody," said Lucy indignantly, "is more careful or tender with
+Mrs. Waldeaux than you!"
+
+"That is because Mr. Perry has the genuine American awe of people of
+good birth," said Jean slyly.  "It is the only trait which makes me
+suspect that he is a self-made man." Mr. Perry, for answer, only bowed
+gravely.  He long ago had ceased to hide his opinion that Miss Hassard
+was insufferable.
+
+Frances, for her part, was sure that the young people were glad to have
+her as a companion.  One day she decided to stay with them, and the
+next to go to New York on the first steamer.  She seemed to see life
+hazily, as one over whose mind a cataract was growing.  What had she to
+do in Europe, she reasoned?  George was gone.  Her one actual hold on
+the world had slipped from her.  That great mysterious thing called
+living was done and past for her.
+
+And yet--there was Kenilworth, and Scott's house?  Scott, who had been
+her friend and leader since she was eight years old!  And in that
+anthem at York minster there was a message, which she had been waiting
+all of her life to hear!  And here was Lucy beside her with her soft
+voice, and loving blue eyes--Lucy, who should have been George's wife!
+In all of these things something high and good called to the poor lady,
+which she heard and understood as a child would the voice of its mother.
+
+One hour she resolved to leave her son with his wife, to go back to
+Weir at once and work with the poultry and Quigg's jokes for the rest
+of her life.  She was dead.  Let her give up and consent to be dead.
+
+The next, she would stay where she could see George sometimes, and try
+to forgive the woman who had him in her keeping.  Perhaps, after all,
+she was human, as Clara said.  If she could forgive Lisa, she could be
+happy with these young people and live--live in this wonderful old
+world, where all that was best of past ages was kept waiting for her.
+
+When they came to London, she went at once to Morgan's to make a
+deposit, for she had been hard at work on her jokes as she travelled,
+and had received her pay.
+
+"Your son, madam," said the clerk, "drew on his account to-day.  He
+said he expected remittances from you.  Is this to be put to his
+credit?"
+
+"My son was in London to-day?
+
+"He has just left the house."
+
+"Did he--he left a message for me?  A letter, perhaps?"
+
+"No, nothing, madam."
+
+"Put the money to his credit, of course." She went out into the narrow
+street and wandered along to the Bank of England, staring up at the
+huge buildings.
+
+He had been looking at them--he had walked on this very pavement a
+minute ago!  That might be the smoke of his cigar, yonder!
+
+She could easily find him.  Just to look at him once; to hold his hand!
+He might be ill and need her; he never was well in foggy weather.
+
+Then she remembered that Lisa was with him.  She would nurse him.
+
+She called a cab, and, as she drove home, looked out at the crowd with
+a hard, smiling face.
+
+Henry Irving that night played "Shylock," and Mr. Perry secured a box
+for Miss Vance.  Frances went with the others.  Before the curtain rose
+there was a startled movement among them, a whisper, and then Clara
+turned to Mrs. Waldeaux.
+
+"Frances, Lisa is coming into the opposite box," she said.  "She is
+really a beautiful woman in that decollete gown, and her cheeks
+flushed, and her eyes----  I had no idea!  She is superb!"
+
+Two men in the dress of French officers entered the box with Lisa.
+They seated her, bending over her with an empressement which, to Mrs.
+Waldeaux's heated fancy, was insulting.  George came last, carrying his
+wife's cloak, which he placed upon a chair.  One of the men tossed his
+cape to him, with a familiar nod, and George laid it aside and sat down
+at the back of the box.
+
+His mother leaned forward, watching.  That woman had put her son in the
+place of an inferior--an attendant.
+
+The great orchestra shook the house with a final crash, and the curtain
+rose upon the Venetian plaza.  Every face in the audience was turned
+attentive toward it.  But Mrs. Waldeaux saw only Lisa.
+
+A strange change came upon her as she watched her son's wife.  For
+months she had struggled feebly against her hate of Lisa.  Now she
+welcomed it; she let herself go.
+
+Is the old story true after all?  Is there some brutal passion hiding
+in every human soul, waiting its chance, even in old age?  It is
+certain that this woman, after her long harmless life, recognized the
+fury in her soul and freed it.
+
+"Frances," whispered Clara, "when this act is over, go and speak to
+them.  I will go with you.  It is your chance to put an end to this
+horrible separation.  They are your children."
+
+"No.  That woman is my enemy, Clara," said Mrs. Waldeaux quietly.  "I
+will make no terms with her."
+
+Miss Vance sighed and turned to the stage, but Frances still watched
+the opposite box.  It seemed as if the passion within her had cleared
+her eyes.  They never had seen George as they now saw him.
+
+Was that her son?  Was it that little priggish, insignificant fellow
+that she had made a god of?  He was dull, commonplace!  Satisfied to
+sit dumb in the background and take orders from those bourgeois French
+Jews!
+
+The play went on, but she saw nothing but George and his wife.
+
+There was the result of all her drudgery!  The hot summers of work in
+the filthy poultry yards; the grinding out of poor jokes; the coarse,
+cheap underclothes (she used to cry when she put them on, she hated
+them so).  Years and years of it all; and for that cold, selfish fop!
+
+His mother saw him leave the box, and knew that he was coming.
+
+"Oh, good-evening, George!" she said gayly, as he opened the door.  "A
+wonderful scene, wasn't it?  I have always wished to see Irving in
+'Hamlet.'"
+
+"This is 'Shylock,'" he said gravely, and turned to speak to the
+others.  They welcomed him eagerly, and made room for him.  He had lost
+something of the cold, blase air which had ennobled him in the eyes of
+the young women.  He looked around presently, and said with a
+comfortable shrug:
+
+"It is so pleasant to talk English again!  My wife detests it.  We
+speak only French.  I feel like an alien and outcast among you!"  He
+laughed; his mother glanced at him curiously.  But Lucy turned her face
+away, afraid that he should see it.  As he talked, George noted the
+clear-cut American features of the girls, and their dainty gowns, with
+a keen pleasure; then he glanced quickly at the opposite box.
+
+"Ah!" said Jean to Mr. Perry.  "The soiled lace and musk are beginning
+to tell!  He is tired of Lisa already!" "I never liked the fellow,"
+said Mr. Perry coldly.  "But he is hardly the cad that you suppose."
+
+He fell into a gloomy silence.  He had wasted two years' salary in
+following Lucy Dunbar about, in showering flowers on her, in posing
+before her in the last fashions of Conduit Street, and yet when this
+conceited fellow came into the box she was blind and deaf to all
+besides!  Her eyes filled with tears just now when he talked of his
+loneliness.  Lonely--with his wife!  A married man!
+
+George, when the curtain fell again, sat down by Frances.
+
+"Mother," he said.
+
+"Yes, George."  Her eyes were bright and attentive, but her countenance
+had fallen into hard lines new to him.
+
+"I went to Morgan's this afternoon.  You have been very liberal to us."
+
+"I will do what I can.  You may depend upon that amount, regularly."
+
+He rose and bade them good-night, and turned to her again.
+
+"We--we are coming to-morrow to thank you.  MOTHER?" There was a hoarse
+sob in his throat.  He laid his hand on her arm.  She moved so that it
+dropped.  "We will come to-morrow," he said.  "Did you understand?
+Lisa wishes to be friends with you.  She is ready to forgive," he
+groped on, blundering, like a man.
+
+"Oh, yes, I understand.  You and Lisa are coming to forgive me
+to-morrow," she said, smiling.
+
+He looked at her, perplexed and waiting.  But she said no more.
+
+"Well, I must go now.  Good-night."
+
+"Good-night, George!"  Her bright, smiling eyes followed him steadily,
+as he went out.
+
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux tapped at Clara's door that evening after they reached
+home.
+
+"I came to tell you that I shall leave London early in the morning,"
+she said.
+
+"You will not wait to see George and his wife?"
+
+"I hope I never shall see them again.  No!  Not a word!  I will hear no
+arguments!"  She came into the room and closed the door.  There was a
+certain novel air of decision and youth in her figure and movements.
+"I am going to make a change, Clara," she said.  "I have worked for
+others long enough.  I am going away now, alone.  I will be free.  I
+will live my own life--at last."  Her eyes shone with exultation.
+
+"And----  Where are you going?" stammered Miss Vance, dismayed.
+
+"I don't know.  There is so much--it has all been waiting so long for
+me.  There are the cathedrals--and the mountains.  Or the Holy Land.
+Perhaps I may try to write again.  There seems to be a dumb word or two
+in me.  Don't be angry with me, Clara," throwing her arms about her
+cousin, the tears rushing to her eyes.  "I may come back to you and
+little Lucy some time.  But just now I want to be alone and fancy
+myself young.  I never was young."
+
+When Lucy stole into her old friend's chamber the next morning as usual
+to drink her cup of coffee with her, she found the door open and the
+room in disorder, and she was told that Mrs. Waldeaux had left London
+at daybreak.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+During the year which followed, Mr. Perry was forced to return to the
+States, but he made two flying trips across "the pond," as he called
+it, in the interests of his magazine, always running down his prey of
+notorieties in that quarter of Europe in which Miss Vance and her
+charges chanced to be.
+
+When he came in July he found them in a humble little inn in Bozen.  He
+looked with contempt at the stone floors, the clean cell-like chambers,
+each with its narrow bed, and blue stone ewer perched on a wooden
+stool; and he sniffed with disgust when breakfast was served on a table
+set out in the Platz.
+
+"Don't know," he said, "whether I can digest food, eating out of doors.
+Myself, I never give in to these foreign ways.  It's time they learned
+manners from us."
+
+"I have no doubt," said Miss Vance placidly, "that you can find one of
+the usual hotels built for rich Americans in the town.  We avoid them.
+We search out the inns du pays to see as far behind the scenes as we
+can.  I don't care to go to those huge houses with mobs of Chicagoans
+and New Yorkers; and have the couriers and portiers turn the
+flashlights on Europe for me, as if it were a burlesque show."
+
+"Now, that's just what I like!" said Perry.  "I always go to the houses
+where the royalties put up.  I like to order better dishes and give
+bigger tips than they do.  They don't know Jem Perry from Adam, but
+it's my way of waving the American flag."
+
+"I am afraid we have no such patriotic motive," said Clara.  "My girls
+seem to care for nothing now but art.  We have made this little inn our
+headquarters in the Tyrol chiefly out of love for the old church
+yonder."
+
+Mr. Perry glanced contemptuously across the Platz at the frowning gray
+building, and sat down with his back to it.
+
+"Art, eh?  Well, I've no doubt I could soon catch on to Art, if I
+turned my mind that way.  It pays, too,--Art.  Not the fellows who
+paint, but the connoisseurs.  There's Miller from our town.  He was a
+drummer for a candy firm.  Had an eye for color.  Well, he buys
+pictures now for Americans who want galleries in their houses.  He
+bought his whole collection for Stout--the great dealer in hams.  Why,
+Miller can tell the money value within five dollars, at sight, of any
+picture in Europe.  He's safe, too.  Never invests in pictures that
+aren't sure to go up in price.  Getting rich!  And began as a candy
+drummer!  No, ma'am!  Art's no mystery.  I've never taken it up myself.
+Europe is sheer pleasure to me.  I get the best out of it.  I know
+where to lodge well, and I can tell you where the famous plats are
+cooked, and I have my coats built by Toole.  The house pays me a salary
+which justifies me in humoring my little follies," stroking his red
+beard complacently.
+
+Lucy's chubby face and steady blue eyes were turned on him
+thoughtfully, and presently, when they sauntered down the windy street
+together, he talked and she still silently watched him.
+
+"Miss Precision is weighing him in the balance," said Jean, laughing,
+as she poured out more black coffee.  "With all of her soft ways Lucy
+is shrewd.  She knows quite well why he races across the Atlantic, and
+why Prince Wolfburgh has backed away from us and charged on us again
+all summer.  She is cool.  She is measuring poor Perry's qualifications
+for a husband now just as she would materials for a cake.  A neat
+little inventory.  So much energy, so much honest kindness--so much
+vulgarity.  I couldn't do that.  If ever a man wants to marry me, I'll
+fly to him or away from him, as quick as the steel needle does when the
+magnet touches it." Miss Vance listened to her attentively.  "Jean,"
+she said, after a pause, "are you sure that it is Lucy whom the prince
+wishes to marry?"
+
+"It is not I," said Miss Hassard promptly.  "He has thought of me
+several times--he has weighed my qualifications.  But the man is in
+love with Lucy as honestly as a ploughman could be.  Don't you think
+I've tough luck?" she said, resting her elbow on the table and her chin
+on her palm, her keen gray eyes following Miss Dunbar and her lover as
+they loitered under the shadow of the church.  "I am as young as Lucy.
+I have a better brain and as big a dot.  But her lovers make her life a
+burden, and I never have had one.  Just because our noses and chins are
+made up differently!"
+
+"Oh, my dear!" said Clara anxiously.  "I never thought you cared for
+that kind of success!"
+
+"I'm only human," Jean laughed.  "Of course I'm an artist.  I'm going
+to paint a great picture some day that all the world shall go mad
+about.  Of Eve.  I'll put all the power of all women into her.  But in
+the meantime I'd like to see one man turn pale and pant before me as
+the fat little prince does when Lucy snubs him."
+
+"Lucy is very hard to please," complained Miss Vance.  "She snubs Mr.
+Perry--naturally.  But the prince--why should she not marry the prince?"
+
+"Your generation," said Jean, smiling slyly, "used to think that an
+unreasonable whim called love was a good thing in marriage----"
+
+"But why should she not love the prince?  He is honorable and kind, and
+quite passable as to looks----  Can there be any one else?" turning
+suddenly to Jean.
+
+Miss Hassard looked at her a moment, hesitating.  "Your cousin George
+used to be Lucy's type of a hero----"
+
+"Why! the man is married!"  Miss Vance stood up, her lean face
+reddening.  "Jean!  You surprise me!  That kind of talk--it's indecent!
+It is that loose American idea of marriage that ends in hideous divorce
+cases.  But for one of my girls----"
+
+"It is a very old idea," said Jean calmly.
+
+"David loved another man's wife.  Mind you, I don't accuse Lucy of
+loving any body, but when the needle has once touched the magnet it
+answers to its call ever after."
+
+Miss Vance vouchsafed no answer.  She walked away across the Platz,
+jerking her bonnet strings into a knot.  Jean was one of the New Women!
+Her opinions stuck out on every side like Briareus' hundred elbows!
+You could not come near her without being jabbed by them.  Such women
+were all opinions; there was no softness, no feeling, no delicacy about
+them.  Skeletons with no flesh!  As for Lucy, she had no fear.  If even
+the child had loved George, she would have cast out every thought of
+him on his wedding day, as a Christian girl should do!
+
+She passed Lucy at that moment.  She was leaning against one of the
+huge stone lions which crouch in front of the church, listening to Mr.
+Perry.  If ever a pure soul looked into the world it was through those
+limpid eyes!
+
+The Platz was nearly empty.  One or two men in blouses clattered across
+the cobblestones and going into the dark church dropped on their knees.
+The wind was high, and now and then swept heavy clouds low across the
+sunlight space overhead.
+
+Lucy, as Jean had guessed, knew why the man beside her had crossed the
+Atlantic, and she had decided last night to end the matter at once.
