initial commit of ebook 38753HEADmain

9 files changed, 35464 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/38753-8.txt b/38753-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bad0e87
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38753-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11777 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+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: Running Sands
+
+Author: Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+Release Date: February 3, 2012 [EBook #38753]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNNING SANDS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Kerry Tani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS
+
+
+BY
+
+REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+"The House of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," etc.
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
+
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+BRUNER KAUFFMAN
+
+Brother and Friend
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and
+in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this
+Woman in holy Matrimony....
+
+"It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in
+the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name....
+
+"It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication;
+that such persons as have not the gift of continence might marry, and
+keep themselves undefiled....
+
+"It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one
+ought to have of the other....
+
+"Into which holy estate these two persons come now to be joined...."
+
+--The Book of Common Prayer.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+      I "WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"   1
+
+     II YOUNG BLOOD                        20
+
+    III EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!                34
+
+     IV THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE             59
+
+      V ONE ROAD TO LOVE                   72
+
+     VI A MAID PERPLEXED                   88
+
+    VII FIRE AND TOW                      106
+
+   VIII "THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"   115
+
+     IX ANOTHER ROAD                      133
+
+      X "UNWILLING WAR"                   156
+
+     XI DR. BOUSSINGAULT                  176
+
+    XII MONTMARTRE                        198
+
+   XIII WORMWOOD                          215
+
+    XIV RUNAWAYS                          230
+
+     XV "NOT AT HOME"                     247
+
+    XVI IN THE BOIS                       254
+
+   XVII THE CALL OF YOUTH                 266
+
+  XVIII OUR LADY OF PROTECTION            285
+
+    XIX HUSBAND AND WIFE                  304
+
+     XX HUSBAND AND LOVER                 318
+
+    XXI THE MAN AND HIS GOD               333
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"
+
+
+Stainton decided that he would go to the Metropolitan Opera House that
+night to hear _Madama Butterfly_. He did not care for operatic music,
+but he hoped to learn. He did not expect to meet anyone he knew, but he
+trusted that he might come to know someone he met. There was, at any
+rate, no spot in the Great American Desert, where he had found his
+fortune, quite so lonely as this crowded lobby of the Astor, the hotel
+at which he was now stopping--so he decided upon the Metropolitan and
+_Madama Butterfly_.
+
+A page was passing, uttering shrill demands for a man whose name seemed
+to be "Mr. Kerrghrrr." Stainton laid a large, but hesitating, hand upon
+the boy's shoulder.
+
+"Where can I buy a ticket for to-night's opera?" he enquired.
+
+The page ceased his vocal rumble and looked up with wounded reproof at
+the tall cause of this interruption.
+
+"News-stand," he said, and immediately escaped to resume the summons of
+"Mr. Kerghrrr."
+
+Stainton followed the direction that the page's eyes had indicated. Over
+the booth where newspapers might be purchased for twice the price that
+he would have to pay for them in the street, fifteen yards away, he saw
+a sign announcing the fact that opera and theatre tickets were here for
+sale. He approached, somewhat awkwardly, and, over a protruding ledge of
+red and blue covered magazines on which were portrayed the pink and
+white prettiness of impossibly insipid girls, confronted a suave clerk,
+who appeared tremendously knowing.
+
+"You have tickets for the opera?" asked Stainton.
+
+"Yessir."
+
+"For the Metropolitan Opera House?"
+
+"Yessir. How many?"
+
+"There are----It's _Madama Butterfly_ to-night, I think the paper said?"
+
+"Yessir. What part of the house do you want?"
+
+"I don't know," said Stainton. "That's a good show, isn't it?"
+
+The clerk was too well fitted for his business to smile at such a query.
+He had, besides, perception enough to discern something beyond the
+humorous in this broad-shouldered, grave man of anywhere from forty to
+fifty, who was evidently so strong in physique and yet so clearly
+helpless in the commonplaces of city-life.
+
+"It's the best production of that opera for the whole season," the clerk
+made answer. "Caruso sings _Pinkerton_ and----"
+
+"So I understand," said Stainton, quickly.
+
+The clerk nimbly shifted the quality of his information.
+
+"And anyhow," he went urbanely on, "the Metropolitan audience is always
+a show in itself, you know. Everybody that is anybody is there; for a
+steady thing it beats the Horseshow in Madison Square Garden. You'll be
+wanting seats in the orchestra, of course?"
+
+"One," corrected Stainton. "Shall I?" he added.
+
+"Oh, yes. That is, if you're a stranger in New York. I----Pardon me,
+sir, but I suppose you are a stranger?"
+
+"Very much of a stranger."
+
+"Then I can recommend this seat, sir." The clerk disappeared behind a
+hanging vine of magazines more glorious than the slopes of the Côte d'Or
+in autumn, and immediately reappeared with a ticket projecting from a
+narrow envelope. "Fifth row," he said. "Second from the aisle. Not on
+the side with the brasses, either. You can see all the boxes from it."
+
+Jim Stainton's heavy, iron-grey eyebrows came together in a puzzled
+meeting. Under them, however, his iron-grey eyes twinkled.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "but I want to see the stage, you know."
+
+"Oh," the clerk reassured him, "of course you'll see the stage
+perfectly."
+
+Stainton accepted the ticket.
+
+"Very well," he said. "Take it out of that."
+
+For many a hard year he had been used, by compulsion of desperate
+circumstance, to counting his two-bit pieces, and now, precisely because
+all that had passed, he enjoyed sharply the luxury of counting nothing,
+not even the double-eagles. He laid a yellow-backed bill on the glass
+counter and received, without regarding it, the change that the now
+thoroughly deferential clerk deftly returned to him. Doubtless he was
+paying a heavy commission to the hotel's ticket-agent; perhaps he was
+obtaining less change than, under the terms of that commission, he was
+entitled to; but certainly about none of these things did he care. Toil
+had at last granted him success, toil and good luck; and success had
+immediately given him the right to emancipation from financial trifling.
+There are two times in a man's life when no man counts its cost: the
+time of his serious wooing and that of his ultimate illness. Stainton
+had come to New York with a twofold purpose; he had come to bury the man
+that he had been, and he had come to woo.
+
+He went to his elaborate rooms to dress. For the last decade and more,
+he had not worn evening-clothes a score of times, and he now donned the
+black suit, fresh from a Fifth Avenue tailor's shop, with a care that
+was in part the result of this scant experience and in part the
+consequence of a fear of just how ridiculous the new outfit would make
+him seem. He endangered the shirt when he came to fasten it; he was
+sure that he had unnecessarily wrinkled the white waistcoat, and the tie
+occupied his bungling fingers for a full five minutes.
+
+His apprehensions, nevertheless, were unjustified. Something, when the
+toilet was completed, rather like a man of fashion appeared to have been
+made by the man of the needle out of the man of the pick: if the miner
+had not wholly vanished, at least the familiar of Broadway had joined
+him. Stainton, critically surveying himself in the pier-glass and
+secretly criticising his attitude of criticism, saw nothing that, to his
+unaccustomed and therefore exacting eye, presented opportunity for
+objection. The figure was heavier, more stalwart than, as he had been
+told, was for that season the mode, but the mode, that season, exacted a
+slimness that indicated the weakling. The clothes themselves were, on
+the other hand, perfection and to the point of perfection they fitted.
+The face--
+
+Jim Stainton, with suspended breath, drew the hanging electric-lamp
+nearer, leaned forward and studied the reflection of that face closely.
+
+He saw a large, well-proportioned head, the head of a man serious,
+perhaps, but admirably poised. The black hair was only sparsely
+sprinkled with gray. The deep line between the thick brows might be the
+furrow of concentration rather than the mark of years. The rugged
+features--earnest eyes of steel, strong nose, compressed lips and
+square, clean-shaven chin--were all features that, whatever the life
+they had faced, betokened stamina from the beginning. Hot suns had
+burnished his cheeks, but a hard career had entailed those abstinences
+which are among the surest warders of youth. Experience had
+strengthened, but time had been kind.
+
+"I am still young," he thought. "I am fifty, but I don't look forty, and
+I have the physique of twenty-five."
+
+He walked to the window and flung it wide.
+
+Below him swirled the yellow evening life of the third greatest among
+the world's great thoroughfares. Looking down from the height of his
+hotel was to Stainton like looking down upon a riverside furnace through
+its roof. Molten streams, swelling from the darker channels to the
+north, flowed along their appointed alleyways and broke and divided,
+hissing and spluttering against the pier that was the Times Building.
+And as the steam rises from the red waste that runs from the furnace
+into the river, there now rose to Stainton's desert-starved ears the
+clanging of cable-cars, the rattle of carriages, the tooting of the
+purring motors--all the humming chorus of the night-wakeful thing that
+men call New York.
+
+He stretched his arms apart to it. He wanted to enfold it, to inhale its
+breath, to mix with it and become lost in it. He had come back. After
+all these years, he had come back, and he had come back a victor
+unscarred.
+
+"I'm still young," he repeated, raising his head and spreading his
+nostrils to the damp air of the city-evening. And "Still young!" he
+continued to whisper on his way down in the elevator and through the
+crowded dining-room to his seat at a glittering table.
+
+A ready waiter detached himself from a group of his fellows and
+dexterously steered a rapid course, between seated diners and laden
+serving-tables, to Stainton's broad shoulder.
+
+Stainton was studying, with less difficulty than he had anticipated, the
+menu.
+
+"Soup, sir?" suggested the waiter.
+
+"Yes; consommé," said Stainton.
+
+"And a little fish, sir?"
+
+"No, thank you; no fish."
+
+"Those bass are very nice, sir. I can recommend them."
+
+"No, thank you, I think not. I want a steak, sirloin."
+
+"Rare, sir?"
+
+"Medium."
+
+"Yes, sir. And shall we say potatoes _au gratin_?"
+
+"No. Boiled potatoes. And French peas."
+
+"A little cauliflower with sauce _Hollandaise_?"
+
+"No. Only the steak, potatoes, and peas."
+
+The waiter raised his brows ever so slightly.
+
+"And what salad, sir?" he asked.
+
+"No salad, thank you."
+
+"Er--and about dessert?"
+
+"Nothing. After the meal you may bring me a demi-tasse."
+
+The waiter suppressed surprise. A New Yorker may dine simply, but that a
+still obvious stranger in New York should dine upon less than five
+courses--that was beyond his experience.
+
+"What cocktail, sir?" he enquired.
+
+"None," said Stainton.
+
+"Very good, sir. Shall I send the wine-card?"
+
+"No."
+
+Stainton spoke briefly this time, even sharply, and his tone had the
+effect that he desired for it. He ate his dinner undisturbed.
+
+A more pleasant disturbance than that of the waiter was, however, in
+store for him. As he left the dining-room and returned to the lobby,
+ready now for the opera, there brushed by him, _en route_ from the
+bar-room, a stout man of about thirty-five, with a round face and a high
+hat perched at the extreme rear of a head almost completely bald.
+
+The two looked at each other.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the stranger.
+
+"I beg your par----" Stainton began to echo.
+
+But he did not finish, for the stranger, suddenly a stranger no longer,
+was fairly shouting:
+
+"Hello, hello, hello! What in the name of all that's----"
+
+Stainton's lips broke into a delighted smile, which showed square, white
+teeth.
+
+"Holt," he said: "George Holt!"
+
+"Alive and well--thanks to you, old man." Holt seized the proffered hand
+and began to pump it. "And you!" he continued. "Think of it! _You!_ I
+saw about your luck in the papers, and I meant to write. Upon my soul, I
+did. I don't know how it was I didn't----"
+
+"Oh, that's all right."
+
+"But I was glad. I never was so glad. And you're here--here in little
+old New York?"
+
+"So it seems."
+
+"For good? Of course it is. Everybody comes here to spend his money."
+
+"Well, I hope it's not for harm."
+
+Holt ceased pumping, dropped the hand, put both his hands on Stainton's
+shoulders, and held him at arm's length.
+
+"Great Scott, but it's good to see you again," he said. "Five years,
+isn't it?"
+
+"All of that."
+
+"And then I was out there in the last of the Wild and Woolly, and we
+were sworn brother-adventurers and all that, and you saved my life----"
+
+"Nonsense."
+
+"Yes, you did--saved my life, by the great horn spoon, just as the
+knife-claws of that big grizzly were raised to rip out what passes with
+me for a heart. I'll never forget it as long as I live."
+
+Stainton wished it forgotten.
+
+"How's the world treating you?" he asked.
+
+"So, so; I mean, badly. In fact, it's not treating me at all; I have to
+pay for myself, and just enough to pay and none to save, at that. But
+you--you! Oh, you lucky beast, you!" He shook Stainton by the shoulders
+and again studied his smiling face. "Good old Jim!" he said.
+
+Stainton's smile went somewhat awry.
+
+"Old?" he echoed. "Oh, I don't know."
+
+"What? No, of course not." Holt thrust a playful thumb between
+Stainton's ribs. "Young as ever, eh? So am I. Still, you know, time does
+pass. Oh, well, what of it? I certainly am glad to see you."
+
+He hooked his arm into Stainton's. "Come on and have a drink."
+
+"Thank you, no," said Stainton; "I scarcely ever take anything, you
+know."
+
+Holt, unlike the waiter, showed his disapproval.
+
+"I know you scarcely ever did out there." He jerked his round face in
+what he supposed was a westerly direction. "But that's over now. You
+don't have to be careful now. What's the good of being rich if you have
+to be careful?"
+
+"Still, I am careful," said Stainton, quietly.
+
+"But on this occasion? Surely not on this occasion, Jim!"
+
+The miner laughed freely now.
+
+"You always were a wonder at discovering occasions, George," he said.
+"Your occasions were as frequent as saints' days and other holidays in a
+Mexican peon's calendar."
+
+"And still are, thank the Lord. But to-night----Even you've got to admit
+to-night, Jim. It isn't every day in the year that a man that's saved my
+life turns up in New York with a newly discovered, warranted pure, gold
+mine in his pocket."
+
+This was so clearly true that Stainton capitulated, or at least
+compromised by going to the bar and drinking a thimbleful of white-mint
+while Holt, chattering like a cheerful magpie--if a magpie can be
+cheerful--consumed two long glasses of Irish whiskey with a little
+aerated water added.
+
+Holt made endless plans for his friend. He would "put up" Stainton's
+name at his club. He would introduce him to this personage and to that.
+He would--
+
+"Oh, by Jove, yes, and the women!" he interrupted himself. "You've got
+to go gently there, Jim."
+
+A bright tint showed on Stainton's cheeks.
+
+"I never----" he began.
+
+"Oh, not _them_!" said Holt, dismissing the entire half-world with a
+light gesture. "I know you didn't--the more fool you. But what I mean is
+the--you know: the all-righters. They'll be setting their caps at you
+worse than any of the other sort. You've got to remember that you're a
+catch."
+
+This was all very pleasant, and Stainton was too honest with himself not
+to admit so much.
+
+"Marriage," he admitted, "isn't beyond my calculations."
+
+"Exactly. Now, you leave that little matter to me, Jim. I know----"
+
+"I think that, if you don't much mind, I shall leave it to myself. There
+is no hurry, you see."
+
+"Um; yes. I do see. But if there's no hurry, just you wait--just you
+wait, old man, till you have seen what I can show you. New York is the
+biggest bond-market and marriage-market in the world." He looked at his
+watch. "Hello," he said: "I'll be late. Now, look here: where'll you be
+after the opera? I've got to go there. I hate it, but I have to."
+
+"The opera?" repeated Stainton. "The Metropolitan?"
+
+"Yes, sure."
+
+"But I'm going there myself."
+
+"The devil you are. Where are you?"
+
+Stainton produced his ticket.
+
+Holt glanced at it and shook his head.
+
+"Too close to hear," he said. "But what's the difference? We've all
+heard the confounded thing so often----"
+
+"I have not," said Stainton.
+
+"Eh? What? But it's _Madama Butterfly_, you know--Oh, yes, of course: I
+forgot. Still, what'll interest you, once you get there, will be what
+interests everybody else--and that's not the stage and not the
+orchestra. Now, look here: I'm with the Newberrys, you know--the Preston
+Newberrys----"
+
+"I don't know," said Stainton.
+
+"Well, you will, my boy; you will. That's just the point. We'll call a
+taxi and motor there together--it's just a step to the Metropolitan--and
+then, after the first act, I'll come round to you and take you over to
+meet 'em. What do you say?"
+
+Stainton said what he was expected to say, which was, of course, that he
+would be delighted to meet any friends of Holt, and so it befell that
+the two men went to the opera-house together and parted at the door only
+with the certainty of meeting soon again.
+
+Yet, the miner was still glowing with the thrill of his new life. "I'm
+young!" he repeated to himself as he was shown to his seat. And he felt
+young. He felt that he had never yet lived and that he was now about to
+live; and he thanked Heaven that he had kept himself trained for the
+experience.
+
+He had dined slowly, as befits a man that has earned his leisure, and
+his conversation with Holt had not been hurried. Consequently, when he
+reached his place, the first act of _Madama Butterfly_ was already well
+over. With the voice of Apollo and the figure of an elephant, the tenor,
+bursting through the uniform of a naval officer with a corpulence that
+would endanger a battleship, was engaged in that vocal assault upon a
+fortress of heavy orchestration which is the penance of all that have to
+sing the rôle of "Pinkerton." Stainton listened and tried to enjoy. He
+listened until the curtain fell at length upon the beginning of the
+inevitable tragedy, until the lights flashed up about him, and he found
+himself looking straight into the eyes of a young girl in a lower box
+not thirty feet away.
+
+About him swept the broad curve of boxes that has been called "The
+Diamond Horseshoe," filled with wonderful toilettes and beautiful women,
+but Stainton did not see these. In the particular box toward which he
+was looking there were three other people: there was a matronly woman in
+what appeared to be brocade; there was a sleek, weary-eyed, elderly man,
+and there was another man faintly suggested in the background, as the
+lover of the mistress is faintly suggested in Da Vinci's
+masterpiece--but Stainton was no more conscious of this trio than he was
+of the gowns and women of the broad horseshoe. He saw, or was conscious
+of seeing, only that girl.
+
+And she was leaning far over the rail, at pause where, when their eyes
+met, his intense gaze had arrested her: a young girl, scarcely eighteen
+years old, her delicate, oval face full of the joy of life, aglow with
+the excitement, the novelty of place, people, music. The light was upon
+her--upon her slim, softly white-clad body trembling at the unguessed
+portal of womanhood just as it trembled also under his gaze. She had
+wonderful hair, which waved without artifice, as blue-black as a
+thunder-cloud in May; she had level brows and eyes large and dark and
+tender. Her lips were damp, the lower one now timidly indrawn. While he
+looked at her, there awoke in Stainton the Neolithic man, the savage and
+poet that sang what he felt and was unashamed to feel and sing: she was
+like a Spring evening in the woods: warm and dusky and clothed in the
+light of stars.
+
+Stainton did not move, yet his heart seemed twisting in his breast. Was
+he mad? Was he alive, sane, awake and in New York of to-day? If so, if
+he were himself, then were the old stories true, and did the dead walk?
+Sitting there, stonily, there floated through his brain a line from a
+well-conceived and ill-executed poem:
+
+"At Paris it was, at the opera there ..."
+
+The girl was the one to break the spell. When Stainton would have ceased
+looking, he could never know. But the girl flushed yet more deeply and
+turned away, with a quick movement that was almost a reprimand but not
+enough of a reprimand to be an acknowledgment that she was aware of him.
+
+Jim, his own cheeks burning at the realisation of his insolence, but his
+heart tumultuous for that other reason, himself started. He shifted
+clumsily in his chair and so became conscious of another movement in the
+box.
+
+A man--the man that had been, at Stainton's first glimpse of the party,
+dimly outlined--was disentangling himself from the background, was
+bending forward to make vehement signs in Stainton's direction, was
+finally, and with no end of effort on Stainton's part, assuming
+recognisable shape. It was George Holt.
+
+Holt waved his hand again and nodded toward the lobby. Then, as Stainton
+nodded a tardy comprehension, he faded once more into the background of
+the box.
+
+They met a few moments later in the corridor.
+
+"I see you found your friends," said Stainton. At least temporarily, he
+had regained his self-control.
+
+"My who? Oh, the Newberrys? Of course. Come over; you must meet them."
+
+"The Newberrys?" Stainton looked a misapprehension.
+
+"Yes, I told you, you know. Good old Preston Newberry and his wife."
+
+"I thought," urged Stainton, "that I saw a girl----"
+
+"Oh, _that_?" asked Holt, recollecting with some difficulty a person of
+such small importance. "That's their little Boston ward."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"Something or other. I forget. Stannard: that's it--Muriel Stannard.
+She's just out of her----"
+
+He stopped and blinked, his narrow eyes directed at Stainton, who had
+lifted to his face a hand that visibly trembled.
+
+"What's the trouble?" asked Holt. "Too used to the desert to stand our
+nifty opera-house air? Don't wonder. Come out and have a drink. Plenty
+of time."
+
+"No," said Stainton. He achieved a smile. "I'm all right. Why in the
+world did you think I wasn't? I'm just----She's eighteen, isn't she?"
+
+"Who? Mrs. New----Oh, the girl? Yes, I imagine she is about that. But
+she's an orphan and hasn't a cent and is too young to mix in, anyhow.
+Don't you bother: she won't interfere. Come along, if you won't have a
+drink, and meet the Newberrys. Mrs. Preston is every bit as good as a
+Bronx cocktail, though she wouldn't be seen in the Bronx for a thousand
+of 'em."
+
+Stainton replied with compressed lips.
+
+"I should like to meet Miss--Miss Stannard," he said.
+
+"Miss Stannard? The youngster?" Holt broke into a laugh. "Bless my soul!
+Why, she's not even out yet; and you mean to say----"
+
+But Stainton's firm fingers had closed so sharply about Holt's arm that,
+while the pain of the unexpected grip shot through him, Holt's laughter
+ended in a gasp.
+
+"Don't joke about this," commanded Stainton. "You remember that we used
+to be friends."
+
+"Sure. Aren't we friends now? What's hit you, Jim? We're friends still,
+I hope. You don't think I'm likely to forget what you once did for me,
+do you?"
+
+"Very well, then: don't joke about Miss Stannard."
+
+"No offence intended," said the perplexed Holt; "but why in thunder
+shouldn't I joke about her?"
+
+Stainton's grip loosened, and his eyes twinkled.
+
+"After all," he said, "it must have seemed strange to you----"
+
+"Strange? It looked like the asylum!" said Holt.
+
+"And so," Stainton continued, "I dare say that I do owe you an
+explanation." He put out his hand again, but Holt dodged.
+
+"No more of that!" said Holt.
+
+"All right," Stainton answered. He laid a hand on Holt's shoulder. "Can
+you keep a secret, George?"
+
+The clubman blinked in anticipation.
+
+"Seems to me we've had a few together," he said.
+
+"Then," said Stainton, "I'll tell you why I was a little sensitive about
+comments on Miss Stannard: I am going to marry her."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+YOUNG BLOOD
+
+
+Holt's jaw fell.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he stammered; "but I didn't know you even knew
+her."
+
+"I have never met her," said Stainton.
+
+"What? Oh, quit your jollying."
+
+"I have never met her."
+
+"Then--well, you _don't_ need a drink, after all."
+
+"After all--that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall
+explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present
+me all round."
+
+Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Cæsars had been driven
+mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of
+stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He
+recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country
+was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits
+in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of
+these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few
+years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came
+the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's
+unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West,
+been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt
+recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold
+mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate
+than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day,
+rich. He wondered if--
+
+But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.
+
+"No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds
+queer, I know----"
+
+"Sounds! Sounds----"
+
+"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll
+explain--later."
+
+"You can't," said Holt.
+
+"Can't what?"
+
+"Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy
+himself."
+
+Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which
+is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen
+again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction.
+
+"Mr. Holt has just been telling us of your splendid bravery and how you
+saved his life," said Mrs. Newberry.
+
+She was a stout, uncertain nonentity, whose chief endeavours in her
+narrow world were to seem as slim as she would like to be and as certain
+of her social position as was proper for a woman of moderate
+antecedents, who had married a membership in Manhattan's three most
+difficult clubs. What, of course, she had been thinking was not at all
+about Stainton's bravery: it was, rather, that Stainton had become quite
+rich quite romantically, and that he was not the rough diamond which
+tradition demanded.
+
+Stainton took all this for granted and, knowing not what to say in
+reply, bowed and said nothing.
+
+"Glad to know you," was what Newberry said: and he presently added: "The
+cast's in rotten voice to-night. Sit down."
+
+Newberry, the sleek, weary-eyed elderly man, whom Stainton had barely
+noticed in his first survey of the box, was the membership in New York's
+three most difficult clubs. He had inherited money without brains, had
+sought to adjust matters by marrying brains without money, and had been
+intellectually disappointed.
+
+To him in turn Stainton bowed in silence. His eyes were on the girl, and
+the girl's slim back was set resolutely toward him.
+
+There was an awkward pause. Nobody seemed to remember Muriel. At length
+Holt, still in terror, blundered forward.
+
+"Miss Muriel----" he began.
+
+The girl turned. The glory of her warm eyes brushed Stainton's face and
+passed it.
+
+"I am Miss Stannard," she said. "It is good of you to join us. Do sit
+down, Mr. Stainton."
+
+Stainton sat down. He sat down directly behind her, and at last,
+politely unencouraging though she at first managed to remain, he
+succeeded in gaining some sort of conversational opening.
+
+What did he say there, for the early ten minutes of their talk? He was
+unable at any later date to recall one word of it. Everything, he was
+sure, that was clumsy. As a matter of fact, his own speech was probably
+by no means so uncouth as his torturing fancy declared it, hers by no
+means so brilliant as his memory, which retained no souvenirs, insisted.
+More likely than not, their talk fulfilled the requirements of
+convention. Convention requires the commonplace.
+
+Nobody paid any but sporadic attention to the opera. To the left of the
+girl and Stainton, Mrs. Newberry and her husband, a Dido matched to a
+Don Juan, exchanged low monosyllables with each other and darting
+exchanges of talk, like rallies at badminton, with Holt. Sometimes they
+were ill-mannered enough to converse in whispers, near Stainton's
+shoulder, but mostly Mrs. Newberry was laboriously conventional, out of
+a constant fear of being adjudged plebeian, and now and again, to
+Stainton's huge disgust, she would lean to confer a word on her niece
+and her niece's companion.
+
+"I hope you care for opera," she said to Stainton in one of these
+sallies.
+
+"I hope to," replied the miner, guardedly.
+
+"Though of course," pursued Mrs. Newberry, "this is rather an off
+evening. The cast led us to expect so much, but they all seem to be in
+such poor voice."
+
+Stainton made a civil noise.
+
+"Apart from the music," his hostess continued, "I dare say that the
+stage doesn't appeal to you."
+
+"I have had very little chance to know it," said Stainton, "but I am
+fond of it."
+
+"Indeed?" Mrs. Newberry's tone indicated that she was mildly interested
+in meeting a tamed adventurer. "But I should suppose that it would all
+seem so false to you. It must seem false, I should think, to anyone that
+has known so much of--of Real Life, you know; and dear Mr. Holt has
+given us _such_ descriptions of your romantic career."
+
+Stainton's disavowal of this apparent praise of his career was earnest,
+but not convincing.
+
+"My life has seemed dull to me," he said, with a deadly glance at dear
+Mr. Holt, grinning in the background.
+
+Holt tried to change the subject.
+
+"At all events, this is a romantic episode for you, isn't it?" he asked.
+
+"What do you mean?" snapped Stainton.
+
+"Oh," Holt hurried to explain, "all this." He indicated the audience
+with the sweep of a plump hand.
+
+"It is new," granted Stainton.
+
+Holt edged his chair forward.
+
+"Of course it is, and whatever's new's romantic. That's all romance is,
+isn't it, Miss Muriel?"
+
+The girl had been listening to the music, her dark eyes, veiled by their
+long lashes, fixed on nothing.
+
+"Is it?" she enquired.
+
+"Sure it is," said Holt. "Now, Jim, you're in the crowd you read about.
+You ought to get us to point 'em out to you."
+
+"The woman just next," whispered Mrs. Newberry--"the one in
+forget-me-not blue, draped with chiffon and crystal trimmings--don't you
+see? The bodice is finished with crystal fringe----"
+
+"I'm afraid----" said Stainton.
+
+Preston Newberry explained.
+
+"Girl with yellow hair," said he.
+
+"Oh!" said Stainton.
+
+"That," Mrs. Newberry went on, "is Dora van Rooz. She was a Huyghens,
+you know."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't read the society-columns," Stainton apologised.
+
+"Dora's not confining herself to them," said Newberry. "She and van Rooz
+are calling each other names in the divorce-court now."
+
+"And just beyond," Mrs. Newberry ran on, "in the American beauty satin
+veiled in ninon--there: her waist is embroidered with beads and rows of
+silver lace; you can't see very well in this light."
+
+"Girl with the fine nose," Preston elucidated.
+
+"I see."
+
+"That's Mrs. Billy Merton. You must have heard of her. She divorced Clem
+Davis last month and married Billy the next day."
+
+She rattled on for some time, ceasing her chatter only for brief pauses,
+at intervals unconsciously regulated by her long acquaintance with the
+opera and its finer moments. The strains of the beautiful music seemed
+to Stainton to be a loveliness unworthily draping, on the stage, the
+story of a base man's perfidy; and the pleasant indiscretions of the
+fashionable opera-gowns to be clothing, in the audience, none but women
+that had already stripped their souls in one or other of the scandalous
+rituals imposed by modern law for the dissolution of the most private of
+relationships.
+
+He made but brief answers, and he was unfeignedly relieved when his poor
+responsiveness forced Mrs. Newberry to retreat and left him free again
+with Muriel. He looked frank admiration at her level brows, her dark
+eyes, and her full lips. Here, he assured himself, was innocence: her
+face was her young soul made visible.
+
+Perhaps, as she pretended, it was his distress at her aunt's garrulity;
+for it must have been evident to her. Perhaps it was the dropped hint of
+his adventurous life; for women are all Desdemonas at heart. Perhaps it
+was only his patent worship of her beauty; since we are all assailable
+through this sort of compliment to whatever of our charms we are least
+responsible for. Perhaps it was all or none of these things. In any
+case, as Mrs. Newberry retired to a continuation of her gossip with
+Holt, broken only by the terser remarks of Newberry, Muriel bent a
+little closer to Stainton.
+
+"You don't care a bit about such things, do you?" she enquired.
+
+Her tone was lower than when she had last spoken. It was low enough to
+draw the curtain of confidence between them and their companions, with
+that subtle quality that takes account of but one listener.
+
+Stainton's pulses leaped.
+
+"About what things?" was all that he was at first able to say.
+
+The girl smiled. Stainton thought her smile wistful.
+
+"The sort that fill these boxes," said Muriel: "the sort, I dare say,
+that uncle and aunt and Mr. Holt and I are."
+
+He heard a shimmering sprite of regret in her voice: regret not that he
+did not care for these people, but that these people should be what they
+were.
+
+"Don't include yourself in this lot," he answered.
+
+He was immediately aware that his reply was scarcely courteous to his
+hosts, and so was she.
+
+"You are hard on them," she said.
+
+"Hadn't you just been hard on them, too?" he countered.
+
+"Ah, yes, but they are my relatives. At least Uncle Preston and Aunt
+Ethel are. Family criticism is permitted everywhere."
+
+He did not like her schoolgirlish attempt at epigram, and he showed his
+disapproval.
+
+"Now you are trying to be of a piece with them," he said.
+
+The glance that she gave him was no longer calm: there was a flash of
+flame in it.
+
+"You talk as if you had known me for years."
+
+"For thirty years."
+
+"Yes?" She did not understand.
+
+"I have known you for thirty years."
+
+What sort of man was this? "But I am only eighteen," she said.
+
+"Nevertheless, I have known you for thirty years."
+
+She gave an empty glance at her programme.
+
+"Since you were in pinafores," she said, still looking down.
+
+Stainton bit his lip. There had been no malice in her tone, yet all
+children are cruel, he reflected, and the modern child's cruelty is
+ingenious. Was there anything in that speech for her to be sorry for,
+and, if there were, would she be sorry?
+
+"Some day," he said quietly, "I shall try to explain."
+
+She regarded him again, this time with altered gaze.
+
+"Some day," she said, "I hope you will tell me about that romantic
+career that Aunt Ethel was talking of."
+
+Was she sorry? Was she interested?
+
+"It's not romantic," he protested. "It isn't in the least romantic. It's
+just a story of hard work and disappointment, and hard work and
+success."
+
+"But Mr. Holt told us that in one month you were condemned to
+death for piracy in Central America and acted--what do they call
+it?--floor-manager for a firemen's ball in Denver."
+
+"George has been dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse. He never
+knew me till he met me in the West five or six years ago. I was
+condemned for piracy _in absentio_ by a Spanish-American court because I
+had a job as cook on a filibustering ship that was wrecked off Yucatan
+and never got any nearer to shore, and I was floor-manager at the
+firemen's ball because--well, because I happened to belong to a
+fire-company."
+
+"But you did have adventures in Alaska and Colorado and New Mexico?"
+
+"Oh, I've knocked about a bit."
+
+"And----" Her lips were parted, her eyes large. She no longer heard the
+voices on the stage. "Did you ever----Mr. Holt said you once shot----"
+
+"Yes," said Stainton, gravely, "I think I once killed a man."
+
+She clasped her hands on the railing of the box.
+
+"Tell me about it," she commanded. Her tone was a compliment.
+
+"There's nothing to tell. It was in an Alaskan mining-camp. The man was
+drunk and armed. He attacked me, and I had to defend myself. He shot
+twice before I shot at all, but I hit and he didn't. I'm sorry I had to
+do it to remain alive, but I'm not sorry to have remained alive."
+
+"Oh," she cried, petulantly, "you are _so_ matter-of-fact!"
+
+"Not nearly so matter-of-fact as you suppose. Not in the important
+things. In business, in everyday life, a man has to be matter-of-fact.
+It's the only method to get what you want."
+
+"Do you really think so?" She appealed to him now as to a well of
+knowledge. Perhaps, he reflected, she had about her ordinarily few wells
+to which she was permitted so to appeal. "Then maybe that is why I don't
+get what I want."
+
+"Surely you have all you want."
+
+She shook her raven hair. "Not any of it."
+
+"And you want?"
+
+"Lots of things."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+She smiled, but was firm. "No, I sha'n't tell you."
+
+"Not one?"
+
+"Not now."
+
+"Perhaps they are not always the sort of things that you ought to have."
+
+"Yes, they are."
+
+"All of them?"
+
+Her nod was positive: "All."
+
+"But, whether you ought to have them or not, are you equally sure that
+they would be worth possessing?"
+
+"How can I know till I have had them?"
+
+"Easily. There are two ways of learning the value of anything we want:
+one is to get it, the other to lose it."
+
+"We're crabbed against the things we miss."
+
+"Are we? I don't know. Even if we are, there's a good deal to be said in
+favour of the comfort that lies in the philosophy of sour grapes."
+
+She did not wholly follow him, but she was clear on the chief point. "It
+doesn't make me feel any more contented," she said, "to believe that I
+wouldn't have been happy if I had got something that I wanted to get and
+didn't."
+
+Stainton shook his head.
+
+"Some time," he said, "that belief will be your greatest comfort."
+
+Muriel looked away. She was revolving this problem in her youthful mind,
+and when she replied it was by the _argumentum ad hominem_, which is an
+excellent argument and generally _ab femina_.
+
+"You have been successful," she began. "If you had not been, would it
+have made you more contented to believe that success wouldn't have
+brought you happiness?"
+
+"I was thinking," said Stainton, "of something in the past, something
+that I didn't get, and something that was not a business matter." He
+spoke slowly.
+
+She understood.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said, softly.
+
+"No, no," he smiled. "In point of fact, whenever I failed in prospecting
+I did try to think that money would not have made me happy. But you may
+be right, for I always started prospecting again."
+
+"And now?"
+
+"Oh, now," said Stainton, with a concluding smile, "I am trying hard to
+resist the manifold temptations of good fortune."
+
+As he spoke, the curtain was falling on the tragic termination of
+_Madama Butterfly_. The Newberrys and their guests rose as the curtain
+fell, and Stainton held her cloak for Muriel. Newberry was gasping his
+way into his own coat, and Holt was holding for Mrs. Newberry a gorgeous
+Japanese kimono absurdly reminiscent of the opera to which they had not
+listened; but Muriel's cloak was a simple and beautiful garment in
+Stainton's eyes, a grey garment lined with satin of the colour of
+old-fashioned roses. As she got into it--"Oh, it's quite easy," she
+said--his awkward hand was brushed by her cheek, and he bent his head,
+certain of being unobserved in that hurry to depart wherewith the
+average American opera-audience expresses its opinion of the average
+operatic performance, and inhaled the perfume of her hair. His hands
+shook.
+
+With Holt he saw their hosts to their motor.
+
+"Aren't you coming home with us for supper?" asked Mrs. Newberry.
+
+But Holt, who was abominably curious, wished to quiz Stainton, and
+Stainton, with the wisdom of his years, knew that enough had been done
+for an initial evening.
+
+"No, thanks," Stainton allowed Holt to say; "we've just met after five
+years, you know, and we've got no end of things to talk about."
+
+Ethel Newberry leaned forward and pressed Stainton's hand.
+
+"You will look us up soon?" she politely enquired.
+
+"Indeed, yes," said Stainton.
+
+"Always glad to see you," said Newberry.
+
+Muriel said nothing, but Stainton pressed warmly the little hand that
+she unreservedly offered.
+
+"Good-night," said Stainton.
+
+"Good-night," said Muriel.
+
+No, thought Stainton, as he reluctantly turned away with Holt, in spite
+of her caustic reference to his age, she must be merely an impulsive,
+innocent girl. He was glad to come to this determination, glad, however,
+simply because it was what he concluded must be a final answer to a
+question that had already become annoying.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!
+
+
+As the motor swerved away from them, making for the up-channel of
+Broadway, Holt seized Stainton's arm, and began to pilot him through the
+crowd.
+
+"Now," said he, "will you _please_ tell me what the----"
+
+"No," said Stainton, "I won't. Not yet."
+
+"But you promised----"
+
+"I know that. Only wait until we get to a quieter place than this. You
+can scarcely expect me to call out such things for all New York to
+hear."
+
+They freed themselves of the whirlpool around the opera-house and began
+to walk northward.
+
+Stainton was looking about him with the eyes of a man that has been for
+years in prison and has but just returned to his native town. He was not
+a New Yorker by birth, and he had never known the city well, but he had
+always loved it and through all his western exile he had dreamed of this
+triumphal return. He soon seemed to have forgotten the puzzle that he
+had agreed to explain to his friend.
+
+"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street,
+pausing now and again to rest on this or that building new to him
+although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's
+new--all new.--What's that place, the one over there on the corner?"
+
+Holt grudgingly told him.
+
+"Fresh?" asked Stainton.
+
+"Five years old," said Holt.
+
+"And that?--And that?"
+
+Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.
+
+"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.
+
+"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"
+
+"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You
+know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years,
+he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is
+true of some cities and most of all of New York."
+
+Holt slapped him on the back.
+
+"Good old Jim!" said Holt.
+
+The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.
+
+"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't
+call me old. I'm not."
+
+"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger
+than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."
+
+Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he
+had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily
+converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed,
+be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at
+thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered
+Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as
+"Old Stainton"!
+
+"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man
+doesn't object to being called old."
+
+The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the
+Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat
+and hear the sad story of your life."
+
+They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker
+to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given
+time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder
+at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where
+bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into
+the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded
+khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of
+Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country
+road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long
+remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was
+drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly
+sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne.
+
+"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a
+suffering fellow-creature!"
+
+Stainton considered.
+
+"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of
+it in a moment of excitement----"
+
+"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."
+
+"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself----"
+
+"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.
+
+"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."
+
+"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.
+
+"You are the best judge of that, George."
+
+Holt smiled.
+
+"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you
+were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton
+is sane."
+
+"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men
+that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."
+
+"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions
+from what I am going to tell you."
+
+Holt groaned.
+
+"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake _tell_ it!"
+
+Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.
+
+"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's
+biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart
+and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you
+may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of
+those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the
+smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My
+mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice,
+but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be
+rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What
+he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon
+of me."
+
+"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.
+
+Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.
+
+"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they
+have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That
+tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to
+assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own,
+has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in
+revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly
+the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus
+be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."
+
+"I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me."
+
+"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious
+malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he
+was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he
+couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another
+life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature
+for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I
+was afraid."
+
+"Afraid? _You!_" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he
+said.
+
+"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the
+twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."
+
+"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age,
+it looks to me as if----"
+
+"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I
+think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father--he
+drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned
+way--was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and
+yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily
+demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I
+dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid
+senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that
+time I saw him--I, a mere boy--become, day by day, a doting idiot.
+
+"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.
+
+"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end.
+Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going
+on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the
+moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and
+malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though
+here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my
+boy; old age.'"
+
+Stainton wet his lips with wine.
+
+"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and
+I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been
+some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in
+my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing
+to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an
+institution--which shows that I was very young indeed,--and so I simply
+nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.
+
+"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It
+was--it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just
+couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I
+kept saying to myself:
+
+"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going
+on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick
+of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of
+the years to come.'"
+
+Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.
+
+"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."
+
+Holt shuffled his feet.
+
+"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.
+
+"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed:
+"One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as
+they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent
+we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant
+odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing,
+steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of
+controlling. These things go, slowly--very slowly--in each of us, and
+when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess
+that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and
+comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it----"
+
+He stopped again, and again went on:
+
+"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see
+anybody die, Holt?"
+
+Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.
+
+"No," he admitted.
+
+"Not your parents?"
+
+"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my
+first trip abroad."
+
+"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk
+about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that.
+Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees:
+it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are
+disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.--There is no dignity in
+terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father----I was looking towards
+him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a
+razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He
+cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I
+remember the queer gurgle and the----
+
+"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old
+age? I lay awake nights, I tell you--nights and nights--interminable
+nights, thinking, shaking.
+
+"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There
+was a girl--it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from
+Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a
+cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day,
+when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into
+the cold black water we both went.
+
+"It seemed to me that I was hours going down--down, and that I was still
+longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies
+of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and
+it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking
+again, and just then she--the girl I was in love with--flung an arm
+toward me. I shoved her away.
+
+"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't
+very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would
+have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a
+lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much
+afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she
+neither forgot nor forgave.
+
+"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me
+over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She
+married the cousin and eighteen years ago--so I heard long after her
+marriage--she died as my mother had died--in childbirth."
+
+Stainton slowly refilled his glass.
+
+Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's
+narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was
+accustomed to be interested.
+
+"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.
+
+"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people
+thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the
+shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do.
+First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live
+in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In
+order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age
+gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee
+you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"
+
+"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."
+
+"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.
+
+"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."
+
+"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run
+away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at
+the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves,
+walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your
+yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping
+from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a
+different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."
+
+"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"
+
+"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death.