+The tears had stood in her eyes for pity at the thought of the pain she
+must give him.  Yet she had put on her new close-fitting coat and a
+becoming fur cap, and pulled out the loose hair which she knew at this
+moment was blowing about her pink cheeks in curly wisps in a way that
+was perfectly maddening.  Clara, seeing the mischief in her eyes as she
+listened shyly to Perry, went on satisfied.  There was no abyss of
+black loss in that girl's life!
+
+Lucy just now was concerned only for Perry.  How the poor man loved
+her!  Why not marry him after all, and put him out of his pain?  She
+was twenty-four.  Most women at twenty-four had gone through their
+little tragedy of love.  But she had had no tragedy.  She told herself
+firmly that there had been no story of love in her life.  There never
+could be, now.  She was too old.
+
+She was tired, too, and very lonely.  This man would seat her on a
+throne and worship her every day.  That would be pleasant enough.
+
+"I am ashamed of myself," he was saying, "to pursue you in this way.
+You have given me no encouragement, I know.  But whenever I go to New
+York and bone down to work, something tells me to come back and try
+again."
+
+Lucy did not answer, and there was a brief silence.
+
+"Of course I'm a fool,"--prodding the ground with his stick.  "But if a
+man were in a jail cell and knew that the sun was shining just outside,
+he'd keep on beating at the wall."
+
+"Your life is not a jail cell.  It's very comfortable, I think."
+
+"It has been bare enough.  I have had a hard fight to live at all.  I
+told you that I began as a canal-boy."
+
+She looked at him with quick sympathy.  At once she fancied that she
+could read old marks of want on his face.  His knuckles were knobbed
+like a laborer's.  He had had a hard fight!  It certainly would be
+pleasant to rain down comfort and luxury on the good, plucky fellow!
+
+"Of course that was all long ago," said Perry.  "I'm not ashamed of it.
+As Judge Baker remarked the other day, 'The acknowledged aristocrats of
+America, to-day, are its self-made men.'  He ought to know.  The Bakers
+are the top of the heap in New York.  Very exclusive.  I've been
+intimate there for years.  No, Miss Dunbar, I may have begun as a
+mule-driver on a canal, but I am choice in my society.  My wife will
+not find a man or woman in my circle who is half-cut."
+
+Lucy drew a long breath.  To live all day and every day with this man!
+
+And yet--she was so tired!  There was a good deal of money to manage,
+and he could do that.  He would like a gay, hospitable house, and so
+would she, and they would be kind to the poor--and he was an
+Episcopalian, too.  There would be no hitch there.  Lucy was a zealous
+High Churchwoman.
+
+Why should she not do it?  The man was as good as gold at heart.  Jean
+called him a cad, but the caddishness was only skin deep.
+
+Mr. Perry watched her, reading her thoughts more keenly than she
+guessed.
+
+"One thing I will say in justice to myself," he said.  "You are a rich
+woman.  If you marry me, YOU will know, if nobody else does, that I am
+no fortune-hunter.  I shall always be independent of my wife.  Every
+dollar she owns shall be settled on her before I go with her to the
+altar."
+
+"Oh, I'm not thinking of the money," said Lucy impatiently.
+
+"Then you are thinking of me!"  He leaned over her.  She felt as if she
+had been suddenly dragged too close to a big unpleasant fire.  "I know
+you don't love me," he panted, "you cold little angel, you!  But you do
+like me?  Eh? just a little bit, Lucy?  Marry me.  Give me a chance.
+I'll bring you to me.  If there is a single spark of love in your heart
+for me, I'll blow it into a flame!  I can do it, I tell you!"  He
+caught her fiercely by the shoulder.
+
+Lucy drew back and threw out her hands.  "Let me have time to think!"
+
+"Time?  You've had a year!"
+
+"One more day.  Come again this evening----"
+
+"This evening?  I've come so often!" staring breathlessly into her
+face.  "It will be no use, I can see that.  Well, as you please.  I'll
+come once more."
+
+The young fellow in his jaunty new clothes shook as if he had the ague.
+He had touched her.  For one minute she had been his!
+
+He turned and walked quickly across the Platz.
+
+Lucy, left alone, was full of remorse.  She looked down into her heart;
+she had forgotten to do it before.  No, not a spark for him to blow
+into a flame; not a single warm thought of him!
+
+The girl was ashamed of herself.  He might be a cad, but he was real;
+his honest love possessed him body and soul.  It was a matter of
+expediency to her; a thing to debate with herself, to dally over, with
+paltry pros and cons.
+
+Miss Vance came hurriedly up the street, an open letter in her hand.
+Lucy ran to meet her.
+
+"What is it?  You have heard bad news?"
+
+"I suppose we ought not to call it that.  It is from George Waldeaux.
+They have a son, two months old.  He tells it as a matter for
+rejoicing."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Lucy feebly.
+
+"They are at Vannes--in Brittany.  He has a cough.  He seems to know
+nobody--to have no friends, and, I suspect, not much money.  He is
+terribly depressed."  Clara folded the letter thoughtfully.  "He asks
+me to tell his mother that the baby has come."
+
+"Where is his mother?"
+
+"In Switzerland."
+
+"Why is she not with him?" demanded Lucy angrily.  "Wandering about
+gathering edelweiss, while he is alone and wretched!"
+
+"He has his wife.  You probably do not understand the case fully," said
+Clara coldly.  "I am going to wire to his mother now."  She turned away
+and Lucy stood irresolute, her hand clutching the shaggy head of the
+stone beast beside her.
+
+"I can give him money.  I'll go to him.  He needs me!" she said aloud.
+Then her whole body burned with shame.  She--Lucy Dunbar, good proper
+Lucy, whose conscience hurt her if she laid her handkerchiefs away awry
+in her drawer, nursing a criminal passion for a married man!
+
+She went slowly back to the inn.  "He has his wife," she told herself.
+"I am nothing to him.  I doubt if he would know me if he met me on the
+street."  She tried to go back to her easy-going mannerly little
+thoughts, but there was something strange and fierce behind them that
+would not down.
+
+Jean came presently to the salle.  "I have had a letter too," she said.
+"The girl who writes came from Pond City.  She was in the same atelier
+in Paris with George.  She says:  'Your friends the Waldeaux have come
+to grief by a short cut.  They flung money about for a few months as if
+they were backed by the Barings.  The Barings might have given their
+suppers.  As for their studio--there was no untidier jumble of old
+armor and brasses and Spanish leather in Paris; and Mme. George posing
+in the middle in soiled tea-gowns!  But the suppers suddenly stopped,
+and the leather and Persian hangings went to the Jews.  I met Lisa one
+day coming out of the Vendome, where she had been trying to peddle a
+roll of George's sketches to the rich Americans.  I asked her what was
+wrong, and she laughed and said, "We were trying to make thirty francs
+do the work of thirty thousand.  And we have made up our minds that we
+know no more of art than house painters.  We are in a blind alley!"
+Soon after that the baby was born.  They went down to Brittany.  I hear
+that Lisa, since the child came, has been ill.  I tell all this dreary
+stuff to you thinking that you may pass it on to their folks.  Somebody
+ought to go to their relief.'"
+
+"Relief!" exclaimed Miss Vance.  "And the money that they were flinging
+into the gutter was earned day by day by his old mother!  Every dollar
+of it!  I know that during the last year she has done without proper
+clothes and food to send their allowance to them." "You forget," said
+Lucy, "that George Waldeaux was doing noble work in the world.  It was
+a small thing for his mother to help him."
+
+"Noble work?  His pictures or his sermons, Lucy?" demanded Miss Vance,
+with a contemptuous shrug.
+
+Lucy without reply walked out to the inn garden and seated herself in a
+shady corner.  There Mr. Perry found her just as the first stroke of
+the angelus sounded on the air.  Her book lay unopened on her lap.
+
+He walked slowly up to her and stopped, breathing hard, as if he had
+been running.  "It is evening now.  I have come for my answer, Miss
+Dunbar," he said, forcing a smile.
+
+"Answer?"  Lucy looked up bewildered.
+
+"You have forgotten!"
+
+The blood rushed to her face.  She held out her hands.  "Oh, forgive
+me!  I heard bad news.  I have been so troubled----"
+
+"You forgot that I had asked you to be my wife!"
+
+"Mr. Perry----"
+
+"No, don't say another word, Miss Dunbar.  I have had my answer.  I
+knew you didn't love me, but I did not think I was so paltry that you
+would forget that I had offered to marry you."
+
+Lucy pressed her hands together, looking up at him miserably without a
+word.  He walked down the path and leaned on the wall with his back to
+her.  His very back was indignant.
+
+Presently he turned.  "I will bid you goodby," he said, with an effort
+at lofty courtesy, "and I will leave my adieux for your friends with
+you."
+
+"Are you going--back to the States?" stammered Lucy.
+
+"Yes, I am going back to the States," he replied sternly.  "A man of
+merit there has his place, regardless of rank.  Jem Perry can hold his
+head there as high as any beggarly prince.  Farewell, Miss Dunbar."
+
+He strode down the path and disappeared.  Lucy shook her head and cried
+from sheer wretchedness.  She felt that she had been beaten to-day with
+many stripes.
+
+Suddenly the bushes beside her rustled.  "Forgive me," he said
+hoarsely.   She looked up and saw his red honest eyes.  "I behaved like
+a brute.  Good-by, Lucy!  I never loved any woman but you, and I never
+will."
+
+"Stay, stay!" she cried.
+
+He heard her, but he did not come back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Lucy was silent and dejected for a day or two, being filled with pity
+for Mr. Perry's ruined life.  But when she saw his name in a list of
+outgoing passengers on the Paris her heart gave a bound of relief.
+Nothing more could now be done.  That chapter was closed.  There had
+been no other chapter of moment in her life, she told herself sternly.
+Now, all the clouds had cleared away.  It was a new day.  She would
+begin again.
+
+So she put on new clothes, none of which she had ever worn before, and
+tied back her curly hair with a fresh white ribbon, and came down to
+breakfast singing gayly.
+
+Miss Vance gave her her roll and milk in silence, and frowning
+importantly, drew out a letter.
+
+"Lucy, I have just received a communication from Prince Wolfburgh.  He
+is in Bozen."
+
+"Here!" Lucy started up, glancing around like a chased hare.
+
+Then she sat down again and waited.  There was no other chapter, and
+the book was so blank!
+
+"His coming is very opportune," she said presently, gently.
+
+"Oh! do YOU think so, my dear?  Really!  Well, I always have liked the
+young man.  So simple.  So secure of his social position.  The
+Wolfburghs, I find, go back to the eleventh century.  Mr. Perry had
+noble traits, but one never felt quite safe as to his nails or his
+grammar."
+
+"But the prince--the prince?" cried Jean.
+
+"Oh, yes.  Well, he writes--most deferentially.  He begs for the honor
+of an interview with me this afternoon upon a subject of the most vital
+importance.  He says, 'regarding you, as I do, in loco parentis to the
+hochgeboren Fraulein Dunbar.'" "Hochgeboren!" said Lucy.  "My
+grandfather was a saddler.  Tell him so, Miss Vance.  Tell him the
+exact facts.  I want no disclosures after----"
+
+"After marriage?" said Jean, rising suddenly.  "Then you have decided?"
+
+"I have not said that I had decided," replied Lucy calmly.
+
+Jean laughed.  "He will not be scared by the saddler.  Europeans of his
+order take no account of our American class distinctions.  They look
+upon us as low-born parvenues, all alike.  They weigh and value us by
+other standards than birth."
+
+"I have money, if you mean that, Jean," said Lucy cheerfully.
+
+"I think you had better go away, girls, if you have finished your
+dejeuner.  He may be here at any moment now," said Clara, looking
+anxiously at her watch.
+
+Lucy went to her little chamber and sat down to work at a monstrous
+caricature which she was painting of the church.  Jean paced up and
+down the stone corridor, looking out of the window into the Platz.
+
+"He has come," she said excitedly, appearing at Lucy's door.  "He went
+into the church first, to say an ave for help, poor little man!  His
+fat face is quite pale and stern.  It is a matter of life and death to
+him.  And it's no more to you than the choosing of a new coat."
+
+Lucy smiled and sketched in a priest on the church steps.  Her hand
+shook, but Jean could not see that.  She went to the window again with
+something like an inward oath at the dolts of commonplace women who had
+all the best chances, but was back in a moment, laughing nervously.
+
+"Do you know he has on that old brown suit?"  She leaned against the
+jamb of the door.  "If I were a prince, and came a-wooing, I would have
+troops of my Jagers, and trumpets and banners with the arms of my
+House, and I'd wear all my decorations.  Of course we Americans are
+bound to say that rank and royalty are dead things.  But if I had them,
+I'd galvanize the corpses!  If they are useful as shows, I'd make the
+show worth seeing.  I'd cover myself with jewels like the old
+Romanoffs.  You would never see Queen Jean in a slouchy alpaca and
+pork-pie hat like Victoria."  While her tongue chattered, her eyes
+watched Lucy keenly.  "You don't hear me!  You are deciding what to do.
+Why on earth should you hesitate?  He is a gentleman--he loves you!"
+and then to Lucy's relief she suddenly threw on her hat and rushed off
+for a walk.
+
+Miss Dunbar painted the priest's robe yellow, in her agitation.  But
+the agitation was not deep.  There really seemed no reason why she
+should hesitate.  He would be kind; he was well-bred and agreeable.  A
+princess?  She had a vague idea of a glorified region of ancestral
+castles and palaces in which dukes and royalties dwelt apart and
+discoursed of high matters.  She would be one of them.
+
+The other day there seemed to be no reason why she should not marry Mr.
+Perry.  In marriage then one must only consider the suitability of the
+man?  There was nothing else to consider----
+
+
+With a queer, hunted look in her soft eyes she worked on, daubing on
+paint liberally.
+
+Meanwhile, in the little salle below, Miss Vance sat stiffly erect,
+while the prince talked in his shrill falsetto.  Although he set forth
+his affection for the engelreine Madchen as simply as the little German
+baker in Weir (whom he certainly did resemble) might have done, she
+could find, in her agitation, no fitting words in which to answer him.
+That she, Clara Vance, should be the arbiter in a princely alliance!
+At last she managed to ask whether Miss Dunbar had given him any
+encouragement on which to found his claim.
+
+"Ah, Fraulein Vance!" he cried, laughing.  "The hare does not call to
+the hounds!  But I have no fear.  She speaks to me in other ways than
+by words.
+
+  "'Mein Herz und seine Augen
+  Verstehen sich gar so gut!'
+
+You know the old song.  Ah, ja!  I understand what she would
+say--here!" touching his heart.
+
+He paced up and down, smiling to himself.  Suddenly he drew up before
+her, tossing his hands out as if to throw away some pleasant dream.  "I
+have come to you, gracious lady, as I would to the mother of Miss
+Dunbar.  I show to you the heart!  But before I address her it is
+necessary that I shall consult her guardian with regard to business."
+
+It was precisely, Clara said afterward, as if the baker from Weir had
+stopped singing, and presented his bill.
+
+"Business?" she gasped.  "Oh, I see!  Settlements.  We don't have such
+things in the States.  But I quite understand all those European social
+traits.  I have lived abroad for years.  I----"
+
+"Who is Miss Dunbar's guardian?" the prince demanded alertly.  He sat
+down by the table and took out a notebook and papers.
+
+"But--settlements?  Is not that a little premature?" she ventured.
+"She has not accepted you."
+
+"HE may not accept my financial proposals.  It is business, you see.
+The gentle ladies, even die Amerikaner, do not comprehend business.  It
+is not, you perceive, dear lady, the same when the head of the House of
+Wolfburgh allies himself with a hochgeboren Fraulein as when the
+tailors marry----"
+
+"Nor bakers.  I see," stammered Clara.
+
+"Miss Dunbar's properties are valuable.  Her estate in Del-aware,"
+glancing at his notebook, "is larger than some of our German kingdoms.
+Her investments in railway and mining securities, if put on the market,
+should be worth a million of florins.  These are solid matters, and
+must be dealt with carefully."
+
+"But, good gracious, Prince Wolfburgh!" cried Miss Vance, "how did you
+find out about Lucy's investments?"
+
+He looked at her in amazement.  "Meine gnadigste Fraulein!  It is not
+possible that you supposed that in such a matter as this men leap into
+the dark--the men of rank, princes, counts, English barons, who marry
+the American mees?  That they do not know for what they exchange
+their--all that they give?  I will tell you," with a condescending
+smile.  "There are agents in the States--in New York--in
+Chicago--in--how do you name it?  St. Sanata.  They furnish exact
+information as to the dot of the lady who will, perhaps, marry here.
+Oh, no!  We do not leap into the dark!"
+
+"So I perceive," said Clara dryly.  "And may I inquire, your Highness,
+what financial arrangement you propose, in case she becomes your wife?"
+
+"Assuredly."  He hastily unfolded a large paper.  "This must be
+accepted by her guardian before the betrothal can take place.  I will
+translate, in brief.  The whole estate passes to me, and is secured to
+me in case of my wife's death without issue.  I inserted that clause,"
+he said, looking up, smiling, for approval, "because American Frauleins
+are so fragile--not like our women.  I will, of course, if we have
+issue, try to preserve the real estate for my heir, and the remaining
+property for my other children."
+
+"It seems to me that a good deal is taken for granted there," said
+Clara, whose cheeks were very hot.  "And where does Miss Dunbar come
+into this arrangement?  Is she not to have any money at all?"
+
+"My widow, should I die first, will be paid an annuity from my estate.
+But while Mees Lucy is my wife, _I_ will buy all that she needs.  I
+will delight to dress her, to feed her well.  With discretion, of
+course.  For there are many channels into which my income must flow.
+But I will not be a niggardly husband to her!  No, no!" cried the
+little man in a glow.
+
+"That is very kind of you.  But she will not have any of her own money
+to spend?  In her own purse?  To fling into the gutter if she chooses?"
+
+The prince laughed gayly.  "How American you are, gracious lady!  A
+German wife does not ask for her 'own purse.'  My wife will cease to be
+American; she will be German," patting his soft hands ecstatically.
+"But you have not told me the name of her guardian?"
+
+"Lucy," said Miss Vance reluctantly, "is of age.  She has full control
+of her property.  A Trust Company manages it for her, but they have no
+authority to stop her if she chooses to--throw it into the gutter."
+
+The prince looked up sharply.  Could this be a trick?  But if it were,
+the agent would find out for him.  He rose.
+
+
+"To have the sole disposal of her own hand and of her fortune?  That
+seems strange to us," he said, smiling.  "But I have your consent, most
+dear lady, to win both, if I can?"
+
+"Oh, yes, prince.  If you can."
+
+He took her hand and bowed profoundly over it, but no courtly grace nor
+words could bring back Clara's awe of him.  She had a vague impression
+that the Weir baker had been wrangling with her about his bill.
+
+"Your Highness has asked a good many questions," she said.  "May I put
+one to you?  Did you inquire concerning Miss Hassard's dot, also?" "Ah,
+certainly!  Why not?  It is very large.  I have spoken of it to my
+cousin Count Odo.  But the drawback--her father still lives.  He may
+marry again.  Her dot depends upon his good pleasure.  Whereas Miss
+Dunbar is an orphan; and besides that, she is so dear to me!" clasping
+his hands, his face red with fervor.  "So truly dear!"
+
+And she knew that he honestly meant it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+When Miss Vance came into the corridor after she had reported this
+interview to Lucy, Jean swept her into her room and dragged the whole
+story from her.  In fact the poor anxious lady was glad to submit it to
+the girl's shrewd hard sense.
+
+"You told him that she was the uncontrolled mistress of her money!"
+
+"It is the truth.  I had to tell him the truth, my dear."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so, for he would have found it out anyhow."
+
+"I do feel," panted Clara, "as if I had put a dove into the claws of a
+vulture."
+
+"Not at all," said Jean promptly.  "The little man has a heart, but an
+empty pocket.  Was Lucy interested most in his love or his bargaining?"
+
+"In neither, I think.  She just went on painting, and said nothing."
+
+"Oh, she will decide the matter in time!  She will bring her little
+intellect to bear on it as if it were a picnic for her Sunday-school
+class!"  Jean stood silent a while.  "Miss Vance," she said suddenly,
+"let me engineer this affair for a few days.  I can help you."
+
+"What do you propose to do, Jean?"
+
+"To leave Bozen to-morrow.  For Munich."
+
+"But the Wolfburghs have a palace or--something in Munich.  Is it quite
+delicate for us----"
+
+"It is quite rational.  Let us see what the something is.  So far in
+our dealings with principalities and powers, we have had a stout little
+man--with no background." The prince was startled when he was told of
+this sudden journey, but declared that he would follow them to-morrow.
+
+Lucy, as usual, asked no questions, but calmly packed her satchel.
+
+As the little train, the next day, lumbered through the valley of the
+Eisach, she sat in her corner, reading a newspaper.  Miss Vance dozed,
+or woke with a start to lecture on points of historic interest.
+
+"Why don't you look, Lucy?  That monastery was a Roman fortress in the
+third century.  And you are missing the color effects of the vineyards."
+
+"I can look now.  I have finished my paper."  Lucy folded it neatly and
+replaced it in her bag.  "I have read the Delaware State Sun," she said
+triumphantly, "regularly, every week since we left home.  When I go
+back I shall be only seven days behind with the Wilmington news."
+
+Jean glanced at her contemptuously.  "Look at that great castle on
+yonder mountain," she said.  "You could lodge a village inside of the
+ramparts.  Do you think Wolfburgh Schloss is like that?  The prince
+told us last night," turning to Miss Vance, "the old legends about his
+castle.  The first Wolfburgh was a Titan about the time of Noah, and
+married a human wife, and with his hands tore open the mountain for
+rocks to lay the foundation of his house.  According to his story there
+were no end of giants and trolls and kings concerned in the building of
+it," she went on, furtively watching the deepening pink in Lucy's
+cheek.  "The Wolfburgh of Charlemagne's day was besieged by him, and
+another entertained St. Louis and all his crusaders within the walls."
+Jean's voice rose shrilly and her eyes glowed.  She leaned forward,
+looking eagerly across the fields.  "The prince told us that the
+Schloss of his race had for centuries been one of the great fortresses
+of Christendom.  And here it is!  Now we shall see--we shall see!"
+
+The car stopped.  The guard opened the door and Miss Vance and Lucy
+suddenly found themselves swept by Jean on to the platform, while the
+little train rumbled on down the valley.  Miss Vance cried out in
+dismay.
+
+"Never mind.  There will be another train in a half hour," said Jean.
+"Here is the Schloss," pointing to a pepper-box tower neatly
+whitewashed, which rose out of a huge mass of broken stone.  "And here,
+I suppose, is the capital of the kingdom over which the Wolfburghs now
+reign feudal lords?"
+
+Clara found herself against her will looking curiously at the forge,
+the dirty shop, the tiny bier-halle, and a half a dozen huts, out of
+which swarmed a few old women and children.
+
+"Where are the men of this village?" Jean demanded of the station
+master, a stout old man with a pipe in his mouth.
+
+"Gone to America, for the most part," he said, with a shrug.
+
+Lucy came up hastily, an angry glitter in her soft eyes.  "You have no
+right to make me play the spy in this way!" she said haughtily, and
+going into the little station sat down with her back to the door.
+
+"You?  It is I--I----" muttered Jean breathlessly.  "And who lives in
+the tower, my good man?  It is not big enough for a dozen hens."  She
+slipped a florin into his hand.
+
+"Four of the noble ladies live there.  The princesses.  The gracious
+sisters of Furst Hugo.  There come two of them now."
+
+A couple of lean, wrinkled women dressed in soiled merino gowns and
+huge black aprons, their hair bristling in curl papers, crossed the
+road, peering curiously at the strangers.
+
+"They came to look at you, Fraulein," said the man, chuckling.
+"Strangers do not stop at Wolfburgh twice in the year."
+
+"And what do the noble ladies do all the year?"
+
+"Jean, Jean!" remonstrated Clara.
+
+"Oh, Miss Vance!  This is life and death to some of us!  What do they
+do?"
+
+"Do?" said the man, staring.  "What shall any gracious lady do?  They
+cook and brew, and crochet lace and----"
+
+"Are there any more princesses--sisters of Furst Hugo?"
+
+"Two more.  They live in Munich.  No, none of them are married.
+Because," he added zealously, "there are no men as high-born as our
+gracious ladies, so they cannot marry."
+
+"No doubt that accounts for it," said Jean.  "Six.  These are 'the
+channels into which the income will flow,' hey?" She gave him more
+money, and marching into the station caught Lucy by the shoulder,
+shaking her passionately.  "Do you think any American girl could stand
+that?  How would YOU like to be caged up in that ridiculous tower to
+cook and crochet and brew beer and watch the train go by for
+recreation?  The year round--the year round?"
+
+Lucy rose quietly.  "The train is coming now," she said.  "Calm
+yourself, Jean.  YOU will not have to live in the tower."
+
+Jean laughed.  When they were seated in the car again, she looked
+wistfully out at the heaps of ruins.
+
+"It must have been a mighty fortress once," she said.  "Those stones
+were hewed before Charlemagne's time.  And a great castle could easily
+be built with them now," she added thoughtfully.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The travellers entered Munich at noon.  The great generous city lay
+tranquil and smiling in the frosty sunlight.
+
+"I have secured apartments," said Miss Vance, "used hitherto by
+royalties or American millionaires.  My girl must be properly framed
+when a prince comes a-wooing."
+
+Lucy smiled.  But her usual warm color faded as they drove through the
+streets.  Jean, however, was gay and eager.
+
+"Ah, the dear splendid town!" she cried.  "It always seems to give us a
+royal welcome.  Nothing is changed!  There is the music in the Kellers,
+and there go the same Bavarian officers with their swagger and saucy
+blue eyes.  They  are the handsomest men in Europe!  And here is the
+Munchen-kindl laughing at us, and the same crowds are going to the
+Pinakothek!  What do you want more?  Beer and splendor and fun and art!
+What a home it will be for you, Lucy!"
+
+Lucy's cold silence did not check Jean's affectionate zeal.  She
+anxiously searched among the stately old buildings, which they passed,
+for the Wolfburgh palace.  "It will not be in these commonplace
+Haussmannized streets," she said.  "It is in some old corner; it has a
+vast, mysterious, feudal air, I fancy.  You will hold a little court in
+it, and sometimes let a poor American artist from Pond City in to hang
+on the edge of the crowd and stare at the haute noblesse."
+
+"Don't be absurd, Jean," said Miss Vance.
+
+"I am quite serious.  I think an American girl like Lucy, with her
+beauty and her money, will be welcomed by these German nobles as a
+white swan among ducks.  She ought to take her place and hold it."
+Jean's black eyes snapped and the blood flamed up her cheeks.  "If I
+were she I'd make my money tell!  I'd buy poor King Ludwig's residence
+at Binderhof, with the cascades and jewelled peacocks and fairy
+grottos, for my country seat.  The Bavarian nobility are a beggarly
+lot.  If they knew that Lucy and her millions were coming to town in
+this cab, they'd blow their trumpets for joy.  'Wave, Munich, all thy
+banners wave!'"  Lucy's impatient shrug silenced her, but she was
+preoccupied and excited throughout the day.  Miss Vance watched her
+curiously.  Could it be that she had heard of the prince's plan of
+marrying her to his cousin, and that she was building these air castles
+for herself?
+
+
+A day or two sufficed to make Miss Vance's cheery apartments the
+rendezvous of troops of Americans of all kinds: from the rich lounger,
+bored by the sight of pictures, which he did not understand, and courts
+which he could not enter, to the half-starved, eager-eyed art students,
+who smoked, and drank beer, and chattered in gutturals, hoping to pass
+for Germans.
+
+There were plenty of idle young New Yorkers and Bostonians too,
+hovering round Lucy and Jean, overweighted by their faultless London
+coats and trousers and fluent French.  But they deceived nobody; they
+all had that nimble brain, and that unconscious swagger of importance
+and success which stamps the American in every country.  Prince Hugo,
+in his old brown suit, came and went quietly among them.
+
+"The genuine article!" Jean declared loudly.  "There is something royal
+in his hospitality!  He lays all Munich at Lucy's feet, as if it were
+his own estate, and the museums and palaces were the furniture of his
+house.  That homely simplicity of his is tremendously fine, if she
+could understand it!"
+
+The homely genuineness had its effect even upon Lucy.  The carriage
+which he brought to drive them to Isar-anen was scaly with age, but the
+crest upon it was the noblest in Bavaria; in the cabinet of portraits
+of ancient beauties in the royal palace he showed her indifferently two
+or three of his aunts and grandmothers, and in the historical picture
+of the anointing of the great Charlemagne, one of his ancestors, stout
+and good-humored as Hugo himself, supported the emperor.
+
+"The pudgy little man," said Jean one day, "somehow belongs to the old
+world of knights and crusaders--Sintram and his companions.  He will
+make it all real to Lucy when she marries him.  He is like Ali Baba,
+standing at the shut door of the cave full of jewels and treasures with
+the key in his hand."
+
+"Those Arabian Night stories are simply silly," said Lucy severely.  "I
+am astonished that any woman in this age of the world should read that
+kind of trash."
+
+"But the prince's cave?" persisted Jean.  "When are we to look into it?
+I want to be sure of the treasures inside.  When are we to go to his
+palace?  When will his sisters ask us to dinner?"
+
+Miss Vance looked anxious.  "That is a question of great importance,"
+she said.  "The princesses have invited me through their brother to
+call.  It is of course etiquette here for the stranger to call first,
+but I don't wish to compromise Lucy by making advances."
+
+There was a moment's silence, then Lucy said, blushing and faltering a
+little, "It would be better perhaps to call, and not prejudice them, by
+any discourtesy, against us.  The prince is very kind."
+
+"So!  The wind is in that quarter?" Jean said, with a harsh laugh.
+
+She jumped up and went to her own room.  She was in a rage at herself.
+Why had she not run away to Paris months ago and begun her great
+picture of the World's mother,  Eve?  There was a career for her!  And
+thinking--perhaps of Eve--she cried hot salt tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+A week passed, but the question of the first call was not yet settled.
+It required as much diplomacy as an international difficulty.  Furst
+Hugo represented the princesses as "burning with impatience to behold
+the engelreine Madchen whom they hoped to embrace as a sister," but no
+visible sign of their ardor reached Miss Vance.
+
+On Monday Jean went to spend the day with some of her artist friends,
+but at noon she dashed into the room where Clara and Lucy sat sewing,
+her dark face blotched red, and her voice stuttering with excitement.
+
+"I have seen into the cave!" she shouted.  "I have got at the truth!
+It's a rather stagy throne, the Wolfburghs!  Plated, cheap!"
+
+"What is the matter with you?" said Miss Vance.