+I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did.
+I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I
+would deliberately court destruction--or appear to. The outcome was
+that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you
+admired me for."
+
+"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd
+become a brave man."
+
+"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his
+cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever
+was."
+
+"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did
+even better with the other scarecrow."
+
+"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in
+another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained
+like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk----"
+
+"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the
+dance-hall at Durango?"
+
+"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got
+myself--you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights--into the
+shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers,
+is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully,
+but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig.
+"Tap that," he said.
+
+He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's
+congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it,
+at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the
+wine.
+
+"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New
+York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest
+disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."
+
+"Well?" asked Holt.
+
+"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over
+twenty-five."
+
+Holt nodded approval.
+
+"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body;
+that's a cinch," said he.
+
+"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than
+anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love
+disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and
+then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in
+spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was
+saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the
+philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate,
+I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is
+the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to
+yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I _believe_ in the world; I
+believe in Man.'"
+
+Holt smiled.
+
+"Wait till you know New York," said he.
+
+"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."
+
+"And so----" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and
+reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.
+
+"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as
+soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went
+to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the
+opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago;
+that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint
+faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old
+sweetheart's daughter. And it was."
+
+"What? Muriel Stannard?"
+
+"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."
+
+Holt whistled softly.
+
+"Well?" asked he.
+
+"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."
+
+For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his
+dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:
+
+"But, Jim----"
+
+There he stopped.
+
+Stainton looked at him enquiringly.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"But, Jim, you--you----Oh, what's the use!"
+
+"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it
+is all simple enough."
+
+Holt took a deep pull at his glass.
+
+"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."
+
+Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."
+
+"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did
+understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't,
+and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his
+stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his
+own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a
+what-do-y'-call-it--anchorite--and had opium-dreams without the fun of a
+smoke."
+
+Stainton stiffened.
+
+"I didn't ask your advice," said he.
+
+"You wanted it," Holt ventured.
+
+"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging
+his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most
+city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when
+you see it, you can't enjoy it."
+
+"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes. "Perhaps I am, but that
+rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know,
+but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."
+
+Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him,
+wanted to quote Cicero: "_Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te
+dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis._"
+All that he said, however, was:
+
+"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good
+woman in the face."
+
+"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.
+
+Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the
+merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.
+
+"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to
+proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a
+ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that
+can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with the _entrée_, somebody
+that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a
+man in livery."
+
+"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To
+make clowns of your fellow men--really I think that's a sin against
+God."
+
+"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a
+girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two
+people who haven't anything to do but tell each other how much they
+love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin
+to want something else to talk about."
+
+"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he
+should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so
+long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on:
+"There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained
+for love only."
+
+"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle
+than it is now, and that's going some. What _was_ it ordained for?
+Babies?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New
+York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't
+thinking babies."
+
+"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."
+
+"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a
+fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here,
+Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know
+what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without
+spoiling the game."
+
+"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will
+object?"
+
+"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."
+
+"Then what do you mean?"
+
+Holt interpreted.
+
+"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and
+that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."
+
+Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better,
+seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt
+of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.
+
+"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this
+marrying-talk, aren't you?"
+
+"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you
+refer to it in that way."
+
+"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it
+won't do, you know. Really."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."
+
+Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his
+glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the
+board.
+
+"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me
+to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."
+
+"O, Hell!" said Holt.
+
+Stainton's brows drew close together.
+
+"I mean what I say," he declared.
+
+"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean what _he_ said?"
+
+"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I
+suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would
+have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed
+treatment--his treatment."
+
+"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet--not by several
+thousand graveyards full."
+
+"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances--really. I have my
+own feelings to go by."
+
+"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old
+as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels--per_haps_."
+
+"A man is as old as his arteries--and a few other units of his physical
+economy."
+
+"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the--what is
+it?--units of _her_ physical economy."
+
+Stainton bit his under lip.
+
+"A girl is mature at eighteen--mature enough. I won't talk of that,
+George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something
+better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge
+of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than
+hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of
+twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done
+something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and
+unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."
+
+"You mean you believe you have."
+
+"I know it."
+
+"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've
+committed yourself, Jim."
+
+Stainton shook his great head.
+
+"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health--mental, moral,
+physical and every other way--understand me: _every other way_--than you
+were ten years ago."
+
+"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody
+knows that; but you----"
+
+"I have never been a waster."
+
+"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."
+
+"You don't mean that."
+
+"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now
+and then."
+
+"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."
+
+"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close
+room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just
+come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant
+you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad
+ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your
+brain is used to 'em. So's your body--only more so. Well, what's going
+to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden--habits of a lifetime,
+mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"
+
+"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under
+the age of forty-five."
+
+"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good
+a girl of eighteen."
+
+Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes
+narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his
+mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended
+gently. Stainton chuckled.
+
+"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you
+because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He
+hesitated. "That is, unless----" He frowned again, but only
+slightly--"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen
+to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"
+
+Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed
+heartily.
+
+"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've
+got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too
+much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can
+give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."
+
+"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and
+will soon find a good woman to supply them. I thank you for your
+interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and,
+in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell
+you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage
+between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."
+
+"Between fifty and eighteen?"
+
+"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."
+
+"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think
+that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"
+
+"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off
+with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an
+irresponsible boy of her own years."
+
+"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more
+irresponsible than the girl?"
+
+"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."
+
+"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed
+Holt. "Is _that_ marriage?"
+
+"An important part of it."
+
+"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an
+easy business."
+
+"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of
+a fool."
+
+"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered
+his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was
+already thickening his speech.
+
+"All," said Stainton.
+
+"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd
+better reckon a little on God, Jim?"
+
+Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of
+drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their
+libations.
+
+"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or
+failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually
+unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"
+
+Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober
+moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups,
+however, were sometimes theological.
+
+"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.
+
+"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices
+made infinite."
+
+"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really
+'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"
+
+"Reason," suggested Stainton.
+
+"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for--for--lemme
+see: for reason."
+
+"Philosophy?"
+
+"To quick for that, too."
+
+"Instinct, perhaps."
+
+"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does
+something--high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in--partly. Not
+altogether. Partly's something else; something from--from----" Holt
+groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved
+an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."
+
+Stainton rose.
+
+"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an
+early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.
+
+"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.
+
+"It is late," repeated Stainton.
+
+Holt shook his head.
+
+"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his
+feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's
+Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things.
+Birds mating in--in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."
+
+"Come on," said Stainton.
+
+But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's
+neck.
+
+"I'm--I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'--an' God
+knows I love you." Easy tears were running down his puffed cheeks.
+"Only you _are_ old, Jim. You know you are."
+
+Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.
+
+"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way,
+you know."
+
+Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.
+
+"So you really mean--mean to do--to do----? You know what I mean?"
+
+"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that
+night: "I intend to marry her."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE
+
+
+Mrs. Preston Newberry had risen to the distinction of that name several
+months before Stainton, as a young Harvard undergraduate, came to know
+and love her sister. Very likely she had never heard of Jim until his
+triumphal march to New York, and certainly, if she had ever heard of
+him, she had long ago forgotten his name. Her early married life had
+completely occupied itself in an endeavour to live up to her new title,
+and, since this effort was not crowned with a success so secure as to
+dispense with the necessity of careful watching (for eternal vigilance
+is the price of more things than liberty), her present existence was
+sufficiently employed to make her regard the care of her niece with
+resignation rather than with joy.
+
+Muriel's father had not survived his wife beyond a decade. In that
+period he managed to spend all the money that the previous portion of
+his mature career had been devoted to acquiring, and Muriel's
+grandparents on both sides had long since passed to the sphere of
+celestial compensations; the girl had, therefore, in some measure, been
+forced upon her aunt. A timid little girl with long dark hair that
+nearly concealed her face, she was brought to New York.
+
+"And now," Mrs. Newberry had remarked to her husband, "the question is:
+what are we to do with her?"
+
+It may be that she had entertained from her early reading of the novels
+of Mrs. Humphry Ward a vague hope that Preston would propose to make
+Muriel the child-light of their otherwise now definitely childless home.
+If, however, such an expectation had formed, it was speedily shattered:
+Preston, like many another husband, inclined to the opinion that one
+member of his wife's family was enough in his house. He expressed this
+opinion in his usual manner: briefly, but not directly.
+
+"How the hell do I know?" he asked.
+
+When Ethel--Ethel was really the stout Mrs. Newberry's Christian
+name--when Ethel had evinced a disposition to discuss in further detail
+the question of Muriel's future, Newberry had done what he usually did
+when Ethel began any discussion: he recalled an engagement at one of the
+three of New York's most difficult clubs.
+
+It was a procedure that seldom failed. He disliked deciding anything,
+even where his own pleasures were involved; and so, he was accustomed to
+presenting the problem to his wife much as he presented her with an
+allowance, recalling an engagement at one of the clubs, going out and
+not returning until he was sure that Ethel had gone to bed "to sleep on
+it." In this way, even when the subject proved a hard mattress,
+Preston's couch remained downy, and Ethel would meet him, over the
+breakfast eggcups, with the riddle solved.
+
+In the instance of the disposal of Muriel, the matter proceeded as
+always. Mrs. Newberry came downstairs next morning in her newest and
+pinkest kimono, an embroidered importation from Japan, whose wing-like
+sleeves showed plumper arms and wrists than such a garment is made to
+display. Though her eyes were red, she smiled.
+
+"You won't mind paying the child's school bills?" she quavered.
+
+"Not if the school's far enough away," said Preston.
+
+"I had thought----" began his wife.
+
+"Because," said Preston, "it would be wrong to the girl to bring her up
+at one of these New York finishing-schools. They inculcate extravagant
+ideals; they're full of a lot of the little children of the rich, and
+Muriel might acquire there a notion that she was to inherit some of my
+money--which she isn't."
+
+Ethel Newberry considered this hint final. She dropped at once to the
+last of the dozen institutions of instruction that she had made into a
+mental list, and Muriel was sent to a convent school.
+
+"Though we are not Catholics," said Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Excellent discipline," said Preston. "Is it far away?"
+
+"Nearly in Philadelphia."
+
+"Oh, well, at holiday time----"
+
+"She can"--Ethel brightened--"she can come----"
+
+"Yes, she can have you come to see her," said Preston.
+
+Muriel passed eight years at this school. So long as Mrs. Newberry's
+conscience was able to conquer her desires, the young pupil's aunt would
+run over to Philadelphia for the short vacations; the long ones were, as
+often as could be arranged, spent by Muriel, by invitation, at the home
+of one or another of her classmates. Now, however, the girl had
+graduated and had remained as a post-graduate as long as the curriculum
+permitted.
+
+"She'll have to come out," said Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Of the school," asked Preston, "or into society?"
+
+"Both. The one entails the other."
+
+"What's the hurry?"
+
+"Good heavens, Preston; if she stays there much longer she'll become a
+nun!"
+
+"Suppose she does?" asked Newberry, who was a Presbyterian. "I'm
+surprised to hear you refer to a pious life as if it were a smash-up."
+
+Nevertheless, in the end, he agreed that Muriel should pass the present
+winter under his hospitable roof ("Though, further than that," he
+mentally vowed, "I'll be damned if I endure"). So, Muriel had, without
+too much effort on her guardians' part, been taken about with them on
+numerous occasions lately, most recently to the Metropolitan, where
+Stainton had met her.
+
+It was on the morning after this meeting that, with commendable
+promptness, but at a deplorably early hour--to be exact, at eleven
+o'clock--Stainton called at the Newberrys'. His card was presented to
+Mrs. Newberry through the crack of the door while that good lady was in
+her bath.
+
+Ethel, who was big, blonde, and bovine, struggled into the nearest
+dressing-gown and hurried to the breakfast-room, where her husband, over
+a newspaper, was engaged in his matutinal occupation of scolding the
+coffee. Her face a tragic mask, Mrs. Newberry placed the offending
+pasteboard by Preston's plate.
+
+"Preston," said she. "Look at that. _Look_ at it!"
+
+Newberry appeared shorter and thinner than ever as he sat crumpled over
+the newspaper, his grey moustache short and thin and his head covered by
+grey hair, short and thin and worn in a bang. He obeyed his wife's
+request. He expressed no surprise.
+
+"Looks like somebody's card," he said.
+
+"It is, Preston," wailed his wife. "It is that awful western person's
+that George Holt would drag to our box--_our_ box--last night."
+
+"My dear," said Newberry, "Mr.--er--what's his name?--oh, ah:
+Stainton;--yes--Mr. Stainton appears to be a man of means. Concerning
+the rich nothing except good."
+
+"But his card, Preston; his card!"
+
+"What's the matter with his card?"
+
+"He has sent it up--here--at this time of day!"
+
+"Hum. Western eccentricity, I suppose. He'll get over all that sort of
+thing in time."
+
+Ethel was hopping heavily from one slippered foot to the other.
+
+"He hasn't merely left it," she distractedly explained. "He's here--he's
+actually in the house."
+
+"Well, he's not a burglar, Ethel."
+
+"Don't talk so, Preston. I know he's not a burglar. But what does he
+want here at this hour?"
+
+"I suppose he wants to see you."
+
+"Now? _What_ can he want to see _me_ about at 11 A.M.?"
+
+"If you really want to know, my dear, I think that the best way to
+satisfy your curiosity is to go down and ask him."
+
+"How can I?" She spread wide her arms, the more clearly to bring to her
+husband's wandering attention the fact that she was not yet by any means
+dressed to receive callers. "Won't you go?" she pleaded.
+
+"Why should I?" asked Newberry. "_I'm_ not in the least curious----This
+coffee is worse every morning. You really must have Mrs. Dawson
+discharge Jane."
+
+Ethel uttered a mighty sob and fled. She sent word to Stainton that she
+would be down in five minutes to greet him. After half an hour, she
+entered the reception room. Not ten minutes later, she rushed again upon
+her husband, this time in the smoking room, that she called his "study."
+
+"What on earth do you suppose he wants?" she cried.
+
+Preston, with a face like a martyred saint's, put down his newspaper. He
+did not, however, take his cigarette from his mouth to reply.
+
+"What who wants?"
+
+Ethel wrung her hands.
+
+"That awful man!" she said.
+
+"Is it possible that you are referring to my friend, Mr.--er--Mr.
+Stainton?"
+
+"Of course I am, Preston."
+
+"Oh! He's still here?"
+
+"Why, yes. I've only just seen him."
+
+"You made him wait rather long, my dear. I hope you are not keeping him
+waiting again."
+
+"What else could I do?"
+
+"How do I know?"
+
+"Preston, do try to show a little interest. I say: what on earth do you
+suppose he wants?"
+
+"If he was as bored by that performance at the Metropolitan as I was,"
+said Newberry, yawning, "he wants a drink. Don't _you_ know what he
+wants?"
+
+"He wants--he wants," Ethel dramatically brought it out, "to take Muriel
+for a ride in his motor."
+
+Preston had been seated in an arm-chair without the slightest indication
+of disturbing himself either for his wife or the visitor. At this
+announcement by Mrs. Newberry he rose with what, for him, was alacrity.
+
+"I'll call her myself," he said.
+
+"But, Preston! Think of it!"
+
+"That is just what I am doing, my dear--and I think confoundedly well of
+it, let me tell you."
+
+"In his motor!" Mrs. Newberry repeated the phrase as if it were pregnant
+with evil.
+
+"What's the matter with his motor?" snapped Preston. "It's a motor, you
+say, not a monoplane. Mr.--Mr. Stainton has money enough to buy a safe
+motor--as motors go."
+
+"Oh, Preston, consider: Muriel--alone--morning! The child isn't even
+really out yet!"
+
+At this, Newberry fronted his wife squarely. For perhaps the first time
+in his life, he suffered the pains of definite assertion.
+
+"Now, understand, Ethel," he said, "let's cut out all this rot about
+Muriel. The girl is _not_ such a child and she is out: she's out of
+school, and that's all the outing she's going to get. In fact, it's high
+time she was in again."
+
+"She can't go back to the convent, Preston."
+
+"Mr. Stainton doesn't want to motor her back to the convent. No. But if
+we manage things with half a hand, she needn't be much longer at large.
+Now, don't keep my friend Mr. Stansfield waiting any longer. I surmise
+that he has his machine with him?"
+
+"He came in it. It's at the door. I couldn't see the make."
+
+"No. Naturally. Well, his bringing it along shows him to be a man of
+expedition. It's what we might expect of a successful miner. And it is
+promising for other reasons, too. Get Muriel, take her down, hand her
+over to him with your blessing--but be sure you hand her over as your
+dearest treasure--and then come back here to me."
+
+Saying this, Preston resumed the perusal of his newspaper.
+
+Ethel left the room. When she returned, she had the air of seeing blood
+upon her hands.
+
+"Well?" asked Preston.
+
+"They're gone."
+
+Preston folded the paper and laid it carefully upon the table that stood
+beside him. The mood of assertion still tore at his vitals.
+
+"Now then," he began, "about this Mr. Stansfield----"
+
+"Stainton," mildly corrected his wife as she took a seat opposite him
+and looked out over the now rapidly filling Madison Avenue.
+
+"Stainton." Newberry accepted the amendment. "What's wrong with him?"
+
+"Oh," said Ethel, her fingers twisting in her lap, "it's not that.
+There's nothing _wrong_ with him."
+
+"Well, then!" Preston spoke as if his wife's admission settled the
+matter.
+
+But it did not settle the matter.
+
+"Only he is not----" Ethel added: "Is he quite a gentleman?"
+
+Newberry sighed as one sighs at a child that will not comprehend the
+simplest statement.
+
+"It's hard for art to compete with Nature," said he; "a gentleman is
+man-made, but Nature can do better when she wants."
+
+"We don't really know him."
+
+"I know a good deal about him, Ethel. Enough for present purposes."
+
+"From Mr. Holt?"
+
+"Yes. When Holt read of his success in the papers, the canny George went
+to his brokers and made inquiries--thorough inquiries."
+
+"He seems to have got whatever money he has very quickly, Preston."
+
+"That only proves that he is either lucky or crooked. It doesn't prove
+he didn't get it. What makes you think he's not quite a gentleman?"
+
+"Well," said Ethel, "----that."
+
+"Poof!" said Newberry. "He was talking a good deal to Muriel at the
+opera last night. Didn't he behave all right?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose so. I asked her what he talked about, and she
+said she didn't know."
+
+"Very sensible of her, I'm sure. I wouldn't have expected it of her. It
+goes to show that she's not too young to marry."
+
+Ethel permitted herself a fat start.
+
+"O, Preston, you never mean----"
+
+"Now, my dear, you know very well that we've meant nothing else. You've
+known it ever since I sent you to call Muriel."
+
+"And you don't think him too old for her?"
+
+"Old? He's probably not fifty."
+
+"Mr. Holt said he thought fifty."
+
+"Very well: fifty. Fifty and eighteen. The one has the youth and the
+other supplies the balance. Most suitable. Besides, it's done every day.
+Heavens, Ethel, you mustn't expect everything!"
+
+"But do you think there's nobody else, Preston? She has been away a good
+deal, you know, and----"
+
+"Somebody else?"
+
+"Yes." Ethel's eyes sought her husband's and, meeting them, fell.
+"Somebody that the child cares for," she murmured.
+
+"Stuff!" said Preston. "That convent-place has a high reputation for
+the way it's conducted. Also, any man of forty can steal a girl from any
+boy of twenty if he only cares to try. The only trouble is that he
+hardly ever cares enough about it to try."
+
+"Fifty," repeated Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Fifty,--granted," continued Preston. "Where we're lucky is that this
+fellow seems to want to try--supposing there is any other chap, and of
+course there isn't."
+
+"Do you think, Preston"--Ethel's eyes were downcast--"that she can learn
+to love him?"
+
+"Ethel!" said Preston.
+
+"But, dear," Ethel insisted, "it does seem a little as if this were the
+sort of thing that a girl ought to be left to decide for herself."
+
+Newberry had risen and gone to the mantelpiece to seek a fresh
+cigarette. His wife's words brought him to a stop. He folded his thin
+arms across his chest.
+
+"Look here," he said; "we have got to face this thing right now, and
+once and for all. What are the facts in the case? The facts are these:
+Here's Muriel with a pretty face and a good, sound, sensible education
+of the proper homely sort, which includes a healthy ignorance of this
+wicked world. And here's this fellow Stainsfield, or Stainborough, or
+whatever his name is, and I'm sure it makes no difference, a strong,
+fatherly kind of old dodo, comes to New York, 'b'gosh,' with his eyes
+bugging out at the first good-looker they light on. Well, he's not the
+Steel Trust, or a Transatlantic steamship combination, but he's what,
+until our palates were spoiled twenty years or so ago, we'd have called
+a confoundedly rich man. Understand? Then add to it that Muriel hasn't a
+cent of her own and no prospects--_no prospects_, mind you. And now see
+whether you'd not better forget to talk sentiment and begin to get busy.
+If you and Muriel don't get busy, it's a hundred-to-one shot some other
+girl will--and'll get him damned quick. Then Muriel will probably be
+left to get a job as school-teacher or something-or-other nearly as bad.
+He's worth a half-million if he's worth a cent."
+
+Ethel Newberry's large, innocent eyes opened wide. If surprise can be
+placid, they were placidly surprised.
+
+"Are you quite sure about the money, dear?" she asked.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ONE ROAD TO LOVE
+
+
+Among the little company of persons aware of Jim Stainton's sentimental
+inclinations, or so far as were concerned the people most intimately
+affected by those inclinations, there appeared, thus far, to be a
+singular unanimity of opinion regarding the matter. Stainton, it is to
+be supposed, approved because the inclinations concurred with his pet
+theories. Newberry, although he did not know anything about Stainton's
+pet theories and would in all probability have jeered at them had he
+been enlightened, proved ready to welcome the miner because he had
+decided that the miner should relieve the Newberry household of a quiet
+presence that, its quiescence to the contrary notwithstanding,
+distinctly disturbed the even course of Newberry's existence. Ethel, as
+may be readily believed, found, under her husband's expert guidance, no
+difficulty in reaching the conclusion that, as she put it, "a match of
+this sort would be for the child's best interests."
+
+To be sure, there was George Holt, if one counted him and his verdict.
+Still, even in this singularly imperfect world, where we believe in
+majorities and where they misgovern us, we acknowledge the purging
+benefits of an ever-present party in opposition; and the party in
+opposition to James Stainton was now composed of Mr. George Vanvechten
+Holt. He was a splendid minority of one, but he was not one of those
+most intimately affected, and he was not generally the sort of
+individual noticed. Stainton had saved his life, yet even Holt admitted
+that the life was scarcely worth the saving.
+
+"Not that I care anything about the youngster for her own sake," he
+would say, night after night, at his club, where he had made all the
+club-members he knew an exception to his promise of secrecy; "it's not
+that, and it isn't that my liking for Stainton shuts my eyes to his
+faults. Not a little bit. Tying up little Muriel to a man half a hundred
+years old is like sending virgins to that Minotaur-chap and all that
+sort of thing. And hitching good old Jim to a girl of eighteen is like
+fastening a scared bulldog to the tail of some new-fangled and
+unexploded naval-rocket: you don't know what's inside of it and you
+don't know where it's going to land; all you do know is that it's going
+to be mighty mystifying to the dog. Still, as I say, I'm not personal.
+What makes me sore is the principle of the thing. It's so rottenly
+unprincipled, you know."
+
+Holt, however, always ended by declaring that he would not attempt to
+interfere. He intimated, darkly, that he could, if he would, interfere
+with considerable effect, but he was specific, if darker, in his
+reasons therefor, in his decision not to attempt to save his threatened
+friends or fight for his outraged principles.
+
+The truth was that George had made one more endeavour after the evening
+of the opera. He was severely rebuffed. Because, as he never tired of
+stating, he really liked Stainton and would not forget that the miner
+had saved his life, he recurred, after much painful plucking-up of
+courage, to the amatory subject, which only intoxication had permitted
+him so boldly to pursue on the night previous.
+
+He was seated in Stainton's sitting-room high in the hotel. It was late
+afternoon; the rumble and clatter of the city rose from the distant
+street, and Stainton, full of fresh memories of his motor drive with
+Muriel, was walking backward and forward from his bedroom, slowly
+getting into evening clothes.
+
+"I sure never would have thought you were morbid," said Holt, from his
+seat on the edge of a table, whence he dangled his legs.
+
+"Morbid?" repeated Stainton. "I am not."
+
+"I mean--you know: about death and old age and all that sort of thing."
+
+"I thought I had explained all that last night."
+
+"It must have been over when I was with you in the West."
+
+"It wasn't."
+
+"Not when you were the first man to volunteer to go down in the shaft
+of 'Better Days' mine after the explosion?"
+
+"I have rarely been more afraid than I was then."
+
+"Or when you played head-nurse in the spotted-fever mess at Sunnyside?"
+
+"I was nearly sick--scared sick--myself."
+
+Holt's patent-leather boots flashed in and out of the shadow cast by the
+table-edge.
+
+"Hum," he said. "It don't seem to show a healthy state of mind, does
+it?"
+
+Stainton had disappeared into his bedroom. From there his answer came,
+partly muffled by the half-closed door.
+
+"I don't care to talk any more about it. I made my explanation to you
+last night, because I had promised to make one. That's all."
+
+"I'm afraid I was a bit illuminated last night," said Holt.
+
+"You were."
+
+"Still, you know, I knew what I was saying."
+
+Stainton did not reply.
+
+"And what I said," Holt supplemented, "is what I think now and what I
+always will think."
+
+"Very well. Let it go at that, George."
+
+Holt made a mighty effort.
+
+"The plain truth is," said he, "that people will call you an old fool to
+buy a piece of undressed kid."
+
+Stainton's bulky figure filled the doorway. He was in his
+shirt-sleeves, his hands busy with the collar-button at the back of his
+neck.
+
+"That will do," he said.
+
+"I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings----" said Holt.
+
+"Then keep quiet."
+
+"But you ought to know what people will say. Someone's got to tell you."
+
+"I don't care what people will say."
+
+"They'll say----"
+
+Stainton advanced. His hands were now at his side, idle, but his face
+was completely calm.
+
+"Never mind," he said.
+
+"They'll say," concluded Holt, "that you're buying the little girl, and
+that you've been cheated in the transaction----"
+
+Stainton's hands were raised. They descended heavily upon Holt's
+shoulders. They plucked Holt from his perch and shook him until his
+teeth chattered. Then they dropped him, rather gently, into a chair.
+
+"Now," said Stainton. His face was firm, and there was a cold blue flame
+playing from under his brows, but he was not even breathing hard. "Now,
+let this end it. If you want to be my friend, let this end your comments
+on my personal affairs. If you do not want to be my friend, go on
+talking as you have been, and I will throw you out of the window."
+
+This incident partially accounts for Holt's resolute refusal thereafter
+to advise Stainton. Advise him further George certainly did not,
+although among his club-fellows he expressed himself as extremely
+anxious to have it remembered that, should anything go wrong with
+Stainton, George Holt had predicted as much.
+
+There remained, however, one person of importance to Stainton's project
+that still remained unconsulted and might have some opinion of more or
+less weight in regard to it. This was Muriel Stannard.
+
+What she thought, or what she would ultimately come to feel about his
+plan, did occupy space in Stainton's cogitations. Notwithstanding his
+romanticism, Stainton was not so blind to fact as to fail to see that
+the girl's mind was as virgin as her body. Indeed, her brain, so far as
+her education might be said to have developed that organ, was less
+advanced than the rest of her physique, and this not because she was not
+intelligent, for now that she was in the world at last he could see her
+daily hastening toward mental maturity, but because her pastors and
+masters had brought her up in the manner supposed to be correct for
+girls of her position. Critics of that manner might say that its
+directors proceed on the theory that, since life is full of serpents,
+the best way to train children for life is not to teach them to
+distinguish between harmless and venomous reptiles, but to keep them in
+such ignorance of the snakes that they will be sure not to know one when
+they see it. Yet Stainton, anything rather than a critic of the
+established order, found himself not displeased with this
+manifestation--or lack of it. He wanted youth; he wanted his long lost,
+long postponed romance, and chance had put both these things within his
+reach in the person of this dusky-eyed girl. Physically she was what her
+mother had been, mentally she could be trained to complete resemblance.
+He would make of her what he conceived to be the best. And so he loved
+her.
+
+To ascertain her opinion, to predetermine it, Stainton was now
+elaborately preparing. Beginning with that introductory motor ride, in
+which Stainton's cautious manipulation of the automobile seemed to
+Muriel's unspoiled delight a union of skill and daring, he went about
+his courtship in what he believed a frank and regular way; in a way that
+both Preston and Ethel Newberry considered absolutely committal; in a
+way that, consider it as she might, Muriel accepted with every evidence
+of girlish pleasure.
+
+There were more motor drives, with the aunt now playing chaperon: a
+chaperon that conscientiously chaperoned as little as possible. There
+were small theatre parties, small suppers, small dinners. One or two
+mothers of daughters, who dared to be civil to Stainton, were shooed
+away, attacked by Ethel with all the brazen loyalty of a ponderous hen
+defending her chicks from the assault of a terrier. The Newberrys, as in
+duty bound, retaliated upon Stainton's theatres, dinners, and suppers
+with two teas and a luncheon. Stainton "came back at them," as George
+Holt phrased it, with more suppers, theatres, and dinners, the dramas
+always carefully selected to suit the immature condition of Muriel's
+soul; and so the whole courtship progressed along those conventional
+lines which lay the road to the altar over a plain of rich foods
+irrigated by vintage wines.
+
+"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl
+during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her,
+unescorted, through Central Park.
+
+"What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!"
+
+It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days
+when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the
+clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none
+other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on
+some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away
+to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel,
+her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted
+nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan
+civilisation.
+
+"Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing:
+New York, the life here, the city."
+
+"I love that, too," said Muriel.
+
+To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not
+merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an
+accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her
+splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its
+disposal.
+
+"So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to
+get back here."
+
+"From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so
+romantic."
+
+"Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them."
+
+"Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she
+said.
+
+Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent.
+
+"How did you get that idea?" he asked.
+
+"Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has
+Uncle Preston."
+
+"They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers
+published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the
+newspapers say."
+
+"I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the
+time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?"
+
+"Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton.
+
+"But did you do it?"
+
+"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly disliked to have his
+supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps
+from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather
+of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"
+
+"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they
+said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid
+to go, and you captured them by yourself--three of them."
+
+Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.
+
+"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half
+so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"
+
+"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"
+
+"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the
+newspapers presented them."
+
+"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please
+tell me about a mine."
+
+He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end
+and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He
+abruptly concluded by telling her so.
+
+"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any
+other. What can girls and women care for business?"
+
+So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the
+night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no
+relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that
+matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty
+and her youth.
+
+"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break
+off the match?"
+
+"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I
+think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."
+
+"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace
+had told her so."
+
+"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think
+she was horrid."
+
+"And her daughter, Lady--Lady----" He hesitated for the name.
+
+"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up
+Arthur like that!"
+
+Stainton smiled gravely.
+
+"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"
+
+"Indeed I would not!"
+
+"What _would_ you have done?"
+
+Muriel's chin became resolute.
+
+"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the
+drawing-room, and I should have put my----" She broke off, rosy with
+embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.
+
+But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.
+
+"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.
+
+"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."
+
+Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had
+partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her
+conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:
+
+"I should just have married him in spite of them all."
+
+Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor
+stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if
+you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.
+
+Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase
+of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers,
+what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the
+early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath,
+our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he
+then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this
+supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the
+acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and
+Stainton.
+
+Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan
+presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should
+admire not his wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the
+genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love
+not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the
+real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the
+prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his
+insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that
+thing happened to be.
+
+Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny
+have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her
+aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in
+the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the
+girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's
+fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and
+Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the
+school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet
+known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first
+time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which
+all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was
+frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a
+pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.
+
+"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the
+luncheon-table, looking, however, not at the subject of her remarks but
+at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home,
+sat opposite her.
+
+"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am
+happier than ever now."
+
+Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the
+smile, and Preston would not.
+
+"Why is that?" asked Ethel.
+
+"Oh, because."
+
+"Because why?"
+
+"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and
+things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"
+
+Ethel's smile faded.
+
+"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."
+
+"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped.
+"Thompson; the salmon."
+
+"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.
+
+"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does
+really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"
+
+"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say _just_ like a boy."
+
+"He seems quite young--he actually seems very young indeed," mused
+Ethel.
+
+"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."
+
+His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.
+
+"He is fif----" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she
+corrected herself: "He must be nearly----"
+
+"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.
+
+"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said----"
+
+"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."
+
+"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip.
+Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."
+
+"You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often."
+
+"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger
+than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself,
+and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."
+
+The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so
+trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past
+thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.
+
+"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or
+fifty."
+
+"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better
+make the most of him while you can."
+
+"I don't see why," said Muriel.
+
+"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several
+women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them
+is sure to succeed."
+
+Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend,
+and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had
+so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke
+so little of women to her.
+
+Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the
+length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his
+tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of
+the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and
+was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally
+romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in
+like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she
+was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She
+regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his
+conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his
+company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he
+was "showing her."
+
+In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton
+was in love.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A MAID PERPLEXED
+
+
+So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in
+their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved
+quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of
+precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scène à
+faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally
+understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and
+found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.
+
+Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the
+white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged
+mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening
+that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing
+theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.
+
+That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement,
+Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm
+of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with
+Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the rôle of duenna, and the
+suitor had consoled himself in the ocular demonstration of the proverb
+that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his
+privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he
+enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that class of
+society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections,
+seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was
+unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry
+an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circumspection.
+Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign,
+and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and
+the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.
+
+The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short
+hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep,
+became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips,
+and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that
+which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that
+the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far
+younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but
+with excitement.
+
+While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the
+glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to
+lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than
+he had ever yet seen her--thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it
+would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young
+enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he
+was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain
+that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at
+the opera, but more desirable.
+
+Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the
+chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows
+piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from
+her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body
+fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the
+flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow
+lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like
+young red roses after the last shower of Spring.
+
+He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box,
+that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood
+at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the
+gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how
+the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast
+what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the
+distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush, which shut the
+heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his
+every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the
+desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the
+demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul
+that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings
+beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would
+either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on
+his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white
+hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her,
+the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes
+with their curving lashes, her parted lips.
+
+She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska
+and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold
+that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing
+not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl
+should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again
+evaded her.
+
+"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."
+
+"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"
+
+"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that
+night at the opera. "I did it all to win Life. That has always been
+what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted--I
+scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You
+understand?"
+
+"I think I understand," she said.
+
+"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living
+as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight.
+I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally
+straight at any sacrifice."
+
+She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the
+violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward
+her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.
+
+"And you've won?" she asked.
+
+He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back,
+and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would
+not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to
+bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved
+only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.
+
+Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The
+atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his
+eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of
+which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:
+
+"And you've won?"
+
+"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel."
+
+It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes
+fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand
+to finger them. The hand shook.
+
+"For me?" she asked.
+
+If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is
+the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to
+many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.
+
+"I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain
+the end? It's you who must tell me that."
+
+She saw now.
+
+"How can I help?" she faltered.
+
+"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face.
+"Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life
+means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."
+
+Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other
+Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he
+sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked
+up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had
+heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her
+eyes.
+
+"Do you remember," he asked, when his story was finished, "how rudely I
+looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?"
+
+"It wasn't rude," she said.
+
+"You must have thought it so then."
+
+"I--I didn't know what to think--exactly."
+
+"Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me
+stare at you."
+
+Her nether lip trembled.
+
+"I didn't know my mother," she said.
+
+"No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and
+then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine
+for her. It was really not love at all--only the rough sketch for what
+might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away,
+when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I
+wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had
+won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living
+original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me."
+
+He came another step nearer.
+
+"I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in
+love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her.
+It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and
+didn't know. Now I am still young--I have kept myself young--but I
+_know_." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said.
+
+The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled
+to the floor.
+
+"I--I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect--I never thought----"
+
+Even this Stainton had foreseen.
+
+"Then don't hurry now," he said. He drew a chair beside her and quietly
+took her free hand. "Take your time. Take a week, two weeks, a month, if
+you choose."
+
+"But it's so new; it's all so new," said Muriel. "I never
+suspected----Oh, I know girls are always supposed to guess; but really,
+really, I never, _never_----"
+
+There was genuine pain in her voice.
+
+"I don't know what is expected of most girls," said Stainton; "but of
+you I shall never expect anything but the truth."
+
+She looked up at him with eyes perplexed.
+
+"Yes--yes, that is just what I want to be: honest. And--don't you
+see?--that is just why--I am so uncertain--that is just why I can't,
+right away, tell you----"
+
+He pressed her hand and rose. He did not like to hurt her.
+
+"I ask only that you will think it over," he said. "Will you think it
+over, Muriel?"
+
+She bowed her head.
+
+"Yes," said she.
+
+"And I may come back in----"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"In two weeks?"
+
+"In two weeks." Her voice was low and shaken. "Oh, you don't mind if I
+ask you to go now?" she pleaded.
+
+"I understand," said Stainton. "I'll be back two weeks from this
+evening. Good-night."
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Stainton," said Muriel.
+
+She waited for him to go. She waited until she heard the street door
+close behind him. Then she hurried in retreat toward her own room.
+
+But Mrs. Newberry was lying in ambush on the landing when the girl came
+upstairs--Mrs. Newberry, broad in white satin, with diamonds at her neck
+and in her hair.
+
+"Well?" asked the aunt.
+
+"Oh!" cried Muriel. She started. "Aunt Ethel!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You frightened me," Muriel explained. "I didn't see you until you
+spoke."
+
+"Well?" persisted Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Nothing. That's all," said Muriel. "Nothing--only that----"
+
+Ethel became diplomatic:
+
+"Mr. Stainton didn't stay very long?"
+
+"Not very long, Aunty."
+
+Ethel heard something ominous in her niece's tone.
+
+"You didn't--you don't mean to say you sent him _away_?"
+
+"No, Aunty. Good-night."
+
+"It's early. You're going to bed so early?"
+
+"Yes, I think I'll go to bed. I'm--I'm tired."
+
+"But it's early," repeated Mrs. Newberry, who was accustomed to order
+her life according to hours and not to reason.
+
+"Is it?" said Muriel.
+
+"It's scarcely ten. The library clock just struck."
+
+"I think it struck some time ago."
+
+"Did it?"
+
+"I think I shall go to bed, Aunty."
+
+Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that
+when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel
+brushed past her and went to her own room.
+
+Ethel returned to the library--so called because it contained a few
+hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She
+said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the
+opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel,
+together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.
+
+Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When
+Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no
+nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.
+
+"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."
+
+Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in
+his pleasantest mood.
+
+"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for
+you to let it alone?"
+
+This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James
+Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult
+to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She
+assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton,
+asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately
+engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a
+French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made
+one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she
+had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's
+manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of
+wifely obedience.
+
+When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will
+that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after
+Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's
+boudoir--it was a pink boudoir--where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at
+eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock
+luncheon.
+
+"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid,
+just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only
+beyond the ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before
+mirrors.
+
+"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"
+
+"Because I want to talk with you."
+
+This was odd. It was so odd that Mrs. Newberry should have scented its
+import; only, it is difficult to scent the import of anything when one
+has supped late the night before, when the first "rat" has not been
+nested upon one's head, and when one has but an eighth part of a day in
+which to make ready for a luncheon.
+
+"Really, Muriel," complained Ethel. "You do choose the most remarkable
+moments for conversation. It's only eleven o'clock! What on earth can
+you want to talk about at such an hour?"
+
+Muriel quietly seated herself by the window.
+
+"About Mr. Stainton," she said.
+
+Mrs. Newberry started so violently that a shower of gilt hairpins
+clattered upon the dressing-table and floor.
+
+"You may go, Marie," she gasped. She waited until the maid had shut the
+door. Then she turned her gaze full upon her niece. "What is it?" she
+cried.
+
+"He wants to marry me."
+
+Mrs. Newberry floundered to her feet and rushed upon Muriel. Her flowing
+sleeves flew back to her sturdy shoulders. She flung plump arms around
+Muriel's neck.
+
+"My dear girl!" said she. She kissed the dear girl on both passive
+cheeks. Then she inquired: "You've had a letter?"
+
+"No," said Muriel. "He asked me."
+
+"But, my dear, he hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. It was--let me
+see--yes, it will be two weeks to-morrow evening."
+
+"That was when he asked me, Aunty."
+
+Mrs. Newberry's embrace relaxed. She looked hurt.
+
+"And you never told me! I think that implies a lack of confidence--a
+lack of affection, Muriel."
+
+"I don't know. I wanted to think it over first."
+
+"Think it over! What was there to debate, I should like to know?"
+
+"A good deal, it seemed to me; and anyhow, Aunty, I think this is the
+sort of thing a girl has to decide for herself--if she can."
+
+"Where ever did you get such notions? A girl never _can_ decide it for
+herself."
+
+Muriel's answering smile was rueful.
+
+"_I_ couldn't, at any rate," she said, "and so, even if I'm late about
+it, I've come to you."
+
+Mrs. Newberry was reassured. After all, the thing had happened; Muriel's
+future--so we fatuous moderns reason--was at last secured. According to
+the custom of her time and class, Ethel had always taken it for granted
+that a poor girl married to a rich man is as safe as a good girl gone
+to Heaven--and more certainly comfortable. She became radiant. It was
+necessary only that they make such decent speed as would prevent any
+other young woman from interfering.
+
+"Well," she said, "I'm glad you _have_ come, because, since long
+engagements aren't fashionable any more, your uncle and I must naturally
+have all the warning possible--for your uncle will, of course, provide
+the wedding. I think it had better be next month--yes, next month and at
+St. Bartholomew's."
+
+Muriel's cheek paled. She turned again to the window and looked out.
+
+"I don't think you quite understand," she said. "I'm not sure----"
+
+"Now, don't be silly," interrupted Mrs. Newberry. "I won't hear any
+foolish talk about a home wedding or a quiet wedding. It isn't the
+proper thing for a wedding to be quiet; it isn't natural; besides, you
+have been living here in your uncle's house, and you owe something to
+his position."
+
+"That's not it." Muriel's back was still turned; her eyes were fixed on
+the cold rain that was falling.
+
+"Well," asked Mrs. Newberry, in complete bewilderment, "then what _is_
+it?"
+
+"I am not sure that I love Mr. Stainton."
+
+The plump Mrs. Newberry again rose. Her face was a pretty blank.
+
+"Love?" she repeated, as if she had heard that word somewhere before
+but could not for the life of her recall where. "_Love_, did you say?"
+
+"Yes," replied Muriel; "I don't know whether I love him."
+
+"What next?" asked Ethel. "Love? You don't know whether you love him!
+The idea! You're too young to know anything about it, my child. Of
+course you love him. You're just too young to know it, that's all."
+
+Muriel displayed a wistful face.
+
+"I'm eighteen."
+
+"A mere baby."
+
+"Then I should think I was too young to marry."
+
+"_Do_ you think so?"