+
+"Nothing is the matter with ME.  It is Lucy's tragedy.  I've seen the
+magnificent ancient palace of the Wolfburghs.  It is a flat!  In the
+very house where I went to-day.  The third story flat just under the
+attics where the poor Joneses daub portraits.  I passed the open doors
+and I saw the shabby old tables and chairs and the princesses--two fat
+old women in frowzy wrappers, and their hair in papers, eating that
+soup of pork and cabbages and raisins--the air was thick with the
+smell!  And that is not the worst!"
+
+"Take breath, Jean," said Lucy calmly.
+
+"The prince himself--the Joneses told me, there can be no doubt--the
+prince makes soap for a living!  No wonder you turn pale, Miss Vance.
+Soap!  He is the silent partner in the firm of Woertz und Zimmer, and
+it is not a paying business either."
+
+Jean did not wait for an answer, but walked up and down the room,
+laughing angrily to herself.  "Yes, soap!  He cannot sneer at Lucy's
+ancestral saddles, now.  Nor my father's saws!  His rank is the only
+thing he has to give for Lucy's millions, and now she knows what it is
+worth!"
+
+Lucy rose and, picking up her work basket, walked quietly out of the
+room.  Jean flashed an indignant glance after her.
+
+"She might have told me that he gave himself!  Surely the man counts
+for something!  Anyhow, rank like his is not smirched by poverty or
+trade.  Bismarck himself brews beer."
+
+"Your temper is contradictory to-day," said Clara coldly.  "Did you
+know," she said presently, "that the princesses will be at the Countess
+von Amte's to-morrow?"
+
+"Then we shall meet them!" cried Jean.  "Then something will be
+settled."
+
+Lucy locked the door of her chamber after her.  She found much comfort
+in the tiny bare room with its white walls and blue stove, and the
+table where lay her worn Bible and a picture of her old home.  The room
+seemed a warm home to her now.  Above the wall she had hung photographs
+of the great Madonnas, and lately she had placed one of Frances
+Waldeaux among them.  That was the face on which she looked last at
+night.  When Clara had noticed it, Lucy had said, "I am as fond of the
+dear lady as if she were my own mother."
+
+She sat down before it now, and taking out her sewing began to work,
+glancing up at it, half smiling as to a friend who talked to her.  She
+thought of Furst Hugo boiling soap, with a gentle pity, and of Jean
+with hot disdain.  What had Jean to do with it?  The prince was her own
+lover, as her gloves were her own.
+
+But indeed, the prince and love were but shadows on the far sky line to
+the little girl; the real things were her work and her Bible, and
+George's mother talking to her.  She often traced remembered
+expressions on Mrs. Waldeaux's face; the gayety, the sympathy, a
+strange foreboding in the eyes.  Finer meanings, surely, than any in
+the features of these immortal insipid Madonnas!
+
+Sometimes Lucy could not decide whether she had seen these meanings on
+Frances Waldeaux's face, or on her son's.
+
+She sewed until late in the afternoon.  There came a tap at the door.
+She opened it, and there stood Mrs. Waldeaux, wrapped in a heavy cloak.
+Lucy jumped at her, trembling, and hugged her.
+
+"Oh, come in!  Come in!" she cried shrilly.  "I have just been thinking
+of you and talking to you!"
+
+Frances laughed, bewildered.  "Oh, it is Miss Dunbar?  The man sent me
+here by mistake to wait.  Miss Vance is out, he said."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so.  But I--I am here."  Lucy threw her arms around her
+again, laying her head down on her shoulder.  She felt as if something
+that she had waited for a long time was coming to her.  "Sit by the
+stove.  Your hands are like ice," she said.
+
+"Yes, I am usually cold now; I don't know why."
+
+Lucy then saw a curious change in her face.  The fine meanings were not
+in it now.  It was fatter--coarser; the hair was dead, the eyes moved
+sluggishly, like the glass eyes of a doll.
+
+"You are always cold?  Your blood is thin, perhaps.  You are overtired,
+dear.  Have you travelled much?"
+
+"Oh, yes! all of the time.  I have seen whole tracts of pictures, and
+no end of palaces and hotels--hotels--hotels!" Frances said, awakening
+to the necessity of being talkative and vivacious with the young girl.
+She threw off her cloak.  There was a rip in the fur, and the dirty
+lining hung out.  Lucy shuddered.  Mrs. Waldeaux's blood must have
+turned to water, or she would never have permitted that!
+
+"You must rest now.  I will take care of you," she said, with a little
+nod of authority.  Frances looked at her perplexed.  Why should this
+pretty creature mother her with such tenderness?
+
+Oh!  It was the girl that George should have married!
+
+She glanced at the white room with its dainty bibelots, the Bible, the
+Madonnas, watching, benign.  Poor little nun, waiting for the love that
+never could come to her!
+
+"I am glad you are here, my child.  You can tell me what I want to
+know.  I have not an hour to spare.  I am going to my son--to George.
+Do you know where he is?"
+
+"At Vannes, in Brittany."
+
+"Brittany--that is a long way."  Frances rose uncertainly.  "I hoped he
+was near.  I was in a Russian village, and Clara's letter was long in
+finding me.  When I got it, I travelled night and day.  I somehow
+thought I should meet him on the way.  I fancied he would come to meet
+me."
+
+Lucy's blue eyes watched her keenly a moment.  Then she rang the bell.
+
+"You must eat, first of all," she said.
+
+"No, I am not hungry.  Vannes, you said?  I must go now.  I haven't an
+hour."
+
+"You have two, exactly.  You'll take the express at eight.  Oh, I'm
+never mistaken about a train.  Here is the coffee.  Now, I'll make you
+a nice sandwich."
+
+Frances was faint with hunger.  As she ate, she watched the pretty
+matter-of-fact little girl, and laughed with delight.  When had she
+found any thing so wholesome?  It was a year, too, since she had seen
+any one who knew George.  Naturally, she began to empty her heart,
+which was full of him, to Lucy.
+
+"I have not spoken English for months," she said, smiling over her
+coffee.  "It is a relief!  And you are a friend of my son's, too?"
+
+"No.  A mere acquaintance," said Lucy, with reserve.
+
+"No one could even see George and not understand how different he is
+from other men."
+
+"Oh! altogether different!" said Lucy.  "Yes, you understand.  And
+there was that future before him--when his trouble came.  Oh, I've
+thought of it, and thought of it, until my head is tired!  He fell
+under that woman's influence, you see.  It was like mesmerism, or the
+voodoo curse that the negroes talk of.  It came on me too.  Why, there
+was a time when I despised him.  George!"  Her eyes grew full of
+horror.  "I left him, to live my own life.  He has staggered under his
+burden alone, and I could have rid him of it.  Now there are two of
+them."
+
+"Two of them?" said Lucy curiously.
+
+"There is a baby--Pauline Felix's grandson.  I beg your pardon, my
+child, I ought not to have named her.  She is not a person whom you
+should ever hear of.  He has them both,--George.  He has that weight to
+carry."  She stood up.  "That is why I am going to him.  It must be
+taken from him."
+
+"You mean--a divorce?"
+
+"I don't know--I can't think clearly.  But God does such queer things!
+There are millions of men in the world, and this curse falls
+on--George!"
+
+Lucy put her hands on the older woman's arms and seated her.  "Mrs.
+Waldeaux," she said, with decision, "you need sleep, or you would not
+talk in that way.  Lisa is not a curse.  Nor a voodoo witch. She came
+to your son instead of to any other man--because he chose her out from
+all other women.  He had seen them."  She held her curly head erect.
+"As he did choose her, he should make the best of her."
+
+Frances looked at her as one awakened out of a dream.  "You talk
+sensibly, child.  Perhaps you are right.  But I must go.  Ring for a
+cab, please.  No, I will wait in the station.  Clara would argue and
+lecture.  I could not stand that to-night," with her old comical shrug.
+
+Lucy's entreaties were vain.
+
+But as the train rushed through the valley of the Isar that night,
+Frances looked forward into the darkness with a nameless terror.  "That
+child was so healthy and sane," she said, "I wish I had stayed with her
+longer."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Prince Hugo had made no secret of his intentions with regard to Miss
+Dunbar, so that when it was known that his sisters and the rich
+American Mees would at last meet at the Countess von Amte's there was a
+flutter of curiosity in the exclusive circle of Munich.  The countess
+herself called twice on Clara that day, so great was her triumph that
+this social event would occur at her house.
+
+She asked boldly "Which of Miss Dunbar's marvellous Parisian
+confections will she wear?  It is so important for her future happiness
+that the princesses should be favorably impressed!  Aber, lieber Gott!"
+she shrieked, "don't let her speak French!  Not a word!  That would be
+ruin!  They are all patriotism!"  She hurried away, and ran back to say
+that the sun was shining as it had not done for days.
+
+"She thinks nature itself is agog to see how the princesses receive
+Lucy," said Miss Vance indignantly.  "One would suppose that the child
+was on trial."
+
+"So she is.  Me, too," said Jean, wistfully regarding the bebe waist of
+the gown which Doucet had just sent her.  "I must go as an ingenue.  I
+don't play the part well!"
+
+"No, you do not," said Clara.
+
+Miss Vance tapped at Lucy's door as she went down, and found her
+working at her embroidery.  "You must lie down for an hour, my dear,"
+she said, "and be fresh and rosy for this evening."
+
+"I am not going.  I must finish these pinks.  I have just sent a note
+of apology to the countess."
+
+"Not going!" Clara gasped, dismayed.  Then she laughed with triumph.
+"The princesses and all the Herrschaft of Munich will be there to pass
+judgment on the bride, and the bride will be sitting at home finishing
+her pinks!  Good!"
+
+"I am no bride!" Lucy rose, stuck her needle carefully in its place,
+and came closer to Miss Vance.  "I have made up my mind," she said
+earnestly.  "I shall never marry.  My life now is quiet and clean.  I'm
+not at all sure that it would be either if I were the Princess
+Wolfburgh."
+
+Clara stroked her hair fondly.  "Your decision is sudden, my dear," she
+faltered, at last.
+
+"Yes.  There was something last night.  It showed me what I was doing.
+To marry a man just because he is good and kind, that is--vile!"  The
+tears rushed to her eyes.  There was a short silence.
+
+"Don't look so aghast, dear Miss Vance," said Lucy cheerfully.  "Go now
+and dress to meet the Herrschaft."
+
+"And what will you do, child?"
+
+"I really must finish these pinks to-night."  She took up her work.
+Her chin trembled a little.  "We won't speak of this again, please,"
+she said.  "I never shall be a bride or a wife or mother.  I will have
+a quiet, independent life--like yours."
+
+The sunshine fell on the girl's grave, uplifted face, on the white
+walls, the blue stove, and the calm, watching Madonnas.  Clara, as Mrs.
+Waldeaux had done, thought of a nun in her cell to whom love could only
+be a sacred dream.
+
+She smiled back at Lucy, bade her goodnight, and closed the door.
+
+"Like mine?" she said, as she went down the corridor.  "Well, it is a
+comfortable, quiet life.  But empty----" And she laid her hand suddenly
+across her thin breast.
+
+
+Jean listened in silence when Clara told her briefly that Lucy was not
+going.
+
+"She is very shrewd," she said presently.  "She means to treat them de
+haut en bas from the outset.  It is capital policy."
+
+Jean, when she entered the countess's salon, with downcast eyes, draped
+in filmy lace without a jewel or flower, was shy innocence in person.
+Furst Hugo stood near the hostess, with two stout women in shabby gowns
+and magnificent jewels.
+
+"The frocks they made themselves, and the emeralds are heirlooms," Jean
+muttered to Clara, without lifting her timid eyes.
+
+"Miss Dunbar is not coming?" exclaimed the prince.
+
+"No," said Miss Vance.
+
+"The Fraulein is ill?" demanded one of his sisters.
+
+"No," Clara said, again smiling.  "WE expected to meet her," the
+younger princess said.  "It is most singular----"
+
+"She has sent her apology to the countess," said Clara gently, and
+passed on.
+
+But her little triumph was short lived.
+
+A famous professional soprano appeared in a white-ribboned enclosure at
+the end of the salon, and the guests were rapidly arranged according to
+their rank to listen.  Clara and Jean stood until every man and woman
+were comfortably seated, when they were placed in the back row.
+
+When the music was over supper was announced, and the same ceremony was
+observed.  The Highnessess, the hochwohlgeboren privy councillors, the
+hochgeboren secretaries, even the untitled Herren who held some petty
+office, were ushered with profound deference to their seats at the long
+table, while Clara stood waiting.  Jean's eyes still drooped meekly,
+but even her lips were pale.
+
+"How can you look so placid?" she whispered.  "It is a deliberate
+insult to your gray hairs."
+
+"No. It is the custom of the country.  It does not hurt me."
+
+They were led at the moment to the lowest seats.  Jean shot one
+vindictive glance around the table.
+
+"You have more wit and breeding than any of them!" she said.  "And as
+for me, this lace I wear would buy any of their rickety old palaces."
+
+"They have something which we cannot buy," said Miss Vance gravely.  "I
+never understood before how actual a thing rank is here."
+
+
+"Cannot it be bought?  I am going to look into that when this huge feed
+is over," Miss Hassard said to herself.
+
+Late in the evening she danced with Count Odo, and prattled to him in a
+childish, frank fashion which he found very charming.
+
+"Your rules of precedence are very disagreeable!" she pouted.
+"Especially when one sits at the foot of the table and is served last."
+
+"They must seem queer to you," he said, laughing, "but they are
+inflexible as iron."
+
+"But they will bend for Miss Dunbar, if she makes up her mind to marry
+your cousin?" she asked, looking up into his face like an innocent
+child.
+
+"No.  Hugo makes a serious sacrifice in marrying a woman of no birth,"
+he said.  "He must give up his place and title as head of the family.
+She will not be received at court nor in certain houses; she must
+always remain outside of much of his social life."
+
+He led her back to Miss Vance.  She seemed to be struck dumb, and even
+forgot to smile when he bowed low and thanked her for the dance.
+
+"Let us go home," she whispered to Clara.  "The American girl is a fool
+who marries one of these men!"
+
+When Miss Vance's carriage reached her hotel, she found Prince Hugo's
+coupe before the door.
+
+"He has come to see Lucy, alone!" she said indignantly, as she hurried
+up the steps.  "He has no right to annoy her!"
+
+She met him coming out of the long salle.  The little man walked
+nervously, fingering his sword hilt.  He could not control his voice
+when he tried to speak naturally.
+
+"Yes, gracious lady, I am guilty.  It was unpardonable to come when I
+knew the chaperone was gone.  But--ach!  I could not wait!" throwing
+out both hands to her.  "I have waited so long!  I knew when she did
+not come to meet my sisters to-night she had resolved against me, but I
+could not sleep uncertain.  So I break all the laws, and come!"
+
+"You have seen her, then?  She has told you?"
+
+He nodded without speaking.  His round face was red, and something like
+tears stood in his eyes.
+
+He waited irresolute a moment, and then threw up his head.
+
+"Soh!  It is over!  I shall not whine!  You have been very good to me,"
+he said earnestly, taking Clara's hand.  "This is the first great
+trouble in my life.  I have loved her very dearly.  I decided to make
+great sacrifices for her.  But I am not to have her--never."
+
+"I am so sorry for you, prince." Clara squeezed his hand energetically.
+"Nor her dot.  That would have been so comfortable for me," he said
+simply.
+
+Clara hid a smile, and bade him an affectionate good-night.