+
+"No, only----"
+
+Mrs. Newberry waxed wise.
+
+"As a matter of fact, Muriel, haven't you," she enquired, "often thought
+of marrying even when you were younger than you are now?"
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"_Well_, then!" Mrs. Newberry in the past few weeks had acquired a few
+of her husband's mannerisms, together with some of his convictions.
+
+But this convincing argument did not settle matters. Muriel again faced
+the window; she seemed to draw inspiration for her incomprehensible
+stubbornness from the prospect of dripping Madison Avenue.
+
+"It's not so easy----" she began.
+
+"Isn't he kind?" demanded Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Yes, he's kind."
+
+"You certainly think him good-looking, child. In fact, _I_ should call
+him handsome."
+
+"I think he is _almost_ handsome, Aunty."
+
+"Of course he is. I have heard lots of women simply _rave_ about him.
+And he is in love with you? You can't deny that?"
+
+"Did you know it, Aunty?"
+
+"How could anyone help knowing it? He shows it all the time. He can't
+keep his eyes off you."
+
+"Then, why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Because----Why, it was so evident that we took it for granted you
+knew."
+
+"We?"
+
+"Your uncle and I, yes."
+
+"Oh! There doesn't seem to be any doubt in _his_ mind that he's in love
+with me."
+
+"Exactly, Muriel; and he is rich--quite rich. Why, there are hundreds of
+girls in New York who would give their eyes to catch him. Hundreds of
+them."
+
+"But he is----" Muriel hesitated.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"He's not young, Aunty."
+
+"What has that to do with it?"
+
+"I don't know, but I should think it might have a good deal to do with
+it. Don't people say that the young love the young?"
+
+"And marry them, you mean? Really, my dear, you have such romantic
+notions! In that case, what's to become of the old?"
+
+"They're supposed to have married before they became old, I should
+think. Now, I am only eighteen. I don't know--I'm only speculating about
+it, and I like Mr. Stainton very much--but when you think of a man of
+his age marrying----"
+
+Again Mrs. Newberry interrupted. She had her position to maintain: her
+position as Preston Newberry's wife.
+
+"Muriel," she said, "I can guess what is in your mind, but I cannot
+guess how it got there. You shock me."
+
+"But, Aunty----"
+
+"That is enough. There are _some_ things that a young girl should not
+discuss."
+
+Muriel put her hands to her burning cheeks.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand!" she cried. "You don't understand at all. I
+don't know what you mean! But he's fifty." She almost sobbed. "I don't
+care what Uncle Preston says. I _know_ he is fifty!"
+
+It was a trying moment for Mrs. Newberry, but she met it bravely. She
+considered Muriel. Then, in the glass, she considered her own image.
+
+"Look at me," commanded Mrs. Newberry.
+
+Her eyes still suffused with unshed tears, Muriel obeyed.
+
+"_I_," said her aunt--"do _I_ look old?"
+
+She did not look young, but Muriel loved her, and those whom a child
+loves seldom grow old.
+
+"No," said Muriel, loyally.
+
+"Well," confessed Ethel, "_I_ am fifty." She was fifty-two. It was a
+sacrifice, nobly offered, upon the altar of family affection. She saw
+nothing in the future for her niece if Stainton could not be made to
+suffice. "But," she added, "you must never tell anyone. All I want to
+explain to you is that fifty is nothing--absolutely nothing at all."
+
+It is, however, the common fate of sacrifices made for family affection
+to go unrecognised by the family. Muriel, honest within the limits of
+her limited training, clear-sighted, was unconvinced.
+
+"Anyhow," she decided, "the question isn't whether he is old or young, I
+suppose. I guess the only question is: Do I love him? I thought all last
+night perhaps you could answer that, but of course I was wrong. I see
+that now. I dare say no person can ever really answer such a question
+but the person that asks it. I was right in the first place: I have to
+find out for myself--and yet I don't seem able to find out for myself,
+either."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FIRE AND TOW
+
+
+Mrs. Newberry's arguments were unavailing. Her pleas failed and so did
+her eulogies of Stainton: both of Stainton the hero and Stainton the
+rich man. Her tears sufficed not. There was no course but to recall her
+luncheon engagement. Her incompetence in the matter sharpened her
+tongue.
+
+They quarrelled. Muriel, in a tempest of sobbing anger, fled to her own
+room; Mrs. Newberry fled to the luncheon.
+
+Upon her return Ethel found that Muriel had gone out. Preston was in his
+"study," studying the stock reports in the Wall Street edition of his
+evening paper, and to him she straightway unburdened herself.
+
+"_What_ do you think of it?" She breathlessly enquired.
+
+"I think you meddled," said her husband.
+
+"But, Preston, the child came to me. I didn't go to her."
+
+"If you didn't, it was no fault of yours. You've been trying to get at
+her for God knows how long. Let her be. For Heaven's sake, let her be,
+Ethel. If you do, she is sure to take him, because I have always
+carefully given her to understand that she may expect nothing from me. I
+have been conscientious about that. And she must know that we are doing
+her a good-sized favour this winter. But if you don't let her alone, she
+is bound to botch the whole affair."
+
+He put aside his newspaper and prepared to go to that one of his clubs
+at which he could obtain the best cocktail. As he was about to leave the
+house, Muriel entered it. Preston smiled.
+
+"Hello," he said. "Been for a walk?"
+
+The girl was flushed and patently troubled.
+
+"Yes, Uncle Preston," she said.
+
+"Hum. Just going myself. How's the weather?"
+
+"Lovely," murmured Muriel. She wanted to hurry to her room.
+
+"What? Why, when I looked out a bit ago, I was sure it was raining."
+
+"Oh, yes; I believe it is raining. I didn't notice."
+
+Preston chuckled. He put out a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched
+her cheek.
+
+"I've always heard that love was blind," he said, "but nowadays it seems
+to be water-proof, too. Look here, my dear: your aunt has been dropping
+a hint or two to me, and I congratulate you."
+
+"On what?" asked Muriel, bristling into immediate rebellion.
+
+Again Preston chuckled.
+
+"Tut, tut!" he said: he always treated her as if she were the child
+that he had always maintained to his wife she was not. "You know well
+enough. He's a fine fellow and well-to-do. Even if we could afford to
+keep you on here indefinitely, which of course we can't, it would be a
+good job. Lucky girl!"
+
+He went out after that and left his wife's niece free again to hide
+herself. But not entirely. Ethel, unable to resist her desire for
+finality, soon tapped at Muriel's door.
+
+"Muriel!" she called.
+
+For some time there was no answer, though Mrs. Newberry made sure that
+she heard sounds within the room.
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+"Yes. Who is there?"
+
+"It's me--Aunt Ethel."
+
+"Yes, Aunt Ethel?"
+
+"Well, Muriel--are you all right?"
+
+"Quite, thanks."
+
+"Don't you want anything?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nothing at _all_?"
+
+"Nothing at all, thank you."
+
+Ethel hesitated.
+
+"But, Muriel----"
+
+The girl apparently waited for her aunt to finish the sentence that
+Ethel had not completed.
+
+"Muriel----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+Ethel softly tried the door: as she had supposed, it was locked.
+
+"O, Muriel, do open the door and let me in."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because, Muriel."
+
+"But why? I'm--I'm dressing."
+
+"But--surely you know why, Muriel. Why won't you confide in me?"
+
+There was a long wait for the answer to this question, but the answer,
+when it came, was resolute enough:
+
+"I've nothing to confide. Please go away now, Aunt Ethel, and leave me
+alone. Please do."
+
+Ethel went. She returned, of course, from time to time, whenever she
+could think of a new excuse or a new suggestion; but she was always
+worsted.
+
+Muriel did not descend to dinner that night until she was sure that Mr.
+Newberry, whose deterrent attitude she instinctively counted upon, was
+there with her aunt. She contrived to be left alone not once with Ethel.
+It was the habit of the members of the Newberry household to breakfast
+together only by chance, which meant that they generally ate separately.
+When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she
+had a headache.
+
+"_What_ do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her
+husband.
+
+"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.
+
+"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"
+
+"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is
+what _you_ may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a
+mess."
+
+"But, Preston----"
+
+"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."
+
+So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's
+card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of
+whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at
+sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.
+
+Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young
+people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of
+most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied.
+All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart
+a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that
+their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much
+Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the
+books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and
+sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff of dreams. But
+she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a
+glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.
+
+What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his
+attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed.
+If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth,
+that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the
+unit of measurement for a life--a mere figure of speech--something
+simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name.
+What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in
+its substance? Why should she even ask these questions--and why, when
+she asked, could she find no answer?
+
+She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her.
+Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps--as a traveller may see an
+unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash--she saw this now; the loss
+might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet
+acquired.
+
+Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that
+lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it
+in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl,
+descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now
+ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater
+Ignorance. Companionship, affection, kindly feeling--all these things
+and more--she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and
+dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual,
+intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes
+it--this she did not as yet know, had never known.
+
+The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The
+crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy,
+ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.
+
+Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there
+since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing.
+She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile,
+how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came
+forward with outstretched hands.
+
+"Have you thought things over?" he asked.
+
+There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for
+pretence was passed.
+
+"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet--and yet----"
+
+His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the
+tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.
+
+"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make
+up your mind?"
+
+She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug she traced a stupid
+figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.
+
+"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard----"
+
+"To love me?"
+
+"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She
+owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love
+you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all,
+would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."
+
+It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not
+create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her
+face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all
+casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black
+hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen
+her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky
+and bathed in the light of stars.
+
+Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and
+seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered
+passion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation,
+passion mastered him. The rein had snapped.
+
+"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know--there are
+things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel?
+Answer! Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"
+
+She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any
+man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer,
+she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his
+strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.
+
+The miracle--oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle--happened.
+Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully,
+terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole
+body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried
+to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.
+
+"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I
+know now. I love you!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"
+
+
+And so they were married. Mrs. Newberry had her way: they were married
+within the month and within the church.
+
+Preston's troubles, meanwhile, were hard to bear, and were not borne in
+silence. By faith, as has been noted, he was a Presbyterian; but by
+reason of his social position it was incumbent to attend
+occasionally--so often, in fact, as he went to church at all--an
+establishment of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion. Yet it appeared,
+when he came to arrange for the wedding of his wife's niece, which was
+the first he had ever arranged for, that there were ecclesiastical
+distinctions about weddings concerning which he had never previously
+dreamed. There were certain churches where one was expected to be a
+regular Sunday attendant; but when it came to a wedding, these would not
+serve: a wedding, to be socially correct, must occur in one of two or
+three churches in which, apparently, nothing else ever occurred. They
+seemed to be set aside for the exclusive business of marrying, and they
+married only exclusive people. Through one's sexton one rented one of
+these as one rents the Berkeley Lyceum, save that, in the matter of the
+wedding church, its rector is thrown in for good measure; then, when one
+proposed to introduce one's friend Buggins, the composer, to play the
+wedding-marches, one was told that only the church's regular organist
+was permitted to play the church's superb organ, and that, if one really
+required music, the regular organist could be hired at so much--and "so
+much" was not so pleasantly indefinite as it sounded.
+
+"I never before realised what my father-in-law went through for me,"
+said Preston.
+
+"Things are never so hard as you think they'll be," said his wife in an
+effort at comfort.
+
+"Things are always worse," replied the uncomforted Newberry. "Thank the
+Lord, I'll never have to arrange for another marriage. I thought that
+was Heaven's business, anyhow: I thought marriages were made in heaven.
+I'd rather be the advance agent of a minstrel show."
+
+Still, in some fashion or other--and Mrs. Newberry and the papers were
+satisfied that it was the very best fashion--the thing was accomplished.
+There was an immediate "Engagement Dinner" given by Ethel; there were
+other dinners given by Jim; there were luncheons given by friends of
+Muriel and the Newberrys; then, at last, there was Stainton's
+bachelor-supper to George Holt and the ushers-to-be, whom Holt had
+collected, held at Sherry's, whence everybody except the host departed
+in one of the four socially requisite stages of drunkenness, and so the
+climax, with the hired church, the hired parson, the frock coats, the
+staring eyes, the odour of flowers, the demure bridesmaids, and the
+hired organist playing Wagner and Mendelssohn and "The Voice That
+Breathed O'er Eden."
+
+Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware
+that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go
+by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the
+young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which
+the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel
+of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of
+the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane
+man would willingly describe as sane. He remembered only that he felt
+white and solemn; that he had an interminable wait in the vestry with
+Holt, a silently reconciled best-man, and a second wait at the altar
+rail, where he was the centre of interest and commiseration until the
+bride appeared, when he fell to an importance scarcely equal to that of
+the clergyman and far below that of the pew opener. Only these things he
+remembered, and that Muriel, with her sweetly serious face admirably set
+off by the white in which she was clad, looked all that he wished her to
+look and strangely spiritual besides. The next event of which he was at
+all certainly conscious was the hurried reception and the swiftly
+following bridal breakfast where Preston Newberry made truly pathetic
+references to some "lamp of sunshine" that had been "filched forever"
+from the Newberry home.
+
+Preston was more than a little relieved. He found it in his heart to
+wish Muriel well.
+
+"Good-bye, youngster," he said, when she came to him in her going-away
+gown. "Good-bye." ("For the sake of goodness, Ethel, stop that
+snivelling!") "He's a fine old buck and he'll be kind to you, I'm sure."
+("My dear, _stop_ it! Hasn't the girl got what you've wanted her to have
+ever since you set eyes on him?")
+
+Muriel heard the asides addressed to Mrs. Newberry and winced at the
+adjective openly applied to Jim, but she bit her lip and tossed her head
+and went away radiant for the first month of their honeymoon in Aiken,
+where she was happy with new and tremendous delights that received and
+asked and gave and demanded and grew.
+
+She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was
+as if her material world had always been at twilight--a soft, luminous,
+fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless--and that now, without the
+intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of
+dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She
+opened her arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in
+it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave
+them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her
+eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of
+his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have
+questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed
+even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was
+certain that she knew love. She was in love with love.
+
+For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic
+prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her
+loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it--his eyes shone and
+his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this
+was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to
+the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten
+moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the
+ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young--he was still young!
+
+"Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her.
+
+This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting
+room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers,
+but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head,
+with its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her
+arms about his waist.
+
+"No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so
+sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of
+endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our
+beginning."
+
+He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him
+to a great tenderness.
+
+"Beginning?" he echoed. "Yes, that's it. It must be the beginning of
+something that will never have an end."
+
+Her dusky eyes glowed.
+
+"Never!" she repeated, and then, as an unreasoned wistfulness shot
+through her, she whispered: "It never will end, will it, Jim?"
+
+"How could it, sweetheart?"
+
+"But I mean it will always go on like this--just like this. I don't want
+us just to grow used to each other, just stupid and merely
+satisfied--just--just affectionate and fond."
+
+"We can never come to that. We love too much, Muriel."
+
+"Then don't let's forget ever," she pleaded, her arms tightening. "It
+must all be honeymoon, forever and forever."
+
+He raised her face and kissed her.
+
+"Always," he said--"always morning. We will never let the shadows
+lengthen; we will hold back the hands of the clock." He kissed her
+again. "You know that we will?" he asked.
+
+"I know--I know," she answered.
+
+They had no quarrels. There was only one matter in which she deviated so
+much as a hair's breadth from his ideal of her and there was but one
+occasion when she was hurt by any act of his.
+
+The first of these affairs sprang from a conversation started by a
+letter with a blue French twenty-five-centime stamp upon it, which their
+always discreet waiter brought to the rooms one morning with the coffee.
+It had been forwarded from New York.
+
+"What's that?" asked Muriel.
+
+Stainton had been reading with his iron-grey brows in a pucker and a
+smile on his lips.
+
+"It is a Frenchman trying to write English," he said. "He doesn't
+succeed."
+
+"Yes, but what _is_ it?"
+
+"Only business, dear."
+
+"Then I ought to see it," said Muriel.
+
+Stainton laughed.
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+"If it is business, I ought to see it," she repeated.
+
+"Trouble your little head with such matters? Not much."
+
+She came to him as if to kiss him, then quickly seized the letter and
+ran laughing away. He pursued her, laughing, too; but she was more
+agile than her husband, and she managed easily to evade him until her
+eyes had caught enough of the letter to enable her to guess its entire
+contents.
+
+"So they want to buy your mine?" she asked. "They say their expert has
+returned and reported"--she glanced again at the letter as his fingers
+closed on it--"reported favourably."
+
+"Yes," he said; "it's a French syndicate, some wealthy men in Lyons, and
+they want to buy the mine."
+
+"But you won't sell?"
+
+"If I can get my figure, I will."
+
+"Your mine?"
+
+"Our mine."
+
+For that she kissed him.
+
+"But, if it's ours, I have something to say about it, and I won't let
+you."
+
+"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her pretty assumption.
+
+"Because I think it would be horrid of you to sell it after all the
+years you spent looking for it."
+
+"I wasn't looking for it on its own account, dear; I was looking for it
+because of what it would bring me."
+
+"I wish you'd take me to see it."
+
+"It's a dull place, Muriel."
+
+"I wish you'd take me. I wouldn't find it dull."
+
+"I shall take you to France instead."
+
+"To sell the mine?"
+
+"To try."
+
+"Horrid!" she pouted.
+
+"But, dearest," he explained, "I don't want to have a mine on my hands.
+I have you."
+
+"Do I keep you busy?"
+
+"You are a gold mine. Don't you see? I want to be free. If I can get my
+price, we shall be rich."
+
+"I thought we were rich now."
+
+"With a mine run by an agent, yes. But if I sold to this syndicate--now,
+you mustn't talk about this outside, you know----"
+
+"Of course I know."
+
+"Or write it home."
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Well, then, if these people buy, we shall be rich without any more
+agents or any more work. I have had enough of mining to make me certain
+that I don't want to chain any son of mine down to the business."
+
+"Any----" The word turned her suddenly white. In the midst of the
+intimacies of the honeymoon, reference to children painted her cheeks
+with scarlet.
+
+Stainton smiled indulgently. He put a strong arm about her and patted
+her shoulder.
+
+"Yes, any sons, dear," he said. "Did you never think of that? Did you
+never think how sweet it would be if we two that are one should really
+see ourselves made one in a little baby?"
+
+To his amazement she burst into tears.
+
+"I don't want a baby!" she wailed, her head on his shoulder, her hands
+clasped behind him. "I don't want a baby. No, no, no!"
+
+He tried to persuade her, but he could scarcely make himself heard until
+he abandoned the topic.
+
+"There, there," he said, "it's all right. I wouldn't hurt you, dearest;
+you know I wouldn't. There will be nothing to worry about."
+
+His heart ached because he had hurt her. He told himself that he should
+have remembered that her present nervous condition could not be normal.
+He upbraided himself for making to her, no matter how long he might have
+been married to her, a frank proposition that her sensitive nature
+probably repelled only because of the matter-of-fact way in which he had
+suggested what, he thought, should have been more delicately put. He did
+not change his design; he merely ceased to speak of it. Throughout the
+world the only persons not consulted about the possible bearing of
+children are the only persons able to bear them. Stainton no longer made
+an exception of Muriel. He decided that the best management of these
+matters was to leave them to chance for their occurrence and nature for
+their acceptance.
+
+This conversation took place a week or more after their verbal
+banishment of sunsets. On the night following, Jim at the demand of his
+abounding health, fell asleep earlier than usual and slept, as always,
+soundly; but his wife chanced to be nervous and restless. She lay long
+awake and she was lonely. Twice she wished to rouse him for her
+comforting; twice she refrained. When, finally, she did sleep, her sleep
+was heavy, and she awoke late to find him gone. She hurried into the
+sitting-room, but he was not there, and it was quite ten minutes later
+when he returned, fully dressed and glowing, a newspaper in his hand.
+
+"Where on earth have you been?" she asked. She had crawled back into
+bed, and she looked very beautiful as she lay there, her black hair wide
+upon the pillows and the lacy sleeves of her night-dress brushed high on
+her wide-flung arms.
+
+"Downstairs. You were fast asleep and you looked so comfy I hadn't the
+heart to waken you. It's a wonderful morning----"
+
+"But, Jim, I woke up all alone! I was afraid!"
+
+He sat on the bed beside her. He took her in his arms, flattered. He
+gave her the chuckling consolation that the strong, knowing their
+strength, vouchsafe the weak. He was sorry that she should have felt
+badly, but he was immensely proud that she should be dependent.
+
+"Too bad, too bad!" he said. "But it won't happen again. Next time I'll
+either rouse you or else sit tight till your dear eyes open of their own
+accord."
+
+He was still holding the newspaper in one of his embracing hands. It
+rustled against her back, and, freeing herself, she saw it.
+
+"What's that?" she asked.
+
+"A newspaper, of course. I thought I should like to see what was going
+on in the world. It suddenly struck me that I hadn't looked at a
+newspaper since I read the notice of our wedding--five hundred years
+ago."
+
+But Muriel pouted.
+
+"Then," she said, "I don't see why you should begin now."
+
+"One has to begin sometime."
+
+"I don't see why. Is anything between us different to-day from
+yesterday?"
+
+"Certainly not, sweetheart."
+
+"Well, I thought we weren't going to be like other people. I thought we
+were always going to be enough to each other."
+
+"We are. Of course we are. But you were asleep, and, anyhow, I said I
+was never going to run away again. Besides, Muriel----"
+
+"I don't see why," Muriel maintained.
+
+He tried to quiet her with kisses. He held her close and pressed her
+face to his.
+
+During all that month, these were the only occasions when they so much
+as approached a difference of opinion. They lived, instead, in that
+crowded winter resort, like a man and a girl made one upon a new island
+in a deserted sea. They walked, hand in hand, and, as it seemed to them,
+heart to heart, through a wonderful world that was new to them.
+Happiness sparkled in their eyes and trembled at their lips. There were
+times when their happiness almost made them afraid. Heaven was very
+near.
+
+Then, as the month ended, the blasting idea came to Muriel: she was
+going to have a child.
+
+It came like that. Just when everything was perfect, just when love had
+realized itself. The thought lay beside her on a morning that she had
+expected to wake to so differently. Muriel felt as if it were the
+thought that had wakened her.
+
+She cast a frightened look at Stainton, who was lying beside her, his
+iron-grey hair disordered, his mouth slightly open, snoring gently.
+
+"Jim!" she said. She clutched at his pajama jacket and tried to shake
+him. "Jim! Jim!"
+
+He awoke, startled. He rubbed his eyes:
+
+"Eh? What?"
+
+"Jim!"
+
+Then he saw her face.
+
+"My God! What is it, dearie?"
+
+She gasped her fear.
+
+"Muriel!" he cried, and held her tight to his heart. His first feeling
+was a flash of gratitude: his desire had been granted; he was to be the
+father of a child.
+
+But Muriel only clung to him and cried. She did not want a baby. She
+was horrified at thought of it. She was panic-stricken.
+
+Stainton watched her grief with a sore heart and essayed to soothe it;
+yet, all the while, his heart swelled with a reasonless pride that
+appeared to him supremely reasonable: he had performed the Divine Act;
+within the year he would see a living soul clothed in his own flesh and
+moulded in his own image. Like hers, his eyes, though from a vastly
+different cause, were dimmed by tears.
+
+"My dear, my dear!" he whispered. "O, my dear!"
+
+Muriel, broken-hearted, wept hysterically.
+
+Stainton stroked her blue-black hair. All women were like this, he
+reflected; it was a law of nature. It was the same law that, in the
+lower animals, first drove the female to repulse the male and then
+submit to him. In mankind it began by making the woman dread the
+accomplishment of her natural destiny and ended by awakening the
+maternal instinct, seemingly so at variance with its preceding action.
+
+Suddenly Muriel looked up and saw his expression. Hers grew wild.
+
+"You--did you know it would be?" she stammered.
+
+"There, there!" said Stainton, stroking her hair.
+
+She drew herself free.
+
+"You did know!"
+
+Stainton prepared to yield to the natural law.
+
+"Of course, I didn't _know_, dear. How could I be certain?"
+
+"Oh, but you were, you were!" she cried. "You knew. And I didn't. I
+didn't know! I didn't know! And you did--_you_!"
+
+"Dearest," said Stainton. He tried to take her hand.
+
+She was sitting straight up in bed, looking down at him, her hair
+falling over her nightgown.
+
+"And you told me I wouldn't----You told me it wouldn't be!" she accused.
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Yes, you did. You said there would be nothing to worry about.
+Those were your very words, Jim."
+
+"Well, but, dear, there won't be anything to worry about."
+
+"Nothing to worry about!" she repeated. She put her fingers to her
+temples. "Not for _you_, of course!"
+
+Stainton was hurt: "Dearie, you know that if I could----"
+
+"And anyhow," she interrupted, "you didn't mean that. You meant me to
+think what I did think."
+
+He felt that, in a sense, she was right: he had meant at least to quiet
+her, to divert her thoughts. He was ashamed of that. He sought to
+comfort her.
+
+"Perhaps you are mistaken," he said.
+
+"No, no!" she said. She got up and, slipperless, began to pace the room.
+
+Stainton struggled to his elbow.
+
+"But, dearie," he said, seeking relief in logic, "you must have known
+that when a girl married, she must expect--it was expected of her--it
+was her duty----"
+
+She continued to walk, her head bent.
+
+"Yes," she answered; "but I didn't know she would have to right away, or
+when she didn't want to, or----"
+
+Genuinely amazed and genuinely pained, Stainton swung his legs from the
+covers and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his
+knees, his mouth agape.
+
+"Sweetheart," he asked, "don't you love me?"
+
+"Of course, I love you, Jim."--She was still walking.
+
+"Then what did you think marriage was for?"
+
+She stopped before him. "I thought it was for love," she said; and,
+crumpling at his feet, put her face upon his knees.
+
+He bent over her, stroking her hair, calling her by the names that they
+had invented for each other, waiting for the natural law to assert
+itself again and trying, meanwhile, to alleviate her apprehensions.
+
+"Perhaps, after all, you are mistaken."
+
+This was the burden of his consolation.
+
+Nevertheless, she was not mistaken, and the succeeding days proved it.
+Nor was the natural law swift in asserting itself.
+
+"Don't you think," he once tried to urge the law, "that it would be
+beautiful if we should have a little baby?"
+
+"_I_ sha'n't be beautiful!" she wailed. "I shall lose my looks. I----"
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+"Yes, I shall. I know. I have seen it--on the street--lots of places. I
+shall grow--I shall----And all my lovely clothes!--Oh!"--She broke off
+and hid her eyes--"I shall grow vulgar looking and horrid!"
+
+They were walking along a country lane, and Stainton glanced about
+nervously, fearing that her words, spoken in a tone altogether
+unrestrained, would certainly be heard by more ears than his own. The
+road, however, was empty. He drew her aside to a spot where the woods
+met the lane and where, a few paces to the left of the lane, the trees
+hid them. He took her into his arms.
+
+"Muriel," he said, "if I could go through this for you, I would; you
+know that."
+
+"I know you can't go through it for me," she wept, "and so it's easy
+enough for you to say."
+
+"No," said Jim, "I can't go through it for you, and so you see, it must
+be God's will that it should be as it is to be."
+
+She was worn out by the days of worry, but she made one more appeal.
+
+"Jim," she said, "can't you do something else for me?"
+
+He knitted his brows.
+
+"Something else?" he wondered. "I can love you; I can back you up with
+all the love of my body and brain and soul. You may always count on
+that, sweetheart."
+
+"But"--her eyes looked straight into his--"can't you _do_ something?"
+
+He understood. He fell back a step, his face grey.
+
+"Muriel!" he whispered.
+
+"I've read of such things in the papers," she said.
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+His eyes were so horrified that she hung her head.
+
+"Oh, it's wrong; I know it's wrong," she said. "But, oh, if you knew how
+afraid I was of this and how I hate and how--O, Jim, Jim!"
+
+She tottered forward, and his arms received her.
+
+"Muriel, my dear wife," he said. "My own dear little girl, to think that
+when God has put a life into our keeping, you----Why, Muriel, that is
+murder!"
+
+That word won Stainton's victory. Muriel succumbed. For her it was like
+the safe passing of one of those physical crises when the patient had
+rather die than face the pain of further living; for him it was the
+sealing of his happiness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ANOTHER ROAD
+
+
+It was a few days later that Muriel, the reconciled, decided that she
+wanted to leave Aiken.
+
+"Don't you think," she asked, for she had come unconsciously often to
+use phrases characteristic of Jim, "that a change of scene would be good
+for us both?"
+
+Stainton had not thought so. He had wandered so much in his life that,
+now wandering was no longer a necessity of life, he was tired of it.
+Besides, he was eminently satisfied with Aiken.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "I think it's splendid here. Haven't we
+been--aren't you happy, dear?"
+
+Muriel was looking out of the window of their hotel sitting-room.
+
+"Of course I'm happy," she said in a low voice. "At least," she added,
+"I know I ought to be, and I know I never knew what happiness was till I
+had you. It was only that I thought it would be--perhaps it would be
+good for me--now--if we travelled."
+
+Stainton cursed himself for a negligent brute.
+
+"What a beast I am!" he said, his arm encircling her waist. "We shall go
+wherever you want, and we shall go to-morrow."
+
+Muriel smiled ruefully.
+
+"Perhaps," she submitted, "the real reason is only that I've always
+wanted so to travel and have never had the chance before."
+
+But Stainton would hear of no reason but her first. He upbraided himself
+again for his stupidity in not guessing her need before she could have
+given it expression.
+
+"I've been cruel to you!" he declared.
+
+She stopped him with a swift embrace.
+
+"You're never anything," she contritely vowed, "but just darling to me.
+I only thought----"
+
+"I know, I know. Where shall we go, Muriel? How about France? I ought to
+see that syndicate, you know: I ought to meet those men personally. Then
+there's Paris. I have always longed for Paris myself, and now I shall
+have you for my guide there."
+
+"Your guide, Jim?"
+
+"Well, you speak French like a book, and I have forgotten nearly all of
+the little I ever learned."
+
+"I speak school-French," Muriel corrected him.
+
+"At any rate," he assured her, "yours is fluent, and I can only stammer
+in the language. Then, too," he went on, "there will be the trip across.
+That will be good for you. Sea air ought to be good for you." She
+winced, and so he hurried to add: "I think I need a bracer, too.--Are
+you a good sailor, Muriel?"
+
+"I don't know. I've never been on the ocean. Are you?"
+
+"I used to be." His eyes darkened. "It's a good many years since I have
+tried the water. But I know I shall be all right. I am in such splendid
+shape. Where is a newspaper? Wait a minute; I'll ring for one. Aren't
+you glad for newspapers now? They carry shipping advertisements, you
+see. We'll look up the sailings. We have found our first five heavens in
+America; we must find the sixth in France, and then we must come back
+here so that our seventh will happen on American soil."
+
+Considering the fact that he did not wish to go, he was
+self-sacrificingly energetic. He was so energetic that they left Aiken
+on the next morning and, three days later, were aboard their steamer.
+
+The Newberrys were out of town, still enjoying the rest that they had
+earned by settling Muriel for life. George Holt was, however, there and
+had come all the way to Hoboken to see them off.
+
+"And as a German steamship captain once said to me when I asked him to
+lunch with me at my club," explained Holt, "it's a terribly long way
+from Hoboken to America."
+
+"It was good of you to come," said Muriel, while the crowd of
+second-class passengers and the friends of passengers jostled about the
+first-class promenade deck. "Don't you wish you were coming along?"
+
+"Better," said Stainton, already in his steamer cap.
+
+"Thanks, no," said Holt, and then, as the siren blew: "If you'd asked my
+advice before you bought your tickets, old man, I'd have told you:
+'Don't go to sea; but if you do go, don't play cards; but if you do play
+cards, cut the cards. They'll cheat you anyhow, but it'll take longer.'"
+
+He waved a plump farewell and bared a bald head and waddled down the
+gang-plank. The band began to play, and Stainton and his wife went to
+their stateroom to unpack: they were travelling without a maid because
+Muriel had said something about wanting to secure one in France.
+
+By sunrise next morning the _Friedrich Barbarossa_ was racing through
+the grey Atlantic with even speed. It was late winter--it was really
+early spring--and she had already encountered a storm and heavy seas,
+but the lean ocean express dove through the former and rode the latter
+as easily as if she had been a railway train running on tried rails
+along a perfect roadbed. There was no reason in the world why anybody
+should be sick aboard her; few others were sick; yet, Stainton, on that
+second day out, remained below.
+
+He could not account for it. He did not like to confess it. He
+especially hated to confess, when he awoke to see his wife putting the
+finishing touches to her toilet in the far corner of their big
+stateroom. But this was manifestly a case where discretion must triumph
+over valour: he no sooner got to his feet than he got off them again.
+
+"It's no use," he sighed. "I don't know what it was. I wish they didn't
+have such good dinners on this boat, for it must have been something I
+ate."
+
+Muriel was all consolation.
+
+"Let me ring for the steward to bring your breakfast here," she said.
+
+"Not if you don't want to kill me! Don't mention food again, please--I
+wonder if that lobster were just fresh."
+
+She insisted for a long time that she would remain below with him, but
+he overruled her. He said that the open air would be good for her, even
+if she did not seem to need it, and he meant that, although he meant
+also--what he dared not say--that he wanted to struggle alone with his
+malady. Finally, therefore, Muriel descended to the big dining saloon
+alone and surprisedly found herself breakfasting with enjoyment, in
+spite of her husband's absence.
+
+She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in
+her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the
+evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy
+novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and
+failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed
+her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters,
+beating to crests of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line
+for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so
+often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She
+went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the
+band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about
+with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and
+resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely,
+but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings,
+oysterplant ménagère, succotash, biscuit japonais and nougat parfait.
+She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward
+motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace passengers walked by
+on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait
+had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road.
+
+He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and
+agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding
+youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy--a boy not five years
+her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and
+alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache
+above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and
+the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank
+curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own
+interested scrutiny and, when they answered it with an honest smile,
+whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks.
+
+Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim
+still slept.
+
+She went on deck again. She knew that the blond young man would be
+there, though how she knew it she could not guess, and yet she argued
+that there was no reason why his presence should banish her from the
+free air.
+
+She sat down. She saw him coming past, on a walk about the deck, and
+looked away. The second time he passed she glanced at him, and he smiled
+and raised his steamer cap. A gust of wind fluttered her rug, and he
+stooped to rearrange it.
+
+"Thank you," stammered Muriel. "It's not necessary, really. The
+steward----"
+
+The young man bowed. It was a bow that, in New York, would have struck
+her as absurdly elaborate; here she liked it.
+
+"But it is, I assure you, a pleasure," he protested.
+
+He spoke English without an accent, but with a precision that, for all
+its ease, betrayed a Teutonic parentage and education.
+
+"Thank you," repeated Muriel, and she blushed again.
+
+The young man stood before her, his arms folded, swaying in serene
+certainty with the rolling rhythm of the boat.
+
+"May I sit down?" he asked, indicating, with a gesture of his hand, the
+row of empty chairs beside her.
+
+Muriel made, by way of reply, what she conceived to be a social
+masterstroke.
+
+"Certainly," she answered; "but I am here only for a few moments. I'll
+soon have to be running downstairs--I mean 'below'--to look after my
+husband."
+
+The stranger's handsome face expressed concern, yet the concern, it
+immediately appeared, was not because of Muriel's marital state, but
+because of her husband's physical plight.
+
+"I am so sorry," he said, taking Jim's chair. "He is ill then, your
+husband?"
+
+Muriel did not seem to like this.
+
+"Not very," said she. "He is"--she searched for a phrase characteristic
+of Stainton--"he is just a bit under the weather."
+
+"So," sighed the stranger, unduly comprehending. "Ah, perhaps Madame has
+made more voyages than has he?"
+
+"No, this is the first trip across for both of us."
+
+"Indeed? But you seem to be so excellent a sailor! Is it only youth that
+makes you so?"
+
+"I don't know." She was clearly, her will to the contrary, a little
+flattered. "I seem to take naturally to the water."
+
+"But not so your husband!"
+
+"He will be all right to-morrow."
+
+"Only to-day he is, your husband, not all right? I am so sorry. Perhaps
+he is not so young as you are?"
+
+Muriel felt herself again flushing. She at once became more angry at her
+anger than she was at what, upon reflection, she decided to be nothing
+more than frank curiosity on the part of her interlocutor.
+
+"Of course he is young!" she heard herself saying.
+
+The stranger either did not observe her emotions or did not care to show
+that he observed them. He launched at once upon an unrestrained flow of
+ship talk. It seemed that he was an Austrian, though of Hungarian blood
+on his mother's side. He had gone into the army, was an officer--already
+a captain, she gathered--and he had been serving for some months as an
+attaché of his country's legation in Washington. Now he had been
+transferred to the legation at Paris. Muriel noted that he spoke with
+many gestures. She tried to dislike these as being un-American, and when
+she found it hard to dislike what were, after all, graceful adjuncts to
+his conversation and frequent aids to his adequate expression, she was
+annoyed and tried to indicate her annoyance.
+
+"I thought you were a soldier?" she said.
+
+With another European bow he produced a silver case engraved with his
+arms, drew from it a card, which he handed to Muriel. The card announced
+him as Captain Franz Esterházy von B. von Klausen.
+
+"But yes," he said. "Please."
+
+Muriel slipped the card into her belt.
+
+"You seem to like the diplomatic service better," she said.
+
+Von Klausen shrugged.
+
+"I go where I am sent," said he.
+
+"Would you ever go to war?" she persisted.
+
+"If I had to. Why not?"
+
+"And fight?"
+
+"Dear lady, but yes. I do not like, though, to fight, for war is what
+one of your great generals said: it is Hell."
+
+"Yet you went into the army?"
+
+"Because all my family have for generations done thus. I was born for
+that, I was brought up for that, and when I came to know"--he extended
+his palms--"I had to live," he concluded.
+
+This was scarcely Muriel's ideal of a soldier. She changed the
+conversation.
+
+"Of course you know Europe perfectly?" she enquired.
+
+"Not Russia," answered von Klausen; "but Germany, France, Spain, Italy
+and England--yes. You will travel much?"
+
+Muriel did not know; very likely they would. They would do whatever Mr.
+Stainton--Mr. Stainton was her husband--elected: she always did, always
+wanted to do, whatever her husband elected.
+
+The young man bowed at mention of Jim's name, as if he were being
+introduced.
+
+"Certainly," he gravely agreed. "Certainly, since he is your
+husband.--But you must not miss my country, dear lady, as so many
+foolish tourists miss it. It is the Tyrol, my fathers' country: the
+Austrian Tyrol. There is scenery--the most beautiful scenery in all the
+world: superb, majestic. You love scenery? Please."
+
+Muriel gave a surprised assent.
+
+"Then do not neglect the Tyrol. They call it the Austrian Tyrol, but it
+is really the only real Tyrol. Come to Innsbruck by the way of Zurich.
+That will bring you along the Waldersee, and so, too, you pass Castle
+Lichtenstein and come across the border at just beyond the ruins of
+Gräphang. You will see genuine mountains then, gigantic, snow-capped,
+with forests as dense as--as what you call a hairbrush--black,
+impenetrable. To the very tops of some the train climbs; it trembles
+over abysses. You look from the window of it down--down--down, a
+thousand feet, fifteen hundred, into valleys exquisite, with pink
+farmhouses or grey in them, the roofs weighted with large stones, the
+sides painted with crucifixes, or ornamented statues of the Blessed
+Virgin."
+
+He loved his country and he made it vivid to her. He rambled on and on.
+Muriel became a more and more fascinated listener. It was not until two
+hours later that she thought, with a guilty start, of Jim.
+
+She excused herself hastily and, leaving the Austrian bowing by the
+rail, ran to the close stateroom and her husband.
+
+He was awake, but still sick.
+
+"Don't bother about me," muttered Stainton as she entered--"and _please_
+don't bang the door!"
+
+She considered him compassionately. His hair fell in disorder over his
+haggard face; his cheeks were faintly green.
+
+"Can't I do something for you?" she asked, stepping forward.
+
+Stainton failed in a smile, but feebly motioned her away.
+
+"I am afraid not," said he--"unless you stop the ship. All I need is a
+little rest. You had better go back on deck. Really."
+
+Muriel delayed.
+
+"A man spoke to me on deck," she breathlessly confessed. "An Austrian
+diplomat, I think he is. My rug blew, and he rearranged it. Do you
+mind?"
+
+"Mind?" asked Stainton. "Certainly not.--How this boat pitches!--Talk to
+him, by all means. These things are common on shipboard, I believe."
+
+Muriel was reassured. She returned to the deck, but von Klausen was not
+there, and she did not see him again until evening.
+
+Then, though she still dutifully wished that Jim were with her, she
+found her appetite better than ever. She ventured upon a lonely
+cocktail. She ate some Blue Points. Captain von Klausen sent to her
+table, with his card, a pint of champagne, and she ordered potage
+Mogador, duckling balls with turnips, cèpes Provençals, sacher tart, and
+ice cream.
+
+When she reached the promenade-deck, von Klausen was already there. He
+had dined in evening clothes, but these were now hidden by the light
+rain-coat that swathed his lithe young figure from neck to heels. Muriel
+observed that its shoulders fitted to the shoulders of the wearer and
+had none of the deceptiveness of the padded shoulders to which she was
+once familiar in American coats.
+
+"Have you seen the phosphorus?" he asked, as she met him at the rail.
+His lifted cap showed his wind-tossed blond hair, and his ruddy face
+gleamed with salt spray.
+
+Muriel admitted her ignorance of phosphorus.
+
+"But," said von Klausen, "that is one of the sights of the voyage, and I
+have not often on the Atlantic seen it finer than it is to-night."
+
+He took her forward, by the starboard rail, under the bridge. Behind
+them were the closely curtained windows of the writing-room, forward
+was, only ten feet below them, the now emptied deck reserved for the
+third-class passengers, and beyond that, higher, rose and fell,
+rhythmically, the keen, dark prow. They were quite alone.
+
+"Look there!" said von Klausen.
+
+He pointed over the rail to where the inky surface of the sea was broken
+by the speed of the _Friedrich Barbarossa's_ passage, bursting into
+boiling, hissing, angry patches of bright whiteness.
+
+Timidly Muriel extended her head.
+
+"Do you see it?" asked von Klausen. He stood close beside her.
+
+"I see the waves," said Muriel, "and the white foam."
+
+"But the phosphorus--you do not see that? There--and there!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Look though," said he. "You do not look in just the correct direction.
+Please. Ahead, to the left. No; away a little from the ship--a little;
+not too much--where we have hit the water and the water recedes from us.
+It is beautiful--beautiful! See!"
+
+The great boat rose on a sudden wave. Von Klausen gripped the rail with
+one slim hand; the other, its arm around her waist, he placed about her
+farther arm.
+
+"Now!" he said, and, letting go of the rail, pointed.
+
+Her eyes followed his finger, and there, shining green and yellow, now
+clear, now opalescent, from burning cores to nebulous edges, she saw
+what seemed to be live stars smouldering and flaming in the hearts of
+the waves.
+
+"I see," she said. "It is beautiful--beautiful!"
+
+She was, she suddenly realised, but repeating his own phrase. Why should
+she not? The phrase was commonplace enough; besides, the phosphorus
+_was_ beautiful.
+
+Then she became conscious of his arm about her, became conscious that
+this arm about her had not been unpleasant; was indignant with him,
+silently, and indignant with herself; made certain, in her own mind,
+that he had put his arm around her waist only that he might protect
+her--and thus soon left him and went to bed without waking Jim.
+
+She opened her eyes after an unquiet night, to find that Stainton was
+somewhat improved, though too mindful of his experience of the preceding
+day to trust himself on deck.
+
+"I'll wait," he decided, "till to-morrow or this evening. Yes, I think I
+shall manage it this evening. I'm really in good shape, but I must have
+eaten something that didn't agree with me. You go up, Muriel. If you see
+that Austrian fellow, don't forget to give him my compliments and tell
+him I'll probably have the pleasure of meeting him this evening. What
+did you say he was?"
+
+"His name," said Muriel, "is von Klausen." She hated herself for her
+unreasonable disinclination to mention the Captain.
+
+"H'm--a diplomat, did you say?"
+
+"Something of the sort."
+
+"As old as most diplomats then, I suppose?"
+
+"No," said Muriel; "he's--he's rather young."
+
+The ship began to descend a lofty wave, and Stainton lay back in his
+berth. His face, with its full day's growth of beard, looked grey.
+
+"All right," he said. "Run along, dear--and look in about noon."
+
+Muriel obeyed him. Their chairs were well forward, and when she reached
+them she saw von Klausen again seated in that which bore Stainton's
+card.
+
+He rose at sight of her. No motion of the boat seemed ever to affect him
+to awkwardness.
+
+"Your husband," he asked, bareheaded and erect while she seated herself;
+"he is, I trust, better?"
+
+"He hasn't really been sick," she asseverated with what she knew, as she
+said it, to be wholly unnecessary emphasis.
+
+The young Austrian performed one of his ceremonious obeisances.
+
+"Then I shall be so pleased, so honoured, this evening to be presented
+to him, and I so deeply regret his having been ill. It is not good, this
+ocean, for the elderly."
+
+Muriel's cheeks warmed.
+
+"Why do you call him that?" she demanded. "I told you yesterday that he
+was--that he was almost young. Why do you call him elderly?"
+
+"Forgive." Von Klausen's wide gesture expressed his regret for this
+error. "I had forgotten entirely. It is too bad of me to forget
+entirely."
+
+"Oh," laughed Muriel, for she was already condemning her annoyance as
+childishness, "it doesn't matter, because it is so absurd. Only, what
+gave you such an impression?"
+
+"Please?"
+
+"The impression that he was elderly: what gave you that?"
+
+Von Klausen manifestly hesitated.
+
+"I do not know," he said. "I thought that--I thought that, before we
+sailed, on the deck here I had seen him with you. You and two American
+gentlemen I thought I saw: one young and stout. I thought the gentleman
+young and stout went ashore. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the other that
+went ashore. Perhaps that was your father."
+
+There was a moment's silence. Muriel looked intently at the ragged
+horizon.
+
+"The stout man was Mr. Holt," she said at last. "He is a friend of
+mine--of ours."
+
+"Ah?" said von Klausen, disinterestedly polite.
+
+"My husband," said Muriel, "is _not_ elderly."
+
+"I ask his pardon," said von Klausen. He produced his bow again. He
+remained quite at his ease, but his manner implied a courteous wonder at
+any person's shame of his years. "He is then----"
+
+"He is not so much over forty," lied Muriel, without the remotest idea
+why she should be thus untruthfully communicative.
+
+Von Klausen ever so slightly turned his head away. She was immediately
+sure that he did it to conceal a smile.
+
+"That is not old," she hotly contended. She made up her mind now that
+she did not like this graceful young foreigner. "And Jim is not so old
+as his age," she continued--"not nearly. He has lived half his life in
+our Great West, and he is as strong as a lion--and as brave."
+
+She felt the folly of her remark as she made it, but von Klausen gave no
+sign of sharing that feeling. He settled himself comfortably in Jim's
+chair. She saw that his face was wholly innocent, his eyes only politely
+eager.
+
+"Tell me of him, please," he said. "I have heard of your brave
+Westerners, as you call them, in your United States. I met, once in
+Washington, a Senator from Texas, but he did not seem to me
+quite--quite----Pray tell me of your husband, dear lady."
+
+She was amazed to find that, offhand, she could not do this. She started
+twice and twice stopped, wondering what, after all, there was to say.
+Then, with a vigorous concentration, she laid hold of all that her aunt
+and uncle had told her of her husband, all that Holt was authority for,
+all that the Sunday supplement of the newspapers had printed. She
+narrated how he had rescued the innocent runaway from the lynching
+party at Grand Joining, how he had saved the lives of his camp mates
+during the spotted fever epidemic at Sunnyside; she told of the shooting
+in Alaska, the filibustering expedition, of Jim's slaying with a knife
+the grizzly bear that was about to strip Holt's flesh from his bones;
+she gave in detail the story of Jim's descent into the shaft of the
+"Better Days" mine, and what she had not learned she supplied to the
+history of the train robbers on the Rio Grande. It was all deliberate
+boasting, and when she ended, she felt a little ashamed.
+
+Von Klausen, however, was visibly affected.
+
+"He is a man to admire, your husband," said the Austrian. "Strength and
+bravery, bravery and strength: these, dear lady, are the two things that
+men envy and women love, all the world over. I wish"--his young smile
+grew crooked--"I wish I had them."
+
+Muriel's red lips parted in surprise:
+
+"But you are a soldier?"
+
+"What of that?" shrugged von Klausen.
+
+"Oh, but you are brave!" She was sure of it.
+
+"How do you know?" he asked--"how do I?"
+
+"And you--you _look_ strong," she continued. Her black eyes passed
+involuntarily over his slim, well-proportioned figure. "Anybody can see
+that you must be strong."
+
+"If I correctly recall my sight of your good husband," said the
+captain, "he could break me in two pieces across his knee."
+
+She inwardly acknowledged this possibility, but she did not like to bear
+her new friend belittle himself.
+
+"That's only because Jim is _very_ strong," she explained.
+
+"Perhaps," said von Klausen, "yet that was not the only kind of strength
+I bore in my mind, dear lady. I thought of the strength--of moral
+strength, strength of purpose--whether the purpose is for the good or
+the bad--which is two-thirds of bravery."
+
+"And haven't you that?"
+
+It might have been because he was altogether so new to her that the
+question came readily. There seemed then nothing strange in the
+discussion of these intimate topics.
+
+"Who knows?" said von Klausen, quietly. "I have not yet been tried.
+Perhaps, should I love something or somebody, I should acquire these
+things." His tone lacked offence because it perfectly achieved the
+impersonal note. "They would come to me then, for I should love that
+cause or person better than my own life or my own welfare. I do not
+know. I have not been tried. I know only that, without the cause or the
+person, I have not real strength; I have not real courage. I have fought
+my duel; I have faced death--but I know there are forms of it that I
+fear. I am at least brave enough to admit that I am sometimes afraid.
+For the rest, I am not the type of man that women love: I need to be
+cared for, to be thought about, to be helped in the hundred foolish
+little ways--and women love men who do not take these things, but who
+give them."
+
+His low voice, his simplicity, and most of all his childish manner,
+touched her.
+
+"I think," she said, "that you are not fair to women."
+
+Von Klausen pointed out across the rail.
+
+"Look there!" said he.
+
+A two-masted fishing boat, storm driven from the Banks to sea, swung
+within three or four hundred yards of them. She could see its dripping
+gunwale contending with the waves, the oil-skinned sailors tottering
+upon its deck.
+
+"Now look there!" said von Klausen.
+
+This time be pointed ahead, and ahead she saw, just beyond the charging
+prow of the imperious _Friedrich_, what seemed to be a thick grey
+curtain. It reached to the heavens and, as the liner approached it,
+opened like three walls: one before the prow, the other two on either
+side. It had all the palpability of heavy cloth.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"Fog," said von Klausen, and in a moment, with the great siren of the
+boat shaking their very hearts, it had descended upon them.
+
+The walls fastened. The curtains enveloped them. The thick, tangible,
+breath-tightening stuff wrapped them in a kind of cocoon. All the clouds
+of the sky seemed to have fallen. Muriel could scarcely distinguish the
+features of the young fellow beside her. And always, reverberating and
+portentous, the siren howled overhead.
+
+"The boat!" she called into von Klausen's ear. "Isn't it odd? Only a
+minute ago it was there. Then I saw only its masts. Now I can't see it
+at all."
+
+He called his answer.
+
+"Once in the Bosphorus--like this--fog. I was on the prow--an express
+boat. We brought up a little, low ship--crowded with pilgrims. Fog--shut
+out--the crash--I could look down and see--faces upturned, calling. I
+could _see_ them calling--could not hear. I am afraid--I am terribly
+afraid--of fogs."
+
+She heard his voice break. She caught a glimpse of his face--the face of
+a frightened child. She felt him trembling as their shoulders touched:
+this soldier who had fought his duel and would not, she knew, fear the
+trial of battle. She was not afraid. Instinctively, she reached out
+toward him, to help, to comfort.
+
+When the fog lifted as suddenly as it had fallen, the little fisherman
+was riding the waves safely and almost gaily far astern. The _Friedrich_
+sped unconcernedly on.
+
+"There was no real danger, I am sure," von Klausen was saying; "these
+Germans I do not like, but they are good sailors--too good to hurt a
+smaller boat."
+
+Then Muriel discovered that she had been holding his hand.
+
+"I think," she said, "that I had better go and look after Mr.
+Stainton."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+"UNWILLING WAR"
+
+
+Stainton recovered. Only someone in a fundamentally bad condition could
+long remain ill aboard this sea-express in the weather that now befell,
+and Jim's condition was good. Consequently, within another twenty-four
+hours he was wholly himself again and wholly able to enjoy the rest of
+the voyage.
+
+Muriel, meanwhile, had not told him of her last conversation with von
+Klausen and of its termination. She convinced herself that she had taken
+the young man's hand merely to calm his fears; that she had been
+unconscious of the action until the fog had lifted; that von Klausen
+understood this, and that, moreover, the whole episode had endured for
+but a small fraction of time. She could not, in the circumstances, tell
+Jim the truth. The present was, indeed, one of those instances that
+hamper the plain practice of what are accepted in theory as the simple
+virtues; it was a case where the telling of the truth would be the
+conveyance of a falsehood. If she had said: "I reached out and took this
+man's hand and held it while we were passing through a brief curtain of
+fog," Stainton, she made certain, would have supposed that she was
+herself afraid in the fog or that she wished to touch von Klausen's
+hand for the sake of the action itself. Now, she argued, either of these
+suppositions would be erroneous. The only way in which to give the true
+value to what she had done would be to repeat what the Austrian had told
+her of his personal terrors, and that, obviously, would have been a
+breach of confidence.
+
+Nevertheless, she thought for some time before she hit upon this
+satisfactory train of logic. She did not, indeed, hit upon it until the
+succeeding morning. She had not forgotten what she felt on the night
+when Jim told her that he loved her. She had felt then that she must
+always be honest with this honest man concerning herself, and she meant,
+even yet, to be loyal to that decision; but she had now, as one has
+said, detected for the first time the fundamental paradox of our moral
+system: that, whereas the code of life is simple, life itself is
+complex; that the real world forever presents difficulties involving the
+ideal law in a cobweb of contradictions; that the best of human beings
+can but rarely do an imperative right to one individual without thereby
+doing a patent wrong to another; that truth at its highest is relative
+and approximate and that, in short, the moral laws are, for those who
+accept them, nothing more than a standard of perfection toward which
+their subjects can but approach and to which reality is hourly enforcing
+exceptions.
+
+Learn her lesson, Muriel, however, at last did. It came to her in the
+morning after she had wakened from a refreshing, though tardy, sleep,
+rocked by the motion of the ship, which somehow miraculously cleared her
+mental vision. She lay still, repeating it, while Stainton, as she saw
+through her half-opened lids, got up, laboriously shaved, and put on his
+clothes. She knew that he must think her asleep, and she was much too
+preoccupied with the solution of her problem voluntarily to disabuse him
+of this belief.
+
+But Stainton was mindful of the displeasure that he had encountered on
+the morning in Aiken when he went downstairs without her. He bent over
+her in her berth and kissed her.
+
+"Are you going to get up, now?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You go. Don't mind me," she drowsily murmured. "I don't mind."
+
+"Sure not?"
+
+"Not this once. Go on, dear. I'll be along presently."
+
+She was left alone. She rose and went to the mirror in the wardrobe
+door. She drew back the curtain from the port-hole and let in the
+morning light. She examined, with anxious care, her face. She looked
+with equal care at her body. By a tacit understanding, she and Jim
+avoided all direct mention of her condition, he because he feared a
+recurrence of her hysterical revolt, she because she had fallen upon one
+of those futile moods in which we feel that to speak of an approaching
+catastrophe is to hasten it; but twice a day, when she could do it
+unobserved, she sought, in silent terror, for the tokens that could not
+possibly so soon be seen.
+
+Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That
+accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and
+breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appetite that had
+directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this
+morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that
+made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the
+promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking
+arm-in-arm.
+
+The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an
+experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other
+floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the
+zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large
+and sturdy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his
+sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched
+with every roll of the ship.
+
+Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that
+it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness
+for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The
+next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had
+not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion
+that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she
+felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the assumption
+that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally,
+she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that
+her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a
+man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush
+what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian
+had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that
+he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would
+have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his
+stupid mistake.
+
+Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and
+Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude
+for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon
+installed in a chair beside Stainton's.
+
+"But do I not trespass?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping
+inclination.
+
+"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure.
+You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."
+
+Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:
+
+"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"
+
+"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent
+annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."
+
+Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the
+band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about
+their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the
+differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of
+money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and
+standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not
+understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.
+
+As the voyage progressed, Stainton and von Klausen became more and more
+friendly, and Muriel more and more restless, she could not tell why. Her
+husband had passed his entire manhood among men and had acquired, though
+he did not know it, the taste for the discussion of what, because of the
+inferior grade of education that we grant to women, we magnificently
+call manly topics. These he had not enjoyed since his wedding-day, and
+now he was hungry for them. He did not neglect Muriel, and von Klausen
+often made efforts to bring her into their conversations, but her mind
+had never been trained to these subjects and was, moreover, now filled
+with a more intimate concern. For an hour she would sit beside Jim and
+listen to him with some admiration, but less comprehension of his
+technical terms, and then for fifteen minutes she would leave the pair
+and walk the deck alone.
+
+"To me it seems," von Klausen was one day saying, "that the great danger
+in your country is the disintegration of the unit of society, the
+break-up of the home."
+
+"Oh," said Stainton, "you're referring to our divorce laws?"
+
+The captain nodded.
+
+"Well, how are they in your country?" asked Jim.
+
+"In Austria the code of 1811 is still in force, and under it there are
+divorces allowed for violence, cruelty, desertion, incompatibility, and
+adultery. Adultery is a crime and is punishable by five years'
+imprisonment."
+
+"That sounds as if your code is pretty broad, too," remarked Stainton.
+
+"Ah, but it is applicable only to persons that are not Catholics, and
+Austria is a Catholic country."
+
+"I see. And what do the Catholics do?"
+
+"They remain married."
+
+"Always?"
+
+"The law allows them the remedy of judicial separation."
+
+Stainton was smoking a cigar. He puffed at it thoughtfully.
+
+"Judicial separation," he finally said, "has always struck me as
+begging the question. It denies liberty and yet winks at license. A good
+marriage ought to be guarded and a bad one broken."
+
+"That," replied von Klausen, "is the American view."
+
+"Not at all. We have all sorts of views--and there is one great trouble.
+You can get a divorce for nothing in Nevada, and you can't get it for
+anything in South Carolina. The South Carolina result is that they have
+had to pass a law there removing illegitimacy as a bar to succession."
+
+"Nevertheless," said von Klausen, "except for Japan, there are more
+divorces in the United States than in any other country in the world. I
+was told, while I was in Washington, that the American statistics
+were--they showed seventy-nine divorces to every hundred thousand of
+your population. Your divorces increase more rapidly than your
+population; they increase more rapidly than your marriage-rate."
+
+"I don't know about that," said Stainton; "although I believe that I
+have seen some such figures given somewhere, but I am clear on one
+point: the man that treats his wife badly ought not to be allowed the
+chance to have a wife any longer." He looked at Muriel, seated at his
+side; he smiled and patted her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair.
+"Don't you think so, dear?" he asked.
+
+Muriel smiled in answer.
+
+"Of course I do," said she. "Don't you, Captain von Klausen?"
+
+The Austrian's face remained serious.
+
+"I am of the religion of my country," he said.
+
+"Eh?" said Stainton. "Oh, I beg your pardon."
+
+"Not at all. Please." Von Klausen waived religious immunity. "I govern
+myself one way, but I do not object to hear the reasons why other people
+should choose other ways. Your way--your American way of divorce--is one
+of the peculiarities of your great nation, and so I studied it much
+while I lived there. If you permit, sir, to say it: the figures do not
+well bear out the boast that the American husband is the best husband.
+So, Mrs. Stainton?"
+
+"But he is, just the same," protested Muriel.
+
+"What do the figures show?" asked Jim.
+
+"That two divorces are granted to wives to every one granted husbands."
+
+"With all the respect to the best wife in the world," chuckled Stainton,
+as he again patted Muriel's hand, "that is largely due to the fact that
+the average American is so good a husband that, innocent as he may be,
+he pretends to be the guilty party."
+
+Von Klausen's eyes twinkled shrewdly.
+
+"Is it not a little," he enquired, "because the disgrace of being judged
+a guilty husband is easier to bear than the ridicule that is involved in
+being unable to keep the love of one's wife?"
+
+"Perhaps it is; perhaps it is," admitted Stainton. "But your figures do
+not prove anything against us as husbands, Captain. The only reason that
+similar figures don't show the men of other countries to be worse
+husbands than we are--if, indeed, they don't show it--is that the laws
+of other countries simply do not permit such easy divorce."
+
+"Then what of your population?" asked the Austrian, reverting to his
+previous line of attack. "It declines as divorce rises in your country."
+
+Muriel rose abruptly.
+
+"I think I shall take a little walk," she said.
+
+Stainton half-rose. Von Klausen sprang to his feet.
+
+"Permit me----" began the Captain.
+
+"No, no," said Muriel; "please sit still, both of you."
+
+"But, my dear----" said Stainton.
+
+"I don't want to interrupt your talk," the girl said. "Finish that and
+then join me, Jim."
+
+"In ten minutes, then," said Stainton.
+
+The men resumed their chairs. They looked after her strong young body
+as, the wind blowing her skirt about her, she walked away.
+
+"At all events," said Stainton heartily, "there goes the best American
+wife."
+
+Von Klausen had grown accustomed to the open domesticity of Americans.
+He did not smile.
+
+"She is a charming lady," he agreed. He looked out to sea. "And a
+beautiful." After a moment he added: "Do you object, sir, if I say that
+it is delightful, the manner in which the black hair gathers over her
+forehead and that in which she carries her gracious head?"
+
+"Object, Captain? I say you're quite right. I'm a lucky man. Have you
+ever seen more lovely eyes?"
+
+Von Klausen was still looking out to sea.
+
+"In all the world I have seen but one pair that was their equal," he
+answered.
+
+Stainton pulled at his cigar.
+
+"You were saying,"--he returned to their previous subject--"that the
+American birth-rate declined as divorce grew. Do you think the increase
+of the one causes the decrease of the other?"
+
+"I admit that the rate falls in times of commercial depression."
+
+"Of course: divorce and birth are both expensive. If you would look into
+the matter a little closer, Captain, I think you would find that the
+growth of child labour and the cost of living have about as much to do
+with the fall in the birth-rate as anything else. Some of our divorces
+are granted to foreigners that come to America because they can't get
+easy divorces in their native lands. Most are given for desertion, which
+generally means that they are arranged by mutual consent. Nearly as
+many result from charges of 'cruelty,' which is as often as not
+the man's habit of whistling in the house when his wife has a
+headache--'constructive cruelty' we call it, although 'concocted
+cruelty' would be a better term. Adultery comes only next, I am told,
+and then neglect to provide, and drunkenness. The other causes are all
+lower in the list. So you see that when our divorces are not really the
+result of a quiet agreement between the husband and wife--and every
+judge that signs a decree knows in his heart that nine-tenths are
+that--they are the result of conduct which, for anybody who does not
+consider marriage a sacrament, abundantly justifies the action."
+
+The talk shifted to Wall Street and continued for half an hour.
+
+"Von Klausen has some antiquated ideas," remarked Stainton to Muriel as
+they were going to bed that night; "but he seems to be a pretty good
+sort of man. I like him."
+
+Muriel was standing before the mirror, brushing the blue-black hair that
+fell nearly to her knees.
+
+"Do you?" she asked, with no show of interest.
+
+"Yes, he has good stuff in him. Of course, he's a mere boy, but he has
+good stuff in him, I'm sure."
+
+"I don't see why you call him a boy," said Muriel,
+
+"Why? Why, because he _is_ a boy, my dear."
+
+"I'm sure you seem just as young as he is."
+
+Stainton laughed and kissed her.
+
+"Little Loyalty!"
+
+"I don't care," said Muriel, "I don't like him."
+
+"You don't? Why, I thought----"
+
+"I did like him at first, but I don't any more."
+
+"Why not? You ought to. He admires you tremendously."
+
+"Does he? How do you know?"
+
+"By what he says. He told me to-day that he had never seen but one pair
+of eyes equal to yours."
+
+"Only one? That was nice of him, I'm sure. What else did he say?"
+
+"He said--oh, lots of things. He said you had beautiful hair and that it
+somehow grew in curves from your forehead, and I said that he was quite
+right."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"All I can remember. How much do you want, anyhow?"
+
+"Well, I don't like him."
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose because you like him too well. I hardly see you
+any more."
+
+Stainton assured his wife that no man or woman in the world was worth
+her little finger. He clambered into the upper berth and watched her for
+some time as her bared arm rose and fell, wielding the brush. At last
+the sight of that regular motion, added to the gentle rocking of the
+ship, closed his eyes. He had had a full day and was tired. He was
+soundly asleep when he was wakened by her embrace.
+
+She was standing on the ladder and pressing his face to hers.
+
+"Love me!" she was whispering. "O, Jim, love me!"
+
+Stainton was still half-asleep,
+
+"I do love you, Muriel," he said.
+
+"Yes, but--_Love_ me, Jim!" she whispered.
+
+She clutched him suddenly.
+
+"Ouch, my hair!" said Stainton. "You're pulling my hair!"
+
+"Oh!" Muriel's tone was all self-reproach. "I'm sorry. Did I hurt you,
+dear?"
+
+"No," he smiled. "No. There, there!" He patted her head. "It's all
+right. Good-night, dearest."
+
+"Good-night?" There was a question in the words as she repeated them,
+but she retreated, albeit slowly, down the ladder. "Good-night, Jim."
+
+"Good-night, dear," he responded cheerily, "and--I do love you, you
+know."
+
+She answered from below:
+
+"Yes, Jim."
+
+"You do know it, don't you, dear heart?"
+
+"Yes, Jim."
+
+He heard her draw the bedclothes about her. When he awoke in the
+morning, she slept, but he would not breakfast until she was ready to
+breakfast with him, and so he sat, hungry, and waited for the hour that
+she devoted to her toilette. Then they went to the saloon, and
+afterwards to the deck, together.
+
+Neither on that day nor on the day following was Muriel alone with von
+Klausen. Indeed, she was not alone with him again until they touched, at
+ten o'clock of a bright morning, at Plymouth, where the grateful green
+and yellow hills rose from the blue water, and the town nestled in a
+long white belt behind a chain of grim, grey men-of-war. The tender had
+stood by, and, now that some of the high stacks of mail-bags, which had
+been filling the stern decks since dawn, were transferred, an endless
+procession of slouching porters out of uniform carried, one brick to
+each man for each trip, large bricks of silver down the gangways and
+deposited them in piles of five, well forward on the tender. Jim had
+gone to the writing-room to scribble a note that might catch a fast boat
+from England to his agent at the mine, and Muriel was left beside the
+rail to talk with the Austrian.
+
+"It has been a delightful voyage, has it not?" he asked, in that precise
+English to which she had now grown accustomed.
+
+"I dare say," answered Muriel. "I don't know. You forget that I have had
+no others with which to compare it."
+
+"But you have not been bored?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It has surely been pleasant, for I have by it had the opportunity to
+meet you and your brave husband."
+
+"My husband, I know, would say as much of it because he has met you."
+
+The Austrian bowed.
+
+"Nor have I failed," he said, "to tell him how much the entire company
+aboard seem to admire his charming wife."
+
+Muriel was resting her elbows on the rail; her glance was fixed upon the
+distant town.
+
+"He told me," she responded, "that you thought my eyes about the second
+best within your experience. I hope your experience has been wide."
+
+Von Klausen flushed.
+
+"My experience," he said, gravely, "has, I regret to tell you, been that
+of most young men."
+
+"Oh!" said Muriel. Her tone showed dislike of all that this implied, but
+she recalled that Jim had had no such experiences as those to which von
+Klausen plainly referred, and she suddenly felt, somehow, that this
+difference between the men did not altogether advance Stainton.
+
+"Nevertheless, dear lady," the Austrian was going on, "the eyes that I
+thought as beautiful as yours--I did not say more beautiful--were eyes
+that have long since been shut."
+
+Muriel was now more piqued than before. Had the man been comparing her
+to a dead fiancée to whom he, living, remained faithful?
+
+"Were they Austrian eyes?" she asked, her own eyes full of obtrusive
+indifference.
+
+"No; they were Italian. Had you come to Europe three years ago, you
+would have seen them when you went to the Louvre. They were the eyes
+that have been given to the Mona Lisa."
+
+Muriel and he were standing apart from the crowd of passengers that
+watched the unloading of the silver. The girl turned to her companion.
+Her glance was interested enough now, and she saw at once that his was
+serious.
+
+"There is something that I have been wanting to tell you," she began,
+before she was well aware that she spoke--"something that I don't know
+exactly how to say, or whether I ought to say it at all."
+
+Von Klausen was openly concerned.
+
+"If you are in doubt," he replied, "perhaps it would be better if you
+first thought more about it."
+
+But his opposition, though totally the reverse to what she had expected,
+clinched her resolve.
+
+"No," she said. "I ought to tell you about it. Now that I have started I
+know I ought. It's--it's about that time in the fog."
+
+Von Klausen's colour mounted. Then, politely, he pretended to forget the
+incident.
+
+"Yes, don't you remember? You must remember."
+
+"I remember. It was a very sudden fog."
+
+"Well," she said, "it was about what happened then. I must speak to
+you--I must explain about that." She was holding tightly to the rail.
+
+Von Klausen saw her wrists tremble. He made little of the subject.
+
+"When you were frightened, and I took your hand to reassure you? Dear
+lady, I trust that you have not supposed that I acted on my
+presumption----"
+
+"You're kind to put it that way," she interrupted. "You're generous. But
+I want to be honest. I have to be honest, because I want you to
+understand--because you must understand--just why I behaved as I did,
+and you wouldn't understand--you couldn't--if I weren't honest with you.
+Captain von Klausen, you didn't take my hand, and you know it. I took
+yours."
+
+He raised the disputed hand; he raised it in protest.
+
+"Mrs. Stainton, I assure you that it was I who----"
+
+"No, it wasn't. And I wasn't frightened by the fog, either. You must
+remember that, from the way I spoke; I showed I didn't even realise what
+a fog means at sea. So how could I be afraid of it? You did know and you
+had just said that you were afraid of fogs. I took your hand. I did it
+before I thought----"
+
+"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Stainton"--he was painfully anxious to end all
+this--"before you thought. It was nothing but a kindly----"
+
+"Before I thought," she pursued, determinedly, her dark eyes steady on
+his. "You had told me of that awful experience of yours in the Bosphorus
+and of the effect it had on you. No wonder it did have such an effect.
+I am not blaming you for that. Only, I saw that you needed help and
+comfort. I was sorry for you. That was all: I was just sorry. I did it
+without thinking. I didn't know I had done it at all till it was all
+over. You see," she concluded, "I just couldn't, now, bear to have you
+misunderstand."
+
+Carefully analysed, it might seem a contradictory explanation, but it
+was no sooner free of her lips than she felt that her soul was free of
+this thing which she had sought to explain.
+
+Von Klausen was quite as much relieved as Muriel. He accepted it as she
+wished him to accept it.
+
+"Never for a moment did I misunderstand," said he.
+
+"Then," added Muriel, "you will understand why I haven't mentioned it to
+my husband----"
+
+"Your husband?" The Austrian was all amazement. "Why should you?"
+
+"Because," said Muriel, compressing her full lips and assuming her full
+height, "I always tell Jim everything."
+
+If the shadow of a smile passed beneath his military moustache, she
+could not be sure of it.
+
+"Everything?" said he. "But you have said that this was nothing."
+
+"Exactly, and--don't you see?--that is one of the reasons why I haven't
+told it. You will--you will please not refer to it to him, Captain von
+Klausen, because----"
+
+"Refer to it?" Von Klausen squared his shoulders. "To him? Never!"
+
+His assertion was vehement.
+
+"There is no reason why you shouldn't," Muriel replied; "only, as I say,
+I haven't told him, and the only real reason that I didn't tell him was
+because to do so I should have to tell him, too, that you had been
+afraid; and that isn't my secret: it's yours."
+
+The Austrian's boyish face was now very grave.
+
+"I thank you," he said. "For your thought of me I thank you, and the
+more I thank you because, by keeping my secret, you made it _ours_."
+
+"Oh, but I don't mean----" said Muriel.
+
+She did not finish, for she saw Stainton come from the writing-room and
+stride rapidly toward them. He had written his letter and despatched it.
+
+Although the three stood shoulder to shoulder in the customs-shed at
+Cherbourg later in the day and occupied the same first-class compartment
+in the fast express through the rolling Norman country to Paris, Muriel
+and von Klausen were not then given an opportunity to conclude their
+conversation. The Austrian bade the Staintons good-bye in the swirl of
+porters and chauffeurs at the Gare St. Lazare, and Muriel took it for
+granted that the interruption must be final.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+DR. BOUSSINGAULT
+
+
+Muriel awoke in their apartments at the Chatham the next morning to find
+herself decidedly out of sorts. Well as she had borne the voyage, she no
+sooner put her feet from her one of the two little canopied beds to the
+floor than she felt again the motion of the ship, and there was a return
+of the nausea that she attributed to the trouble which silently weighed
+upon her. She crawled back to the bed.
+
+"I can't get up," she said.
+
+Stainton was worried. He fluttered about her. He wanted to ring for
+servants to bring half-a-dozen things that Muriel would not accept. He
+wanted the smallest details of her symptoms. He wanted to send for a
+doctor.
+
+"Go away," Muriel pleaded. "Please go away."
+
+"But, dearie----"
+
+"I wish I were back in New York."
+
+Stainton, though he now feared the sea, was ready to undertake the
+return trip on the morrow.
+
+"No, no," moaned Muriel. "Of course, now we are here, we must see
+things. But I won't have a doctor, Jim. Can't you see how it is with
+me? I shall be all right in an hour."
+
+"All right, dearie; all right. I shall sit here by you."
+
+"Please don't. I'm horrid when I'm sick."
+
+"Not to me," said Jim.
+
+"But I am. I look so horrid."
+
+"I don't see it."
+
+"Oh, you're good, Jim. But I want to be alone, just as you did when you
+were seasick. Go into the sitting-room. Please. I'll call you if I need
+you."
+
+He went into their sitting-room, a room that shone with green and gilt,
+and looked out, across a narrow street, at the grey houses of uniform
+height and listened to the shrill street-sounds of Paris. He was lonely.
+
+Somebody knocked at the door opening on the hall.
+
+"Come in," he called. "I mean: _entrez_!"
+
+A servant advanced, bearing a tray.
+
+Jim saw that there was a card on the tray. He took it up and read the
+name of Paul Achille Boussingault. He did not remember ever having heard
+the name.
+
+"_Pour moi?_" asked Jim.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the servant, in a wholly unaccented English.
+
+"Hum," said Jim. "Now I wonder what _he_ wants. Very well, show him up."
+
+He hurried to the bedroom.
+
+"Dear," he enquired, "tell me quick: how do you pronounce B-o-u-double
+s-i-n-g-a-u-l-t?"
+
+Muriel did not lift the covers that concealed her face.
+
+"Go away," she said.
+
+"I am going, only, dearie----"
+
+"Go away--_please_!"
+
+Jim re-entered the sitting-room. Was it Bou-sing-go? He had his doubts
+about that French _in_. If he remembered rightly, it was a kind of _an_,
+and the _n_ ended somewhere in the nose. And who was M. Boussingault,
+anyhow?
+
+"M. le docteur Boo-sàn-go," announced the servant.
+
+"Wait. How was that?" asked Jim, and then found himself face to face
+with his visitor.
+
+His visitor was a stocky man, of not more than five feet five or six
+inches in height, inclined to pugginess. He had a leathery complexion,
+and the point of his thin Van Dyck beard was in a straight line from the
+sharper point in which his close-clipped bristling hair ended above his
+nose. It was black hair, and it retreated precipitately on both sides.
+He looked at Jim through eyeglasses bearing a gold chain and bound
+together by a straight bar, which gave the effect of a continuous scowl
+to his heavy brows. He bowed deeply.
+
+"M. James Stainton?" he enquired.
+
+"Yes," said Jim. "Good-morning."
+
+"Good-morning, monsieur. I have the honour to present the compliments of
+my brother, M. Henri Duperré Boussingault, and to ask that you will be
+so very good as me to command in the case I can be of any the slightest
+service to you and madame during your visit to Paris."
+
+Stainton was at a loss.
+
+"Your brother?" said he.
+
+"M. Henri Boussingault," repeated the visitor. "He has to me written
+from Lyon to attend well to the appearance of your name among the
+distinguished arrivals in the _Daily Mail_."
+
+The mention of Lyons aided Stainton's memory. He recalled now that the
+name of Henri Boussingault had appeared among those of the Lyonnaise
+syndicate that was interested in the purchase of the mine.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said, and his broad teeth showed in a smile. "To be sure.
+This is very kind of you. Won't you sit down?"
+
+Paul Achille Boussingault arranged his coat-tails and sat down with a
+grunt that apparently always accompanied this action on his part. His
+knees were far apart, and his feet scarcely touched the parquet floor.
+He was dressed completely in black, with the ribbon of an order fastened
+in the lapel of his frock-coat. His collar was low and round and
+upright, its junction with the shirt concealed by a small, prim black
+tie.
+
+Stainton took a chair opposite him.
+
+"Won't you have a cigar?" he asked.
+
+"But thanks," said the visitor. "A cigarette only, if you do not
+object?" He produced a yellow packet of _Marylands_, and offered it to
+Jim.
+
+"Thank you," said Stainton, lighting the cigarette. He did not like it,
+because, being an American, he did not care for American tobacco; but he
+tried to appear to like it. He wondered what he should talk about. "I
+shall be glad to make use of your kind offer."
+
+"You will honour me," said the Frenchman.
+
+"Um. And are you, too, interested in mining investments?"
+
+The visitor dismissed mines and mining to his brother with a wave of his
+short hand. Stainton noticed that his fingers, though not long, were
+well shaped and tapering, in contradistinction to the spatulate thumbs,
+and that he wore a diamond set in a ring of thick gold.
+
+"Those there are the avocation of my brother. I take no part in these
+affairs of the bourse. You will me forgive if I say, monsieur, that I
+have no traffic with such abominations of our society modern. I am a man
+of science."
+
+"A doctor?" asked Jim.
+
+"Of medicine."
+
+For a moment Stainton revolved the idea of taking the visitor to see
+Muriel, but he divined Muriel's attitude toward such an action and
+banished the thought. Her indisposition was, of course, but natural and
+passing.
+
+"What," asked Jim, "ought we to see first in Paris? We are strangers
+here, you know."
+
+The doctor flung out his short arms. He indulged in an apostrophe to
+Paris that reminded Stainton of some of the orations he had read as
+having been delivered in the councils of the First Republic.
+Boussingault's English was frequently cast in a French mould and
+sometimes so fused that it was mere alloyage; but he never paused for a
+word, and he spoke with a fervour that was almost vehemence. There were
+moments when Jim wondered if the Frenchman suspected him of some slur on
+Paris and conceived it a duty to defend the city. What Jim must see was,
+in brief, everything.
+
+Nevertheless, so soon as the apostrophe ended, Boussingault appeared to
+forget all about it. His sharp eyes travelled over the hotel
+sitting-room, and his mind occupied itself therewith as devotedly as it
+had just been giving itself to the Gallic metropolis.
+
+"Ah, you Americans," he sighed; "how you love the luxury!"
+
+"Perhaps we do," said Jim, recalling certain negotiations that he had
+conducted at the hotel's _bureau_; "but if the price of these rooms is a
+criterion, you French make us pay well for it."
+
+Dr. Boussingault's glance journeyed to the partly open doors of the
+bathroom, displaying a tiled whiteness.
+
+"And without doubt a bath?" he enquired.
+
+"A bath," nodded Stainton.
+
+"And me"--Boussingault shook his bullet-like head--"I well recall when
+the water-carts stopped at the corners of the streets too narrow for
+their progress, and one called from the high window that one wished to
+buy so much and so much, because one bathed oneself or the servant
+washed the linen to-day."
+
+He talked for a while, again rhapsodically, of the old city, the city of
+his youth, and, when he chanced to touch upon its restaurants, Stainton
+asked him if, that evening or the next, he would dine with Muriel and
+himself.
+
+"Ah, no," said Boussingault. "It is that madame and you, monsieur, shall
+dine with me. To-night? To-morrow night?"
+
+Stainton accepted for the following evening.
+
+"And at what spot would you prefer, monsieur?"
+
+"I don't know," said Jim. "I have eaten _sole à la Marguery_. We might
+catch that in its native waters: we might dine at Marguery's."
+
+"Well," the Frenchman shrugged, "Marguery is not bad. At least the
+kitchen is tolerable. But you should eat your sole as she swims."
+
+They were not, however, destined to keep the appointment on the day set,
+for, during that morning came a _petit bleu_ from Boussingault,
+postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing
+with fine spencerian regrets to the effect that its writer had been
+imperatively summoned to Grenoble for consultation in an illness
+"occurring in a family distinguished."
+
+"I don't care if we never see him," said Muriel. "I could hear him
+through the door: he talks too loud."
+
+They consoled themselves and wearied themselves with sightseeing, and
+often this tried Muriel's nerves. Secretly she still watched for the
+appearance of signs to indicate her condition and secretly she tightened
+her stays, long before any signs could appear. She was often sick in the
+mornings, though with decreasing recurrence, and, when she began to feel
+relief by the diminution, she became the more despondent upon
+realisation of its cause. Moreover, even the comfort of _petit déjeuner_
+in bed did not compensate for those crumbs for which no one could be
+held responsible.
+
+True to his policy to "let nature take her course," Stainton maintained
+a firm reticence upon the subject uppermost in the minds of both, but
+this reticence was applied only to his speech; and his solicitude, his
+patient but patent care, and his evident anxiety often annoyed her,
+since they kept her destiny before her and seemed to her apprehensive
+imagination--what they were far from being--no more than the expressions
+of a fear that she might make some physical revelation of her state in a
+public and embarrassing manner.
+
+"You don't think of me!" she one day wept, when he had put her into a
+_taxi-mètre_ to drive a few hundred yards.
+
+"Muriel," said Stainton, "I think of nothing else."
+
+"No, you don't think of me," she insisted. "You think only of--of _it_.
+You're worried about me as a mother and not as a wife. You are!"
+
+Stainton protested, grieved to the heart; but she would not hear him.
+
+"It's as if you were a stock-farmer," she said, the tears in her velvety
+eyes, "and I were only your favorite thoroughbred in foal."
+
+This simile he found revolting. It required all his masculine philosophy
+satisfactorily to account for her use of it, and, even when that had
+been applied, he reprimanded her, with kindness, but with decisiveness
+also. It was some time before she begged his pardon and condemned
+herself; some time before he soothed her and told her, what she hated to
+hear, that her words had risen not from herself but from her condition.
+
+They went to Marguery's, when the doctor returned to Paris, rather worn
+out by their week of sightseeing; but they found the crowded restaurant
+pleasantly diverting. The chatter of the diners, the scurrying of the
+waiters, and the gratification of the leather-covered seat from which,
+across a shining table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made
+them forget for a space the subject that one of them was weary of
+remembering.
+
+Then, by some mischance, Stainton hit upon a fatal topic.
+
+"Doctor," he said, "I am sure you can give me some authoritative
+information on a matter that I have read a little of. I mean the
+question of the decrease in the French birth-rate and the efforts to
+stop it and build up not only a larger race but a race of the best
+stock."
+
+He saw instantly that he had struck the little man's hobby. Dr.
+Boussingault sat with one thick knee covered by his serviette and thrust
+into the aisle for the _garçons_ to stumble over. His dark eyes, keen
+and expressive, were shaped like wide almonds and, unobscured by any
+vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his glasses
+in a lively disregard of the phlegmatic indications given by the dark
+bags beneath them.
+
+"The most healthy sign in France to-day," he said. "Absolutely."
+
+"You mean the effort to increase and better the stock?"
+
+"No. One thousand no's. The success in decreasing it."
+
+"My dear sir----"
+
+The doctor waved his hands. He drank no alcohol, he said; only some wine
+of the country, red; but of this, heavily diluted by water, he was
+drinking copiously.
+
+"Attend, monsieur. I know well, my God, these good people who go to
+England and have international congresses and, between the dinners given
+by Her Grace of Dulpuddle and the lawn parties, when one permits them to
+enter the park of the Castle Cad, indulge in a debauch of scientific
+verbosity. But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard
+one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry,
+and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them
+say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and
+breathed: "_I_ say one word: 'Environment!'--and they silence
+themselves."
+
+Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed.
+
+"I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their
+purpose is the improvement of the race."
+
+"Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How
+do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good
+the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong
+sons and some robust daughters? _Jamais!_ Rather by to continue the
+present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has
+made unfit, by to encourage breeding--million thunders, yes, among those
+very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits _them_!"
+
+Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the talk would soon turn
+to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced
+at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of
+_canard sauvage_ that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she
+must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were
+talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a
+physician. Nevertheless, he wavered.
+
+"I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the
+poor to increase the population?"
+
+The Frenchman's broad, pale lips smiled. He shrugged.
+
+"Money? My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot
+say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your
+country and in England these savants--name of God!--want what they call
+the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this
+reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault
+leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive
+forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor
+to produce families, they are the _propriétaires_ and those lackeys of
+the _propriétaires_, the generals of the armies. The _propriétaire_
+wants much workers, and he wants workers so bound by family
+'responsibilities'"--the Frenchman hissed the s's of this word--"that
+they dare not revolt; he wants competition for the workers, for she
+lowers the wage. For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to
+the monster, War."