+
+As he passed into the outer salle a childish figure in creamy lace rose
+before him, and a soft hand was held out.  "I know what has happened!"
+she whispered passionately.  "She has treated you scandalously!  She
+cannot appreciate YOU!"
+
+Prince Hugo stuttered and coughed and almost kissed the little hand
+which lay so trustingly in his.  He found himself safely outside at
+last, and drove away, wretched to the soul.
+
+But below his wretchedness something whispered:  "SHE appreciates me,
+and her dot is quite as large."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+George Waldeaux hummed a tune gayly as he climbed the winding maze of
+streets in Vannes, one cloudy afternoon, with Lisa.
+
+"It is impertinent to be modern Americans in this old town," he said.
+"We might play that we were jongleurs, and that it was still mediaeval
+times.  I am sure the gray walls yonder and the fortress houses in this
+street have not changed in ages."
+
+"Neither have the smells, apparently," said Lisa grimly.  "Wrap this
+scarf about your throat, George.  You coughed last night."
+
+George tied up his throat.  "Coughed, did I?" he said anxiously.  He
+had had a cold last winter, and his wife with her poultices and fright
+had convinced him that he was a confirmed invalid.  The coming of her
+baby had given to the woman a motherly feeling toward all of the world,
+even to her husband.
+
+"Look at these women," he said, going on with his fancy presently.  "I
+am sure that they were here wearing these black gowns and huge red
+aprons in the twelfth century.  What is this?" he said, stopping
+abruptly, to a boy of six who was digging mud at the foot of an ancient
+ivy-covered tower.
+
+"C'est le tour du Connetable," the child lisped.  "Et v'la, monsieur!"
+pointing to a filthy pen with a gate of black oak; "v'la le donjon de
+Clisson!" "Who was Clisson?" said Lisa impatiently.
+
+"A live man to Froissart--and to this boy," said George, laughing.  "I
+told you that we had gone back seven centuries.  This fog comes in from
+the Morbihan sea where Arthur and his knights went sailing to find the
+Holy Greal.  They have not come back.  And south yonder is the country
+of the Druids.  I will take you to-morrow and show you twenty thousand
+of their menhirs, and then we will sail away to an island where there
+is an altar that the serpent worshippers built ages before Christ."
+
+
+Lisa laughed.  He was not often in this playful mood.  She panted as
+she toiled up the dark little street, a step behind him, but he did not
+think of giving her his arm.  He had grown accustomed to regard himself
+as the invalid now, and the one who needed care.
+
+"I am going for letters," he called back, diving into a dingy alley.
+The baby and its bonne were near Lisa.  The child never was out of her
+sight for, a moment.  She waited, standing a little apart from Colette
+to watch whether the passers-by would notice the baby.  When one or two
+of the gloomy and stolid women who hurried past in their wooden sabots
+clicked their fingers to it, she could not help smiling gayly and
+bidding them good-day.
+
+The fog was stifling.  As she waited she gave a tired gasp.  Colette
+ran to her. "Madame is going to be ill!"
+
+"No, no!  Don't frighten monsieur."
+
+George came out of the gate at the moment.
+
+"Going to faint again, Lisa?" he said, with an annoyed glance around
+the street.  "Your attacks do choose the most malapropos times----"
+
+"Oh, dear no, George!  I am quite well quite."  She walked beside him
+with an airy step, laughing gayly now and then, but George's frown
+deepened.
+
+"I don't understand these seizures at all," he said.  "You seem to be
+in sound physical condition."
+
+"Oh, all women have queer turns, George."
+
+"Did you consult D'Abri, as I told you to do, in Paris?"
+
+"Yes, yes!  Now let us talk no more about it.  I have had
+these--symptoms since I was a child."
+
+"You never told me of them before we were married," he muttered.
+
+Lisa scowled darkly at him, but she glanced at the baby and her mouth
+closed.  Little Jacques should never hear her rage nor swear.
+
+From an overhanging gable at the street corner looked down a roughly
+hewn stone Madonna.  The arms of the Holy Child were outstretched to
+bless.  Lisa paused before it, crossing herself.  A strange joy filled
+her heart.
+
+"I too am a mother!  I too!" she said.  She hurried after George and
+clung to his arm as they went home.
+
+"Was there any letter?" she asked.
+
+"Only one from Munich--Miss Vance.  I haven't opened it."
+
+"I thought your mother would write.  She must have heard about the boy!"
+
+George's face grew dark.  "No, she'll not write.  Nor come."
+
+"You wish for her every day, George?"  She looked at him wistfully.
+
+"Yes, I do.  She and I were comrades to a queer degree.  I long for
+something hearty and homelike again.  See here, Lisa.  I'm going home
+before my boy begins to talk.  I mean he shall grow up under wholesome
+American influences--not foreign."
+
+"Not foreign," she repeated gravely.  She was silent a while.  "I have
+thought much of it all lately," she said at last.  "It will be
+wholesome for Jacques on your farm.  Horses--dogs----  Your mother will
+love him.  She can't help it.  She--I acted like a beast to that woman,
+George.  I'll say that.  She hit me hard.  But she has good traits.
+She is not unlike my own mother."
+
+George said nothing.  God forbid that he should tell her, even by a
+look, that she and her mother were of a caste different from his own.
+
+But he was bored to the soul by the difference; he was tired of her
+ignorances, which she showed every minute, of her ghastly, unclean
+knowledges--which she never showed.
+
+They came into the courtyard of the Chateau de la Motte, the ancient
+castle of the Breton dukes, which is now an inn.  The red sunset flamed
+up behind the sad little town and its gray old houses and spires massed
+on the hill, and the black river creeping by.  George's eyes kindled at
+the sombre picture.
+
+"In this very court," he said, "Constance stood when she summoned the
+States of Brittany to save her boy Arthur from King John."
+
+"Oh, yes, you have read of it to me in your Shakespeare.  It is one of
+his unpleasant stories.  Come, Bebe.  It grows damp."
+
+As she climbed the stone stairway with the child, Colette lingered to
+gossip with the portier.  "Poor lady!  You will adore her!  She is one
+of us.  But she makes of that bete Anglais and the ugly child, saints
+and gods!"
+
+When George presently came up to their bare little room, Lisa was
+singing softly, as she rocked Jacques to sleep.
+
+"Can't you sing the boy something a bit more cheerful?" he said.  "You
+used to know some jolly catches from the music halls."
+
+"Catches for HIM?" with a frightened look at the child's shut eyes.
+
+"The 'Adeste Fideles' is moral, but it is not a merry air.  You sing it
+morning, noon, and night," he grumbled.
+
+"Yes," she whispered, laying the child in its crib.  "One never knows
+how much HE understands, and he may remember, I thought.  Some day when
+he is a great boy, he may hear it and he'll think, 'My mother sang that
+hymn.  She must have been a good woman!'"
+
+"Nonsense, Lisa," said George kindly.  "You'll teach him every day,
+while he is growing to be a great boy, that you are a good woman."
+
+She said nothing, but stood on the other side of the crib looking at
+him.
+
+"Well, what is it?" said George uneasily. "You look at me as if
+somebody were dragging you away from me."
+
+She laughed.  "What ridiculous fancies you have!"  She came behind him
+and, drawing his head back, kissed him on the forehead.  "Oh, you poor,
+foolish boy!" she said.
+
+Lisa sat down to her work, which was the making of garments for Jacques
+out of her own gowns.  She was an expert needlewoman, and had already a
+pile of fantastic kilts of cloth and velvet.
+
+"Enough to last until he is ten years old," George said contemptuously.
+"And you will not leave a gown for yourself."
+
+"There will be all I shall need," she said.
+
+He turned up the lamp and opened Clara's letter.
+
+Lisa's needle flew through the red and yellow silk.  It was pleasant
+work; she was doing it skilfully.  The fire warmed her thin blood.  She
+could hear the baby's regular, soft breathing as it slept.  A pleasure
+that was almost like health stole through her lean body.  She leaned
+back in her chair looking at Jacques.  In three years he could wear the
+velvet suit with the cap and pompon.  His hair would be yellow and
+curly, like his father's.  But his eyes would be like her mother's.
+She pressed her hands together, laughing, the hot tears rushing to her
+eyes.  "Ah, maman!" she said.  "Do you know that your little girl has a
+baby?  Can you see him?"
+
+What a superb "great boy" he would be!  He should go to a military
+school.  Yes!  She lay back in her chair, watching him.
+
+George suddenly started up with a cry of amazement.
+
+"What is it?" she said indifferently.
+
+He did not answer, but turned the letter and read it over again.  Then
+he folded it with shaking fingers.
+
+"I have news here.  Miss Vance thinks it time that I was told, and I
+agree with her.  It appears that I am a pauper, and always have been.
+My father died penniless."
+
+"Then Jacques will be poor?"
+
+"Jacques!  You think of nothing but that mewling, senseless thing!  It
+is mother--she always has supported me.  We are living now on the money
+that she earns from week to week, while I play that I am an artist!"
+
+Lisa listened attentively.  "It does not seem strange that a mother
+should work for her son," she said slowly.  "But she has never told us!
+That is fine!  I like that!  I told you she had very good traits."
+
+George stared at her. "But--me!  Don't you see what a cad I am?"
+
+He paced up and down, muttering, and then throwing on his hat went out
+into the night to be alone.
+
+Lisa sank back again and watched Jacques.  At military school, yes; and
+after he had left school he would be a soldier, perhaps.  Such a
+gallant young fellow!
+
+She leaned over the cradle, holding out her hands.  Ah, God! if she
+could but live to see it!  Surely it might be?  There was no pain now.
+Doctors were not infallible--even D'Abri might be mistaken, after all.
+
+George, coming in an hour later, found her sitting with her hands
+covering her face.
+
+"Are you asleep, Lisa?"
+
+"No."
+
+"There is a telegram from Clara.  My mother has left Munich for Vannes.
+She will be here in two days."
+
+She rose with an effort.  "I am glad for you, George."
+
+"You are ill, Lisa!"
+
+"A little tired, only.  Colette will give me my powder, and I shall be
+quite well in the morning.  Will you send her to me now?"
+
+After George was gone the rumbling of a diligence was heard in the
+courtyard, and presently a woman was brought up to the opposite chamber.
+
+The hall was dark.  Looking across it, Frances Waldeaux saw in the
+lighted room Lisa and her child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Before we come to the dark story of that night in the inn, it is but
+fair to Frances to say that she came there with no definite evil
+purpose.  She had been cheerful on her journey from Munich.  There was
+one clear fact in her brain:  She was on her way to George.
+
+The countless toy farms of southern France, trimmed neatly by the inch,
+swept past her.  In Brittany came melancholy stretches of brown heath
+and rain-beaten hills; or great affluent estates, the Manor houses
+covered with thatch, stagnant pools close to the doors, the cattle
+breaking through the slovenly wattled walls.
+
+Frances, being a farmer, felt a vague amusement at these things, but
+they were all dim to her as a faded landscape hanging on the wall.
+
+She was going to George.
+
+Sometimes she seemed to be in Lucy's room again, with the sweet, clean
+air of youth about her.  All of that purity and love might have gone
+into George's life--before it fell into the slough.
+
+But she was going now to take it out of the slough.
+
+There was a merchant and his wife from Geneva in the carriage with
+their little boy, a pretty child of five.  Frances played and joked
+with him.
+
+"Has madam also a son?" his mother asked civilly.
+
+She said yes, and presently added, "My son has now a great trouble, but
+I am going to relieve him of it."
+
+The woman, startled, stared at her.
+
+"Is it not right for me to rid him of it?" she demanded loudly.
+
+"Mais oui, certainement," said the Swiss.  She watched Frances after
+that furtively.  Her eyes, she thought, were quite sane.  But how
+eccentric all of these Americans were!
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux reached Vannes at nightfall.  At last!  Here was the
+place in this great empty world where he was.
+
+When the diligence entered the courtyard, George was so near to the
+gate that the smoke of his cigar was blown into her face, but he did
+not see her.  He was lean and pale, and his eyes told his misery.  When
+she saw them his mother grew sick from head to foot with a sudden
+nausea.  This was his wife's doing.  She was killing him!  Frances
+hurried into the inn, her legs giving way under her.  She could not
+speak to him.  She must think what to do.
+
+She was taken to her room.  It was dark, and across the corridor she
+saw Lisa in her lighted chamber.  This was good luck!  God had put the
+creature at once into her hands to deal with!
+
+She was conscious of a strange exaltation, as if from wine--as if she
+would never need to sleep nor eat again.  Her thoughts came and went
+like flashes of fire.  She watched Lisa as she would a vampire, a
+creeping deadly beast.  Pauline Felix--all that was adulterous and vile
+in women--there it was!
+
+Her mind too, as never before, was full of a haughty complacency in
+herself.  She felt like the member of some petty sect who is sure that
+God communes with him inside of his altar rails, while the man is
+outside whom he believes that God made only to be damned.
+
+Lisa began to undress.  Frances quickly turned away, ashamed of peeping
+into her chamber.  But the one fact burned on into her brain:
+
+The woman was killing George.
+
+If God would rid the world of her!  If a storm should rise now, and the
+lightning strike the house, and these stone walls should fall on her,
+now--now!
+
+But the walls stood firm and the moonlight shone tranquilly on the
+world outside.
+
+She told herself to be calm--to be just.  But there was no justice
+while this woman went on with her work! God saw.  He meant her to be
+stopped.  Frances prayed to him frantically that Lisa might soon be put
+off of the earth.  Just as the Catholic used to pray before he
+massacred the Huguenot, or the Protestant, when he tied his Catholic
+brother to the stake.  If this woman was mad for blood, it was a
+madness that many sincere people have shared.
+
+Colette was busy with her mistress for a long time.  She was very
+gentle and tender, being fond of Lisa, as people of her class always
+were.  She raised her voice as she made ready to leave the room.
+
+"If the pain returns, here is the powder of morphia, mixed, within
+madame's reach," she said.
+
+Frances came close to the door.
+
+"And if it continues?" asked Lisa.
+
+"Let monsieur call me.  I would not trust him to measure a powder,"
+Colette said, laughing.  "It is too dangerous.  He is not used to
+it--like me."
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux saw her lay a paper package on a shelf.
+
+"I will pray that the pain will not return," the girl said.  "But if it
+does, let monsieur knock at my door.  Here is the tisane when you are
+thirsty."  She placed a goblet of milky liquid near the bed.
+
+What more she said Frances did not hear.
+
+It was to be!  There was the morphia, and yonder the night drink within
+her reach.  It was God's will.
+
+Colette turned out the lamp, hesitated, and sat down by the fire.
+Presently she rose softly, bent over her mistress, and, finding her
+asleep, left the room noiselessly.  Her door closed far down the
+corridor.
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux was quite alone, now.
+
+It was but a step across the hall.  So easy to do--easy.  It must be
+done at once.
+
+But her feet were like lead, she could not move; her tongue lay icy
+cold in her mouth.  Her soul was willing, but her body rebelled.
+
+What folly was this?  It was the work of a moment.  George would be
+free.  She would have freed him.
+
+In God's name then----
+
+She crossed the hall softly.  Into the hell of her thoughts flashed a
+little womanish shame, that she, Frances Waldeaux, should be walking on
+tiptoe, like a thief.
+
+She took down the package, and leaning over the table at the side of
+the bed, shook the white powder into the glass.  Then she went back to
+her room and shut the door.
+
+The casement was open and the moonlight was white outside.  She was
+conscious that the glare hurt her eyes, and that there was a strange
+stricture about her jaws and the base of her brain, like an iron hand.