+
+"You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton.
+
+"Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I:
+Boussingault, _médecin_!"
+
+"At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along
+without children, you know."
+
+He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms
+and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse
+into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled.
+
+Jim regarded the neighboring tables, but no one of the company there
+paid any attention to the commanding tones of the physician, probably
+because nearly all the guests of the restaurant were engaged in talk
+that was quite as violent as that of Paul Achille. Muriel might have
+been a thousand miles away.
+
+Now the word "children" again loosed the storm.
+
+"Children?" shouted the doctor. "Let us be reasonable! Let us regard
+with equanimity the children! They ask the poor for the children, these
+_propriétaires_; but what they would say is servants and _filles de
+joie_ to work for them. They will not pay the man sufficient to make a
+marriage; they pretend not to like that the women bear children without
+marriage--and they run about and sob for more babies! _Bien._ In effect,
+then, what is it that the labourer to them replies? He replies: 'Give
+me the 'abitable houses, and then I will give you in'abitants--not
+before.'"
+
+Dr. Boussingault produced a huge handkerchief, shook it, mopped his
+sparkling brow, and resumed absolute immobility.
+
+Stainton was now sincerely interested. He had thought somewhat upon
+these matters and, although he saw as yet no personal relevance in them,
+he had an intellectual appetite for their discussion.
+
+"As I see it," he said, "none of these people that are trying to improve
+the breed denies that the poor are in a bad way, but just because the
+poor are in a bad way, they fail to be the stuff by which the race can
+be improved. I am now speaking, you understand, of what you, doctor,
+consider the American and English savants. What they are after is to
+increase the best, and their best raw material is found in the sons of
+the well-to-do, because the well-to-do are the intelligent, are the
+people that do the work of the world."
+
+Boussingault chortled derisively.
+
+"What propelled your ship to France?" he demanded. "An engine, is it
+not? But the engine, it is necessary that it be fed, and think you that
+the man who put the coal in that engine was well-to-do? Who grinds your
+corn, who makes your shoes, who builds your house? Name of God!"
+
+"I am thinking about the directing intelligence, doctor. The improper
+character tossed into the human pond sinks to its bottom, and the proper
+character, even if placed at its bottom, rises to the top."
+
+"So you propose to improve the race, monsieur, by breeding from the
+thieving millionaire risen to the top of the pond and by letting the
+Christs sink, as they have always sanken? Do not talk of breeding for
+ability until you give a chance for to develop the ability that now goes
+everywhere to waste. Men and women they will mate in spite of you."
+
+"The process would strengthen marriage," said Stainton.
+
+"But yes," replied the Frenchman. "Marriage is of relations the most
+intimate: they would make it the most public. It was wrong enough, my
+God, when, after centuries of no attention to marriage, the church
+quickly assumed of it the control and made of it a public ceremony. It
+will be more bad when the police assume of it the control and make of it
+a public scandal."
+
+Muriel raised her great, dark eyes to the doctor and then lowered them
+to her plate.
+
+Stainton shifted uneasily.
+
+"I do not believe in that sort of thing and never would," he said, "but
+I am sure that marriage is the best friend of the race's future."
+
+"Not so long as it is directed even as it now is. Not so long as the
+diseased 'usband may legally force a child on his wife, or the
+wife-merely-lazy may refuse to bear a child to a healthy 'usband. A wife
+can divorce a 'usband because he is sterile through not his own fault,
+but if he is sterile because he wants sterility, she must continue to be
+his wife. You speak well as if to make people to breed it is necessary
+but to go to whip them, or trick them, into a wedding. Marriage does not
+imply parenthood. That relationship is arbitrary."
+
+This was something more than Jim had counted on. A slow flush mounted to
+his iron-grey hair. He saw that Muriel attended entirely to her food,
+and he did not know whether to admire this peace as evidence of her
+self-control or to wonder how she could hear such things and give no
+sign of hearing them.
+
+The doctor, however, ran from bad to worse.
+
+"Most of the children in this world are here by accident. They are not
+wanted, no, because they are too much trouble or too much cost, or they
+are girls, as the case may be. They are not a tie binding their parents'
+love by their presence; generally they are a sword to divide it by
+necessitating economies. What married man, even rich, does not endeavour
+to limit the number of his little ones, _hein_?" To Jim's horror the
+doctor broadly winked. "What unmarried man does not endeavour to
+suppress his little ones altogether? Both will in private joke the one
+to the other about it, and both fear it should publicly be known.
+Marriage? Poof! It is the name of a _prix fixe_ charged for
+respectability."
+
+Stainton was not the man to try to evade an issue by an attempt to
+divert the conversation, and he saw that the doctor was not the man to
+be diverted. As the waiter brought the coffee ("No cognac, thank you,"
+said Boussingault; "no alcohol") Jim challenged direct.
+
+"You shock me," declared the American, "by what you tell me about
+children not being wanted. I don't agree with you there. Of course, that
+is sometimes the case in irregular relations, but I think too well of
+humanity to believe that, by married parents of any means at all,
+children are not wanted after they get here."
+
+"None?"
+
+Both men turned: it was Muriel that had spoken. Her face grew scarlet
+under their look.
+
+The doctor's glance was keen.
+
+"I am of madame's mind," said he, quietly.
+
+Stainton strove to pass the embarrassing interruption.
+
+"Well, doctor," he said, and from the corner of his eye saw with
+satisfaction that Muriel busied herself with an intricate ice, "I stick
+to my belief in humanity."
+
+Boussingault flourished his coffee cup and spilled a liberal portion of
+its contents.
+
+"In what world do you live?" he asked.
+
+"In an eminently sane one," said Stainton.
+
+"_Bien_; I knew it was not the real world. In your world you know
+nothing, then, of all the ways, direct and indirect, to make women bear
+babies they do not want; in it you know nothing of the child unloved and
+scarcely endured; in it you know nothing of the boy or girl for these
+reasons, or because the mother hated the price of marriage, afflicted
+with morbid nerves and will-atrophy. Those who would improve the race
+must know of these things, but they consider them not. They consider not
+that there is the motherly-physical inclination combined with physical
+ability; that degrees of inclination and ability vary. They make one law
+for all that, by physique only, appear fit. Good, then: the person the
+best fitted for their plan is she who will not let them send her to the
+altar as if she had no proper will. Again, suppose you forbid the
+'unfit' to marry? You straightway increase not only the number of
+illegitimate children, but of illegitimate unfit children, for the
+illegitimate child, in our mad world, has not the whole of a chance. M.
+Stainton, your savants would raise the race by oppressing the
+individuals."
+
+Stainton's anxiety was now to end the meal. He felt that matters had
+gone far enough, and he feared that the topic of discussion had proved a
+morbid one for a prospective mother. He murmured something about the
+survival of the fittest.
+
+"The survival of the fittest," roared Boussingault. "My good friend,
+who is it that is fitted to survive? He who can? The brute? You say"--he
+had quite placed poor Stainton in the opposition by this time--"you say
+that you would rather have for parent a robust burglar than a tubercular
+bishop. Me, Boussingault, I choose the bishop, for it is better to have
+ill health with money to hire Boussingaults than good health without
+money to buy food. 'Defectives'! Holy blue! The prize-fighter in New
+York who murders the little girl is of splendid physique and gives
+extraordinary care to his body. He is scrupulously clean. He does not
+smoke, does not even drink red wine. Of the sixteen children of his
+parents only seven prove, by survival, fitness to survive. He is of
+them--and he murders the little girl."
+
+"Well," said Stainton, smiling, "perhaps sixteen is _too_ many."
+
+"Tell me why," said the Frenchman. "Our great Massenet is of a
+family of children"--he swung his arm and dropped his emptied
+cup--"countless--absolutely countless. Environment, that is what you
+forget; environment, and inclination and _suitable_ physique. What to
+do? You should change the economic conditions that breed your
+'defectives' as a refuse-heap breeds flies, but instead you propose to
+spend time and money to try to 'segregate' defectives as fast as you
+manufacture them. 'Segregate' and 'sterilize'? I have yet to hear of one
+of you sterilising a degenerate child of your own. You produce them
+not? Often. And you produce the good? Francis Galton left no child at
+all. I, Boussingault, say to you: breed a Florence Nightingale and an
+Isaac Newton and bring them up in a city slum and set them to work in a
+city factory, and their very good breeding will be society's loss.
+Truly. What you will have will not be a philanthropist and a scientist,
+but only a more than commonly seductive _fille_ and a more than commonly
+clever thief. You cannot breed a free race until you have given to the
+possible mothers of it freedom of choice; and you cannot breed a healthy
+race until you have given to papa and mamma and baby proper food and
+surroundings--until you have given the man working the full pay for his
+toil."
+
+He leaned back in his chair, held his handkerchief before his mouth
+without concealing it, and began to pick his teeth.
+
+Muriel rose; she was pale. The two men started also to rise.
+
+"Please don't," said Muriel. "I shall be back in a moment."
+
+"Dearest----" began Stainton.
+
+Muriel's answer was one look. She hurried from the room.
+
+"My wife," said Stainton, resuming his seat, "is not very well."
+
+"You desolate me," replied the physician as he grunted his way back
+into his chair. "But now that madame absents herself for a moment, let
+me be explicit."
+
+"Explicit?" said Stainton. "I should have thought--Why, you have been
+talking as if the very construction of society were a crime!"
+
+"Ah," said Boussingault, delightedly, "then you perceive just my point.
+That is it; you put it well: modern society is The Great Crime--life is
+The Great Sin--what we have made of Life. Disease, Ignorance, Poverty,
+Wage-slavery, Child-slavery, Lust-slavery, Marriage-slavery! Marriage
+does not produce good children more than bad. Some of the highest types
+of humanity have been produced by the left hand. You ignore the positive
+side of selective breeding. If you can decide what constitutes a 'fit'
+man, how can you limit his racial gifts to the child-bearing capacities
+of one woman? And the woman, her, too; you must provide for selective
+futile polygamy and polyandry. You must be presented to the unmarried
+mother----"
+
+"Really----" began Stainton.
+
+"There is something in these your theories," interposed Boussingault,
+rushing to his conclusion, "but here you go too far and there half-way.
+In Germany, until German bureaucracy captures them, they are the great
+aids to the revolt of Womankind, your theories. Educate for parenthood,
+endow mothers, pension during pregnancy and nursing--what then? Name of
+God! You have more to do than that, my friend--_we_ have more to do: we
+have to give every child born an equal chance, every man how much he
+earns; we must build a society where no superstition, no economic
+strain, no selfish 'usband keeps childless the woman that wants to be
+and ought to be a mother in marriage or outside; and we must recognise
+of all other women their inalienable right to refuse motherhood!"
+
+Stainton rose quickly.
+
+"Here comes my wife," he said. "I am afraid we shall have to hurry away,
+doctor."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MONTMARTRE
+
+
+Alone in their _taxi-mètre_, Stainton and Muriel preserved for some time
+an awkward silence. Jim was waiting for some hint from her to indicate
+what would be his safest course. His wife sat rigid, her fists clenched
+in her lap.
+
+"That doctor is a strange type," said Stainton at last.
+
+"Horrid man! He's a _horrid_ man!" gasped Muriel.
+
+"Well, of course," said Stainton, seeking to steer her into the
+quiescence of a judicial attitude, "he is all wrong in his
+conclusions----"
+
+"He picked his teeth," said Muriel.
+
+Jim had preserved his own good manners to the age of fifty, but his
+years in mining-camps had blunted his observation of the lack of nicety
+in others.
+
+"Did he?" asked Jim.
+
+"Didn't you _see_ him? He carries a gold toothpick around with him. I
+believe he was proud of it. It's--that's what made me sick."
+
+"Then," enquired Jim, growing uncomfortable, "it wasn't what he said?"
+
+"Said? You both sat up there and quarrelled----"
+
+"We didn't quarrel. The doctor has what seems to be the national manner,
+but we were merely discussing----"
+
+"You were discussing me!" said Muriel. "I thought I should die. I don't
+know how I bore it; I----"
+
+Jim slipped his arm around her waist. "My dear, my dear, how could you
+think such a thing? We were talking about a general subject. We
+were----Why, we didn't say anything that could possibly affect you."
+
+"I don't care," Muriel declared: "everything that _he said_--that
+man--was awful."
+
+"It was," admitted Stainton, glad that the burden of offence had again
+been shifted to Boussingault's shoulders. "It was, rather. I didn't know
+whether you were paying attention to it at all. To some of it I hoped
+you weren't."
+
+"Nobody could help hearing such shouting. I was so afraid there might be
+some English or Americans there."
+
+"Still, you didn't appear to hear,"--Stainton spoke with relief at
+thought of this,--"so it was as well as it could be."
+
+"I must have shown it, Jim. I thought my face would burn away."
+
+"At any rate, you didn't talk."
+
+"How _could_ I?"
+
+Stainton was silent for a few seconds. Then he asked:
+
+"What did you mean by your question?"
+
+Muriel took some time to reply:
+
+"What question?"
+
+"You know: the only one you asked--about--about children not being
+wanted?"
+
+This time Muriel's answer was swift: she took her husband's broad
+shoulders in her arms and, as they rolled down the boulevard, began
+sobbing.
+
+"I never want to see him again!" she vowed. "Never bring him to the
+hotel. I won't be at home if he comes. I won't see him. I won't!"
+
+She suggested changing their hotel. She declared that, even if they did
+change, she could not sleep that night. She begged him to take her
+somewhere to amuse her and get her thoughts away from the dreadful
+Boussingault.
+
+It was Stainton who proposed that they should see Montmartre--which
+term, when used by the travelling American, means to see two or three
+places in Montmartre conducted largely for Americans, which charge in
+strict accord with the French ideas of the average American's
+pocketbook, and are visible only between the hours of ten o'clock at
+night and four o'clock in the morning.
+
+"Very well," said Jim; "we might go to Montmartre. I think we ought to
+see Montmartre."
+
+"What's that?" asked Muriel.
+
+"It's--oh, it's a part of Paris. You'll know when we get there."
+
+"I don't remember hearing of it in our French course."
+
+"I don't think it's included in the French course of a convent. I hope
+not."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For the very reason that we ought to go see it--now."
+
+He was quite sure that he was sincere in his attitude. They were
+sightseers, and he had always been told that Montmartre was one of the
+sights of Paris. They had seen everything else. They had seen Notre
+Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the markets, the Palais de Justice, the
+Chambre des Députés, the tomb of Napoleon--everything. They had enjoyed
+the Jardins des Tuileries and the pictures and sculpture of the
+Luxembourg Museum, and they had walked through the weary miles of
+painted canvases in the Louvre, where Muriel lingered before the spot at
+which the Mona Lisa had long hung. They had even permitted themselves
+the horrors of the Morgue. Why should Stainton not complete his
+knowledge of Paris, and why should he not, like most other Americans,
+take his wife, however young she was, to Montmartre with him? Jim had
+once said to Holt that he had, all his life long, kept himself clean.
+The curiosities of his youth had remained unsatisfied.
+
+The strongest impulses are not infrequently those of which one is
+entirely unconscious. At Aiken, Stainton had yielded himself with the
+extravagance of the young man of twenty-five, which he thought he was,
+to the demands of the situation in which he found himself. At sea there
+had necessarily been a quieter period; but this had ended with the
+arrival of the Staintons in Paris. The tension of sightseeing had,
+alone, sufficed to wear them out, and now (though he persuaded himself
+that this was but the inevitable development of the novel into the
+commonplace) he began to fear that the high tide of his emotion might be
+sinking to the low level of habit and affection, that what was true of
+himself was also true of Muriel, and he drew the inference that another
+sort of sightseeing would be good for them both.
+
+So they went to Montmartre.
+
+At the advice of their chauffeur, they commenced with the Bal Tabarin.
+From the motor-car that had hauled them up the long hills of dark and
+tortuous streets, they stepped into a blaze of yellow light, under which
+half a dozen men hurried to them. One held the door of the cab; another,
+as if it were his sole business in life, wielded a folded newspaper as a
+shield to protect Muriel's gown from contamination by the motor's muddy
+tires; two pointed to the scintillating doorway, and two more chattered
+enquiries that Jim could in no wise interpret.
+
+He knew, however, that there was one answer to every question: he doled
+out a handful of francs, in true American fashion, and then handed a
+purple and white bill to his wife.
+
+Curiously text-book French though it was, Muriel's French had proved
+really intelligible; she had rapidly acquired the power of comprehending
+a full third of the French addressed to her, and all this struck
+Stainton, who loved to follow the lips that were his, speaking a
+language that was not his and of which he was nearly ignorant, as a
+proof of her superiority. Therefore she now preceded him to the ticket
+window and made their purchase. A moment later a large man in a frock
+coat was ushering them, among capped and aproned maids that begged
+permission to check wraps, up to the double stairway at the end of the
+big ballroom and into a box twenty feet above the floor.
+
+They sat down, conscious of themselves, and ordered a bottle of
+Ayala, presently served to them in goblets to play the rôle of
+wine-glasses--for one drinks champagne from goblets in Montmartre--and
+looked down at the dancers on the floor below. From its balcony at the
+other end of the hall a brass band was sending forth a whirlwind of
+quadrille music, and in the centre of the ballroom eight women danced
+the can-can. They were large women, some of them rather fat, and none of
+them rather young. They wore wide straw hats and simple tailored
+shirtwaists and dark skirts of a cut almost severe; but in sharp
+contrast to this exterior, when they danced, they displayed incredible
+yards and yards of lace petticoat and stockings that outshone the
+rainbow.
+
+"What do you think of it?" asked Stainton.
+
+Muriel condemned the Bal Tabarin as she had condemned Boussingault.
+
+"I think it's horrid," she replied. "Aren't they ugly?" But she did not
+take her eyes from the dancers.
+
+All about the dancing-floor, except in that large circular clearing for
+the performers, were little tables where men and women sat and drank
+beer and smoked cigarettes. Along one side was a long bar at which both
+sexes were served. Everyone gave casual heed to the dancing; everyone
+applauded when he was pleased and hissed when he was not. Now and then a
+young woman would rush to a neighbouring table, seize upon a man and
+guide him madly about one corner of the floor in time to the music, and
+now and then it would be a young man that seized upon a woman, at which
+the patrons, if they paid any attention at all to it, smiled
+good-naturedly. At one of the most conspicuous tables were a couple
+kissing above their foaming beer-mugs, and nobody seemed to notice them.
+Clearly, this was a world where one did as one pleased, and, so long as
+one did not trespass upon the individuality of another, none objected.
+
+"Something new, isn't it?" asked Jim, rather dubiously.
+
+"It's unbelievable," said Muriel, her face flushed.
+
+"Shall we go?"
+
+"No--we might as well wait a little while--until we've finished our
+champagne."
+
+The quadrille ended. There were ten minutes during which the visitors to
+the place waltzed rapidly, with feet lifting high, about the floor. Down
+the centre two young girls were swaying together in a form of waltzing
+that neither of the Americans had ever seen before. A man and a woman,
+dancing, would embrace violently at every recurrence of a certain
+refrain.
+
+Muriel slipped her hand along the rail of the box. Stainton, whose eyes
+were fixed on the dancers, started at her touch.
+
+"Hold my hand," said Muriel.
+
+He took her hand in his, lowering it from the view of the spectators.
+
+"No," commanded Muriel: "on the rail, please."
+
+"Certainly, but isn't that rather----"
+
+"It seems to be the custom, Jim."
+
+So he held her hand before them all, and soon found himself liking this.
+
+A troupe of girls ran upon the floor and, to the music, began a
+performance in tumbling. The hair of one was loosened, the ribbon that
+held it fell at her slippered feet, and two men, from near-by tables,
+leaped upon it and struggled laughingly for possession of the trophy.
+
+The Staintons were intent upon this when they heard a low laugh behind
+them. They looked about: three women with bright cheeks were peeping
+through the swinging doors of the box. Involuntarily, Jim smiled, and,
+since a smile in Montmartre passes current for an invitation, the
+foremost of the girls entered, shutting out her companions.
+
+"_Vous êtes Américains?_" she enquired.
+
+Stainton's French went as far as that. He nodded.
+
+"_Du nord ou du sud?_"
+
+Jim was accustomed to thinking that there was but one real America.
+
+"The United States," said he.
+
+"Ver' well," laughed the girl in an English prettily accented. "Your
+good 'ealth, sar--and the good 'ealth of mademoiselle."
+
+She raised from the table Jim's goblet of champagne and drank a little.
+It was evident that her English was now exhausted.
+
+Jim, frankly puzzled, looked at Muriel.
+
+"What shall we do?" he wondered.
+
+He thought that Muriel would resent the intrusion, but Muriel did not
+seem to resent it.
+
+"It appears to be the custom," said Muriel again. "I suppose that we had
+better ask her to sit down and have some champagne."
+
+"Very well," said Stainton, none too willingly. "You ask her, then: the
+French verb 'to sit' always was too much for me."
+
+Muriel offered the invitation; the visitor laughingly accepted; another
+bottle was ordered and, while Jim, unable to understand what was being
+said, leaned over the rail and looked at the dancers, his wife and the
+vermilion-lipped intruder engaged in an encounter of small-talk that
+Muriel began by enjoying as an improvement at once of her French and her
+knowledge of the world.
+
+The visitor, however, so managed the conversation that, though she did
+give Muriel her address in a little street off the Boulevard Clichy, it
+was she who was gathering information. She was extremely polite, but
+extremely inquisitive.
+
+"You have been long in Paris, is it not?" she asked.
+
+"No, not long; only two weeks," said Muriel.
+
+"But in France--no?"
+
+"We came direct to Paris."
+
+"But you speak French well, mademoiselle."
+
+The compliment pleased Muriel to the extent that she missed the title
+applied to her.
+
+"My knowledge of French is very small," she replied. "I studied the
+language in America."
+
+"In America? Truly? One would never suppose."
+
+"We had a French nun for teacher."
+
+"Yes, yes. And monsieur your sweetheart, he does not speak French--no?"
+
+Muriel started.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, a little stiffly, "is my husband."
+
+But the visitor, far from feeling reprimanded, was openly delighted.
+
+"Your husband?" she echoed. "Very good. He is handsome, your husband."
+
+"I think so," said Muriel.
+
+"And it is always good," pursued the guest, "that the husband be much
+older than the wife, is it not?"
+
+Instantly Muriel relapsed. She could not know that the girl spoke
+sincerely. She was among strangers, and, like most of us, instinctively
+suspected all whose native tongue was not her own.
+
+"He is not much older!" she retorted.
+
+"Oh--but yes. And it is well. It is so that it is most often arranged in
+France."
+
+"No doubt--but our marriages are not 'arranged' for us in America. We
+choose for ourselves."
+
+The visitor seemed surprised. She raised her long, high brows and looked
+from Stainton to Muriel.
+
+"How then," she enquired, "you choose for yourself a man so much older?"
+
+"I say he is _not_ much older, not any older," said Muriel, despising
+herself for having fallen into such a discussion, yet unable, in an
+alien language, to disentangle herself.
+
+"But madame is a mere girl," said the visitor, seeking only to be
+polite.
+
+"And my husband is young also," declared Muriel.
+
+Something in the tone of this repetition convinced the French girl that
+the subject was not further to be pursued. She essayed another tack.
+
+"And the babies?" she asked. "Is it that you brought with you the
+babies?"
+
+Muriel's cheeks warmed again, and she looked away.
+
+"We have no children," she responded, shortly.
+
+"No children?" The visitor plainly considered this unbelievable. "You
+have no little babies? Then, why to marry?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Not one?"
+
+"We have none."
+
+"But how unhappy, how unfortunate for monsieur! Perhaps soon----"
+
+"We have been married only a short time."
+
+"Ah!" The French girl seemed to rest upon that as the sole reasonable
+explanation. "Then," she said with a note of encouragement in her tone,
+"it is not without hope. After a while you will have the babies."
+
+Muriel was angry. She looked to Jim for rescue; but Jim was still
+leaning over the rail, engrossed in the spectacle presented by the
+dancers.
+
+"I do not want any children," said Muriel, suddenly.
+
+"No children? You wish no children?" gasped her inquisitor. "You choose
+to marry, and yet you want no children? But why then did madame marry?"
+
+Muriel rose.
+
+"For reasons that you cannot understand," she said. "We must go now,"
+she added; and she touched Jim's arm. "Come," she said to him; "let's
+go, Jim."
+
+Stainton turned slowly.
+
+"What's the hurry?" he asked.
+
+"It must be after one o'clock," said Muriel.
+
+"But we are in Montmartre."
+
+"Yes--and we have still a great deal of it to see before daylight, I
+believe."
+
+Jim rose.
+
+"All right," he said.
+
+The girl put out her hand.
+
+"_S'il vous plaît, monsieur_," she said: "_la petite monnaie_."
+
+Stainton had tried to take the extended hand to bid its owner
+good-night, but he noticed, before she began to speak, that it was
+turned palm upward.
+
+"What's this?" he enquired of Muriel.
+
+"My cab-fare," said the visitor in French, and Muriel, vaguely
+appreciating the fact that here was another custom of the country,
+translated.
+
+"Give her a five-franc piece," she said. "Something of the sort is
+evidently expected."
+
+"So I have to pay her for the privilege of buying her champagne?"
+laughed Jim. "Ask her what I _am_ paying for. I am curious about this."
+
+"No," said Muriel.
+
+"Do," urged Stainton.
+
+But the girl appeared now to comprehend. She was not embarrassed.
+
+"In brief," she explained, "for my time."
+
+"You pay her," Muriel grudgingly translated, "for her time. But," she
+concluded, "I wouldn't pay her much, Jim."
+
+"So that's it!" chuckled Stainton. "Oh, well, I don't want to seem
+stingy after all this discussion of it."
+
+He handed her a ten-franc louis.
+
+The girl's eyes caught the unexpected glint of gold.
+
+"Oh, la-la-la!" she gurgled, and, with what seemed one movement, she
+pocketed the money; drank to Jim's health; flung her arms about him with
+a sounding kiss on his mouth, and ran giggling through the
+folding-doors.
+
+Stainton, tingling with a strange excitement and looking decidedly
+foolish, gazed at his wife.
+
+"What do you think of that?" he choked.
+
+Muriel stood before him trembling, her black eyes ablaze.
+
+"How _dared_ you?" she demanded.
+
+"_I?_" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth did _I_ do?"
+
+"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.
+
+"But, my dear, _I_ didn't do anything. It was the girl----"
+
+"You permitted it."
+
+"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid.
+And she meant it as a compliment."
+
+"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."
+
+"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter
+that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."
+
+"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you
+couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."
+
+He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of
+which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most
+gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they
+went.
+
+They climbed the crowded stairs and paused for a moment in the doorway,
+while Jim began to divest himself of his overcoat. Muriel, ahead, was
+looking into the elaborate room.
+
+Pale green and white it was and loud with laughter and music, with the
+popping of many corks and the chatter of persons that seemed to have no
+mission there save the common mission of enjoyment. In the centre was a
+cleared space, and there, among handsomely appointed tables, the white
+waistcoated men and radiantly-gowned women loudly applauding, two
+Spanish girls in bright costumes were dancing the sensuous mattchiche.
+
+Muriel saw that, at one of the tables nearest the dancers, was a young
+man who applauded more enthusiastically than any of his neighbours. She
+saw that the girls observed this and liked it. She saw one girl, with an
+especially violent embrace, seize her partner, hold her tight for an
+instant, release her, and then, dashing to the young man, extend her
+arms, to which the young man sprang amid the tolerant laughter of his
+companions. Muriel saw the Spanish girl and the young man continue the
+dance.
+
+Quickly she wheeled to her husband.
+
+"I don't want to go in here," she said.
+
+"What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded.
+
+She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the
+room, in the position that he had thus far maintained.
+
+"I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the
+stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well."
+
+She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced
+to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat.
+
+In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between
+sobs, to kissing him.
+
+"I love you!--I love you!" she cried.
+
+The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+WORMWOOD
+
+
+When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through
+which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed,
+often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried
+lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing
+gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to
+return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply,
+bidding her sleep and not bother.
+
+Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that
+opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps
+this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but
+Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of
+his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his
+hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he
+cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the
+turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected
+of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.
+
+Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes
+and gladly let him go.
+
+On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he
+was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal
+of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked
+down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that
+he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to
+smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He
+knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their
+surmise and the truth.
+
+He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to
+Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every
+fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours
+more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round
+tables on the sidewalk outside a corner café. Only one of them was in
+use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a
+closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner
+was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and
+his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other
+customer.
+
+A dirty waiter appeared from the café and shuffled forward, adjusting
+his apron.
+
+"_B'jour, monsieur_," the waiter mumbled.
+
+Stainton did not return this salutation.
+
+"_Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau_," he ordered.
+
+He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago.
+He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter
+would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the
+boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.
+
+The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the
+little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink,
+put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the
+glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself
+after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an
+afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.
+
+The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress
+toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind
+inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with
+the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their
+work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their
+play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys
+shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim
+by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the
+papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles;
+the girls annoyed him most because they would call one another's
+attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these
+people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been
+doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their
+own hearts; but Jim hated them all.
+
+He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage,
+went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but,
+when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he
+found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.
+
+Was _M. le médecin_ in? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he
+doubted if _M. le médecin_ could as yet receive monsieur. It was early,
+and _M. le médecin_ rarely saw any patients before--
+
+Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before
+the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily
+bade him enter.
+
+"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and
+as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's
+hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, _hein_? Did
+the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not
+my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what
+is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend?
+Sit."
+
+The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and
+pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner
+Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiène Sociale,"
+Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier,
+Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits,
+there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling
+ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and
+there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a
+memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his
+back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.
+
+Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample
+mouth were contracted.
+
+"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something
+else. I dare say it's not--not much. I know that these things may be the
+merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical
+weariness, or--or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does
+like to have a physician's assurance."
+
+Boussingault peered through his bar-bound _pince-nez_. He began to
+understand.
+
+"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe
+before the _déjeuner_."
+
+Stainton tried to smile.
+
+"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life,"
+he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I
+took it on an empty stomach."
+
+The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.
+
+"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"
+
+"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but----"
+
+"But you do not come here to pass the time, _hein_?"
+
+"No, doctor."
+
+"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his
+shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take
+absinthe for the second time in your life."
+
+He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's
+nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had
+come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared
+to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be
+founded.
+
+"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you--you
+met my wife last evening."
+
+Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.
+
+"What then?" he inquired.
+
+"What do you think of her?"
+
+"I think that she is very charming--and, M. Stainton, very young."
+
+It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with
+significance.
+
+"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk
+even to my physician of--of certain intimate matters; but"--he glanced
+at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf--"from the titles
+of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within
+the limits of your specialty."
+
+He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he
+could find a suitable one, his vis-à-vis, looking him straight in the
+eyes, had settled the matter:
+
+"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should
+drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of
+excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He
+paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded,
+"she is how old?"
+
+Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his
+anxiety to protect himself.
+
+"She is nearly nineteen."
+
+"Eighteen, _bien_. And you?"
+
+Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the
+arms of his chair.
+
+"Before I married," he said, "only a very short time before I married, I
+had myself looked over carefully by one of the most eminent physicians
+in New York. He assured me that I was in perfect physical condition,
+that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact----"
+
+Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.
+
+"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, your _biceps
+flexor_. How many years are you alive?"
+
+"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand----"
+
+"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"
+
+"On the contrary."
+
+"And your age?"
+
+Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.
+
+"Fifty," he belligerently declared.
+
+Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.
+
+"_Vous voilà!_"
+
+"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand----"
+
+"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is
+it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl
+of eighteen----"
+
+"But I have lived a careful life!"
+
+"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are
+moderate drinkers."
+
+"I drink no more than you."
+
+"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."
+
+"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.
+
+"La-la-la!"
+
+"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely
+abstemious."
+
+It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant
+effort to speak as if he did not.
+
+"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."
+
+Stainton rose.
+
+"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.
+
+Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled
+the more knowingly.
+
+"Yet you are here," said he.
+
+Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to
+leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he
+showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.
+
+"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as
+restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl----"
+
+"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come
+to consult me."
+
+"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression--all my life
+of--of----"
+
+Boussingault rose at last. He came round the desk and, with a touch of
+genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.
+
+"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he
+comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!'
+The old roué, he comes to me and says--the same thing. We all some day
+curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of
+merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on
+one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it
+with regard to no man."
+
+"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."
+
+"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"
+
+"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.
+
+The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.
+
+"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but
+even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make
+him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt,
+I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her
+young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself
+with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts--you try to live
+downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not
+possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is
+not cruel. It is not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the
+beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps
+time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember
+your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now--Poof!
+It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to
+quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her
+respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us.
+Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this
+prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more.
+You must yourself rest."
+
+He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and
+handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same
+strain, as before.
+
+"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been
+easier."
+
+"In a little while?"
+
+"There will be a child."
+
+Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.
+
+"What?" he said. "And you--you----Thousand thunders, these Americans
+here!"
+
+At this Stainton himself grew angry.
+
+"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."
+
+"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to the ceiling. "Hear him! 'It is
+far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the
+great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the '_Avis Important_'
+he there has posted on the door."
+
+It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain
+and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had
+been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried
+by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame
+Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had
+been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more
+exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of
+maturity.
+
+"A week," he said, patting Stainton's broad, straight back. "One little
+week. We must ourself sever from the so charming lady for so long, for
+we know that, ultimately, an absence will work for even her good. Is it
+not, _hein_? But the not-knowing profound of mankind! Incredible! Truly.
+Nine-tens of my women patients, they are married, who of themselves know
+not half so much as the savage little girl of ten years. And the men,
+they I think no more wise."
+
+Stainton passed through the now crowded waiting-room and into the sunlit
+street in a mood that wavered between rebellion and submission. He
+walked to the Chatham and, once arrived, walked past the hotel. He did
+this twice, when, with the realisation that he hesitated from fear of
+Muriel, he mastered his timidity and entered.
+
+His wife was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, but Stainton knew that
+she was not asleep. He went to her and kissed her.
+
+"Muriel," he said, "I am going to Lyons."
+
+She did not open her eyes.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"I think that I ought to go," said Stainton, "and clean up this matter
+of the sale. I shall get the American consul there to recommend a good
+lawyer, and I'll complete the whole transaction as soon as I can."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It will probably take an entire week," pursued Stainton. He waited. "I
+don't like to leave you alone in Paris, but you'd be frightfully lonely
+in Lyons, and I shall be busy--very busy. Now, I know you don't like
+Boussingault. I don't like his opinions myself, but he is a leading man
+in his specialty, and his wife is a good woman. She has said that she
+will call on you this afternoon and take you to stay with her."
+
+Muriel was silent.
+
+"That's all," said Stainton, "except that there is a train from the Gare
+de Lyon at noon, and I ought to take it."
+
+"Then you have been to Dr. Boussingault?" asked Muriel.
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"And he----"
+
+"He said the--the change was what I needed."
+
+He busied himself packing a bag. At last he came again to the bed and
+bent over her.
+
+"Good-bye," he said.
+
+She raised her lips, and he strained her to him. He did not trust
+himself to say more, and he was grateful to her for her refusal to ask
+any further question. She kissed him, her eyes unopened. All that he
+knew was that she kissed him.
+
+Muriel lay quiet for some time. Then she got up and dressed and
+shuddered when she looked at herself in the mirror, and tightened her
+stays. Yet she dressed carefully before going out for a long walk.
+
+In the Tuileries Gardens she watched the gaily costumed maids and wet
+nurses with their little charges. She saw a woman of the working class,
+who was soon to be a mother. She looked away.
+
+She hailed a passing cab.
+
+"Drive me to the Boulevard Clichy," she said in French.
+
+The driver nodded.
+
+Muriel entered the cab. She had an important errand.
+
+Late in the afternoon she returned to the Chatham and left it with a
+suitcase in her hand. She told the unsurprised clerk at the _bureau_
+that her rooms were to be held for her, but that she would be absent for
+five days.
+
+"If anyone calls," she said, "you will say that I have gone to Lyon with
+monsieur."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+RUNAWAYS
+
+
+Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better
+spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly
+his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that
+Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to
+be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from
+congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he
+announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before
+received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her
+normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below
+the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.
+
+Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the
+day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to
+meet him, and he embraced her warmly.
+
+"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to
+have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's
+good to be with you again!"
+
+"What wire?" asked Muriel.
+
+"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come
+here."
+
+"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."
+
+"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to
+have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back
+here."
+
+"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me
+before those strangers."
+
+"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our
+two selves--just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now,"
+he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his
+knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my
+reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is
+gone--going, going, gone--and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri
+Duperré Boussingault et Cie., for----I told you the figure, didn't
+I--_our_ figure? Isn't it splendid?"
+
+"I am glad," said Muriel.
+
+"You don't really object?" he asked.
+
+"Why should I? Of course I am glad."
+
+"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell
+it."
+
+"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember--but you showed me how foolish that was."
+
+He laughed happily.
+
+"I am a great converter," he said. "If you could only have heard me
+converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel--and mostly
+through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and
+you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."
+
+"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."
+
+"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little
+brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"
+
+"Yes, Jim."
+
+"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On
+Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and
+there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on
+a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked
+that?"
+
+"I should----" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.
+
+"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were
+the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind?
+Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you
+wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you
+didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the
+Boussingaults."
+
+Muriel sat upon his knee.
+
+"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.
+
+"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.
+
+"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.
+
+"But, dearest, how--What?--Where were you? You mean to say that you
+stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and
+sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.
+
+"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did
+you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"
+
+Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I--Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"
+
+"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then
+you never got my letters?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Muriel! And you pretended--Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She
+said she would call the afternoon that I left."
+
+"I suppose she did."
+
+"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see
+her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"
+
+"I didn't see her. I left word at the _bureau_ that I was out. I left
+word that I had gone to Lyons with you."
+
+"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking
+right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would
+know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that
+you weren't with me."
+
+She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.
+
+Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.
+
+"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and
+were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a
+fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand,
+dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel----"
+
+"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.
+
+"I was. Yes, I was."
+
+"You are the best man in the world, only--only----"
+
+"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt,
+dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"
+
+"I had to."
+
+"Out of consideration for me."
+
+"No."
+
+"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and
+so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought for
+anything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave,
+lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in
+your condition!"
+
+She drew from him.
+
+"Jim----" she said.
+
+"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.
+
+"But, Jim----"
+
+"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults.
+Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell
+him."
+
+"Don't tell him, Jim."
+
+"We'll see; we'll see."
+
+"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him
+again."
+
+"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."
+
+"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am--I dare say I am
+as bad----"
+
+"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not.
+Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in
+the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or
+interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and
+soon"--he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child--"in
+a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."
+
+"Don't!" said Muriel.
+
+But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.
+
+"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am
+going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear
+of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly
+always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make
+a tour of the shops."
+
+She lifted her face with a troubled smile.
+
+"I have everything I want," she said.
+
+"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared
+to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."
+
+"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."
+
+"All?" smiled her husband.
+
+"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already
+that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them.
+You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."
+
+"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad
+you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get
+some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those--some little
+things--some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival
+of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know
+I am."
+
+Muriel's voice faltered.
+
+"So soon----" she said.
+
+"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city
+where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come
+along."
+
+She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after
+shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes.
+She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she
+endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed
+her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which
+he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as
+he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop
+clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as
+this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the
+approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last
+broke down and fainted in their _taxi-mètre_.
+
+The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.
+
+"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept
+long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"
+
+"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."
+
+"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."
+
+They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains
+and stood looking out upon a grey day.
+
+"I don't want to think it over," she said.
+
+"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."
+
+"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I
+want to go to-day."
+
+"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed
+it.
+
+"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been
+like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."
+
+He softened.
+
+"Aren't you well?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.
+
+"Don't call me that," she said.
+
+"Why not, Muriel?"
+
+"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim----" She put her
+hand in his--"I'm horrid, I know----"
+
+"You're never that!"
+
+"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired
+of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can
+pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."
+
+Again Muriel took refuge at the window.
+
+"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."
+
+"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"It'll be cold, dear."
+
+"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm
+weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."
+
+She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make
+arrangements. In an hour he was back.
+
+"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of
+mail sent on as far as Neuchâtel. We can get a train in forty-five
+minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a
+ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English--and here are the tickets.
+Can you be ready?"
+
+She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly
+distracting journey.
+
+The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their
+train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard,
+then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over
+fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white
+strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without
+deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel
+and emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old
+red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel
+would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church
+would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the
+tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier
+and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward
+and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds
+about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchâtel with the white Sentis to
+the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.
+
+But a day at Neuchâtel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted
+to move on. She made enquiries.
+
+"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor
+was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.
+
+"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly
+protested.
+
+"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done
+almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no
+business and nothing else to do."
+
+So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne,
+through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg,
+past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of
+Königsfelden, where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary
+had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by
+John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden
+and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to
+Zurich.
+
+They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of
+their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on
+their way to the Gross-Münster, Muriel said:
+
+"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here.
+Let's go on to-morrow."
+
+It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.
+
+"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back
+to the hotel this minute and lie down."
+
+She would not hear of that.
+
+"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe
+Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you
+know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"
+
+Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon
+the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her
+unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than
+he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.
+
+"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself down to sleep, eight hours
+later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few
+real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."
+
+Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to
+loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.
+
+"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."
+
+"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"
+
+"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"
+
+"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."
+
+"We've seen it, haven't we?"
+
+"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to
+Innsbruck."
+
+Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the
+door.
+
+"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to
+know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed
+and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.
+
+"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am
+about done up."
+
+Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan
+to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that
+Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded
+Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruins of Gräphang and, on the
+great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.
+
+Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of
+their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring
+moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer,
+saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had
+the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last
+there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a
+sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.
+
+"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte
+and Twain and Do-_nel_li."
+
+"Our what?" asked Jim.
+
+"Please?"
+
+"I didn't catch that last name."
+
+"Donelli--Ignatius Donelli."
+
+"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly--yes."
+
+"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know
+of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"
+
+The Austrian left the train just before they reached the
+six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight
+after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:
+
+"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"
+
+Muriel moved uneasily. Von Klausen's name had not been mentioned more
+than twice between them since they had left the _Friedrich Barbarossa_.
+
+"Why, no," she answered.
+
+"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."
+
+"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."
+
+Stainton reflected.
+
+"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed
+rather to neglect us in Paris."
+
+"_My_ Austrian? Why mine?"
+
+"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"
+
+"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."
+
+He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to
+quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all
+Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.
+
+Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the
+Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then
+across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by
+way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale
+spring sunshine and where, in rôles of gallants to the fashionable
+ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of
+light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel
+said that the women were dowdy and their escorts effeminate; she
+scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the
+copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediæval
+roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene
+Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the
+Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb
+of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."
+
+Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton
+was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf.
+So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure
+these things--and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.
+
+Muriel was again in tears.
+
+"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."
+
+"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear.
+Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."
+
+"But I'm tired of looking and waiting--we've been doing that ever since
+we went away. Let's go back to Paris."