+
+It seemed to her but a minute that she stood there, but the dawn was
+breaking when there was a sudden confusion in the opposite room.  She
+heard Colette's voice, and then George's, calling Lisa.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+Frances stood up, to listen.  "Will she not speak?" she cried.  "Make
+her speak!"
+
+But in reality she said nothing.  Even her breath had stopped to listen.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+Frances was awake now, for the rest of her life.  She knew what she had
+done.
+
+"Why, George," she said, "she cannot speak.  She is dead.  I did it."
+
+She stood in the room a minute, looking from side to side, and then
+went with measured steps out of it, down the corridor and into the
+street.
+
+"I did it," she said to herself again and again, as she walked slowly
+on.
+
+The old cathedral is opposite to the inn.  Her eyes, as she passed,
+rested on the gargoyles, and she thought how fine they were.  One was a
+ridiculous head with lolling tongue.
+
+A priest's voice inside was chanting mass.  A dozen Breton women in
+their huge white winged caps and wooden shoes hurried up to the door,
+through the gray fog.  They met Mrs. Waldeaux and saw her face.  They
+huddled to one side, crossing themselves, and when she passed, stood
+still, forgetting the mass and looking, frightened, up the steep street
+behind her to find what horror had pursued her.
+
+"They know what I have done," she said aloud.
+
+Once when she was a child she had accidentally seen a bloated wretch, a
+murderer, on his way to the gallows.
+
+"I am he," she thought.  "I--_I_, Frances."
+
+Then the gargoyle came into her mind again.  What a capital headpiece
+it would make for "Quigg's" next column!  It was time this week's jokes
+were sent.
+
+But at last these ghosts of yesterday's life faded out, and she saw the
+fact.
+
+She had hated her son's wife and had killed her!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+When the sun was well up the women who had been at mass gathered down
+by the little river which runs through the old city, to wash their
+clothes.  They knelt on the broad stones by the edge of the water,
+chattering and singing, tossing the soap from one to another.
+
+There was a sudden silence.  "Here she is again," they whispered, as a
+slight, delicate woman crossed the bridge with steady steps.
+
+"She is blind and deaf," said old Barbe.  "I met her an hour ago and
+asked her whom she sought.  She did not see nor hear me, but walked
+straight on."
+
+Oliver Bauzy was lounging near, as usual, watching his wife work.
+
+"She is English.  What does she know of your Breton talk?  I speak
+English and French--I!" he bragged,  and walking up to Mrs. Waldeaux,
+he flourished his ragged hat, smiling.  "Is madame ill?  She has walked
+far," he said kindly.
+
+The English words seemed to waken her.  "It is always the town,"
+looking around bewildered.  "The people--houses.  I think I am not
+well.  If I could find the woods----"
+
+Bauzy had but a hazy idea of her meaning, but he nodded gravely.  "She
+is a tourist.  She wants to go out of Vannes--to see the chateaux, the
+dolmens.  I'm her man.  I'll drive her to Larmor Baden," he said to his
+wife.  "I have to go there to-day, and I may as well make a franc or
+two.  Keep her until I bring the voiture."
+
+But Frances stood motionless until the old wagon rattled up to the
+water's edge.
+
+"She has a dear old face," Bauzy's wife whispered.
+
+"She is blind and deaf, I tell you," old Barbe grumbled, peering up at
+her.  "Make her pay, Oliver, before you go."
+
+Bauzy nodded, and when Frances was seated held out his hand.
+
+"Twenty francs," he said.
+
+She opened her bag and gave them to him.
+
+"She must be folle!" he said uneasily.  "I feel like a thief.  Away
+with you, Babette!" as a pretty baby ran up to him.  "You want to ride?
+That is impossible.  Unless, indeed, madame desires it?" lifting the
+child to place her on the seat.  Babette laughed and held out her hands.
+
+But Mrs. Waldeaux shrank back, shuddering.  "Take her away," she
+whispered.  "She must not touch me!"
+
+The mother seized the child, and the women all talked vehemently at
+once.  Oliver climbed into the voiture and drove off in silence.  When
+he looked around presently he saw that the woman's face was bloodless,
+and a cold sweat stood on it.  He considered a while.  "You want food,"
+he said, and brought out some hard bread and a jug of Normandy cider.
+
+Frances shook her head.  She only spoke once during the morning, and
+then told him something about a woman "whom no child could touch.  No
+man or woman could touch her as long as she lived.  Not even her son."
+
+As Bauzy could make nothing of this, he could only nod and laugh
+civilly.  But presently he, too, grew silent, glancing at her
+uncomfortably from time to time.
+
+They drove through great red fields of sarasson, hedged by long banks
+of earth, which were masses of golden gorse and bronzed and crimson
+ferns.  The sun shone, the clover-scented air was full of the joyous
+buzzing of bees and chirp of birds.
+
+"It is a gay, blessed day!" Bauzy said, "thanks to the good God!"  He
+waited anxiously for her reply, but she stared into the sunshine and
+said nothing.
+
+Larmor Baden is a lonely little cluster of gray stone huts on the shore
+of the Morbihan sea.  Some of Bauzy's friends lounged smiling up to
+welcome him, waving their wide black hats with velvet streamers, and
+bowing low to the lady.  Oliver alighted with decision.  One thing he
+knew:  He would not drive back with her.  Something was amiss.  He
+would wash his hands of her.
+
+"Here, madame, is Vincent Selo, paysageur," he said rapidly in French.
+"He has a good boat.  He will take you where you desire.  Sail with her
+to Gavr' Inis," he said to Selo, "and bring her back at her pleasure.
+Somebody can drive her back to Vannes, and don't overcharge her, you
+robbers!"
+
+"Gavr' Inis?" Frances repeated.
+
+"It is an island in the sea yonder, madame.  A quiet place of trees.
+When there was not a man in the world, evil spirits built there an
+altar for the worship of the devil.  No men could have built it.  There
+are huge stones carried there from the mountains far inland, that no
+engine could lift.  It is a great mystery."
+
+"It is the one place in the world, people say," interrupted Selo,
+lowering his voice, "where God never has been.  A dreadful place,
+madame!"
+
+Frances laughed.  "That is the place for me," she said to Selo.  "Take
+me there."
+
+The old man looked at her with shrewd, friendly eyes, and then beckoned
+Bauzy aside.
+
+"Who is she?  She has the bearing of a great lady, but her face hurts
+me.  What harm has come to her?"
+
+"How do I know?" said Bauzy.  "Go for your boat.  The sea is rising."
+
+
+Late in the afternoon M. Selo landed his strange passenger upon the
+pebbly beach of the accursed island.  He led her up on the rocks,
+talking, and pointing across the sea.
+
+"Beyond is the Atlantic, and on yonder headland are the great menhirs
+of Carnac--thirty thousand of them, brought there before Christ was
+born.  But the Evil One loves this island best of all places.  It has
+in it the mystery of the world.  Come," he said, in an awed voice.  "It
+is here."
+
+He crossed to the hill, stooped, and entered a dark cave about forty
+feet long, which was wholly lined with huge flat rocks carved with
+countless writhing serpents.  As Frances passed they seemed to stir and
+breathe beside her, at her feet, overhead.  The cave opened into a
+sacrificial chamber.  The reptiles grew gigantic here, and crowded
+closer.  Through some rift a beam of melancholy light crept in; a smell
+of death hung in the thick, unclean air.
+
+Selo pointed to a stone altar.  "It was there they killed their
+victims," he whispered, and began to pray anxiously, half-aloud.  When
+he had finished, he hurried back, beckoning to her to come out.
+
+"Go," she said.  "I will stay here."
+
+"Then I will wait outside.  This is no place for Christian souls.  But
+we must return soon, madame.  My little girl will be watching now for
+me."
+
+When he was gone she stood by the altar.  This island of Gavr' Inis was
+one of the places to which she and George had long ago planned to come.
+She remembered the very day on which they had read the legend that on
+this altar men before the Flood had sacrificed to the god of Murder.
+
+"I am the murderer now, and George knows it," she said quietly.  But
+she was cold and faint, and presently began to tremble weakly.
+
+She went out of the cave and stood on the beach.  "I want to go home,
+George," she said aloud.  "I want to be Frances Waldeaux again.  I'm
+sure I didn't know it was in me to do that thing."
+
+There was no answer.  She was alone in the great space of sky and sea.
+The world was so big and empty, and she alone and degraded in it!
+
+"I never shall see George again.  He will think of me only as the woman
+who killed his wife," she thought.
+
+She went on blindly toward the water, and stood there a long time.
+
+Then, in the strait of her agony, there came to Frances Waldeaux, for
+the first time in her life, a perception that there was help for her in
+the world, outside of her own strength.  Her poor tortured wits
+discerned One, more real than her crime, or George, or the woman that
+she had killed.  It was an old, hackneyed story, that He knew every man
+and woman in the world, that He could help them.  She had heard it
+often.
+
+Was there any thing in it?  Could He help her?
+
+Slowly, the nervous twitching of her body quieted, her dulled eyes
+cleared as if a new power of sight were coming to them.
+
+After a long time she heard steps, and Selo calling.  She rose.
+
+The murder was known.  They were coming to arrest her.
+
+What did it matter?  She had found help.
+
+Selo came up excitedly.
+
+"It is another boat, English folk also, that comes to arrive."
+
+She turned and waited.
+
+And then, coming up the hill, she saw George, and with him--Lisa!
+Lisa, smiling as she talked.
+
+They ran to meet her with cries of amazement.  She staggered back on
+the rock.
+
+"You are not dead?  Lisa----"
+
+"Dead?  Poor lady!" catching her in her arms.  "Some water, George!  It
+is her head.  She has been too much alone."
+
+When Frances opened her eyes she was lying on the grass, her children
+kneeling beside her.  She caught Lisa's arm in both hands and felt it:
+then she sat up.
+
+"I must tell you what I did--before you speak to me."
+
+"Not now," said Lisa.  "You are not well.  I am going to be your nurse.
+The baby has made me a very good nurse," and she stooped again over
+Frances, with kind, smiling eyes.
+
+Selo came to wile George up to the mysterious cave, but Lisa
+impatiently hurried them to the beach.  "Caves and serpent worshippers
+truly!" she cried.  "Why, she has not seen Jacques!" and when, in the
+boat, George, who was greatly alarmed, tried to rouse his mother from
+her silent stupor, Lisa said gayly, "She will be herself again as soon
+as she sees HIM."
+
+When they reached Larmor Baden, she despatched George in search of
+Colette and the child, and she went into the church.  It was late, and
+the village women sat on the steps gossipping in the slanting sunlight.
+There is nothing in their lives but work and the church; and when, each
+day, they have finished with one they go to the other.
+
+Frances followed her.  The sombre little church was vacant.  She
+touched Lisa on the shoulder.
+
+"There is something I must tell you," she said.  "You would not let me
+touch the child, if you knew it."
+
+She stooped and spoke a few sentences in a vehement whisper, and then
+leaned back, exhausted, against the wall.
+
+Lisa drew back.  Her lips were white with sudden fright, but she
+scanned Mrs. Waldeaux's face keenly.
+
+"You were in Vannes last night?  You tried----  My God, I remember!
+The tisane tasted queerly, and I threw it out."  She walked away for a
+moment, and then turning, said, "You called my mother a vile woman
+once.  But SHE would not have done that thing!
+
+"No," said Frances, not raising her head.  "No."
+
+Lisa stood looking at her as she crouched against the wall.  The fierce
+scorn slowly died out of her eyes.  She was a coarse, but a
+good-natured, woman.  An awful presence, too, walked with her always
+now, step by step, and in that dread shadow she saw the things of life
+more justly than we do.  She took Frances by the hand at last.  "You
+were not quite yourself, I think," she said quietly.  "I have pushed
+you too hard.  George has told me so much about you!  If we could be
+together for a while, perhaps we should love each other a little.  But
+there is no time now----"  She turned hastily, and threw herself down
+before a crucifix.
+
+After a long time she went out to the vestibule, where she found
+Frances, and said, with an effort to be cheerful and matter-of-fact,
+"Come, now, let us talk like reasonable people.  A thing is coming to
+me which comes to every-body.  I'm not one to whine.  But it's the
+child--I don't think any baby ever was as much to a woman as Jacques is
+to me.  I suppose God does not think I am fit to bring him up.  Sit
+down and let me tell you all about it."
+
+They sat on the steps, talking in a low tone.  Frances cried, but
+Lisa's eyes were quite dry and bright.  She rose at last.
+
+"You see, there will be no woman to care for him, if you do not.  There
+he is with Colette."  She ran down, took the baby from the bonne, and
+laid him in Frances's arms.
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux looked down at him.  "George's son," she whispered,
+"George's boy!"
+
+"He is very like George and you," Lisa answered.  "He is a Waldeaux."
+
+"Yes, I see."
+
+She held him close to her breast as they drove back to Vannes.  George
+whistled and sang on the box.  He was very light of heart to have her
+with him again.
+
+He looked impatiently at an ancient village through which they passed,
+with its towers, and peasants in strange garbs, like the pictures in
+some crusading tale.
+
+"Now that we have mother, Lisa," he said, "we'll go straight back home.
+I am tired of mediaeval times.  I must get to work for this youngster."
+
+Lisa did not speak for a moment.  "I should like to stay in Vannes a
+little longer," she said.  "I did not tell you, but--my mother is
+buried there.  That was why I came; I should like to be with her."
+
+"Why, of course, dear.  As long as you like," he said affectionately.
+"I will not detain you long.  Perhaps only a week or two," she said.
+
+He nodded, and began to whistle cheerfully again.  Frances looked at
+Lisa, and her eyes filled with tears.  It was a pitiful tragedy!
+
+But the poor girl was quite right not to worry George until the last
+moment.  She was blocking his way--ruining his life, and God was taking
+her away so that she could no longer harm him.
+
+And yet--poor Lisa!
+
+They drove on.  The sun warmed the crimson fields, and the birds
+chirped, and this was George's child creeping close to her breast.  It
+stirred there a keen pang of joy.
+
+Surely He had forgiven her.
+
+A month later a group of passengers in deep mourning stood apart on the
+deck of the Paris as she left the dock at Liverpool.  It was George
+Waldeaux, his mother, and little Jacques with his nurse.  Mrs. Waldeaux
+was looking at Clara and her girls, who were watching her from the
+dock.  They had come to Vannes when Lisa died, and had taken care of
+her and the baby until now.  Frances had cried at leaving them, but
+George stood with his back to them moodily, looking down into the black
+water.
+
+"It seems but a few days since we sailed from New York on the Kaiser
+Wilhelm," he said, "and yet I have lived out all my life in that time."
+
+"All?  Is there nothing left, George?" his mother said gently.
+
+"Oh, of course, you are always a good companion, and there is the
+child----"  He paused.  The fierce passions, the storms of delight and
+pain of his life with Lisa rushed back on him.  "I will work for
+others, and wear out the days as I can," he said.  "But life is over
+for me.  The story is told.  There are only blank pages now to the end."
+
+He turned his dim eyes toward the French coast.  She knew that they saw
+the little bare grave on the hill in Vannes.  "I wish I could have seen
+something green growing on it before I left her there alone!" he
+muttered.
+
+"Her mother's grave was covered with roses----" Frances answered
+quickly.  "They will creep over to her.  She is not alone, George.  I
+am glad she was laid by her mother.  She loved her dearly."
+
+"Yes.  Better than any thing on earth," he responded gloomily.
+
+A few moments later the ship swung heavily around.
+
+"We are going!" Mrs. Waldeaux cried, waving her hand.  "Won't you look
+at Clara and Lucy, George?  They have been so good to us.  If Lucy had
+been my own child, she could not have been kinder to me."
+
+Mr. Waldeaux turned and raised his crepe-bound hat, looking at Lucy in
+her soft gray gown vaguely, as he might at a white gull dropped on the
+shore.
+
+"I suppose I never shall see her again," said his mother.  "Clara tells
+me she is besieged by lovers.  She is going to marry a German prince,
+probably."
+
+"That would be a pity," George said, with a startled glance back at the
+girl.
+
+"Good-by, my dear!" Mrs. Waldeaux leaned over the bulwark.  "She is
+beautiful as an angel!  Good-by, Lucy!  God bless you!" she sobbed,
+kissing her hand.
+
+Mr. Waldeaux looked steadily at Lucy.  "How clean she is!" he said.
+
+When the shore was gone he walked down the deck, conscious of a sudden
+change in himself.  He was wakening out of an ugly dream.  The sight of
+the healthy little girl, with her dewy freshness and blue eyes, full of
+affection and common sense, cheered and heartened him.  He did not know
+what was doing it, but he threw up his head and walked vigorously.  The
+sun shone and the cold wind swept him out into a dim future to begin a
+new life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+George Waldeaux took his mother and boy back to the old homestead in
+Delaware.  They arrived at night, and early the next morning he rowed
+away in his bateau to some of his old haunts in the woods on the bay,
+and was seen no more that day.
+
+"He is inconsolable!" his mother told some of her old neighbors who
+crowded to welcome her.  "His heart is in that grave in Vannes." The
+women listened in surprise, for Frances was not in the habit of
+exploiting her emotions in words.
+
+"We understood," said one of them, with a sympathetic shake of the
+head, "that it was a pure love match.  Mrs. George Waldeaux, we heard,
+was a French artist of remarkable beauty?"
+
+Frances moved uneasily.  "I never thought her--but I can't discuss
+Lisa!"  She was silent a moment.  "But as for her social position"--she
+drew herself up stiffly, fixing cold defiant eyes on her
+questioner--"as for her social position," she went on resolutely, "she
+was descended on one side from an excellent American family, and on the
+other from one of the noblest houses in Europe."
+
+When they were gone she hugged little Jacques passionately as he lay on
+her lap.  "That is settled for you!" she said.
+
+When George came back in the evening, he found her walking with the boy
+in her arms on the broad piazzas.
+
+"I really think he knows that he has come home, George!" she exclaimed.
+"See how he laughs!  And he liked the dogs and horses just as Lisa
+thought he would.  I am glad it is such a beautiful home for him.  Look
+at that slope to the bay!  There is no nobler park in England!  And the
+house is as big as most of their palaces, and much more comfortable!"
+
+"Give the child to Colette, mother, and listen to me.  Now that I have
+settled you and him here, I must go and earn your living."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She followed him into the hall.
+
+"I leave you to-morrow.  There is no time to be lost."
+
+"You are going back to art, George?"
+
+"No!  Never!"
+
+Frances grew pale.  She thought she had torn open his gaping wound.
+
+"I did not mean to remind you of--of----"
+
+"No, it isn't that!"
+
+He scowled at the fire.  Art meant for him his own countless daubs, and
+the sickening smell of oily paints and musk, and soiled silk tea gowns,
+and the whole slovenly, disreputable scramble of Bohemian life in Paris.
+
+"I loathe art!" he said, with a furious blow at the smouldering log in
+the fireplace, as if he struck these things all down into the ashes
+with it.
+
+"Will you go back into the Church, dear?" his mother ventured timidly.
+
+"Most certainly, no!" he said vehemently. "Of all mean frauds the
+perfunctory priest is the meanest.  If I could be like one of the old
+holy gospellers--then indeed!"
+
+He was silent a moment, and then began to stride up and down the long
+hall, his head thrown back, his chest inflated.
+
+"I have a message for the world, mother."
+
+"I am sure of it," she interrupted eagerly.
+
+"But I must deliver it in my own way.  I have lost two years.  I am
+going to put in big strokes of work now.  In the next two years I
+intend to take my proper place in my own country.  I will find standing
+room for George Waldeaux," with a complacent smile.  "And in the
+meantime, of course, I must make money enough to support you and the
+boy handsomely.  So you see, mother," he ended, laughing, "I have no
+time to lose."
+
+"No, George!"  It was the proudest moment of her life.  How heroic and
+generous he was!
+
+She filled his pocket-book the next day, when he went to New York to
+take the world by the throat.  It was really not George Waldeaux's
+fault that she filled it.
+
+Nor was it his fault that during the next two years the world was in no
+hurry to run to his feet, either to learn of him, or to bring him its
+bags of gold.  The little man did his best; he put his "message," as he
+called it, into poems, into essays, into a novel.  Publishers thanked
+him effusively for the pleasure of reading them, and--sent them back.
+The only word of his which reached the public was a review of the work
+of a successful author.  It was so personal, so malignant, that George,
+when he read it, writhed with shame and humiliation.  He tore the paper
+into fragments.
+
+"Am I so envious and small as that!  Before God, no words of mine shall
+ever go into print again!" he said, and he kept his word.
+
+He came down every month or two to his mother.
+
+"Why not try teaching, George?" she said anxiously.  "These great
+scholars and scientific men have places and reputations which even you
+need not despise."
+
+He laughed bitterly.  "I tried for a place as tutor in a third-class
+school, and could not pass the examinations.  I know nothing
+accurately.  Nothing."
+
+It occurred to him to  go into politics and help reform the world by
+routing a certain Irish boss.  He made a speech at a ward meeting, and
+broke down in the middle of it before the storm of gibes and hootings.
+
+"What was the matter?" he asked a friend, whose face was red with
+laughter.
+
+"My dear fellow, you shouldn't lecture them!  You're not the parson.
+They resent your air of enormous superiority.  For Heaven's sake, don't
+speak again--in this campaign."
+
+It is a wretched story.  There is no need of going into the details.
+There was no room for him.  He tried in desperation to get some
+foothold in business.  The times were hard that winter, which of course
+was against him.  Besides, his critical, haughty air naturally did not
+prepossess employers in his favor when he came to ask for a job.
+
+At the end of the second year the man broke down.
+
+"The work of the world," he told Frances, "belongs to specialists.
+Even a bootblack knows his trade.  I know nothing.  I can do nothing.
+I am a mass of flabby pretences."
+
+Every month she filled his pocket-book.  She found at last that he did
+not touch the money.  He sold his clothes and his jewelry to keep
+himself alive while he tramped  the streets of New York looking for
+work.  He starved himself to make this money last.  His flesh was
+lead-colored from want of proper food, and he staggered from weakness.
+"'He that will not work neither let him eat,'" he said grimly.
+
+It was about this time that Miss Vance came home.  Mrs. Waldeaux in a
+moment of weakness gave her a hint of his defeat.
+
+"Is the world blind," she cried, "to deny work to a man of George's
+capacity?  What does it mean?"
+
+Clara heard of George's sufferings with equanimity.  "The truth is,"
+she said, when she told the story to Miss Dunbar, "Frances brought that
+boy up to believe that he was a Grand Llama among men.  There is no
+work for Grand Llamas in this country, and when he understands that he
+is made of very ordinary clay indeed, he will probably be of some use
+in the world."
+
+Lucy was watering her roses.  "It is a matter of indifference to me,"
+she said, "what the people of New York think of Mr. Waldeaux."
+
+Clara looked at her quickly.  "I do not quite catch your meaning?" she
+said.
+
+But Lucy filled her can, and forgot to answer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Clara had brought Miss Dunbar back and established her in her own house
+near Weir, under the care of a deaf widowed aunt.  Dunbar Place was a
+stately colonial house, set in a large demesne, and all Kent County
+waited breathless to know what revelations the heiress would make to
+it, in the way of equi-pages, marqueterie furniture, or Paris gowns.
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux found Lucy one day, a month after her arrival, seated at
+her sewing on the broad, rose-covered piazza, looking as if she never
+had left it.
+
+"Have you come to stay now, my dear," she said, "or will Prince
+Wolfburgh----"
+
+"Oh, that is an old story," interrupted Clara.  "Lucy handed the little
+prince over to Jean Hassard, who married him after he had a long fight
+with her father about her dot.  He won the dot, but Count Odo is now
+the head of the house.  Jean, I hear, is in Munich fighting her way up
+among the Herrschaft."
+
+"Jean has good fighting qualities," Lucy said.  "She will win."
+
+"I had a letter from her to-day," said Miss Vance.  "Here it is.  She
+says, 'I mean to rebuild the Schloss, and I have put a stop to the
+soap-boiling business.  I will have no fumes of scorching fat in our
+ancestral halls.  Four of the princesses live with us here in the flat.
+Gussy Carson from Pond City is staying with me now.  We have an
+American tea every Wednesday.  Gus receives with me.'"
+
+"Poor princesses!" said Lucy.
+
+Miss Vance folded the letter with a complacent nod.  "I am glad that
+Jean is settled so satisfactorily," she said.  "As for Lucy----"
+
+No one answered.  Lucy threaded her needle.
+
+"I start next week to Chicago, did you know, Frances?  The Bixbys--two
+orphan heiresses--wish me to take them to Australia, coming back by
+India.  And I suppose," she said, rising impatiently, "if I were to
+stay away forty years I should find Lucy when I came back, with white
+hair maybe, but sitting calmly sewing, not caring whether there was a
+man in the world or not!"
+
+Lucy laughed, but did not even blush.
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux presently said good-by, and Clara went home with her to
+spend the night.  Lucy was left alone upon the piazza.  It was there
+that George Waldeaux saw her again.
+
+
+This had been the hardest day of his life.  He rose that morning
+telling himself with an oath that he would earn the money to buy his
+own food or never eat again.  His mother had sent him a cheque by post.
+He tore it up and went out of his cheap lodging-house without
+breakfast.  There was a queer change in him--a sudden lofty
+independence--a sudden loathing of himself.  He knew now that it was
+not in him to do good work in the world, but at least he would pay his
+own way.  He had been a mass of vanity and now he was so mean in his
+own eyes that he shrank from the passers-by.  Perhaps the long strain
+had damaged the gray matter of the brain, or some nervous centre--I do
+not know what change a physician would have found in him, but the man
+was changed.
+
+A clerk was needed in a provision shop on Green Street.  George placed
+himself in the line of dirty, squalid applicants.  The day was hot, the
+air of the shop was foul with the smells of rotting meat and
+vegetables.  He felt himself stagger against a stall.  He seemed to be
+asleep, but he heard the butchers laughing.  They called him a drunken
+tramp, and then he was hurled out on the muddy pavement.
+
+"Too much whiskey for this time o' day!" a policeman said, hauling him
+to his feet.
+
+"Move along, young man!"
+
+Whiskey?  That was what he wanted.  He turned into a shop and bought a
+dram with his last pennies.  It made him comfortable for a few hours,
+then he began to cry and swear.  George Waldeaux had never been drunk
+in his life.  The ascetic, stainless priest in him stood off and looked
+at this dog of the gutter with his obscene talk, and then came defeat
+of soul and body.
+
+"I give up!" he said quietly.  "I'll never try again."
+
+He wandered unconsciously to the ferry and, having his yearly book of
+tickets in his pocket, took the train for home from force of habit.  He
+left the cars at a station several miles from Weir, and wandered across
+the country.  Just at sundown, covered with mud and weak from hunger
+and drunkenness, he crossed the lawn before Lucy's house and, looking
+up, saw her.
+
+He had stumbled into a world of peace and purity!  A soft splendor
+filled the sky and the bay and the green slopes, with their clumps of
+mighty forest trees.  The air was full of the scents of flowers and the
+good-night song of happy birds.  And in the midst of it all, lady of
+the great domain, under her climbing rose vines, sat the young, fair
+woman, clad in some fleecy white garments, her head bent, her blue eyes
+fixed on the distance--waiting.
+
+George stopped, sobered by a sudden wrench of his heart.  There was the
+world to which he belonged--there!  His keen eye noted every delicate
+detail of her beauty and of her dress.  He was of her sort, her
+kind--he, kicked into the gutter from that foul shop as a tramp!
+
+This is what I have lost! his soul cried to him.
+
+He had not as yet recognized Lucy.  But now she saw him, and with a
+little inarticulate cry like that of a bird, she flew down the steps.
+"Ah!  It is you!" she said.  "I thought you would come to welcome me
+some time!"
+
+Her voice was like a soft breath; her airy draperies blew against him.
+It was as if a wonderful, beautiful dream were folding him in--and in.
+
+He drew back.  "I am not fit, Miss Dunbar.  I did not know you were
+here.  Why--look at me!"
+
+"Oh!  You are ill!  You have had an accident!" she cried.  She had laid
+her little white fingers on his hand and now, feeling it burn and
+tremble at her touch, she caught it in both of her own and drew him
+into the house.
+
+"Mr. Waldeaux," she said to a servant who appeared, "has had a fall.
+Bring him water and towels.  Take care of him, Stephen."  She spoke
+quietly, but her voice trembled with fright.
+
+The man led George to an inner room.
+
+"Were you thrown, sir?" he asked sympathetically.
+
+George hesitated.  "Yes, I was thrown," he said grimly.
+
+He made himself clean in angry haste, taking the whisk from the man and
+brushing off the dry mud with a vicious fury.
+
+Lucy came to meet him, with a pale, anxious smile.  "You must not go
+without a cup of hot coffee," she said, leading him to a lounge in the
+hall.  It was very sweet to be treated like a sick man!
+
+"And God knows I am sick, body and soul!" he thought, sinking down.
+
+Beside the lounge was a little table with one cover.  He noted with
+keen pleasure the delicate napery, the silver candlesticks, the bowl of
+roses, with which the substantial meal was set out.  Lucy waited on him
+with the quick intelligence of a trained nurse.  She scarcely spoke,
+yet her every motion, as she served him, seemed a caress.  When he had
+finished he began to stammer out his thanks.
+
+"No," she said, rising decisively.  "You are too weak to talk to me
+to-night, Mr. Waldeaux.  The coupe is at the door.  John will drive you
+home.  You need sleep now."
+
+As he sank down into the luxurious cushions and drove away through the
+twilight, he saw the little white figure in the door, and the grave
+wistful face looking after him.
+
+"Did she suspect!" he suddenly cried, starting up.
+
+But George Waldeaux never knew how much Lucy suspected that night.
+
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. Waldeaux's mare had jogged on leisurely, dragging her
+mistress and Miss Vance home through the shady country lanes.
+
+"Phebe is old," apologized Frances.  "She really is a retired car
+horse."
+
+"You used to take pride in your horses, Frances?"
+
+"Yes."  Mrs. Waldeaux added after a pause.  "My income is small.  Of
+course George soon will be coining money, but just now----  The peach
+crop failed this year too.  And I save every dollar for Jack's
+education."
+
+"But what of the jokes for the New York paper?  They were profitable."
+
+"Oh, I gave them up long ago." She glanced around cautiously.  "Never
+speak of that, Clara.  I would not have George know for the world; I
+never would hold up my head if he knew that I was 'Quigg.'"