+
+Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she
+had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them
+both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions--and now
+she wanted to go back to Paris!
+
+"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.
+
+"I know; but now it will be spring there--real spring--and everyone says
+that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."
+
+"Yet the climate----"
+
+"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."
+
+"Do you think"--Stainton put his hand upon hers--"do you think that you
+can rest there: really rest?"
+
+"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak
+a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful.
+I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German,
+either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been
+hurrying--hurrying--hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"
+
+"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked
+sixty years old.
+
+"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that
+pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know _what's_ the matter with me;
+but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back
+home."
+
+This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more
+quartered at the Chatham.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+"NOT AT HOME"
+
+
+"A gentleman to see madame."
+
+The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the
+barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four
+hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up"
+at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris,
+there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's
+nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of
+Captain von Klausen.
+
+"I am not at home," said Muriel.
+
+"Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added:
+"This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that
+madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and
+it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed
+disappointed."
+
+"I am not at home," repeated Muriel.
+
+This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself
+out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat
+wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the
+sitting-room again opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen
+downstairs and had brought him along.
+
+In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and
+his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it.
+Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an
+air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed
+utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had
+Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have
+protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young
+fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a
+schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented
+Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.
+
+Nevertheless, Muriel was annoyed. She was annoyed lest they had fallen
+in with the servant, which they had not done, and been told that she was
+out. She was annoyed with Jim because he had brought to call upon her a
+man that, only a few days before, she had told him she disliked. And she
+was distinctly annoyed with von Klausen.
+
+Yet the interview passed off pleasantly enough. Jim was never the man to
+observe under a woman's conventional politeness, even when that
+politeness was ominously intensified, the fires of her disapproval, and
+von Klausen, if indeed he saw more than the husband, at least appeared
+to see no more. He remained to tea.
+
+"Why on earth did you bring _him_ here?" asked Muriel as soon as the
+door had closed on the Austrian.
+
+"Why, did you mind?"
+
+"I told you that I didn't like him."
+
+"I know, but you didn't seem to mind."
+
+"I managed not to be rude to your guest, that's all. Jim, you must have
+remembered that I said I didn't like him."
+
+"Yes, I do remember," Stainton confessed; "but the fact is that I
+brought him because I couldn't very well get out of bringing him. He was
+so extremely glad to see me that I couldn't merely drop him in the
+lobby."
+
+"How did he know that we were here?"
+
+"I told him on the boat that we were to stop here."
+
+"But we have been and gone and returned since then."
+
+"Then I suppose he found us out in the same way that Boussingault did:
+in the hotel news of the _Daily Mail_."
+
+"Well, you might have told him that I wasn't at home. That's what I told
+the servant when his card was sent up."
+
+"Yes, Muriel, I might have tried that, and, as a matter of fact, I did
+think of it; but then he would have hung on to me downstairs, and I knew
+you would be lonely up here without me."
+
+Muriel turned away to observe herself in a long mirror.
+
+"You know I don't like him," she repeated.
+
+"Yes, yes, dear, but what was I to do. Besides, he is really a very good
+fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you
+have for your prejudice?"
+
+"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she
+hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's
+generally good ground for it."
+
+"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a
+mere boy."
+
+"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than
+I am."
+
+"Are you so very aged, my dear?"
+
+"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."
+
+Stainton kissed her.
+
+"Well said," he declared; "your young husband has been so weather-beaten
+that he has been a pretty poor sort of spouse lately. We won't worry any
+more about von Klausen."
+
+Yet to worry about von Klausen they were forced. They seemed, during the
+next ten days, to meet him everywhere, and he was always so polite that
+his invitations could not be contumeliously refused. He took them to
+the opera and to supper afterwards, and they, at last, had to ask him to
+dine.
+
+It was in the midst of this dinner at Les Fleurs that Stainton, begging
+his guest's pardon, glanced at a letter that had been handed him as he
+and Muriel that evening left the hotel.
+
+"Hello," he said, "these French business-men are not so slow, after all.
+They have drawn the final papers, and I am to sign them to-morrow."
+
+He turned to Muriel.
+
+"So," he said, "I shall have to break our agreement this once, Muriel,
+and leave you alone for the morning. Will you forgive me?"
+
+Muriel smiled.
+
+"I'll try," she said.
+
+"You won't be bored?"
+
+"Oh, I'll be bored, of course, but I shall make the best of it."
+
+"Permit me," interposed von Klausen, "to offer my services to Mrs.
+Stainton."
+
+"Your services?" asked Muriel.
+
+"To occupy you during your husband's absence. It is unendurable to think
+of you as wholly deserted--is it not, sir?"
+
+The Austrian was addressing Jim. Stainton and his wife exchanged a quick
+glance. Jim was thinking of her expression of dislike for the Captain;
+Muriel was annoyed because her husband had neglected to read his letter
+before they joined von Klausen: she was in the mood for revenge.
+
+"Oh, she'll make out," said Stainton. "Won't you, Muriel?"
+
+"I don't know," replied Muriel. "It will be very dull."
+
+"Then I renew my offer," said von Klausen.
+
+"But, Captain," protested Jim, apparently blind to everything but his
+wife's prejudice, "we couldn't think of imposing on you."
+
+"An imposition--Mr. Stainton! How an imposition? A privilege, I assure
+you, sir."
+
+"But your duties at the Embassy?"
+
+"One can sacrifice much for one's friends, Mr. Stainton; as it
+fortunately happens, I shall be all at liberty to-morrow morning. The
+spring is come upon us early. It will, I am sure, be delightful weather.
+If Mrs. Stainton will permit me the pleasure of driving her through the
+Bois----"
+
+"Thank you," said Muriel. "You are very kind. I'll go."
+
+Stainton looked perplexedly at his wife.
+
+He did not, however, again broach the matter until they were safely in
+their own rooms at the hotel and were ready for bed.
+
+"I hope you'll forgive me," he at last said.
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For getting you into that confounded engagement with young von
+Klausen. It was stupid of me. I don't know how I ever blundered into
+it."
+
+"It's of no consequence. I dare say I can stand him for once."
+
+"Of course you can, dear. Still, I know how you dislike the Captain, and
+so I hope you'll pardon----"
+
+"Nonsense," yawned Muriel. "Don't think about it any more. And do turn
+out the light. I'm awfully sleepy."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+IN THE BOIS
+
+
+That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely
+begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and
+so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the Forêt de Rouvray and the
+Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets
+and the Champs Elysées, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic
+commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman
+seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and
+turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence
+fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the
+horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.
+
+"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.
+
+Muriel hesitated.
+
+"Why?" she enquired.
+
+"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the
+most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality
+of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you
+have been good enough to visit."
+
+His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to
+contradict him. She looked out at the Lac Inférieur, with its shaded
+banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in
+imitation of a Swiss _chalet_. She was resolved to prefer this to his
+Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the
+Austrian Tyrol as his own.
+
+"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.
+
+"Better? But--why?"
+
+"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and
+inviting."
+
+"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen,
+smiling.
+
+He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself
+fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain
+turned to the driver.
+
+"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.
+
+There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the
+undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.
+
+"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."
+
+Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."
+
+"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after
+your return from your visit to my country."
+
+"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said
+this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her
+companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have
+not been thinking much about you one way or the other."
+
+"I am sorry," said von Klausen.
+
+"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."
+
+"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."
+
+"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.
+
+"Yes."
+
+She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at
+his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.
+
+"How dared you?" she gasped.
+
+"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a
+reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."
+
+"Well, you shan't know."
+
+"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to
+plead in his own defence?"
+
+"You are not accused--and you aren't judged."
+
+"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how
+is that possible?"
+
+"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"
+
+"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none.
+Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To
+accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in
+another of them."
+
+Muriel bit her red under-lip.
+
+"Let us go back," she said.
+
+"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."
+
+They walked a few steps forward.
+
+"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.
+
+"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are
+presumptuous."
+
+"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."
+
+"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."
+
+"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."
+
+"What nonsense!"
+
+"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret,
+madame."
+
+Muriel's eyes flashed.
+
+"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident
+that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."
+
+Von Klausen bowed.
+
+"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to
+the reference."
+
+"I did not."
+
+"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close
+acquaintanceship."
+
+"I required nothing--and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was
+the merest trifle."
+
+Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.
+
+"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to
+your husband."
+
+She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky
+cheeks were aflame.
+
+"How low of you!" she cried.
+
+But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.
+
+"To mention the truth?" he murmured.
+
+"To bring up such a trifle--to trade on such a confidence--to make of an
+impulsive action and of the consequences of that action--you know--I
+told you at the time, and you must know--that I didn't mention the
+circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been
+to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you
+would not want your terror known."
+
+"Ah--so you did think of me, then?"
+
+"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."
+
+They were now half-way along the Lac Inférieur. Under the arching trees
+in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring
+morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the
+Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling
+companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his
+blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.
+
+"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched
+my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always--think of me deeply. I
+cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must
+listen. I tell you now, once and forever--I tell you----"
+
+Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise
+understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there
+was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly
+unloosed--the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite
+of all the hampering harness of convention--and she was undeniably
+curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain
+sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory
+knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this
+soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage
+and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been
+goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion
+against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent
+opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something
+else--something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the
+young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of
+ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of
+elaborately conceived convention.
+
+Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the
+last, it will have its word.
+
+"Stop!" said Muriel.
+
+Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.
+
+"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do
+not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only
+a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and
+slowly; now----"
+
+Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically
+Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the
+Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence
+for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.
+
+Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was
+evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her
+soul--and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful
+consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the
+moment before.
+
+She raised a trembling hand.
+
+"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as
+ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would--I believe
+he would kill you."
+
+Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but
+the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands
+fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.
+
+"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some
+phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no
+man that lives."
+
+"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered:
+"afraid and ashamed."
+
+"Not afraid."
+
+"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the
+splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way.
+Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."
+
+It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result.
+Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so
+deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley
+in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he
+did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and
+the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was
+somehow inexplicably true.
+
+Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him.
+His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he
+was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.
+
+Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could
+not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was
+doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the
+result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty
+had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak
+began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth
+which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard
+his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.
+
+"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself
+murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry--very sorry. We will never
+speak of it again--not to ourselves--and not to anybody else."
+
+"But we shall be friends?" he asked.
+
+"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was
+before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his
+manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had
+previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will
+never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a
+herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.
+
+When one is young such promises are lightly made.
+
+"Never," he vowed.
+
+"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this
+affair to me?"
+
+"Never again, dear lady."
+
+"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in--in that
+way."
+
+He pressed her hand ever so slightly.
+
+"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."
+
+"But the thoughts are wrong."
+
+"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I
+cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only
+master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The
+good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he
+has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions.
+I shall remember always his words."
+
+She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and
+their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them
+to fall, upon trivial things.
+
+"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the
+subject of her fevered trip with Jim.
+
+"We didn't get anywhere near it. I--we were in a hurry to get back to
+Paris. We--we thought it would be warmer in Paris."
+
+"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"
+
+"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we
+crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had
+driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came
+right back here."
+
+"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it.
+It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world
+goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit
+at a table before one of the cafés, of an evening in summer or of a
+Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebière or the rue
+Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime--you and
+your husband."
+
+"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and
+I."
+
+"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and
+more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons
+seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."
+
+She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.
+
+"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has
+sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau--the particular point
+that I mean--a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are
+set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises
+almost to the clouds. Nearly at its top, a precipice below and a
+precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That
+cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelène spent, in penance,
+the last thirty years of her life."
+
+He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.
+
+Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.
+
+"You have been there, then?" she asked.
+
+"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers
+and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot--the silent chapel; the long,
+fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to
+the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below,
+and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE CALL OF YOUTH
+
+
+That evening there came the beginning of the end.
+
+The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with
+preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate
+any sort of fête of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had
+not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von
+Klausen had promised his two American friends, the _grand boulevard_
+would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the
+Madelaine.
+
+"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with
+Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to
+luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The
+streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be
+masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."
+
+He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of
+the dull routine of the Embassy.
+
+Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own
+part, though she told herself religiously that she had done no wrong,
+she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and
+kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been
+preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm
+over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she
+glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.
+
+"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.
+
+"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention
+had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description
+of the evening before the fête. If he felt somewhat worn from the now
+unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome
+this chance for novel amusement.
+
+"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our
+pilot, Captain?"
+
+Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.
+
+"If," he said, "you will do me the honour--you and Mrs. Stainton--to
+dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot
+and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the
+boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no
+alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of
+her drive this morning?"
+
+Jim, too, looked at Muriel.
+
+"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the
+Austrian's.
+
+Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.
+
+"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This
+juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."
+
+"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the
+signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the
+movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all."
+He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."
+
+"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during
+the remainder of the afternoon----"
+
+"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not
+stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with
+her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to
+face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own
+thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely
+knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to
+waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious
+if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every
+minute. You _are_ sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"
+
+Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by
+motoring to Versailles and back."
+
+So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in
+time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odéon and dined on
+_croûte consommé_, _filet_ of cod, and _canard sauvage à la presse_.
+After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than
+he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.
+
+When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from
+the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had
+predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from
+house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and
+threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as
+riotously happy as only a fête-day crowd in Paris can be.
+
+Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue
+Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of
+merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of
+confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue
+Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton
+was lost.
+
+They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood
+on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on
+this side, and again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered
+their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and
+though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away,
+Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts,
+he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.
+
+Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the
+fête-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel
+began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.
+
+"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said--and, as he had to bend to
+her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a
+loose strand of her dark hair--"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall
+find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."
+
+"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in
+order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her
+fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man
+grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll
+go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves--at once--at once!
+Call a cab."
+
+Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her,
+bending to her ear.
+
+"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far--if you are not too tired?"
+
+"No, no, I'm not too tired--or I won't be if we can only hurry."
+
+They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.
+
+"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are
+afraid--of me?"
+
+His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine
+sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't----"
+
+"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this
+morning."
+
+"_Not afraid_--even then. And now--well, I remember the talk we had
+afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."
+
+Again his lips were near her neck.
+
+"I shall never forget it," he vowed.
+
+Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her
+words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she
+dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed.
+She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they
+had reached the hotel.
+
+"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they
+met.
+
+The servant thought not.
+
+"Ask at the _bureau_."
+
+Stainton had not yet come back.
+
+"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be
+better that we await him in your sitting-room."
+
+Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the
+hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now
+a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor
+errors--perhaps the greatest--that they inspire us with the fear that
+the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had
+never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her.
+She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than
+withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world
+would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with
+the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she
+became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted
+eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not
+precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method
+of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been
+roused.
+
+"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the
+servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will
+say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my--in the
+sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."
+
+For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on
+their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen
+shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this
+silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her
+wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It
+was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and
+she sought refuge in platitude.
+
+"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she
+added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."
+
+"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."
+
+There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish
+than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes
+narrowed.
+
+"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.
+
+"Only what has happened to us. He--I think he will be here soon."
+
+Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that.
+She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence.
+She wished devoutly that Jim would return.
+
+"It--it is rather close here," she said.
+
+"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes
+from her. He did not move.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "Will you--will you be so good as to open the
+window?"
+
+He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice,
+and he turned to the window.
+
+The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to
+draw them from the glass. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between
+them. Then something went wrong with the knob that controls the bolt. He
+shook the knob. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a
+tinkle of falling glass.
+
+Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was
+trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.
+
+"You are hurt?" she cried.
+
+Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.
+
+"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."
+
+The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.
+
+"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.
+
+She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the
+knuckles--a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white
+fingers and marked them with a bright stain.
+
+That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had
+begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature;
+the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black
+hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm
+and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things
+they had never seen before.
+
+Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with
+electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.
+
+The circuit was complete.
+
+"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.
+
+From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a
+voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:
+
+"I love you!"
+
+She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond
+reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when
+they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips,
+in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast
+there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to
+the force in her own true being.
+
+"But--but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.
+
+Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.
+
+"But Jim----You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is
+far, far too good for either of us."
+
+Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost
+merry kiss.
+
+"He need never know," said the Austrian.
+
+She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.
+
+"You--you----" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could
+never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"
+
+It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.
+
+"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"
+
+"Go!"
+
+Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She
+pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with
+hate and shame.
+
+"Go!"
+
+"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."
+
+"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the
+word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across
+her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"
+
+"But, Muriel----"
+
+"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring
+for the servants."
+
+"Muriel----"
+
+"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again,
+I'll ring."
+
+He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave
+him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He
+shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.
+
+Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination,
+Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried
+to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which
+only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into
+the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the
+window.
+
+Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his
+day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the
+boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.
+
+"Muriel!" he cried.
+
+She opened her heavy eyes.
+
+"Jim!"
+
+He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father
+strokes the hair of his weary child.
+
+"My poor little girl!" he said.
+
+Had she thought at all coherently about his coming, she had not meant
+to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had
+occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth,
+or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him
+while he did that.
+
+"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you
+anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought--I hardly
+know what I thought."
+
+"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached
+for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"
+
+Muriel started.
+
+"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's----" She
+laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It
+stuck--the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his
+wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the
+pieces from the floor."
+
+She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to
+her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of
+marital ethics.
+
+After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to
+draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of
+deception. Truth became impossible.
+
+She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible it became, the more
+bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that
+she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her
+relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration
+of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen
+had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far
+below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy
+against her lover and heightened her affection--call it love as she
+would, it would now be no more than affection--for Jim. She wanted to
+tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that
+barred her way.
+
+She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.
+
+"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."
+
+At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood
+had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for
+motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.
+
+"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is
+really no reason for you to worry."
+
+She did not look up, but she shook her head.
+
+"I am not," she repeated.
+
+He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her
+cheek, which her hands left bare.
+
+"There, there," he said.
+
+At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.
+
+"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."
+
+He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.
+
+"What--what----" he stammered.
+
+"O, Jim!" she cried.
+
+"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What--how? When? You don't
+mean----"
+
+"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.
+
+Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control
+himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his
+reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy
+of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he
+began again:
+
+"You don't mean----"
+
+"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"
+
+He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the
+edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its
+fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite
+Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.
+
+"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey
+brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"
+
+Her head sank lower in her hands.
+
+"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."
+
+"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You
+must know! How did this happen?"
+
+Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her
+only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her
+breast.
+
+"Answer me!" he demanded.
+
+She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her
+face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into
+a sheet.
+
+"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a
+drive. Coming back--here at the hotel--I fell from the cab--getting out.
+I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor--_not_
+Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said
+it was easy--They said I would be all right in a week.--I thought I
+was--But I have suffered--O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't,
+please, think----"
+
+She crashed to the floor at his feet.
+
+Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers
+while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their
+mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony
+that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He
+stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head
+against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to
+murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.
+
+Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.
+
+"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew
+it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have
+had rest, and instead----Why didn't you tell me? Why?"
+
+"I was afraid," she said, simply.
+
+"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"
+
+Her words were a fresh stab.
+
+"Yes. I knew how much you wanted----And I was afraid."
+
+"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me
+what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."
+
+"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the
+place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time,
+perhaps----Only now--oh, take me away!"
+
+"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to
+our own country. Back home."
+
+But at that she shuddered.
+
+"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than
+Paris. Don't you see? We left there happy, expecting----Not there. No,
+I couldn't bear that."
+
+Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking
+her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand,
+brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.
+
+She drew the hand from him.
+
+"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."
+
+"It is--there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk
+about getting away."
+
+"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we
+were in Italy."
+
+"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell
+you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."
+
+"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not
+anything I have said about it?"
+
+"Not that. I don't know. Something before that----"
+
+"Because you lost me in the crowd?"
+
+"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the
+boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I--I don't
+like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."
+
+He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both
+that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in
+unfamiliar surroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are
+familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be
+remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those
+which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.
+
+New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would
+do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris
+and different from New York.
+
+"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.
+
+She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to
+be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It
+was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her
+effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.
+
+The next morning they left for Marseilles.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+OUR LADY OF PROTECTION
+
+
+For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel,
+because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to
+the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however,
+was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned
+and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the
+Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by
+taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road
+beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had
+ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing
+that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.
+
+"Let's take it," said Muriel.
+
+She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of
+hotels.
+
+"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may
+want to be getting back home when--when all's well again."
+
+"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are
+willing to pay them a little more than they would ask on a long lease,"
+Muriel serenely assured him.
+
+Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a
+small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it
+to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at
+once.
+
+They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their
+rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of
+fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of
+business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for
+the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for
+Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because
+she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to
+banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to
+which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own
+reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It
+annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her
+shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put
+roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders
+and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for
+excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she
+was heartily sorry for Jim.
+
+It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to
+press once more the question of their return to New York. They were
+sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their
+villa, and were looking over the blue bay.
+
+"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"
+
+His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have
+thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to
+see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.
+
+"Perhaps," she granted.
+
+On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out
+the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill
+on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern
+monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open
+elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed
+the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which
+stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.
+
+The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a
+quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of
+storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of
+the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other
+ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at
+the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers
+answered or to the making of other prayers.
+
+"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping
+before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused,
+"that these people wanted."
+
+Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.
+
+"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."
+
+His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.
+
+"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."
+
+"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in
+here."
+
+"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze
+out there."
+
+"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."
+
+Muriel's lips tightened.
+
+"Very well," she said.
+
+She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled
+to the side overlooking the bay.
+
+Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a
+panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping
+in the _vieux port_, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed
+houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from
+the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the Cité Chabas
+and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point,
+where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in
+terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From
+dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas
+on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue;
+the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the
+waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of
+land where towers the Château d'If.
+
+She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The
+breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen
+below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape--of a
+landscape of which she had only heard:
+
+"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away;
+the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the
+distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and
+was saved."
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and
+had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner
+serious.
+
+"How did you come here?"
+
+The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her
+weapons of defence.
+
+"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning
+after you departed--because I had to see you, whether you wished me or
+not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and
+they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your
+hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on
+the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come
+here."
+
+His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her
+poise.
+
+"How dared you come?" she asked.
+
+"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.
+
+"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."
+
+"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."
+
+"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"
+
+"You must." He came nearer to her.
+
+"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she
+demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."
+
+"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that
+you have told him nothing."
+
+She eyed him menacingly.
+
+"Are you so sure of that?"
+
+"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told
+him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."
+
+"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider
+me?--But of course you don't!"
+
+"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have
+come to say--perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear
+that I should cause you annoyance----"
+
+"You annoy me now."
+
+"But if you have not told him----Well, what I have to say is my excuse.
+If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste
+in saying it."
+
+He moved still nearer.
+
+"I have told him," she said.
+
+"No."
+
+"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes,
+her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.
+
+"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said
+von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to
+tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied.
+I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I
+have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was
+in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I
+know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence
+from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do
+not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that
+word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now--now, _ach_, I know I
+love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred
+as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in
+your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my
+punishment--for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and
+I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still
+be hopeless."
+
+She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it
+rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the
+cold.
+
+"Hopeless?" she repeated.
+
+"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes
+of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."
+
+She remembered her teaching in the convent school.
+
+"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.
+
+"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact,
+you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."
+
+She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning
+the corner of the promenade.
+
+"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything.
+Wait. There will be another chance for us: I must have one word alone
+with you before--before----"
+
+"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our
+lives."
+
+The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.
+
+"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see
+you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive
+glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.
+
+Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to
+the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience
+with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so
+the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The
+Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself
+altogether at the best.
+
+"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been
+homesick for a long time without knowing."
+
+"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little
+dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"
+
+"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have
+one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we
+are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that
+both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."
+
+"Then you are returning soon?"
+
+"Three weeks from to-day."
+
+Muriel looked at Jim.
+
+"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.
+
+"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed,
+didn't we, dear?"
+
+She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She
+could only nod.
+
+"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not
+mention it to me when we met to-day."
+
+"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled
+pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."
+
+She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a
+departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in
+three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious
+manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there
+were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her
+were not the sense of her deception of him.
+
+"I forgot," she said.
+
+"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing,
+my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the
+Captain for a few minutes with his _dubonais_. We have an outside
+stateroom on the upper deck of the _Prinzess Wilhelmina_, and we sail
+from Genoa."
+
+He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the
+southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced
+another surprise.
+
+"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains
+to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here
+until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."
+
+This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.
+
+"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."
+
+"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's
+not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you
+had to to run right off to dress, you know."
+
+"Why must you go?"
+
+"Those French purchasers again."
+
+"I thought you were through with them."
+
+"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they
+have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I
+wrote to them and fixed a price on that."
+
+"You don't mean that you tricked them?"
+
+"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of
+doing business."
+
+"You didn't say you had written them."
+
+"My dear, when do I bore you with business affairs?" Stainton turned to
+von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But
+perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening
+and see that she is not too much depressed."
+
+Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately
+shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he
+was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone
+there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and
+she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house.
+Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and
+the Austrian left without naming his hotel.
+
+When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing,
+although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company.
+She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:
+
+"Why are you going away to-morrow?"
+
+Jim was surprised.
+
+"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"
+
+"Then I think you might have told me when _he_ wasn't here."
+
+"My dear, you gave me no chance."
+
+"And you booked passage back, Jim?"
+
+"Passage home, yes."
+
+Muriel's mouth drooped.
+
+"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.
+
+He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked
+searchingly into hers.
+
+"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"
+
+"I know, Jim, but I never promised----"
+
+"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."
+
+He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how
+to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that,
+within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in
+France or America.
+
+"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want
+to leave early. We had better go to bed."
+
+She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to
+Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet
+she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule
+never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded
+that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent,
+and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and
+watched him climb aboard his train.
+
+She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried
+to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none.
+As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more afraid. When
+nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew
+afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed
+him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown
+into her drawing-room.
+
+"You shouldn't," she said--"you shouldn't have come!"
+
+Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young
+and handsome.
+
+"Why not?" he asked.
+
+"Because of Jim."
+
+"He invited me."
+
+"Yes, I know, but----" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted
+her fingers.
+
+"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."
+
+"He was queer. His manner--I don't know. Only I had not promised to go
+home in three weeks."
+
+"No?"
+
+"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"
+
+Von Klausen smiled.
+
+"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"
+
+"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons
+and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."
+
+"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of
+business. I know that; surely you should know it better."
+
+"That business wasn't like him."
+
+"It was very--shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself.
+Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married
+man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife
+in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once
+more!'"
+
+She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this
+was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa,
+the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare
+shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.
+
+The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the
+walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half
+hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say
+good-bye forever.
+
+Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la
+Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love
+for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had
+asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the
+characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love
+for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether.
+This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not
+have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at
+all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and
+of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he
+had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more
+than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one
+might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon
+a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.
+
+They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet
+Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.
+
+"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now
+think of as so right might end by being very wrong."
+
+"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be
+right."
+
+"Not the ruin of our lives?"
+
+"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your
+husband's----"
+
+"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't
+honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is
+good and kind and brave; but somehow--I don't know why: I don't know
+why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did
+love him."
+
+"Nevertheless, you are married to him."
+
+"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when----"
+
+"A divorce is always wrong."
+
+"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the
+marriage a real one?"
+
+"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of
+any faith is binding."
+
+"But marriage is a contract."
+
+"Marriage is a sacrament."
+
+They would get so far--always darting down this byway and that of
+casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against
+the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom--and then she would come back
+to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her
+great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from
+taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile,
+and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one
+in a passion of abnegation.
+
+But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it
+must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued
+proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung,
+with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding
+interview.
+
+In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.
+
+Muriel started.
+
+"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling
+bell.
+
+"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.
+
+They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in
+that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of
+man.
+
+Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind
+rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the
+Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.
+
+"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"
+
+With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He
+told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they
+occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as
+passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to
+chastity.
+
+To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past
+seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded
+it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force
+balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim
+had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had
+once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving
+how much stronger was her hold on him.
+
+"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her
+hand.
+
+They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment
+more and they would go on, forever, apart.
+
+He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with
+pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan
+Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer,
+fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her
+wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high,
+curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were
+damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars.
+He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled
+her in his arms.
+
+It was then that Stainton entered the room.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+HUSBAND AND WIFE
+
+
+They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each
+was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the
+door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one
+glance. Each turned toward the husband.
+
+Stainton smiled heartily.
+
+"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed
+her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see
+you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you.
+But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your
+country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."
+
+"When----" began Muriel.
+
+"I got as far as Montélimart when they caught me with one of their blue
+telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have
+to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what
+train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles
+and landed at Lyons before I heard that--I wasn't wanted."
+
+Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Muriel had been on the verge
+of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian,
+nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to
+court it quite another.
+
+"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored
+your good wife."
+
+"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my
+good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"
+
+Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last
+distinctly to say:
+
+"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."
+
+"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.
+
+"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.
+
+"You have said, sir, that it is late."
+
+"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."
+
+The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.
+
+Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the
+drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left
+her.
+
+"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an
+explanation."
+
+She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his
+approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.
+
+"Don't touch me!" she cried.
+
+She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely,
+what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual rôle of fond
+protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even
+pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she
+could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened
+by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there
+cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.
+
+Jim stopped short.
+
+"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well,
+you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to
+me!"
+
+Tradition always shows us the wronged husband in a towering rage, in the
+throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for
+either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife
+the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of
+their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is
+contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his
+senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to
+pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to
+her.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" he asked.
+
+Muriel sat down.
+
+"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"
+
+"About my trip to Lyons?"
+
+"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."
+
+"I have some right, I think, to come home."
+
+"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an
+'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"
+
+"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has
+been in my mind for some time."
+
+"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your
+suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at
+the first?"
+
+"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"
+
+"Love affair? There has been no love affair."
+
+Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he
+stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.
+
+"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't
+for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"
+
+Muriel was silent.
+
+"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I
+tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that
+night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the
+Spanish dancer----"
+
+Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames
+of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved,
+with an upward motion, slowly around her.
+
+"You saw that!"
+
+"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and,
+naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe
+what it was."
+
+The wife fought for her self-control and won it.
+
+"Deceit! Deceit even then!"
+
+"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did
+not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris--and I
+understood later why you wanted to go back."
+
+He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.
+
+"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your
+illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did
+not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy,
+too, there came the night of the fête. I could tell when von Klausen and
+you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the
+air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the
+boulevards: I separated myself from you."
+
+He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once
+beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.
+
+"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to give me a fair chance?
+You threw me into his arms--or tried to--and you call that a fair
+chance?"
+
+Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which
+clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he
+smiled quietly.
+
+"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger;
+your love for me--or failing your love, your moral strength--need not
+assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself
+to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."
+
+"You coward!"
+
+"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be
+a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full
+opportunity. Otherwise the fear--a very small one then--would have
+continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives,
+his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."
+
+"You dare to say that!"
+
+He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the
+room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing
+its point.
+
+"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is
+that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all
+upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went
+on, "a woman compromises herself with X, at least after she has become
+a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself
+with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only
+exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner
+or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y
+and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their
+personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though
+this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she
+should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has
+managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a
+few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."
+
+Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks
+were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the
+low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a
+lightning-flash on a darkened sea.
+
+"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she
+declared.
+
+He raised a steady hand.
+
+"Only a moment more, please," he said.
+
+Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:
+
+"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I
+took you away from Paris again--the next day, wasn't it?--because you
+wanted to go, but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen
+was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am
+by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian
+turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I
+decided to make an end of it. Now"--he spoke as if he were concluding an
+affair of business--"I have made that end."
+
+"How have you made that end?"
+
+Stainton smiled wanly.
+
+"My dear----" he said.
+
+"Don't call me that."
+
+"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you
+are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."
+
+"How have you made an end?"
+
+"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."
+
+"You mean that you think--that you dare to think that I--that the
+Captain and--that we----"
+
+"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know.
+Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the
+preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this
+house----"
+
+"At your invitation!"
+
+"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained
+alone with you in this room until after midnight--I say, given all
+these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I
+wanted--the evidence of seeing you in his arms--no man in his senses
+would for one moment doubt----"
+
+"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her
+disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.
+
+"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say----"
+
+"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will
+never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You
+unclean-minded old man!"
+
+He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.
+
+At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own
+high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been
+so long festering in her mind--at first unguessed, then vehemently
+denied, but always there and always becoming more and more
+poisonous--the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned
+to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in
+a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had
+achieved maturity.
+
+"Now you listen to me," she commanded.
+
+Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.
+
+Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its
+back and leaned across the back toward her.
+
+So they stood, facing each other.
+
+"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible
+alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and
+hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and
+trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to
+hope--actually to hope!--for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young,
+and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one
+minute your wife."
+
+Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.
+
+"You were a good imitation," he said.
+
+"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife,
+anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and
+couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real,
+so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what
+was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what
+you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an
+admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was
+it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And
+me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house,
+and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"
+
+"For a time you were a good imitation."
+
+"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I
+tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I
+soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things
+would change, that they were so bad they must change--and they
+wouldn't."
+
+"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper
+lip.
+
+"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't
+you remember, at the very start, how I _said_ I wanted to be honest? But
+somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened,
+seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why
+does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie,
+and so all we did was lies and lies."
+
+"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."
+
+"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to
+give--not what I gave you--not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What
+was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you
+always _knew_ that _you_ had all _you_ wanted. Well, you had. But did
+you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as
+a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I
+sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let
+myself be married to a man three times my age--and this is Nature's
+punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and
+then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger,
+and because I _was_ hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that
+was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"--she
+flashed it out at him--"what happened to me while you were selling the
+mine was not an accident!"
+
+This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger
+and horror struggled for him.
+
+"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean----"
+
+"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that
+girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and
+I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that
+I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to
+have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't
+want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think
+I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the
+time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go
+crazy--_crazy_! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother
+against my will!"
+
+He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her
+deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely
+done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:
+
+"You loved him--then?"
+
+"I didn't love you."
+
+"Did you love him?"
+
+"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied
+to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But
+then, when I did _that_ thing, I only knew what I've told you."
+
+Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself,
+but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the
+door.
+
+Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.
+
+"But I love him now," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.
+
+"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing--nothing. I was no
+more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so
+little, were fit to be my husband."
+
+Stainton half turned.
+
+"And he?" Jim asked.
+
+"He loves me: you only liked having me."
+
+He turned slowly away again.
+
+She thought that she heard him whisper:
+
+"No child!"
+
+"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost
+everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a
+baby, a little dead baby. It will never leave me: it's the little
+ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."
+
+He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of
+going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an
+hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a
+candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face.
+One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with
+him. She was right; he was growing old.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+HUSBAND AND LOVER
+
+
+At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and
+flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling
+clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.
+
+"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or
+less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me,
+I----"
+
+"But, monsieur----"
+
+"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."
+
+"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."
+
+"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried
+to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion
+flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
+
+"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."
+
+"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"
+
+"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to
+monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."
+
+Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed to him and, as the maid
+left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth
+time when the domestic reappeared.
+
+"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.
+
+"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his
+question.
+
+The maid presented a card.
+
+"Show Captain von Klausen up here," said Jim.
+
+A moment later, husband and lover stood alone together.
+
+"Good-morning," said Stainton.
+
+He held out his hand, and von Klausen, after a swift hesitation, took
+it.
+
+The Austrian's expression was disturbed. He was unshaven. It was obvious
+that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. The sight seemed, somehow,
+to restore his host's self-confidence.
+
+"You will please to pardon for this early intrusion----" von Klausen
+began.
+
+Stainton smiled.
+
+"You are always so pleasant, Captain," he said, "that you never intrude.
+Besides, the earlier the better. As it happens, I was just this moment
+thinking of you."
+
+Von Klausen bowed. There was a brief pause, the Austrian's blue eyes
+wandering about the room in an endeavour to escape Stainton's glance,
+and Stainton's eyes fastened thoughtfully upon the Austrian.
+
+"Well?" asked the husband.
+
+Von Klausen coughed.
+
+"Madame is--is----" he started, but stopped short.
+
+"You asked for me. Did you expect to find her up at this time of day?"
+
+"Oh, no--no: certainly not. Pardon me. I forgot the hour."
+
+"Ah, you often forget the hour, don't you, Captain?"
+
+The Austrian braced himself. He raised his chin defiantly. He met the
+issue directly.
+
+"You refer," he asked, "to my late call of last evening--yes?"
+
+"More or less. I am rather curious about that call."
+
+"Sir, there is nothing about it to excite your curiosity. You asked me
+to call. There is nothing of my call that you may not learn from your
+wife."
+
+"No doubt. Of course not; but it may be that I prefer to ask you."
+
+Von Klausen was in a corner. Anger he could have met with anger, but
+here was something that he did not comprehend.
+
+"I can answer no question," he said, stiffly, "that you have not asked
+of Mrs. Stainton."
+
+"How do you know that I haven't asked her?"
+
+"I do not know that you have."
+
+"You are sure of that?"
+
+"What do you wish to say, Mr. Stainton?"
+
+"I mean: are you sure that you haven't seen her since you left here last
+night?"
+
+The Austrian's face expressed a bewilderment that Stainton could not
+mistrust.
+
+"How is that possible?" inquired von Klausen.
+
+"Oh, of course!" Stainton, convinced, shrugged his shoulders. "However,
+I do want to make a few inquiries of you."
+
+"Then I prefer to wait until your wife descends, so that you may make
+them in her presence."
+
+Stainton still held in his left hand the letter that Muriel had
+addressed to him. He tapped it upon the knuckles of his right hand.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, "that I can't conveniently wait so long. Captain
+von Klausen, are you in love with my wife?"
+
+The Austrian rose precipitately. His blond moustache bristled.
+
+"Sir!" said he.
+
+"I merely wanted to know."
+
+"At your question I am amazed, sir."
+
+"Oh, I really had a good reason for asking."
+
+"In my country no reason suffices for such a question."
+
+"Hum. Well, you see, neither my wife nor I belong to your country, and
+you are not in your country now. However, there is no need for you to
+get excited, Captain. I am sorry if I seem to have intruded on your
+confidence with a lady; but, to tell you the truth, as my wife has
+admitted that she is in love with you, I was not unnaturally somewhat
+curious to discover whether you reciprocated her affection."
+
+Von Klausen's eyes protruded. This husband was, obviously, mad. He might
+have been driven mad by his discovery. The discovery seemed a thing
+accomplished. With a great in-taking of breath, the Austrian made
+answer:
+
+"You have loved your wife. Why should _I_ be ashamed to say that I love
+her?"
+
+If von Klausen expected an explosion, he was disappointed.
+
+"Well," said Stainton, calmly, "that is one way of looking at it."
+
+"Please?"
+
+"Never mind. You say you love her?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Stainton looked at him narrowly, from under heavy brows. He regularly
+tapped his knuckles with the envelope.
+
+"For a day?" he asked.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"I mean: is this a world-without-end business so far as you are
+concerned, or is it one of your little amusements by the way?"
+
+The Austrian clenched his teeth.
+
+"Do you mean to insult me, sir?"
+
+"I assure you that I mean nothing of the sort."
+
+"Then you insult your wife!"
+
+"Not at all. I am sorry that you should suppose I could think ill of
+her."
+
+"If you do not think ill of her, you have no right to ask such a
+question as this which you have asked."
+
+"It's not impossible that I should be a trifle interested, you know."
+
+"I cannot understand, sir, how you can have the calmness----"
+
+"Why not? She is my wife, you see. What I want to know is whether you
+are genuinely, sincerely in love with her. You know what I mean. As
+between man and man now: is this a for-ever-and-ever affair with you?"
+
+The Austrian's bewilderment found vent in a long sigh.
+
+"It is," said he.
+
+"Good," said Stainton. He thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets
+and bent forward. "If I let her get a divorce from me, will you marry
+her?" he asked.
+
+"Do you make a joke?"
+
+"I don't consider this a joking matter, Captain. I ask you a frank
+question and I want a frank answer."
+
+Von Klausen doubted his ears, but he replied:
+
+"I would desire nothing better, but my faith forbids."
+
+"You're sincere in that?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"I mean about your faith, you know."
+
+"Whatever else may be charged against me, sir, heresy or infidelity may
+not be charged."
+
+"Have a cigar," said Stainton.
+
+He produced his cigar-case, gave the Austrian a cigar, held a steady
+match while his guest secured a light, and then, with a cigar between
+his teeth, began to walk rapidly up and down the room, puffing quietly,
+his hands clasped behind his back.
+
+"Look here," he said. "I am the kind of man that lives to look ahead and
+prepare for all contingencies. I do not always succeed, but I see no
+harm in trying. Well. When I first began to think about this thing, I
+said I would be prepared for the worst, if the worst came. I remembered
+your prejudices, and I had a fellow do some research work for me at the
+Bibliothèque Nationale, and yesterday I spent some time in the seminary
+library at Avignon. My dear fellow, you haven't got a leg to stand on."
+
+"No leg?"
+
+"Not in your objections to divorce and remarriage."
+
+"The Church----"
+
+"Was founded by, or at any rate pretends allegiance to, Jesus of
+Nazareth. Now, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said--it's not
+certain--something that may seem to bear out your theories; but that
+something which may be twisted to your way was said just about two
+thousand years ago to a small, outlying, semi-barbarous province. Are
+you going to try to apply it to civilisation to-day?"
+
+The Austrian had philosophically seated himself in the chair against
+which Jim had leaned the night before.
+
+"I apply the Sermon on the Mount," said von Klausen.
+
+"Do you? I didn't think you did. But we'll pass that. Your faith bases
+its argument on the interpretation of that text made by the Early
+Church, and the Christian Fathers interpreted it in just about two dozen
+different ways."
+
+"So?" said von Klausen: he would humour this lunatic.
+
+"In the first place, at the beginning of the Christian Era marriage in
+Rome was a private partnership that the parties could dissolve by mutual
+consent, or by one notifying the other, as in any other partnership;
+that was part of Roman law, and for centuries neither the Church nor its
+Fathers disputed that law. In all the history of the first phase of
+Christianity in Rome you can't find one time when the whole Church
+accepted the idea that marriage was indissoluble. Once or twice the
+Church tried to get the law to require the Church's sanction before
+decree of divorce would be legally valid, but that was not a denial of
+divorce; it was a recognition and an endeavour to capture the control
+and exploitation of divorces."
+
+"That matters nothing," said von Klausen. "These things were determined
+otherwise. With all my heart I wish not, but they were."
+
+"How? The Church began by having nothing to do with marriages. Weddings
+were not held in the churches and so of course marriage was not
+considered a sacrament. I can give you chapter and verse for everything
+I say. About the only early council that tried to interfere with the law
+was the Council of 416, or some time near that. It tried to make Rome
+abolish divorce, but no emperor listened to it till early in the ninth
+century--Charlemagne, and he practised divorce himself. Only a little
+earlier--I think it was in 870--the Church officially allowed
+dissolution of marriage. In the Middle Ages the episcopal courts allowed
+divorce and were supported by the popes."
+
+"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage
+indissoluble?"
+
+"I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the
+Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble, _anathema sit_. The
+Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the
+Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He
+shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do,"
+he said.