+
+Miss Vance gave a contemptuous sniff, but Mrs. Waldeaux went on
+eagerly, "I have a plan!  You know that swampy tract of ours near
+Lewes?  When I have enough money I'll drain it and lay out a summer
+resort--hotels--cottages.  I'll develop it as I sell the lots.  Oh,
+Jack shall have his millions yet to do great work in the world!" her
+eyes sparkling.  "Though perhaps he may choose to strip himself of
+everything to give to the poor, like Francis d'Assisi!  That would be
+best of all.  It's not unlikely.  He is the most generous boy!"
+
+"Stuff!" said Miss Vance.  "St. Francis, indeed!  I observe, by the
+way, that he crosses himself after his meals.  Are you making a
+Romanist of the child?  And you speak French to him, too?"
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux's color rose.  "His mother was French and Catholic," she
+said.  "I will not have Lisa forgotten."
+
+They went on in silence.  Miss Vance was lost in thought.  Was George
+Waldeaux equally eager to keep his wife's memory alive?  Now that the
+conceit had been beaten out of him, he would not make a bad husband.
+And her child Lucy had always--esteemed him highly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+The next day was Sunday.  George jumped out of bed with the dawn.  He
+whistled and sang scraps of songs as he took his bath.  The sun shone.
+What a full, happy world it was, anyhow!  And he had given up the game
+last night?  Why, life was just beginning for him!  He was nothing but
+a boy--not yet thirty.  He would make a big success soon, and then try
+to win--to win----  He stopped, breathless, looking into the distance,
+and his eyes slowly grew wet with passion and longing.
+
+He left the house and struck across the country through the woodland
+and farms.  He did not know why he went--he had to go.  When he reached
+the Dunbar woods, he stood in the thicket for hours, watching the
+house.  She came out at last and sat down on the steps to play with the
+dog.  Last night in her white, delicate beauty she had not seemed
+real--she was far off, like an angel coming down into his depths of
+misery.
+
+But to-day she sat on the steps in her pretty blue gown, and laughed
+and rolled Tramp over, and sung snatches of songs, and was nothing but
+a foolish girl.  For so many years he had been thinking of work and
+money-making and bosses.  All of that mean drudgery fell out of sight
+now.  He was a man, young, alone, on fire with hope and passion.  His
+share of life had been mean and pinched; yonder was youth and gladness
+and tranquillity.  The world was empty, save for themselves.  He was
+here, and there was the one woman in it--the one woman.
+
+He looked at his tanned, rough fingers.  Last night she had folded them
+in her two soft little hands, and drawn him on--on into home!
+
+He would go up to her now and tell her----
+
+George pushed aside the bushes, but at that moment Lucy rose and went
+into the house.  After a moment he crossed the lawn and sat down on the
+piazza, calling the dog to him.  She would come back soon.  Tramp's
+head rested on his knee as he stroked it.  It was here her hand had
+touched it--and here----
+
+The scent of roses was heavy in the sunshine, the bees hummed; he sat
+there in a hazy dream, waiting for the door to open and the joy of his
+life to begin.
+
+He was dragged roughly enough out of his dream.
+
+Miss Dunbar's landau drove to the door to take her to church.  George
+looked up, carelessly noting how quiet and perfectly appointed it was,
+from the brown liveries of the negro coachman and footman to the
+trappings on the black ponies.  There were no horses of such high breed
+in Delaware.  He stood up suddenly, his jaws pale as if he had been
+struck.  What money there was in it!  He had forgotten.  She was a
+great heiress.
+
+She came out at the moment.  He scanned her fiercely, the plain, costly
+gown, the ruby blazing on her ungloved hand.  Then he glanced down at
+his own shabby Sunday suit.  She was the richest woman in Delaware, and
+he had not a dollar in his pocket, and no way to earn one.
+
+He went up to her, courteously took her hand when she held it out,
+blushing and dimpling, bowed to her aunt, saying that he had merely
+walked over to put her into her carriage, and, having shut the door,
+looked after them, hat in hand, smiling when she glanced shyly back at
+him.
+
+Then he laughed loudly.  If he had the salary that she paid her negro
+driver he would be lucky!  And he had meant to marry her.  He laughed
+again and took his way homeward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+His mother was waiting to give George his breakfast.  Whether he chose
+to lie in bed until noon or to walk twenty miles at dawn, she smiled a
+joyful approval.  But neither the crisp toast, nor the fried chicken,
+nor any of her funny stories, would penetrate the blackness of his
+gloom.
+
+"Oh, by the way!" she said; "here is a letter that came by last night's
+mail.  I forgot to give it to you."
+
+He glanced at the envelope.  "Great Heavens!  It is life and death to
+me, and you forget it to tell Jack's pert sayings!"  He read the letter
+and threw it down.
+
+"What is it, George?" she asked humbly.
+
+"Burnett & Hoyle offer me a place in their house."
+
+"Mr. Hoyle is an old friend of mine.  I wrote to him.  What is the
+salary, George?"
+
+"Forty dollars a week.  I could earn more as a coachman--for some rich
+heiress."
+
+"But George dear----  It would be a beginning.  They are brokers, and
+there are so many short cuts to fortune in that business!  Do try it,
+my son."
+
+"Of course I'll try it.  Do you think I'm a fool?  It will keep me from
+starving.  But I want something else in life than to be kept from
+starving, mother."
+
+He stretched out his arms with a groan, and walked to the window.  She
+followed him with wretched, comprehending eyes.  Why did not Lucy give
+him her fortune?  Any woman would be honored who could give George her
+fortune.
+
+"I always have heard that brokers know the short cuts to wealth," she
+said calmly.  "You go on the Street some day, and come back a
+millionaire."
+
+"That is a woman's idea of business.  Instead, I will sit on a high
+stool and drudge all day, and on Saturday get my wages, and after three
+or four years I'll make a fight for ten dollars more a week, and thank
+God if I get it.  'A short cut to fortune!'"
+
+Mrs. Waldeaux carefully averted her eyes from him. "You may marry," she
+said, "and it may happen that your wife also will have some little
+income----"
+
+"Mother!  Look at me!" he interrupted her sternly.  "I will never be
+dependent on my wife, so help me God!"
+
+"No, George, no!  Of course not.  Don't speak so loud.  Only, I thought
+if she had a small sum of her own, she would feel more comfortable,
+that's all."
+
+
+In spite of his ill temper George threw himself into his work with
+zeal.  After a couple of months he came home for a day.  He was dressed
+with the quiet elegance which once had been so important in his eyes.
+
+His mother noted it shrewdly.  "A man has more courage to face life,
+decently clothed," she said to herself.
+
+He did not come again until winter.  Lucy happened to be spending the
+day with Mrs. Waldeaux.  There were no liveried servants, no priceless
+rings, no Worth gown in sight.  She was just the shy, foolish girl whom
+he had once for an hour looked upon as his wife.  George talked about
+Wall Street to her, being now wise as to stocks; took her out
+sleighing, and when in the evening she took Jack in her arms and sang
+him to sleep, sat listening with his head buried in his hands.  Mrs.
+Waldeaux carried the boy up to bed, and Lucy and George were left
+alone.  They talked long and earnestly.
+
+"She consulted me about her affairs," he said, after she was gone, his
+eyes shining.
+
+"I am afraid she does not understand business!" Mrs. Waldeaux replied
+anxiously.
+
+"Oh, like a woman!  That is, not at all.  Her whole property is in the
+hands of The Consolidated Good Faith Companies.  I reminded her of the
+old adage, 'Never put all of your eggs into one basket.'"
+
+"But that is so sound a basket, George!" "Yes.  It is thought so," with
+a shrug.
+
+"Poor child!  She needs a guardian to advise her."
+
+Waldeaux's countenance grew black.  "She should employ an attorney.  It
+certainly will never be my duty to advise Miss Dunbar," he retorted
+irritably.
+
+
+George showed himself shrewd and able in his work.  Mr. Hoyle was a
+powerful backer.  Before spring his salary was doubled.  But what was
+that?  The gulf between him and the great heiress gaped, impassable.
+
+Lucy spent much time with her old friend, and Frances at last broke the
+silence concerning him.
+
+"The boy never before knew what love was.  And it is you that he loves,
+child."
+
+"He has not told me so," said Lucy coldly.
+
+"No.  And never will.  It is your wealth that makes him dumb.  I wish
+it was gone," said Frances earnestly.  "Gone.  You would be so happy.
+What is money compared to being----"
+
+"George's wife?" Lucy laughed.
+
+"Yes.  George's wife.  I know what he is worth," his mother said
+boldly.  "You might give it away?" looking eagerly in the girl's face.
+"In charity."
+
+"I might do so," said Miss Dunbar tranquilly.
+
+
+One morning in April Mrs. Waldeaux saw George coming up from the
+station.  She ran to meet him.
+
+He was pale and breathless with excitement.  "What is it?  What has
+happened?" she cried.
+
+"Hush--h!  Come in.  Shut the door.  No one must hear.  The
+Consolidated Companies have failed.  They have robbed their depositors."
+
+"Well, George?  What have we---- Oh, Lucy!"
+
+"Yes, Lucy!  She is ruined!  She has nothing.  It was all there."  He
+paced up and down, hoarse with agitation and triumph.  "She mustn't
+know it, mother, until she is safe in another home."
+
+"Another home?" "Oh, surely you understand!  Here--if she will come.
+Poor little girl!  She has not a dollar!  I am getting a big salary.  I
+can work for you all.  My God!  I will have her at last!  Unless----
+Perhaps she won't come!  Mother, do you think she will come?"  He
+caught her arm, his jaws twitched, the tears stood in his eyes, as when
+he used to come to her with his boyish troubles.
+
+"How can I tell?" said Frances.  "Go and ask her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+In July Miss Vance returned unexpectedly.  Her charges had tired of
+travel, and turned their backs upon India.  She dropped them in
+Chicago, and came to Weir for rest.  The evening of her arrival she
+strolled with Frances through the park, listening to the story of
+George's sudden wooing, and the quiet, hurried wedding.
+
+"It had to be quiet and hurried," said Mrs. Waldeaux, "in order to keep
+her ignorant of her change of fortune.  He took her to the Virginia
+mountains, so that no newspapers could reach her.  They are coming
+to-morrow.  It won't trouble her to hear that her money is gone when
+she is here with us all, at home.  As for me," she went on excitedly,
+"I am beginning to advertise the summer resort.  I must put my hand to
+the plough.  I don't mean that she shall miss any comfort or luxury as
+George's wife."
+
+Miss Vance looked at her.  "Frances, give up your planning and working.
+Let George work for you and his wife," she said curtly. "It is time for
+you to stop and rest."
+
+"And why should I stop and rest, Clara?" said Frances, amazed.
+
+"Surely you know, dear.  You are not as young as you once were.  Your
+eyes are weak, and your hearing is a little dulled, and----"
+
+Frances threw out her hand eagerly.  "You think I am growing old!  It
+is only my eyes and ears that are wearing out.  _I_ am not deaf nor
+blind," she said earnestly.  "_I_ am not old.  I find more fun and
+flavor in life now than I did at sixteen.  If I live to be seventy, or
+a hundred, I shall be the same Frances Waldeaux still."
+
+Clara gave an annoyed shrug.  "But really, _I_ make the thought of
+death my constant companion.  And you are older than I."
+
+
+  "'After the busy day
+  Comes the calm sleep of night,'"
+
+she quoted, with a sententious sigh.
+
+"Calm and sleep do not appear to me to be the highest conditions of
+life.  No!  I will not be set aside, even when I am dead, like a
+burned-out candle!"  The indignant tears stood in her eyes.  "Why, even
+in that other world I shall not be a barren stock, thank God!  I have
+given a family to mankind.  To watch a long line of your descendants at
+work, to see in them your own thoughts and your own soul reaching out,
+live powers through all eternity--I often think of it.  That will
+be--not calm nor sleep."
+
+Miss Vance touched Mrs. Waldeaux's arm affectionately.  "What a queer
+idea, Frances.  Well, I never argue, you know.  Drop in the harness, if
+you choose.  Let us go in now.  It is chilly."
+
+The older woman looked after her, and smiled good-humoredly.  After a
+moment she raised her hand, examining it attentively.  Her hand had
+been very beautiful in shape, white and dimpled, and she had been vain
+enough to wear fine rings.  Now it was yellow and wrinkled.  The great
+emerald looked like a bit of glass upon it.
+
+"Yes, I see," she said, with a miserable little laugh, and then stood
+looking out into the far distance.  "But _I_ am not growing old."  She
+spoke aloud, as if to one who stood apart with her and could
+understand.  "Even out in that other world I shall not be only a
+mother.  I shall be me.  ME!" touching her breast.  "After a million of
+years--it will still be me."
+
+There stirred within the lean body and rheumatic limbs depths of unused
+power, of thought, of love and passion, and, deeper than all, awful
+possibilities of change.
+
+"I have it in me still to be worse than a murderer," she thought, with
+whitening face.
+
+She stood a long time, alone.  A strange content and light came slowly
+into her face.  "Come what will, I shall never be left to myself
+again," she said at last, speaking to a Friend whom she had found long
+ago.
+
+Then she went in search of the boy.  "Come, Jack," she said cheerfully,
+"there are busy days before us."
+
+
+George and Lucy that evening reached Dover, prettiest of American
+towns.  They strolled down the shaded street out into a quiet country
+lane.  Lucy sat down upon a fallen tree, and George threw himself upon
+the grass beside her.
+
+"To-morrow we shall be at home," she said, pushing his hair back.  "Do
+you know that your profile is absolutely Greek?"  Her eyes half closed
+critically.  "Yes, we shall be at home about eleven o'clock.  I wrote
+to Stephen to order all the dishes that you like for luncheon.  Your
+mother and Jack are coming.  It will be such a gay, happy day!"
+
+He took her hand.  He would tell her now.  It would not distress her.
+The money weighed for nothing in her life.  He was her world; he knew
+that.
+
+"Lucy!" he said.
+
+She turned, startled at his grave tone.  The color rose in her delicate
+little face, and there was a keen flash of intelligence in her blue
+eyes.  It vanished, and they were only blue and innocent.
+
+"Lucy, would you be willing to come to my house?  To take it for home?
+To be a poor man's wife, there?  God knows I'll try to make you happy
+in it."
+
+"No," she said gently.  "That is your mother's home.  She has made it.
+It is not fair to bring young queen bees into the old queen's hive.  We
+will live at your house, Dunbar Place, George."
+
+"It is not mine nor yours!" George broke out.  "Oh, my darling, I have
+hidden something from you.  It is all gone.  Your property, income,
+every thing!  The Consolidated Consolidated Companies failed.  Their
+depositors are ruined."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Lucy, brushing a fallen leaf from her gown.  "But
+they had no control over my affairs.  I withdrew them from their
+management in February."
+
+George started up.  "Then you--you are a great heiress still?"
+
+"No."  She rose, holding out her hands, laughing.  "My husband, I
+believe, is a rich man, and I shall have what he gives me."
+
+But he did not hear her.  He walked away down the road, shaken by a
+dumb fury.  He had been tricked!  Who had tricked him?
+
+Then he heard a miserable sob and turned.  Great God!  Was any thing on
+earth so dear as that little woman standing there?  She was crying!
+Had he struck her?  He was a brute.  What had he done?
+
+He ran to her, and taking her outstretched hands, kissed them
+passionately.
+
+"They are mine--mine!" he whispered, and knew nothing beyond.
+
+
+They walked together like two happy children down the shady lane toward
+the golden sunset.  The money was forgotten.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Frances Waldeaux, by Rebecca Harding Davis
+
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