+
+"You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said.
+
+"I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed
+divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom
+tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so
+afraid of women that he--he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce
+for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was
+careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming."
+
+"St. Augustine is the authority in this matter."
+
+"And no one other person ever said so many contradictory things about
+it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs
+without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't
+condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery;
+in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in
+the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to
+bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take
+their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake."
+
+Stainton paused to relight his cigar.
+
+"But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage."
+
+"Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the
+other."
+
+Von Klausen shrugged.
+
+"Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after
+the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow
+him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in
+everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly
+blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her
+husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced
+person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was
+weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate
+the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation.
+Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more
+than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine
+himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it."
+
+The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual
+interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only
+intellectual.
+
+"It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted;
+"it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a
+sacrament."
+
+"Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an
+act of the flesh?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then how can what is done by the flesh be a sacrament?"
+
+"I do not know. I know that it is. The Church, whether early or late,
+has spoken and it has said that marriage is a sacrament indissoluble
+save by the death of the husband or the wife."
+
+Stainton put down his cigar.
+
+"Captain," he said, "you are in earnest, aren't you?"
+
+The Austrian flushed, but did not flinch.
+
+"I am," said he.
+
+"You love her?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Truly?"
+
+"With heart and soul, both."
+
+"And there is no changing your faith?"
+
+"No way."
+
+"There isn't any short-cut, any quick trail over the mountain, any
+bridle-path? A fellow cannot get an Indulgence--nothing of that sort?"
+
+"I wish--I wish deeply that one might; but--no."
+
+"No," said Jim with a little sigh, "I suppose not nowadays. I looked
+that up, too. Public opinion is pretty strong, and as wrong as usual."
+He seemed to shake the subject from him. "And," he ended, "now that I
+have bored you with my cheap pedantry, I remember that I have been a bad
+host: I have not asked you your errand."
+
+What change was coming over the madman now?
+
+"My errand?" asked von Klausen.
+
+"Exactly. You come here at about 9 A.M., and I take up your valuable
+time with a discussion of ecclesiastical polity. What was it that you
+wanted to see me about?"
+
+What the Austrian had wanted he had long since learned. He had no sooner
+left the villa on the night previous than he began to doubt whether his
+supposition that Stainton was unsuspicious was quite so well founded as
+he had at first imagined. He recalled a certain constraint in the
+husband's deportment, and then he imagined other tokens that had not
+been displayed. In the end, he decided to return to Muriel's home at the
+earliest possible moment, discover whether there were any real danger
+and, if there was, face its consequences. Now, however he learned that
+Muriel had made some sort of confession to Stainton and that Stainton
+had received that confession in a manner inexplicable to von Klausen.
+Confronted with Jim's abrupt question, he did not know what to say, and
+so he found himself saying:
+
+"I should like to see Mrs. Stainton."
+
+Stainton whistled.
+
+"I wish you could," he answered. "Indeed, indeed, I wish you could, my
+boy; but I am sorry to say that it is out of the question."
+
+"You forbid it?" Von Klausen wished that these confounded Americans
+could be brought to see the simplicity of settling complex difficulties
+by the code of honour.
+
+"I didn't say that I forbade it; I said it was out of the question. I
+meant that it was out of the question."
+
+The Austrian bent forward, hot anger in his eyes.
+
+"Do you dare to deprive her of her liberty?" he asked.
+
+"On the contrary, my dear sir, she has taken her liberty. She has gone
+away."
+
+The thing seemed incredible to von Klausen:
+
+"Away from Marseilles?"
+
+Stainton nodded.
+
+"That's it," he agreed.
+
+There shot through von Klausen's mind the thought that this lunatic had
+killed her. If so, he would surely kill the lunatic or be killed in the
+attempt.
+
+"I don't believe it," he said. "I believe that you are----"
+
+"Captain von Klausen, I have learned all that I want to know about your
+religious faith, and I am not in the slightest degree interested in the
+question of your other beliefs. I say to you that my wife has gone away,
+and I am afraid that, whether you like it or not, you are obliged, for
+the present, to accept my word."
+
+"I will not accept your word!"
+
+"Pardon me, but I don't see what else you can very well do. Of course,
+you might watch the house, but the Corniche gets very hot by midday."
+
+"You joke. You can joke about such a thing!"
+
+"I have never been so serious as I am now."
+
+Stainton emphasised his words with a gesture of his left hand, in which
+he held the now crumpled letter.
+
+"That letter!" said von Klausen with sudden inspiration. "It is from
+her!"
+
+"It is."
+
+"Ah, you have intercepted a letter from her to me!"
+
+"I am not in the habit of reading my wife's personal letters to other
+people--when she writes any. This note is addressed to me, and it is
+this note that tells me of her departure."
+
+"It tells you where she is going?"
+
+"It tells me that and more. It tells me that she is sorry for a wound
+she thinks she has inflicted on my feelings, and she proposed to look
+for rest in a certain secluded place."
+
+The Austrian's blue eyes brightened.
+
+"A secluded place?" he repeated, excitedly.
+
+"Exactly; but I shall not tell you its name. I shall keep that to myself
+until I have had another interview with my wife."
+
+The Captain looked closely at Stainton.
+
+"You mean to follow and chastise her?" he asked.
+
+"There," said Stainton, quietly, "I think we reach a point where the
+matter becomes entirely my own affair."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+THE MAN AND HIS GOD
+
+
+If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very
+small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:
+
+"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus
+(5 fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) Gémenos to the (4 hrs.)
+Hôtellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the
+(5½ M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad
+road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the Hôtellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on
+the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, 3/4 hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of
+the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees--The Ste.
+Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen
+retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is
+still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the
+mountains among which it lies."
+
+So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or
+else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists
+spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which
+hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen's last
+residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant
+had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the
+earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it
+might quite as well be across the celestial border.
+
+Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had
+written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking
+reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.
+
+The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died
+away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to
+have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the
+difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning
+herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her
+because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy
+which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.
+
+She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but
+she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with
+his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before
+recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least
+won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before,
+assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised
+herself to him in that long ago and far away New York--how tall and
+strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master,
+of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed
+her to his breast--how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure
+that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed
+her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of
+such short life?
+
+In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand
+little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point
+its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to
+him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in
+character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her
+anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement,
+as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of
+any physical contact with him made her shiver.
+
+Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She
+was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a
+sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it
+could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as
+his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral
+rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?
+
+Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her primal impulses
+she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage
+trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding,
+wanted to hide and suffer alone.
+
+She had some money in her purse--a thousand francs. She wrote the note
+to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that
+she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes
+and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram
+to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.
+
+It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind
+a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas,
+they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged
+mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became
+sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only
+thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes,
+looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath
+her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the
+gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view,
+only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to
+gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer
+precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed
+to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that showed
+even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they
+rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide
+plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came,
+among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hôtellerie that had for many
+years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of
+its builders.
+
+They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid
+sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell
+of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church
+inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.
+
+A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon
+her knees and prayed.
+
+She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after
+her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.
+
+She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a
+gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill
+became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn
+path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant
+boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since
+they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags
+above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached
+at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of
+smooth rock that leaned far forward from the clouds as if it were about
+to fall.
+
+Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting
+steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of
+the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted
+natural balcony, was the grotto.
+
+Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were
+open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of
+the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the
+cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an
+irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the
+low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primæval forest,
+to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered
+von Klausen's words:
+
+"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the
+snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant
+sheep-bells, and the memory----"
+
+She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.
+
+He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see
+that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she
+noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.
+
+"You followed?"
+
+He nodded briefly.
+
+"Why did you follow me?" she asked.
+
+It was fully a minute before he regained his breath; but when he spoke
+he spoke calmly and gently.
+
+"I came," he said, "to say some things that I should have said last
+night."
+
+Muriel braced herself against the parapet.
+
+"Very well," said she.
+
+He understood her.
+
+"I don't mean to scold you, dear," began Stainton.
+
+His eyes regarded her wistfully, and she turned away, glancing first
+over the precipice where, below them, the treetops tossed and then up,
+far up, straight up, to the awful height of sheer cliff overhead where,
+somewhere just beyond her sight, there nestled, she knew, the little
+chapel of St. Pilon.
+
+"Why not?" she asked.
+
+"Wait and you will understand."
+
+She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear.
+She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as
+punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.
+
+"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry
+with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for,
+but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you--I promised to
+love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be
+loved, you deserve it. And yet I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come
+back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with
+you. If you want me to, we can start right away."
+
+But Stainton would not yet hear of that.
+
+"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps
+something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and
+heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor
+little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"
+
+"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"
+
+"I could never do that, Muriel."
+
+"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you--you, my husband--and I
+do--I do----"
+
+The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not
+utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:
+
+"You do love him?"
+
+She bowed her dark head in assent.
+
+"You are very sure?" he asked.
+
+"Very, very sure."
+
+"So that it was not"--he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to
+put the question--"it was not merely passion?"
+
+Muriel looked straight into his eyes.
+
+"It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only
+twice even so much as kissed him."
+
+Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to
+him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been
+baser.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see."
+
+He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them.
+
+"And--von Klausen," he presently pursued--"you will let me ask it, won't
+you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure
+that his love for you is--is of the same sort that yours is for him?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"On the same evidence."
+
+"I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me."
+
+She gave a short cry.
+
+"Is he hurt?" she asked.
+
+"Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I
+didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by
+motor-bus, to learn--what I have learned; and to say--what I am about to
+say."
+
+"You told him where I was?"
+
+"I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving
+a note in which you told me that you were bound for a certain secluded
+spot to be alone."
+
+Muriel clasped her white hands in distress.
+
+"He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me
+of this place--told me only the other day in much those words."
+
+Stainton smiled a little.
+
+"I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should."
+
+"But he will follow!"
+
+"No doubt."
+
+"You--you--why do you speak so?"
+
+"He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably
+come the whole way by motor."
+
+"He will--he will! He will know that you have come----"
+
+"I told him that I meant to."
+
+"And he will think you mean to punish me----"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And--oh, don't you see?--he will come to protect me!"
+
+The husband again put his hand timidly upon her arm.
+
+"My dear," he said, "that is just what I wanted him to do--and what I
+feared he might not do if I told him that I wanted it. The worst thing
+about this whole tragedy is that it is unnecessary, a quite useless
+tragedy. I've thought a great deal since you spoke out plainly to me,
+and I am beginning to see--even I, who wish not to see it--that you were
+not so far from right; for if man's stupidity hadn't devised for itself
+a wholly crooked and muddled system for the conduct of his life, this
+sort of now common catastrophe simply couldn't happen. Listen."
+
+He plucked at her sleeve, and she turned her pale face toward him.
+
+"All my life," he went on, "I've been afraid of two things: old age
+and--something else. Perhaps I've learned better in the last few hours.
+I've tried to learn that only the laws of man are horrible and bad and
+that no natural law can be, if we face it for what it is, either
+repellent or wrong. Before, I tried to be young. I trained myself to be
+young. I denied my youth, believing that I could strengthen and prolong
+it. I decided that youth was a state of mind--that it could be retained
+by an effort of the will. I postponed love with that in mind, and I
+postponed too long. Then, when I never doubted myself, I married you."
+
+He released her arm.
+
+"I married you," he continued; "and so, from sinning against myself, I
+began to sin against another. Much that you said last night was right. I
+have been selfish. I have robbed you of your youth, and I've given you
+nothing in return but what a man might give to spoil a child or to
+flatter a mistress. It wasn't a marriage. I see that now. The white heat
+of passion fused together two pieces of greatly differing metals, but
+when the passion cooled, the welding wouldn't hold: the joint snapped. I
+thought I could hold you. Hold you--as if that could be love which must
+be held! I took a low advantage of your ignorance of life. I came to
+you, who knew nothing, and said: 'I will teach you'--but--I was giving
+you the half-sunshine of the sunset when your just portion was the blaze
+of noon. I was keeping youth from youth."
+
+Her large eyes were tender with tears.
+
+"Do you mean it?" she asked. "Do you really mean--all this?"
+
+"As I never meant anything else in my life. I violated nature and must
+pay the price."
+
+Throughout all time and lands, he now felt, youth calls to youth,
+generation to generation, and not all the laws upon the statute-books of
+all the world can silence it.
+
+"I've thought that you were ignorant," he was saying; "perhaps you were
+wiser than I. You are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling it. I was
+the one that was ignorant. I was the one that was wrong."
+
+Out of sheer generosity, though her brain and heart cried assent to his
+every word, she tried to protest. But the youth in her heart clamoured
+that he was speaking truth.
+
+"And so," he concluded, "now that I am sure that you truly love each
+other, I mean to step aside."
+
+She looked at him blankly.
+
+"Step aside?" she repeated.
+
+"I mean to make what reparation is possible: I must."
+
+Muriel's face quivered.
+
+"So that I--that we----" she started.
+
+"So that you and von Klausen may marry."
+
+"But we can't anyhow! Oh--that's the horror of it! That's why the thing
+can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a
+sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."
+
+Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of
+pain.
+
+"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and
+now----"
+
+"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage----"
+
+"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am
+only wondering----"
+
+His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases
+of the colloquial.
+
+"Look there!" he broke off.
+
+Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the
+tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was
+bounding: fevered, lithe, young.
+
+Muriel clutched the parapet.
+
+"It's Franz!" she said.
+
+"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought
+I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the Hôtellerie. He must
+have left the car there and come right on."
+
+"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what
+shall I do?"
+
+"See him, of course."
+
+"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll
+just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it
+all over again? I'm tired--I'm so tired!"
+
+Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not
+take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward
+translate into a good-bye.
+
+"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around
+to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."
+
+"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life--you've said so
+yourself."
+
+Stainton smiled.
+
+"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more
+appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of
+the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke
+enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this
+cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to
+Marseilles--Try it, Muriel--for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't
+pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never
+say die!"
+
+He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer.
+He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down
+the steps.
+
+She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young
+head and shoulders came above the steps.
+
+"Franz!" she cried.
+
+The Austrian hurried to her.
+
+Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led
+around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from
+his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep
+behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease
+with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the
+mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of
+bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously,
+his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the
+Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most
+men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from
+towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven
+by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of
+finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations: the
+sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was
+the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He
+was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St.
+Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that
+end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the
+death that he had all his life feared.
+
+He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the
+panorama of the Chaîne de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles,
+from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full
+sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue,
+cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The
+summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices
+were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and
+there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or
+the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining
+half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke
+that was blue.
+
+He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single
+room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the
+edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the
+chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it
+and the drop; looked over and then instinctively fell on his knees and
+so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.
+
+He saw below him--far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue
+rock--the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of
+the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the
+parapet, the precipice continue to the primæval forest, the trees of
+which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him.
+Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.
+
+He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open.
+He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father
+after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body
+below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed
+in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman
+thing....
+
+Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped
+down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around
+the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.
+
+He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed
+unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one
+argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried
+to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful
+was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that
+thought his thoughts lost all order. He recalled how happy he had been
+with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised
+that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the
+child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at
+the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to
+lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fortitude. His
+father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to
+live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean
+old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the
+affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was
+right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?
+
+He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that
+he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and
+like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly
+all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell--a foot, over a
+stone.
+
+He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.
+
+Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again
+to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he
+gained the edge, looked over----
+
+One little push would do it; one leap.
+
+His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocks before him until his
+fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in
+his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the
+chapel and to safety.
+
+He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure
+was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined.
+He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not
+die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back
+to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love,
+to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a
+woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine
+that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she,
+unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what
+Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he
+would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If
+passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an
+animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him
+detest each other.
+
+The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They
+must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an
+unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical
+immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a
+secret, a secret of which they might never rid themselves. He,
+unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and
+thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and
+loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that
+he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.
+
+He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain
+might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had
+so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in
+it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pass. He came down
+in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way
+on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.
+
+They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward
+them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von
+Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.
+
+"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly
+ridiculous."
+
+Stainton was thinking:
+
+"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I
+must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."
+
+What he said was:
+
+"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I
+had a little tumble."
+
+They both started forward.
+
+"Are you hurt?" they asked, and they asked it together.
+
+"No--no; I'm all right. Quite all right." He looked at Muriel. "You
+can't fix it up?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+He looked at von Klausen.
+
+"You"--he wet his lips with his thick tongue--"you won't change your
+prejudices?"
+
+The Austrian flushed.
+
+"I cannot change my religion," said he.
+
+Stainton clumsily drew his watch from his pocket.
+
+"Then," said Stainton, "you and I must be hurrying, Muriel. I'm sorry,
+Captain; but the bus leaves the Hôtellerie in half an hour, and we've
+got to hurry to catch it. Good-bye. Muriel, come on."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+The CROWN NOVELS
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+HER SOUL AND HER BODY, by Louise Closser Hale
+
+The struggle between the spirit and the flesh of a young girl early in
+life compelled to make her own way. Exposed to the temptations of life
+in a big city, the contest between her better and lower natures is
+described with psychological analysis and tender sympathy. Absorbingly
+interesting.
+
+
+HELL'S PLAYGROUND, by Ida Vera Simonton
+
+This book deals with primal conditions in a land where "there ain't no
+ten commandments"; where savagery, naked and unashamed, is not confined
+to the blacks. It is a record of the life in the African tropics and it
+is a powerful and fascinating story of a scene that has rarely been
+depicted in fiction.
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF No. 47, by J. Storer Clouston
+
+This is a most ingenious detective story--a thriller in every sense of
+the word. The reader is led cleverly on until he is at a loss to know
+what to expect, and, completely baffled, is unable to lay the book down
+until he has finished the story and satisfied his perplexity.
+
+
+THE SENTENCE OF SILENCE, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE," ETC.
+
+By "The Sentence of Silence" is meant that sentence of reticence
+pronounced upon the subject of sex. That which means the continuance of
+the human race is the one thing of which no one is permitted to speak.
+In this book the subject is dealt with frankly.
+
+
+THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE."
+
+The inexpressible conditions of human bondage of many young girls and
+women in our cities demand fearless and uncompromising warfare. The
+terrible peril that lingers just around the corner from every American
+home must be stamped out with relentless purpose.
+
+
+TO-MORROW, by Victoria Cross
+
+Author of "Life's Shop Window," etc.
+
+Critics agree that this is Victoria Cross' greatest novel. Those who
+have read "Life's Shop Window," "Five Nights," "Anna Lombard," and
+similar books by this author will ask no further recommendation.
+"To-morrow" is a real novel--not a collection of short stories.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+TO-DAY, by George H. Broadhurst and Abraham S. Schomer
+
+If you want real human interest, real heart throbs, be sure to read
+"To-Day."
+
+If you loved your wife and she committed the greatest wrong, would you
+forgive her?
+
+Get your answer in the sensational novel hit of the year.
+
+
+AT BAY, by Page Philips
+
+Who was the culprit?
+
+The police accused a prominent society girl, and Aline Graham herself
+thought she was guilty. This remarkable detective story unravels the
+mystery in a series of thrilling scenes.
+
+
+THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, by Owen Davis
+
+Sometimes a respectable father revolts from the bondage imposed upon him
+by an extravagant wife and family.
+
+Charles Nelson needed affection. Lacking it at home, he sought it
+elsewhere, thereby stumbling into a most amazing entanglement.
+
+
+THE SECRET OF THE NIGHT, by Gaston Leroux
+
+Rouletabille has returned! The hero of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room!"
+He appears again in the most successful mystery story of the year.
+
+
+THE APPLE OF DISCORD, by Henry C. Rowland
+
+Calvert Lanier, and his floating studio, obtrudes himself upon an
+exclusive summer colony and succeeds in kissing the three most exclusive
+and fairest members of the colony, and later, gets all at sea, in more
+senses than one, with two of them.
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+In the skillful hands of the author this novel runs admirably and
+convincingly true to life; it reveals a depth of insight into human
+nature, a grasp of the real forces of life.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+SIMPLY WOMEN, by Marcel Prévost
+
+"Marcel Prévost, of whom a critic remarked that his forte was the
+analysis of the souls and bodies of a type half virgin and half
+courtesan, is now available in a volume of selections admirably
+translated by R. I. Brandon-Vauvillez."--_San Francisco Chronicle._
+
+
+GUARDIAN ANGELS, by Marcel Prévost
+
+"'Guardian Angels' is elegance and irony--and only for those youths who
+are dedicated to sex hygiene and eugenic lore."--_New York Times._
+
+A true picture of Parisian life with all its glitter and fascination.
+
+
+WHOSO FINDETH A WIFE, by J. Wesley Putnam
+
+Being an answer to Hall Caine's "The Woman Thou Gavest Me"
+
+Elizabeth Ferris marries without love. How she comes to a broader
+conception of life and to love her husband in time to prevent a tragedy
+is told in this story.
+
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF A NICE YOUNG MAN, by Aix. Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
+Up-to-Date
+
+A handsome young man, employed as a lady's private secretary, is bound
+to meet with interesting adventures.
+
+
+HER REASON, Anonymous
+
+A frank exposure of Modern Marriage. "Her Reason" shows the deplorable
+results of the process at work to-day among the rich, whose daughters
+are annually offered for sale in the markets of the world.
+
+
+LIFE OF MY HEART, by Victoria Cross
+
+How Love revenges herself on those who disregard her plainest promptings
+is the theme of this novel, full of humor, pathos, and fidelity to the
+facts of life.
+
+
+THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION, by Victoria Cross
+
+The self-sacrifice of woman in love. The heroine gives herself to a man
+for his own sake. He is her hero, her god, and she declines to marry him
+until satisfied that he cannot live without her.
+
+
+THE LAW OF LIFE, by Carl Werner
+
+Helen Willoughby is beautiful and attractive. Among her lovers there are
+two, both strong, both determined to win her, who presently enter into a
+bitter rivalry for her hand.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE LIFE SENTENCE, by Victoria Cross
+
+A beautifully written story, full of life, nature, passion, and pathos.
+A splendid vitality glows throughout this novel, whose characters are
+depicted with graphic intensity. "The Life Sentence" proclaims anew the
+author's power of insight into human nature.
+
+
+THE LURE OF THE FLAME, by Mark Danger
+
+"The book carries a lesson for women that all should learn.
+
+"It is the experience of one who abandoned the path of virtue.
+The downward path, at first attractive, was swift and fatal. The
+author has handled a difficult subject with great force and boldness
+and has eliminated much that is defiling without losing its
+effectiveness."--_Boston Globe._
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF FOLLY, by Violet Craig
+
+Throbbing with human emotion, this book is the record of one woman's
+mistake. The principal scenes are laid in present day New York, and no
+more powerful commentary on life in our big centers has been written in
+a long time.
+
+
+A WORLD OF WOMEN, by J. D. Beresford
+
+Romantic and dramatic are the situations in this novel. The book is like
+a dream-garden peopled with women of moving humanity who find themselves
+in a situation never before conceived. As a result, their impulses and
+emotions find vent in entirely original ways.
+
+
+THE WHIP, by Richard Parker
+
+Novelised from Cecil Raleigh's great Drury Lane melodrama of the same
+name.
+
+BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTURES PROM THE PLAY
+
+This big love story of English sporting society is crammed full of
+dramatic incidents. "The Whip" strikes an answering chord of sympathy
+and interest in every reader. England and America have voted it the big
+hit of the decade.
+
+
+ROMANCE, by Acton Davies
+
+The World's Greatest Love Story
+
+Based on Edward Sheldon's Play Fully Illustrated
+
+Filled to overflowing with the emotional glamor of love, "Romance" is
+the romance of a famous grand opera singer and a young clergyman.
+Despite their different callings they are drawn together by a profound
+and sincere love. In the hour of trial the woman rises to sublime
+heights of self-denial.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE DANGEROUS AGE, by Karin Michaelis
+
+Here is a woman's soul laid bare with absolute frankness. Europe went
+mad about the book, which has been translated into twelve languages. It
+betrays the freemasonry of womanhood.
+
+
+MY ACTOR HUSBAND, Anonymous
+
+The reader will be startled by the amazing truths set forth and the
+completeness of their revelations. Life behind the scenes is stripped
+bare of all its glamor. Young women whom the stage attracts should read
+this story. There is a ringing damnation in it.
+
+
+MRS. DRUMMOND'S VOCATION, by Mark Ryce
+
+Lily Drummond is an unmoral (not immoral) heroine. She was not a bad
+girl at heart; but when chance opened up for her the view of a life she
+had never known or dreamed of, her absence of moral responsibility did
+the rest.
+
+
+DOWNWARD: "A Slice of Life," by Maud Churton Braby
+
+AUTHOR OF "MODERN MARRIAGE AND HOW TO BEAR IT."
+
+"'Downward' belongs to that great modern school of fiction built upon
+woman's downfall. * * * I cordially commend this bit of fiction to the
+thousands of young women who are yearning to see what they call
+life."--_James L. Ford in the N. Y. Herald._
+
+
+TWO APACHES OF PARIS, by Alice and Claude Askew
+
+AUTHORS OF "THE SHULAMITE," "THE ROD OF JUSTICE," ETC.
+
+All primal struggles originate with the daughters of Eve.
+
+This story of Paris and London tells of the wild, fierce life of the
+flesh, of a woman with the beauty of consummate vice to whom a man gave
+himself, body and soul.
+
+
+THE VISITS OF ELIZABETH, by Elinor Glyn
+
+One of Mrs. Glyn's biggest successes. Elizabeth is a charming young
+woman who is always saying and doing droll and daring things, both
+shocking and amusing.
+
+
+BEYOND THE ROCKS, by Elinor Glyn
+
+"One of Mrs. Glyn's highly sensational and somewhat erotic
+novels."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+The scenes are laid in Paris and London; and a country-house party also
+figures, affording the author some daring situations, which she has
+handled deftly.
+
+
+THE REFLECTIONS OF AMBROSINE, by Elinor Glyn
+
+The story of the awakening of a young girl, whose maidenly emotions are
+set forth as Elinor Glyn alone knows how.
+
+"Gratitude and power and self-control! * * * in nature I find there is a
+stronger force than all these things, and that is the touch of the one
+we love."--Ambrosine.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE VICISSITUDES OF EVANGELINE, by Elinor Glyn
+
+"One of Mrs. Glyn's most pungent tales of feminine idiosyncracy and
+caprice."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+Evangeline is a delightful heroine with glorious red hair and amazing
+eyes that looked a thousand unsaid challenges.
+
+
+DAYBREAK: a Prologue to "Three Weeks"
+
+"Daybreak" is a prologue to "Three Weeks" and forms the first of the
+series, although published last. It is a highly interesting account of a
+love episode that took place during the youth of the famous Queen of
+"Three Weeks."
+
+A story of the Balkans, this is one of the timely novels of the year.
+
+
+ONE DAY: a Sequel to "Three Weeks"
+
+"There is a note of sincerity in this book that is lacking in the
+first."--_Boston Globe._
+
+"One Day" is the sequel you have been waiting for since reading "Three
+Weeks," and is a story which points a moral, a clear, well-written
+exposition of the doctrine, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
+
+
+HIGH NOON: a New Sequel to "Three Weeks"
+
+A Modern Romeo and Juliet
+
+A powerful, stirring love-story of twenty years after. Abounding in
+beautiful descriptions and delicate pathos, this charming love idyl will
+instantly appeal to the million and a quarter people who have read and
+enjoyed "Three Weeks."
+
+
+THE DIARY OF MY HONEYMOON
+
+A woman who sets out to unburden her soul upon intimate things is bound
+to touch upon happenings which are seldom the subject of writing at all;
+but whatever may be said of the views of the anonymous author, the
+"Diary" is a work of throbbing and intense humanity, the moral of which
+is sound throughout and plain to see.
+
+
+THE INDISCRETION OF LADY USHER: a Sequel to "The Diary of My Honeymoon"
+
+"Another purpose novel dealing with the question of marriage and dealing
+very plainly,--one of the most interesting among the many books on these
+lines which are at present attracting so much attention."--_Cleveland
+Town Topics._
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE SPIDER'S WEB, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+A splendid story, in every way equal to the "House of Bondage," written
+in the author's best manner.
+
+
+LITTLE LOST SISTER, by Virginia Brooks
+
+Gripping, vital, true, intense, it is a page from the life of a
+beautiful girl.
+
+
+SPARROWS, by Horace W. C. Newte
+
+The story of an unprotected girl, of which the reader will not skip a
+single page.
+
+
+THE OTHER MAN'S WIFE, by Frank Richardson
+
+The duel of sex is here, and it is described without bias, as fearlessly
+stated as it is exquisitely conceived.
+
+
+SALLY BISHOP, by E. Temple Thurston
+
+There have been few stories so sweet, so moving, so tender, so
+convincing as this life-record of a London girl.
+
+
+THE PRICE, by Gertie de S. Wentworth-James
+
+Dealing with woman's life under modern conditions, the author writes of
+the heights and the depths of existence.
+
+
+DAUGHTERS OF THE RICH, by Edgar Saltus
+
+A story of great strength and almost photographic intensity, wise,
+witty, yet touchingly pathetic.
+
+
+HAGAR REVELLY, by Daniel Carson Goodman
+
+A truthful presentation of the real reasons why some girls go wrong and
+others do not.
+
+
+UNCLOTHED, by Daniel Carson Goodman
+
+A novel for the woman of thirty, this book is an honest attempt to be
+honest.
+
+
+LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE, by Upton Sinclair
+
+A novel which deals with a husband and a wife, which for efficiency and
+truth is unexcelled.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+SIX WOMEN, by Victoria Cross
+
+A half-dozen of the most vivid love stories that ever lit up the dusk of
+a tired civilization.
+
+
+LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW, by Victoria Cross
+
+It tears the garments of conventionality from woman, presenting her as
+she must appear to the divine eye.
+
+
+PAULA, by Victoria Cross
+
+Here the author's fervid energy combines with a sense of humor to make a
+book both vital and attractive.
+
+
+THE RELIGION OF EVELYN HASTINGS, by Victoria Cross
+
+A study of passion, but it is passion that ennobles and brings
+happiness.
+
+
+SIX CHAPTERS OF A MAN'S LIFE, by Victoria Cross
+
+There is no mistaking the earnestness of the morality which it enforces.
+
+
+A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE, by Victoria Cross
+
+Here the author presents a stirring story of love, intrigue and
+adventure, woven about a proud, independent, reckless heroine.
+
+
+THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T, by Victoria Cross
+
+A striking, well-told story, fascinating in its hold on the reader.
+
+
+ANNA LOMBARD, by Victoria Cross
+
+A bold, brilliant, defiant presentation of the relations of men and
+women.
+
+
+THE ETERNAL FIRES, by Victoria Cross
+
+Given the soul of a maiden waiting for love, the plot as it unfolds
+shows how the heroine finds one worthy of her.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+Italic typeface in the original book is indicated with _underscores_.
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+The following spelling variants have been retained as printed:
+
+  "Lyon" and "Lyons"
+
+  "nearby" and "near-by"
+
+  "treetops" and "tree-tops"
+
+  "sha'n't" and "shan't"
+
+On page 333, an asterisk * appears; however, there is no corresponding
+note in this book.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNNING SANDS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38753-8.txt or 38753-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/7/5/38753/
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Kerry Tani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/38753-8.zip b/38753-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d64b0a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38753-8.zip
diff --git a/38753-h.zip b/38753-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c998cb7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38753-h.zip
diff --git a/38753-h/38753-h.htm b/38753-h/38753-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..566e826
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38753-h/38753-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,11894 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+    }
+
+h1,h2,h3,h4 {
+    text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+    clear: both;
+    }
+
+p {
+    margin-top: .75em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: .75em;
+    }
+
+hr {
+    width: 75%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    clear: both;
+    }
+
+hr.medium {
+    width: 50%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    clear: both;
+    }
+
+
+table {
+    margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    }
+
+.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+    /* visibility: hidden; */
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+    color: #808080;
+    }
+
+
+.center {
+    text-align: center;
+    }
+
+.right {
+    text-align: right;
+  }
+
+.smcap {
+    font-variant: small-caps;
+    }
+
+.blurb {
+    margin-left: 3em;
+    margin-right: 3em;
+    }
+
+#notes  {
+    background-color: #eeeeee;
+    padding: 1em;
+    }
+
+
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+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: Running Sands
+
+Author: Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+Release Date: February 3, 2012 [EBook #38753]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNNING SANDS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Kerry Tani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>RUNNING SANDS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>RUNNING SANDS</h1>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN</h3>
+
+<p class="center"><small>AUTHOR OF</small></p>
+
+<p class="center">"The House of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," etc.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><small>NEW YORK</small><br />
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1918, by</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h4>To<br />
+BRUNER KAUFFMAN<br />
+Brother and Friend</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and
+in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this
+Woman in holy Matrimony....</p>
+
+<p>"It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in
+the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name....</p>
+
+<p>"It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication;
+that such persons as have not the gift of continence might marry, and
+keep themselves undefiled....</p>
+
+<p>"It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one
+ought to have of the other....</p>
+
+<p>"Into which holy estate these two persons come now to be joined...."</p>
+
+<p class="right">&mdash;The Book of Common Prayer.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="left" colspan='2'><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td align="left"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I</td><td align="left">"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I</td><td align="left">I YOUNG BLOOD</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III</td><td align="left">EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV</td><td align="left">THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V</td><td align="left">ONE ROAD TO LOVE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI</td><td align="left">A MAID PERPLEXED</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII</td><td align="left">FIRE AND TOW</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_106">106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII</td><td align="left">"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX</td><td align="left">ANOTHER ROAD</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_133">133</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X</td><td align="left">"UNWILLING WAR"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XI</td><td align="left">DR. BOUSSINGAULT</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XII</td><td align="left">MONTMARTRE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIII</td><td align="left">WORMWOOD</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIV</td><td align="left">RUNAWAYS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XV</td><td align="left">"NOT AT HOME"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_247">247</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVI</td><td align="left">IN THE BOIS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVII</td><td align="left">THE CALL OF YOUTH</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVIII</td><td align="left">OUR LADY OF PROTECTION</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIX</td><td align="left">HUSBAND AND WIFE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XX</td><td align="left">HUSBAND AND LOVER</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_318">318</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XXI</td><td align="left">THE MAN AND HIS GOD</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>RUNNING SANDS</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Stainton decided that he would go to the Metropolitan Opera House that
+night to hear <i>Madama Butterfly</i>. He did not care for operatic music,
+but he hoped to learn. He did not expect to meet anyone he knew, but he
+trusted that he might come to know someone he met. There was, at any
+rate, no spot in the Great American Desert, where he had found his
+fortune, quite so lonely as this crowded lobby of the Astor, the hotel
+at which he was now stopping&mdash;so he decided upon the Metropolitan and
+<i>Madama Butterfly</i>.</p>
+
+<p>A page was passing, uttering shrill demands for a man whose name seemed
+to be "Mr. Kerrghrrr." Stainton laid a large, but hesitating, hand upon
+the boy's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Where can I buy a ticket for to-night's opera?" he enquired.</p>
+
+<p>The page ceased his vocal rumble and looked up with wounded reproof at
+the tall cause of this interruption.</p>
+
+<p>"News-stand," he said, and immediately escaped to resume the summons of
+"Mr. Kerghrrr."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton followed the direction that the page's eyes had indicated. Over
+the booth where newspapers might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> be purchased for twice the price that
+he would have to pay for them in the street, fifteen yards away, he saw
+a sign announcing the fact that opera and theatre tickets were here for
+sale. He approached, somewhat awkwardly, and, over a protruding ledge of
+red and blue covered magazines on which were portrayed the pink and
+white prettiness of impossibly insipid girls, confronted a suave clerk,
+who appeared tremendously knowing.</p>
+
+<p>"You have tickets for the opera?" asked Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Yessir."</p>
+
+<p>"For the Metropolitan Opera House?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yessir. How many?"</p>
+
+<p>"There are&mdash;&mdash;It's <i>Madama Butterfly</i> to-night, I think the paper said?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yessir. What part of the house do you want?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Stainton. "That's a good show, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>The clerk was too well fitted for his business to smile at such a query.
+He had, besides, perception enough to discern something beyond the
+humorous in this broad-shouldered, grave man of anywhere from forty to
+fifty, who was evidently so strong in physique and yet so clearly
+helpless in the commonplaces of city-life.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the best production of that opera for the whole season," the clerk
+made answer. "Caruso sings <i>Pinkerton</i> and&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So I understand," said Stainton, quickly.</p>
+
+<p>The clerk nimbly shifted the quality of his information.</p>
+
+<p>"And anyhow," he went urbanely on, "the Metropolitan audience is always
+a show in itself, you know. Everybody that is anybody is there; for a
+steady thing it beats the Horseshow in Madison Square Garden. You'll be
+wanting seats in the orchestra, of course?"</p>
+
+<p>"One," corrected Stainton. "Shall I?" he added.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes. That is, if you're a stranger in New York. I&mdash;&mdash;Pardon me,
+sir, but I suppose you are a stranger?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very much of a stranger."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I can recommend this seat, sir." The clerk disappeared behind a
+hanging vine of magazines more glorious than the slopes of the Côte d'Or
+in autumn, and immediately reappeared with a ticket projecting from a
+narrow envelope. "Fifth row," he said. "Second from the aisle. Not on
+the side with the brasses, either. You can see all the boxes from it."</p>
+
+<p>Jim Stainton's heavy, iron-grey eyebrows came together in a puzzled
+meeting. Under them, however, his iron-grey eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he said; "but I want to see the stage, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," the clerk reassured him, "of course you'll see the stage
+perfectly."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton accepted the ticket.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Very well," he said. "Take it out of that."</p>
+
+<p>For many a hard year he had been used, by compulsion of desperate
+circumstance, to counting his two-bit pieces, and now, precisely because
+all that had passed, he enjoyed sharply the luxury of counting nothing,
+not even the double-eagles. He laid a yellow-backed bill on the glass
+counter and received, without regarding it, the change that the now
+thoroughly deferential clerk deftly returned to him. Doubtless he was
+paying a heavy commission to the hotel's ticket-agent; perhaps he was
+obtaining less change than, under the terms of that commission, he was
+entitled to; but certainly about none of these things did he care. Toil
+had at last granted him success, toil and good luck; and success had
+immediately given him the right to emancipation from financial trifling.
+There are two times in a man's life when no man counts its cost: the
+time of his serious wooing and that of his ultimate illness. Stainton
+had come to New York with a twofold purpose; he had come to bury the man
+that he had been, and he had come to woo.</p>
+
+<p>He went to his elaborate rooms to dress. For the last decade and more,
+he had not worn evening-clothes a score of times, and he now donned the
+black suit, fresh from a Fifth Avenue tailor's shop, with a care that
+was in part the result of this scant experience and in part the
+consequence of a fear of just how ridiculous the new outfit would make
+him seem. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> endangered the shirt when he came to fasten it; he was
+sure that he had unnecessarily wrinkled the white waistcoat, and the tie
+occupied his bungling fingers for a full five minutes.</p>
+
+<p>His apprehensions, nevertheless, were unjustified. Something, when the
+toilet was completed, rather like a man of fashion appeared to have been
+made by the man of the needle out of the man of the pick: if the miner
+had not wholly vanished, at least the familiar of Broadway had joined
+him. Stainton, critically surveying himself in the pier-glass and
+secretly criticising his attitude of criticism, saw nothing that, to his
+unaccustomed and therefore exacting eye, presented opportunity for
+objection. The figure was heavier, more stalwart than, as he had been
+told, was for that season the mode, but the mode, that season, exacted a
+slimness that indicated the weakling. The clothes themselves were, on
+the other hand, perfection and to the point of perfection they fitted.
+The face&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Jim Stainton, with suspended breath, drew the hanging electric-lamp
+nearer, leaned forward and studied the reflection of that face closely.</p>
+
+<p>He saw a large, well-proportioned head, the head of a man serious,
+perhaps, but admirably poised. The black hair was only sparsely
+sprinkled with gray. The deep line between the thick brows might be the
+furrow of concentration rather than the mark of years. The rugged
+features&mdash;earnest eyes of steel, strong nose,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> compressed lips and
+square, clean-shaven chin&mdash;were all features that, whatever the life
+they had faced, betokened stamina from the beginning. Hot suns had
+burnished his cheeks, but a hard career had entailed those abstinences
+which are among the surest warders of youth. Experience had
+strengthened, but time had been kind.</p>
+
+<p>"I am still young," he thought. "I am fifty, but I don't look forty, and
+I have the physique of twenty-five."</p>
+
+<p>He walked to the window and flung it wide.</p>
+
+<p>Below him swirled the yellow evening life of the third greatest among
+the world's great thoroughfares. Looking down from the height of his
+hotel was to Stainton like looking down upon a riverside furnace through
+its roof. Molten streams, swelling from the darker channels to the
+north, flowed along their appointed alleyways and broke and divided,
+hissing and spluttering against the pier that was the Times Building.
+And as the steam rises from the red waste that runs from the furnace
+into the river, there now rose to Stainton's desert-starved ears the
+clanging of cable-cars, the rattle of carriages, the tooting of the
+purring motors&mdash;all the humming chorus of the night-wakeful thing that
+men call New York.</p>
+
+<p>He stretched his arms apart to it. He wanted to enfold it, to inhale its
+breath, to mix with it and become lost in it. He had come back. After
+all these years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> he had come back, and he had come back a victor
+unscarred.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm still young," he repeated, raising his head and spreading his
+nostrils to the damp air of the city-evening. And "Still young!" he
+continued to whisper on his way down in the elevator and through the
+crowded dining-room to his seat at a glittering table.</p>
+
+<p>A ready waiter detached himself from a group of his fellows and
+dexterously steered a rapid course, between seated diners and laden
+serving-tables, to Stainton's broad shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was studying, with less difficulty than he had anticipated, the
+menu.</p>
+
+<p>"Soup, sir?" suggested the waiter.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; consommé," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"And a little fish, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you; no fish."</p>
+
+<p>"Those bass are very nice, sir. I can recommend them."</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you, I think not. I want a steak, sirloin."</p>
+
+<p>"Rare, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"Medium."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. And shall we say potatoes <i>au gratin</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Boiled potatoes. And French peas."</p>
+
+<p>"A little cauliflower with sauce <i>Hollandaise</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Only the steak, potatoes, and peas."</p>
+
+<p>The waiter raised his brows ever so slightly.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And what salad, sir?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No salad, thank you."</p>
+
+<p>"Er&mdash;and about dessert?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. After the meal you may bring me a demi-tasse."</p>
+
+<p>The waiter suppressed surprise. A New Yorker may dine simply, but that a
+still obvious stranger in New York should dine upon less than five
+courses&mdash;that was beyond his experience.</p>
+
+<p>"What cocktail, sir?" he enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"None," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Very good, sir. Shall I send the wine-card?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton spoke briefly this time, even sharply, and his tone had the
+effect that he desired for it. He ate his dinner undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>A more pleasant disturbance than that of the waiter was, however, in
+store for him. As he left the dining-room and returned to the lobby,
+ready now for the opera, there brushed by him, <i>en route</i> from the
+bar-room, a stout man of about thirty-five, with a round face and a high
+hat perched at the extreme rear of a head almost completely bald.</p>
+
+<p>The two looked at each other.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," said the stranger.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your par&mdash;&mdash;" Stainton began to echo.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not finish, for the stranger, suddenly a stranger no longer,
+was fairly shouting:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Hello, hello, hello! What in the name of all that's&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's lips broke into a delighted smile, which showed square, white
+teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Holt," he said: "George Holt!"</p>
+
+<p>"Alive and well&mdash;thanks to you, old man." Holt seized the proffered hand
+and began to pump it. "And you!" he continued. "Think of it! <i>You!</i> I
+saw about your luck in the papers, and I meant to write. Upon my soul, I
+did. I don't know how it was I didn't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's all right."</p>
+
+<p>"But I was glad. I never was so glad. And you're here&mdash;here in little
+old New York?"</p>
+
+<p>"So it seems."</p>
+
+<p>"For good? Of course it is. Everybody comes here to spend his money."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I hope it's not for harm."</p>
+
+<p>Holt ceased pumping, dropped the hand, put both his hands on Stainton's
+shoulders, and held him at arm's length.</p>
+
+<p>"Great Scott, but it's good to see you again," he said. "Five years,
+isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"All of that."</p>
+
+<p>"And then I was out there in the last of the Wild and Woolly, and we
+were sworn brother-adventurers and all that, and you saved my life&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you did&mdash;saved my life, by the great horn spoon, just as the
+knife-claws of that big grizzly were raised to rip out what passes with
+me for a heart. I'll never forget it as long as I live."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton wished it forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>"How's the world treating you?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"So, so; I mean, badly. In fact, it's not treating me at all; I have to
+pay for myself, and just enough to pay and none to save, at that. But
+you&mdash;you! Oh, you lucky beast, you!" He shook Stainton by the shoulders
+and again studied his smiling face. "Good old Jim!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's smile went somewhat awry.</p>
+
+<p>"Old?" he echoed. "Oh, I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"What? No, of course not." Holt thrust a playful thumb between
+Stainton's ribs. "Young as ever, eh? So am I. Still, you know, time does
+pass. Oh, well, what of it? I certainly am glad to see you."</p>
+
+<p>He hooked his arm into Stainton's. "Come on and have a drink."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, no," said Stainton; "I scarcely ever take anything, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>Holt, unlike the waiter, showed his disapproval.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you scarcely ever did out there." He jerked his round face in
+what he supposed was a westerly direction. "But that's over now. You
+don't have to be careful now. What's the good of being rich if you have
+to be careful?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Still, I am careful," said Stainton, quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"But on this occasion? Surely not on this occasion, Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>The miner laughed freely now.</p>
+
+<p>"You always were a wonder at discovering occasions, George," he said.
+"Your occasions were as frequent as saints' days and other holidays in a
+Mexican peon's calendar."</p>
+
+<p>"And still are, thank the Lord. But to-night&mdash;&mdash;Even you've got to admit
+to-night, Jim. It isn't every day in the year that a man that's saved my
+life turns up in New York with a newly discovered, warranted pure, gold
+mine in his pocket."</p>
+
+<p>This was so clearly true that Stainton capitulated, or at least
+compromised by going to the bar and drinking a thimbleful of white-mint
+while Holt, chattering like a cheerful magpie&mdash;if a magpie can be
+cheerful&mdash;consumed two long glasses of Irish whiskey with a little
+aerated water added.</p>
+
+<p>Holt made endless plans for his friend. He would "put up" Stainton's
+name at his club. He would introduce him to this personage and to that.
+He would&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, by Jove, yes, and the women!" he interrupted himself. "You've got
+to go gently there, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>A bright tint showed on Stainton's cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"I never&mdash;&mdash;" he began.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not <i>them</i>!" said Holt, dismissing the entire half-world with a
+light gesture. "I know you didn't&mdash;the more fool you. But what I mean is
+the&mdash;you know: the all-righters. They'll be setting their caps at you
+worse than any of the other sort. You've got to remember that you're a
+catch."</p>
+
+<p>This was all very pleasant, and Stainton was too honest with himself not
+to admit so much.</p>
+
+<p>"Marriage," he admitted, "isn't beyond my calculations."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. Now, you leave that little matter to me, Jim. I know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I think that, if you don't much mind, I shall leave it to myself. There
+is no hurry, you see."</p>
+
+<p>"Um; yes. I do see. But if there's no hurry, just you wait&mdash;just you
+wait, old man, till you have seen what I can show you. New York is the
+biggest bond-market and marriage-market in the world." He looked at his
+watch. "Hello," he said: "I'll be late. Now, look here: where'll you be
+after the opera? I've got to go there. I hate it, but I have to."</p>
+
+<p>"The opera?" repeated Stainton. "The Metropolitan?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sure."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm going there myself."</p>
+
+<p>"The devil you are. Where are you?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton produced his ticket.</p>
+
+<p>Holt glanced at it and shook his head.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Too close to hear," he said. "But what's the difference? We've all
+heard the confounded thing so often&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I have not," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh? What? But it's <i>Madama Butterfly</i>, you know&mdash;Oh, yes, of course: I
+forgot. Still, what'll interest you, once you get there, will be what
+interests everybody else&mdash;and that's not the stage and not the
+orchestra. Now, look here: I'm with the Newberrys, you know&mdash;the Preston
+Newberrys&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you will, my boy; you will. That's just the point. We'll call a
+taxi and motor there together&mdash;it's just a step to the Metropolitan&mdash;and
+then, after the first act, I'll come round to you and take you over to
+meet 'em. What do you say?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton said what he was expected to say, which was, of course, that he
+would be delighted to meet any friends of Holt, and so it befell that
+the two men went to the opera-house together and parted at the door only
+with the certainty of meeting soon again.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, the miner was still glowing with the thrill of his new life. "I'm
+young!" he repeated to himself as he was shown to his seat. And he felt
+young. He felt that he had never yet lived and that he was now about to
+live; and he thanked Heaven that he had kept himself trained for the
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>He had dined slowly, as befits a man that has earned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> his leisure, and
+his conversation with Holt had not been hurried. Consequently, when he
+reached his place, the first act of <i>Madama Butterfly</i> was already well
+over. With the voice of Apollo and the figure of an elephant, the tenor,
+bursting through the uniform of a naval officer with a corpulence that
+would endanger a battleship, was engaged in that vocal assault upon a
+fortress of heavy orchestration which is the penance of all that have to
+sing the rôle of "Pinkerton." Stainton listened and tried to enjoy. He
+listened until the curtain fell at length upon the beginning of the
+inevitable tragedy, until the lights flashed up about him, and he found
+himself looking straight into the eyes of a young girl in a lower box
+not thirty feet away.</p>
+
+<p>About him swept the broad curve of boxes that has been called "The
+Diamond Horseshoe," filled with wonderful toilettes and beautiful women,
+but Stainton did not see these. In the particular box toward which he
+was looking there were three other people: there was a matronly woman in
+what appeared to be brocade; there was a sleek, weary-eyed, elderly man,
+and there was another man faintly suggested in the background, as the
+lover of the mistress is faintly suggested in Da Vinci's
+masterpiece&mdash;but Stainton was no more conscious of this trio than he was
+of the gowns and women of the broad horseshoe. He saw, or was conscious
+of seeing, only that girl.</p>
+
+<p>And she was leaning far over the rail, at pause<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> where, when their eyes
+met, his intense gaze had arrested her: a young girl, scarcely eighteen
+years old, her delicate, oval face full of the joy of life, aglow with
+the excitement, the novelty of place, people, music. The light was upon
+her&mdash;upon her slim, softly white-clad body trembling at the unguessed
+portal of womanhood just as it trembled also under his gaze. She had
+wonderful hair, which waved without artifice, as blue-black as a
+thunder-cloud in May; she had level brows and eyes large and dark and
+tender. Her lips were damp, the lower one now timidly indrawn. While he
+looked at her, there awoke in Stainton the Neolithic man, the savage and
+poet that sang what he felt and was unashamed to feel and sing: she was
+like a Spring evening in the woods: warm and dusky and clothed in the
+light of stars.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton did not move, yet his heart seemed twisting in his breast. Was
+he mad? Was he alive, sane, awake and in New York of to-day? If so, if
+he were himself, then were the old stories true, and did the dead walk?
+Sitting there, stonily, there floated through his brain a line from a
+well-conceived and ill-executed poem:</p>
+
+<p>"At Paris it was, at the opera there ..."</p>
+
+<p>The girl was the one to break the spell. When Stainton would have ceased
+looking, he could never know. But the girl flushed yet more deeply and
+turned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> away, with a quick movement that was almost a reprimand but not
+enough of a reprimand to be an acknowledgment that she was aware of him.</p>
+
+<p>Jim, his own cheeks burning at the realisation of his insolence, but his
+heart tumultuous for that other reason, himself started. He shifted
+clumsily in his chair and so became conscious of another movement in the
+box.</p>
+
+<p>A man&mdash;the man that had been, at Stainton's first glimpse of the party,
+dimly outlined&mdash;was disentangling himself from the background, was
+bending forward to make vehement signs in Stainton's direction, was
+finally, and with no end of effort on Stainton's part, assuming
+recognisable shape. It was George Holt.</p>
+
+<p>Holt waved his hand again and nodded toward the lobby. Then, as Stainton
+nodded a tardy comprehension, he faded once more into the background of
+the box.</p>
+
+<p>They met a few moments later in the corridor.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you found your friends," said Stainton. At least temporarily, he
+had regained his self-control.</p>
+
+<p>"My who? Oh, the Newberrys? Of course. Come over; you must meet them."</p>
+
+<p>"The Newberrys?" Stainton looked a misapprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I told you, you know. Good old Preston Newberry and his wife."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I thought," urged Stainton, "that I saw a girl&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>that</i>?" asked Holt, recollecting with some difficulty a person of
+such small importance. "That's their little Boston ward."</p>
+
+<p>"What's her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something or other. I forget. Stannard: that's it&mdash;Muriel Stannard.
+She's just out of her&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped and blinked, his narrow eyes directed at Stainton, who had
+lifted to his face a hand that visibly trembled.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the trouble?" asked Holt. "Too used to the desert to stand our
+nifty opera-house air? Don't wonder. Come out and have a drink. Plenty
+of time."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Stainton. He achieved a smile. "I'm all right. Why in the
+world did you think I wasn't? I'm just&mdash;&mdash;She's eighteen, isn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who? Mrs. New&mdash;&mdash;Oh, the girl? Yes, I imagine she is about that. But
+she's an orphan and hasn't a cent and is too young to mix in, anyhow.
+Don't you bother: she won't interfere. Come along, if you won't have a
+drink, and meet the Newberrys. Mrs. Preston is every bit as good as a
+Bronx cocktail, though she wouldn't be seen in the Bronx for a thousand
+of 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton replied with compressed lips.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I should like to meet Miss&mdash;Miss Stannard," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Stannard? The youngster?" Holt broke into a laugh. "Bless my soul!
+Why, she's not even out yet; and you mean to say&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But Stainton's firm fingers had closed so sharply about Holt's arm that,
+while the pain of the unexpected grip shot through him, Holt's laughter
+ended in a gasp.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't joke about this," commanded Stainton. "You remember that we used
+to be friends."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure. Aren't we friends now? What's hit you, Jim? We're friends still,
+I hope. You don't think I'm likely to forget what you once did for me,
+do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then: don't joke about Miss Stannard."</p>
+
+<p>"No offence intended," said the perplexed Holt; "but why in thunder
+shouldn't I joke about her?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's grip loosened, and his eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>"After all," he said, "it must have seemed strange to you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Strange? It looked like the asylum!" said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"And so," Stainton continued, "I dare say that I do owe you an
+explanation." He put out his hand again, but Holt dodged.</p>
+
+<p>"No more of that!" said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," Stainton answered. He laid a hand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> on Holt's shoulder. "Can
+you keep a secret, George?"</p>
+
+<p>The clubman blinked in anticipation.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to me we've had a few together," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said Stainton, "I'll tell you why I was a little sensitive about
+comments on Miss Stannard: I am going to marry her."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>YOUNG BLOOD</h3>
+
+
+<p>Holt's jaw fell.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," he stammered; "but I didn't know you even knew
+her."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never met her," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"What? Oh, quit your jollying."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never met her."</p>
+
+<p>"Then&mdash;well, you <i>don't</i> need a drink, after all."</p>
+
+<p>"After all&mdash;that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall
+explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present
+me all round."</p>
+
+<p>Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Cæsars had been driven
+mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of
+stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He
+recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country
+was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits
+in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of
+these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few
+years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came
+the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West,
+been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt
+recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold
+mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate
+than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day,
+rich. He wondered if&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds
+queer, I know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sounds! Sounds&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll
+explain&mdash;later."</p>
+
+<p>"You can't," said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which
+is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen
+again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Holt has just been telling us of your splendid bravery and how you
+saved his life," said Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>She was a stout, uncertain nonentity, whose chief endeavours in her
+narrow world were to seem as slim as she would like to be and as certain
+of her social<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> position as was proper for a woman of moderate
+antecedents, who had married a membership in Manhattan's three most
+difficult clubs. What, of course, she had been thinking was not at all
+about Stainton's bravery: it was, rather, that Stainton had become quite
+rich quite romantically, and that he was not the rough diamond which
+tradition demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton took all this for granted and, knowing not what to say in
+reply, bowed and said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Glad to know you," was what Newberry said: and he presently added: "The
+cast's in rotten voice to-night. Sit down."</p>
+
+<p>Newberry, the sleek, weary-eyed elderly man, whom Stainton had barely
+noticed in his first survey of the box, was the membership in New York's
+three most difficult clubs. He had inherited money without brains, had
+sought to adjust matters by marrying brains without money, and had been
+intellectually disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>To him in turn Stainton bowed in silence. His eyes were on the girl, and
+the girl's slim back was set resolutely toward him.</p>
+
+<p>There was an awkward pause. Nobody seemed to remember Muriel. At length
+Holt, still in terror, blundered forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Muriel&mdash;&mdash;" he began.</p>
+
+<p>The girl turned. The glory of her warm eyes brushed Stainton's face and
+passed it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I am Miss Stannard," she said. "It is good of you to join us. Do sit
+down, Mr. Stainton."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton sat down. He sat down directly behind her, and at last,
+politely unencouraging though she at first managed to remain, he
+succeeded in gaining some sort of conversational opening.</p>
+
+<p>What did he say there, for the early ten minutes of their talk? He was
+unable at any later date to recall one word of it. Everything, he was
+sure, that was clumsy. As a matter of fact, his own speech was probably
+by no means so uncouth as his torturing fancy declared it, hers by no
+means so brilliant as his memory, which retained no souvenirs, insisted.
+More likely than not, their talk fulfilled the requirements of
+convention. Convention requires the commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody paid any but sporadic attention to the opera. To the left of the
+girl and Stainton, Mrs. Newberry and her husband, a Dido matched to a
+Don Juan, exchanged low monosyllables with each other and darting
+exchanges of talk, like rallies at badminton, with Holt. Sometimes they
+were ill-mannered enough to converse in whispers, near Stainton's
+shoulder, but mostly Mrs. Newberry was laboriously conventional, out of
+a constant fear of being adjudged plebeian, and now and again, to
+Stainton's huge disgust, she would lean to confer a word on her niece
+and her niece's companion.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you care for opera," she said to Stainton in one of these
+sallies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I hope to," replied the miner, guardedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Though of course," pursued Mrs. Newberry, "this is rather an off
+evening. The cast led us to expect so much, but they all seem to be in
+such poor voice."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton made a civil noise.</p>
+
+<p>"Apart from the music," his hostess continued, "I dare say that the
+stage doesn't appeal to you."</p>
+
+<p>"I have had very little chance to know it," said Stainton, "but I am
+fond of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed?" Mrs. Newberry's tone indicated that she was mildly interested
+in meeting a tamed adventurer. "But I should suppose that it would all
+seem so false to you. It must seem false, I should think, to anyone that
+has known so much of&mdash;of Real Life, you know; and dear Mr. Holt has
+given us <i>such</i> descriptions of your romantic career."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's disavowal of this apparent praise of his career was earnest,
+but not convincing.</p>
+
+<p>"My life has seemed dull to me," he said, with a deadly glance at dear
+Mr. Holt, grinning in the background.</p>
+
+<p>Holt tried to change the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"At all events, this is a romantic episode for you, isn't it?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" snapped Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Holt hurried to explain, "all this." He indicated the audience
+with the sweep of a plump hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It is new," granted Stainton.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Holt edged his chair forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it is, and whatever's new's romantic. That's all romance is,
+isn't it, Miss Muriel?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl had been listening to the music, her dark eyes, veiled by their
+long lashes, fixed on nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it?" she enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure it is," said Holt. "Now, Jim, you're in the crowd you read about.
+You ought to get us to point 'em out to you."</p>
+
+<p>"The woman just next," whispered Mrs. Newberry&mdash;"the one in
+forget-me-not blue, draped with chiffon and crystal trimmings&mdash;don't you
+see? The bodice is finished with crystal fringe&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid&mdash;&mdash;" said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>Preston Newberry explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Girl with yellow hair," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"That," Mrs. Newberry went on, "is Dora van Rooz. She was a Huyghens,
+you know."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I don't read the society-columns," Stainton apologised.</p>
+
+<p>"Dora's not confining herself to them," said Newberry. "She and van Rooz
+are calling each other names in the divorce-court now."</p>
+
+<p>"And just beyond," Mrs. Newberry ran on, "in the American beauty satin
+veiled in ninon&mdash;there: her waist is embroidered with beads and rows of
+silver lace; you can't see very well in this light."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Girl with the fine nose," Preston elucidated.</p>
+
+<p>"I see."</p>
+
+<p>"That's Mrs. Billy Merton. You must have heard of her. She divorced Clem
+Davis last month and married Billy the next day."</p>
+
+<p>She rattled on for some time, ceasing her chatter only for brief pauses,
+at intervals unconsciously regulated by her long acquaintance with the
+opera and its finer moments. The strains of the beautiful music seemed
+to Stainton to be a loveliness unworthily draping, on the stage, the
+story of a base man's perfidy; and the pleasant indiscretions of the
+fashionable opera-gowns to be clothing, in the audience, none but women
+that had already stripped their souls in one or other of the scandalous
+rituals imposed by modern law for the dissolution of the most private of
+relationships.</p>
+
+<p>He made but brief answers, and he was unfeignedly relieved when his poor
+responsiveness forced Mrs. Newberry to retreat and left him free again
+with Muriel. He looked frank admiration at her level brows, her dark
+eyes, and her full lips. Here, he assured himself, was innocence: her
+face was her young soul made visible.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, as she pretended, it was his distress at her aunt's garrulity;
+for it must have been evident to her. Perhaps it was the dropped hint of
+his adventurous life; for women are all Desdemonas at heart. Perhaps it
+was only his patent worship of her beauty; since we are all assailable
+through this sort of compliment to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> whatever of our charms we are least
+responsible for. Perhaps it was all or none of these things. In any
+case, as Mrs. Newberry retired to a continuation of her gossip with
+Holt, broken only by the terser remarks of Newberry, Muriel bent a
+little closer to Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't care a bit about such things, do you?" she enquired.</p>
+
+<p>Her tone was lower than when she had last spoken. It was low enough to
+draw the curtain of confidence between them and their companions, with
+that subtle quality that takes account of but one listener.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's pulses leaped.</p>
+
+<p>"About what things?" was all that he was at first able to say.</p>
+
+<p>The girl smiled. Stainton thought her smile wistful.</p>
+
+<p>"The sort that fill these boxes," said Muriel: "the sort, I dare say,
+that uncle and aunt and Mr. Holt and I are."</p>
+
+<p>He heard a shimmering sprite of regret in her voice: regret not that he
+did not care for these people, but that these people should be what they
+were.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't include yourself in this lot," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>He was immediately aware that his reply was scarcely courteous to his
+hosts, and so was she.</p>
+
+<p>"You are hard on them," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Hadn't you just been hard on them, too?" he countered.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes, but they are my relatives. At least Uncle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> Preston and Aunt
+Ethel are. Family criticism is permitted everywhere."</p>
+
+<p>He did not like her schoolgirlish attempt at epigram, and he showed his
+disapproval.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you are trying to be of a piece with them," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The glance that she gave him was no longer calm: there was a flash of
+flame in it.</p>
+
+<p>"You talk as if you had known me for years."</p>
+
+<p>"For thirty years."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" She did not understand.</p>
+
+<p>"I have known you for thirty years."</p>
+
+<p>What sort of man was this? "But I am only eighteen," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, I have known you for thirty years."</p>
+
+<p>She gave an empty glance at her programme.</p>
+
+<p>"Since you were in pinafores," she said, still looking down.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton bit his lip. There had been no malice in her tone, yet all
+children are cruel, he reflected, and the modern child's cruelty is
+ingenious. Was there anything in that speech for her to be sorry for,
+and, if there were, would she be sorry?</p>
+
+<p>"Some day," he said quietly, "I shall try to explain."</p>
+
+<p>She regarded him again, this time with altered gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"Some day," she said, "I hope you will tell me about that romantic
+career that Aunt Ethel was talking of."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Was she sorry? Was she interested?</p>
+
+<p>"It's not romantic," he protested. "It isn't in the least romantic. It's
+just a story of hard work and disappointment, and hard work and
+success."</p>
+
+<p>"But Mr. Holt told us that in one month you were condemned to death for
+piracy in Central America and acted&mdash;what do they call
+it?&mdash;floor-manager for a firemen's ball in Denver."</p>
+
+<p>"George has been dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse. He never
+knew me till he met me in the West five or six years ago. I was
+condemned for piracy <i>in absentio</i> by a Spanish-American court because I
+had a job as cook on a filibustering ship that was wrecked off Yucatan
+and never got any nearer to shore, and I was floor-manager at the
+firemen's ball because&mdash;well, because I happened to belong to a
+fire-company."</p>
+
+<p>"But you did have adventures in Alaska and Colorado and New Mexico?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I've knocked about a bit."</p>
+
+<p>"And&mdash;&mdash;" Her lips were parted, her eyes large. She no longer heard the
+voices on the stage. "Did you ever&mdash;&mdash;Mr. Holt said you once shot&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Stainton, gravely, "I think I once killed a man."</p>
+
+<p>She clasped her hands on the railing of the box.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about it," she commanded. Her tone was a compliment.</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing to tell. It was in an Alaskan mining-camp.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> The man was
+drunk and armed. He attacked me, and I had to defend myself. He shot
+twice before I shot at all, but I hit and he didn't. I'm sorry I had to
+do it to remain alive, but I'm not sorry to have remained alive."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she cried, petulantly, "you are <i>so</i> matter-of-fact!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not nearly so matter-of-fact as you suppose. Not in the important
+things. In business, in everyday life, a man has to be matter-of-fact.
+It's the only method to get what you want."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really think so?" She appealed to him now as to a well of
+knowledge. Perhaps, he reflected, she had about her ordinarily few wells
+to which she was permitted so to appeal. "Then maybe that is why I don't
+get what I want."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely you have all you want."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her raven hair. "Not any of it."</p>
+
+<p>"And you want?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lots of things."</p>
+
+<p>"For instance?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled, but was firm. "No, I sha'n't tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"Not one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not now."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they are not always the sort of things that you ought to have."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, they are."</p>
+
+<p>"All of them?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her nod was positive: "All."</p>
+
+<p>"But, whether you ought to have them or not, are you equally sure that
+they would be worth possessing?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I know till I have had them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Easily. There are two ways of learning the value of anything we want:
+one is to get it, the other to lose it."</p>
+
+<p>"We're crabbed against the things we miss."</p>
+
+<p>"Are we? I don't know. Even if we are, there's a good deal to be said in
+favour of the comfort that lies in the philosophy of sour grapes."</p>
+
+<p>She did not wholly follow him, but she was clear on the chief point. "It
+doesn't make me feel any more contented," she said, "to believe that I
+wouldn't have been happy if I had got something that I wanted to get and
+didn't."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Some time," he said, "that belief will be your greatest comfort."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel looked away. She was revolving this problem in her youthful mind,
+and when she replied it was by the <i>argumentum ad hominem</i>, which is an
+excellent argument and generally <i>ab femina</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been successful," she began. "If you had not been, would it
+have made you more contented to believe that success wouldn't have
+brought you happiness?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking," said Stainton, "of something in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> the past, something
+that I didn't get, and something that was not a business matter." He
+spoke slowly.</p>
+
+<p>She understood.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," she said, softly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," he smiled. "In point of fact, whenever I failed in prospecting
+I did try to think that money would not have made me happy. But you may
+be right, for I always started prospecting again."</p>
+
+<p>"And now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, now," said Stainton, with a concluding smile, "I am trying hard to
+resist the manifold temptations of good fortune."</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, the curtain was falling on the tragic termination of
+<i>Madama Butterfly</i>. The Newberrys and their guests rose as the curtain
+fell, and Stainton held her cloak for Muriel. Newberry was gasping his
+way into his own coat, and Holt was holding for Mrs. Newberry a gorgeous
+Japanese kimono absurdly reminiscent of the opera to which they had not
+listened; but Muriel's cloak was a simple and beautiful garment in
+Stainton's eyes, a grey garment lined with satin of the colour of
+old-fashioned roses. As she got into it&mdash;"Oh, it's quite easy," she
+said&mdash;his awkward hand was brushed by her cheek, and he bent his head,
+certain of being unobserved in that hurry to depart wherewith the
+average American opera-audience expresses its opinion of the average
+operatic performance, and inhaled the perfume of her hair. His hands
+shook.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With Holt he saw their hosts to their motor.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you coming home with us for supper?" asked Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>But Holt, who was abominably curious, wished to quiz Stainton, and
+Stainton, with the wisdom of his years, knew that enough had been done
+for an initial evening.</p>
+
+<p>"No, thanks," Stainton allowed Holt to say; "we've just met after five
+years, you know, and we've got no end of things to talk about."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel Newberry leaned forward and pressed Stainton's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"You will look us up soon?" she politely enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, yes," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Always glad to see you," said Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel said nothing, but Stainton pressed warmly the little hand that
+she unreservedly offered.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>No, thought Stainton, as he reluctantly turned away with Holt, in spite
+of her caustic reference to his age, she must be merely an impulsive,
+innocent girl. He was glad to come to this determination, glad, however,
+simply because it was what he concluded must be a final answer to a
+question that had already become annoying.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h3>EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!</h3>
+
+
+<p>As the motor swerved away from them, making for the up-channel of
+Broadway, Holt seized Stainton's arm, and began to pilot him through the
+crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said he, "will you <i>please</i> tell me what the&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Stainton, "I won't. Not yet."</p>
+
+<p>"But you promised&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know that. Only wait until we get to a quieter place than this. You
+can scarcely expect me to call out such things for all New York to
+hear."</p>
+
+<p>They freed themselves of the whirlpool around the opera-house and began
+to walk northward.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was looking about him with the eyes of a man that has been for
+years in prison and has but just returned to his native town. He was not
+a New Yorker by birth, and he had never known the city well, but he had
+always loved it and through all his western exile he had dreamed of this
+triumphal return. He soon seemed to have forgotten the puzzle that he
+had agreed to explain to his friend.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street,
+pausing now and again to rest on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> this or that building new to him
+although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's
+new&mdash;all new.&mdash;What's that place, the one over there on the corner?"</p>
+
+<p>Holt grudgingly told him.</p>
+
+<p>"Fresh?" asked Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Five years old," said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"And that?&mdash;And that?"</p>
+
+<p>Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.</p>
+
+<p>"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You
+know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years,
+he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is
+true of some cities and most of all of New York."</p>
+
+<p>Holt slapped him on the back.</p>
+
+<p>"Good old Jim!" said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.</p>
+
+<p>"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't
+call me old. I'm not."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger
+than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he
+had been once so fast a friend and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> whom New York had so speedily
+converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed,
+be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at
+thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered
+Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as
+"Old Stainton"!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man
+doesn't object to being called old."</p>
+
+<p>The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the
+Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat
+and hear the sad story of your life."</p>
+
+<p>They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker
+to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given
+time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder
+at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where
+bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into
+the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded
+khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of
+Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country
+road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long
+remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was
+drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly
+sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a
+suffering fellow-creature!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton considered.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of
+it in a moment of excitement&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."</p>
+
+<p>"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.</p>
+
+<p>"You are the best judge of that, George."</p>
+
+<p>Holt smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you
+were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton
+is sane."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men
+that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."</p>
+
+<p>"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions
+from what I am going to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>Holt groaned.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake <i>tell</i> it!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's
+biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart
+and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you
+may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of
+those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the
+smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My
+mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice,
+but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be
+rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What
+he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon
+of me."</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.</p>
+
+<p>"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they
+have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That
+tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to
+assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own,
+has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in
+revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> exactly
+the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus
+be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious
+malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he
+was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he
+couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another
+life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature
+for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I
+was afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Afraid? <i>You!</i>" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the
+twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age,
+it looks to me as if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I
+think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father&mdash;he
+drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned
+way&mdash;was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and
+yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily
+demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid
+senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that
+time I saw him&mdash;I, a mere boy&mdash;become, day by day, a doting idiot.</p>
+
+<p>"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.</p>
+
+<p>"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end.
+Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going
+on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the
+moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and
+malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though
+here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my
+boy; old age.'"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton wet his lips with wine.</p>
+
+<p>"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and
+I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been
+some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in
+my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing
+to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an
+institution&mdash;which shows that I was very young indeed,&mdash;and so I simply
+nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.</p>
+
+<p>"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It
+was&mdash;it was Hell. There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> are things, lots of them, about it that I just
+couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I
+kept saying to myself:</p>
+
+<p>"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going
+on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick
+of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of
+the years to come.'"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.</p>
+
+<p>"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."</p>
+
+<p>Holt shuffled his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed:
+"One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as
+they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent
+we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant
+odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing,
+steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of
+controlling. These things go, slowly&mdash;very slowly&mdash;in each of us, and
+when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess
+that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and
+comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped again, and again went on:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see
+anybody die, Holt?"</p>
+
+<p>Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Not your parents?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my
+first trip abroad."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk
+about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that.
+Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees:
+it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are
+disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.&mdash;There is no dignity in
+terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father&mdash;&mdash;I was looking towards
+him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a
+razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He
+cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I
+remember the queer gurgle and the&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old
+age? I lay awake nights, I tell you&mdash;nights and nights&mdash;interminable
+nights, thinking, shaking.</p>
+
+<p>"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There
+was a girl&mdash;it was a good many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> years ago, and I had just graduated from
+Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a
+cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day,
+when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into
+the cold black water we both went.</p>
+
+<p>"It seemed to me that I was hours going down&mdash;down, and that I was still
+longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies
+of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and
+it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking
+again, and just then she&mdash;the girl I was in love with&mdash;flung an arm
+toward me. I shoved her away.</p>
+
+<p>"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't
+very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would
+have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a
+lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much
+afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she
+neither forgot nor forgave.</p>
+
+<p>"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me
+over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She
+married the cousin and eighteen years ago&mdash;so I heard long after her
+marriage&mdash;she died as my mother had died&mdash;in childbirth."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stainton slowly refilled his glass.</p>
+
+<p>Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's
+narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was
+accustomed to be interested.</p>
+
+<p>"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people
+thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the
+shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do.
+First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live
+in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In
+order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age
+gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee
+you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."</p>
+
+<p>"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."</p>
+
+<p>"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run
+away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at
+the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves,
+walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your
+yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping
+from a clothesline, or something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> else commonplace seen only in a
+different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"</p>
+
+<p>"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death.
+I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did.
+I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I
+would deliberately court destruction&mdash;or appear to. The outcome was
+that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you
+admired me for."</p>
+
+<p>"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd
+become a brave man."</p>
+
+<p>"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his
+cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever
+was."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did
+even better with the other scarecrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in
+another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained
+like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the
+dance-hall at Durango?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got
+myself&mdash;you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights&mdash;into the
+shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers,
+is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> spoke a little boastfully,
+but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig.
+"Tap that," he said.</p>
+
+<p>He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's
+congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it,
+at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the
+wine.</p>
+
+<p>"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New
+York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest
+disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" asked Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over
+twenty-five."</p>
+
+<p>Holt nodded approval.</p>
+
+<p>"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body;
+that's a cinch," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than
+anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love
+disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and
+then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in
+spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was
+saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the
+philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate,
+I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is
+the whole secret of it, George;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> all that you have to do is to say to
+yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I <i>believe</i> in the world; I
+believe in Man.'"</p>
+
+<p>Holt smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait till you know New York," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."</p>
+
+<p>"And so&mdash;&mdash;" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and
+reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.</p>
+
+<p>"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as
+soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went
+to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the
+opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago;
+that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint
+faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old
+sweetheart's daughter. And it was."</p>
+
+<p>"What? Muriel Stannard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."</p>
+
+<p>Holt whistled softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" asked he.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his
+dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:</p>
+
+<p>"But, Jim&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>There he stopped.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stainton looked at him enquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Jim, you&mdash;you&mdash;&mdash;Oh, what's the use!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it
+is all simple enough."</p>
+
+<p>Holt took a deep pull at his glass.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did
+understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't,
+and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his
+stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his
+own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a
+what-do-y'-call-it&mdash;anchorite&mdash;and had opium-dreams without the fun of a
+smoke."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton stiffened.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't ask your advice," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"You wanted it," Holt ventured.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging
+his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most
+city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when
+you see it, you can't enjoy it."</p>
+
+<p>"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> "Perhaps I am, but that
+rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know,
+but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him,
+wanted to quote Cicero: "<i>Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te
+dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis.</i>"
+All that he said, however, was:</p>
+
+<p>"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good
+woman in the face."</p>
+
+<p>"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the
+merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to
+proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a
+ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that
+can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with the <i>entrée</i>, somebody
+that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a
+man in livery."</p>
+
+<p>"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To
+make clowns of your fellow men&mdash;really I think that's a sin against
+God."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a
+girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two
+people who haven't<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> anything to do but tell each other how much they
+love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin
+to want something else to talk about."</p>
+
+<p>"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he
+should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so
+long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on:
+"There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained
+for love only."</p>
+
+<p>"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle
+than it is now, and that's going some. What <i>was</i> it ordained for?
+Babies?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New
+York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't
+thinking babies."</p>
+
+<p>"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a
+fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here,
+Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know
+what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without
+spoiling the game."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will
+object?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what do you mean?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Holt interpreted.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and
+that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better,
+seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt
+of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this
+marrying-talk, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you
+refer to it in that way."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it
+won't do, you know. Really."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his
+glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the
+board.</p>
+
+<p>"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me
+to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."</p>
+
+<p>"O, Hell!" said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's brows drew close together.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean what I say," he declared.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean what <i>he</i> said?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I
+suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would
+have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed
+treatment&mdash;his treatment."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet&mdash;not by several
+thousand graveyards full."</p>
+
+<p>"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances&mdash;really. I have my
+own feelings to go by."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old
+as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels&mdash;per<i>haps</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"A man is as old as his arteries&mdash;and a few other units of his physical
+economy."</p>
+
+<p>"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the&mdash;what is
+it?&mdash;units of <i>her</i> physical economy."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton bit his under lip.</p>
+
+<p>"A girl is mature at eighteen&mdash;mature enough. I won't talk of that,
+George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something
+better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge
+of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than
+hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of
+twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done
+something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and
+unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You mean you believe you have."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it."</p>
+
+<p>"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've
+committed yourself, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton shook his great head.</p>
+
+<p>"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health&mdash;mental, moral,
+physical and every other way&mdash;understand me: <i>every other way</i>&mdash;than you
+were ten years ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody
+knows that; but you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I have never been a waster."</p>
+
+<p>"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean that."</p>
+
+<p>"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now
+and then."</p>
+
+<p>"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."</p>
+
+<p>"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close
+room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just
+come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant
+you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad
+ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your
+brain is used to 'em. So's your body&mdash;only more so. Well, what's going
+to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>&mdash;habits of a lifetime,
+mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"</p>
+
+<p>"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under
+the age of forty-five."</p>
+
+<p>"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good
+a girl of eighteen."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes
+narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his
+mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended
+gently. Stainton chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you
+because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He
+hesitated. "That is, unless&mdash;&mdash;" He frowned again, but only
+slightly&mdash;"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen
+to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"</p>
+
+<p>Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed
+heartily.</p>
+
+<p>"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've
+got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too
+much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can
+give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and
+will soon find a good woman to supply<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> them. I thank you for your
+interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and,
+in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell
+you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage
+between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."</p>
+
+<p>"Between fifty and eighteen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."</p>
+
+<p>"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think
+that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off
+with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an
+irresponsible boy of her own years."</p>
+
+<p>"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more
+irresponsible than the girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."</p>
+
+<p>"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed
+Holt. "Is <i>that</i> marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>"An important part of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an
+easy business."</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of
+a fool."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered
+his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was
+already thickening his speech.</p>
+
+<p>"All," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd
+better reckon a little on God, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of
+drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their
+libations.</p>
+
+<p>"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or
+failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually
+unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"</p>
+
+<p>Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober
+moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups,
+however, were sometimes theological.</p>
+
+<p>"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices
+made infinite."</p>
+
+<p>"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really
+'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Reason," suggested Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for&mdash;for&mdash;lemme
+see: for reason."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Philosophy?"</p>
+
+<p>"To quick for that, too."</p>
+
+<p>"Instinct, perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does
+something&mdash;high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in&mdash;partly. Not
+altogether. Partly's something else; something from&mdash;from&mdash;&mdash;" Holt
+groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved
+an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an
+early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.</p>
+
+<p>"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"It is late," repeated Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>Holt shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his
+feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's
+Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things.
+Birds mating in&mdash;in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's
+neck.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm&mdash;I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'&mdash;an' God
+knows I love you." Easy tears<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> were running down his puffed cheeks.
+"Only you <i>are</i> old, Jim. You know you are."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way,
+you know."</p>
+
+<p>Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.</p>
+
+<p>"So you really mean&mdash;mean to do&mdash;to do&mdash;&mdash;? You know what I mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that
+night: "I intend to marry her."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Preston Newberry had risen to the distinction of that name several
+months before Stainton, as a young Harvard undergraduate, came to know
+and love her sister. Very likely she had never heard of Jim until his
+triumphal march to New York, and certainly, if she had ever heard of
+him, she had long ago forgotten his name. Her early married life had
+completely occupied itself in an endeavour to live up to her new title,
+and, since this effort was not crowned with a success so secure as to
+dispense with the necessity of careful watching (for eternal vigilance
+is the price of more things than liberty), her present existence was
+sufficiently employed to make her regard the care of her niece with
+resignation rather than with joy.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's father had not survived his wife beyond a decade. In that
+period he managed to spend all the money that the previous portion of
+his mature career had been devoted to acquiring, and Muriel's
+grandparents on both sides had long since passed to the sphere of
+celestial compensations; the girl had, therefore, in some measure, been
+forced upon her aunt. A<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> timid little girl with long dark hair that
+nearly concealed her face, she was brought to New York.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," Mrs. Newberry had remarked to her husband, "the question is:
+what are we to do with her?"</p>
+
+<p>It may be that she had entertained from her early reading of the novels
+of Mrs. Humphry Ward a vague hope that Preston would propose to make
+Muriel the child-light of their otherwise now definitely childless home.
+If, however, such an expectation had formed, it was speedily shattered:
+Preston, like many another husband, inclined to the opinion that one
+member of his wife's family was enough in his house. He expressed this
+opinion in his usual manner: briefly, but not directly.</p>
+
+<p>"How the hell do I know?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>When Ethel&mdash;Ethel was really the stout Mrs. Newberry's Christian
+name&mdash;when Ethel had evinced a disposition to discuss in further detail
+the question of Muriel's future, Newberry had done what he usually did
+when Ethel began any discussion: he recalled an engagement at one of the
+three of New York's most difficult clubs.</p>
+
+<p>It was a procedure that seldom failed. He disliked deciding anything,
+even where his own pleasures were involved; and so, he was accustomed to
+presenting the problem to his wife much as he presented her with an
+allowance, recalling an engagement at one of the clubs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> going out and
+not returning until he was sure that Ethel had gone to bed "to sleep on
+it." In this way, even when the subject proved a hard mattress,
+Preston's couch remained downy, and Ethel would meet him, over the
+breakfast eggcups, with the riddle solved.</p>
+
+<p>In the instance of the disposal of Muriel, the matter proceeded as
+always. Mrs. Newberry came downstairs next morning in her newest and
+pinkest kimono, an embroidered importation from Japan, whose wing-like
+sleeves showed plumper arms and wrists than such a garment is made to
+display. Though her eyes were red, she smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't mind paying the child's school bills?" she quavered.</p>
+
+<p>"Not if the school's far enough away," said Preston.</p>
+
+<p>"I had thought&mdash;&mdash;" began his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said Preston, "it would be wrong to the girl to bring her up
+at one of these New York finishing-schools. They inculcate extravagant
+ideals; they're full of a lot of the little children of the rich, and
+Muriel might acquire there a notion that she was to inherit some of my
+money&mdash;which she isn't."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel Newberry considered this hint final. She dropped at once to the
+last of the dozen institutions of instruction that she had made into a
+mental list, and Muriel was sent to a convent school.</p>
+
+<p>"Though we are not Catholics," said Mrs. Newberry.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Excellent discipline," said Preston. "Is it far away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nearly in Philadelphia."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, at holiday time&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"She can"&mdash;Ethel brightened&mdash;"she can come&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she can have you come to see her," said Preston.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel passed eight years at this school. So long as Mrs. Newberry's
+conscience was able to conquer her desires, the young pupil's aunt would
+run over to Philadelphia for the short vacations; the long ones were, as
+often as could be arranged, spent by Muriel, by invitation, at the home
+of one or another of her classmates. Now, however, the girl had
+graduated and had remained as a post-graduate as long as the curriculum
+permitted.</p>
+
+<p>"She'll have to come out," said Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>"Of the school," asked Preston, "or into society?"</p>
+
+<p>"Both. The one entails the other."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the hurry?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens, Preston; if she stays there much longer she'll become a
+nun!"</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose she does?" asked Newberry, who was a Presbyterian. "I'm
+surprised to hear you refer to a pious life as if it were a smash-up."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, in the end, he agreed that Muriel should pass the present
+winter under his hospitable roof ("Though, further than that," he
+mentally vowed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> "I'll be damned if I endure"). So, Muriel had, without
+too much effort on her guardians' part, been taken about with them on
+numerous occasions lately, most recently to the Metropolitan, where
+Stainton had met her.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the morning after this meeting that, with commendable
+promptness, but at a deplorably early hour&mdash;to be exact, at eleven
+o'clock&mdash;Stainton called at the Newberrys'. His card was presented to
+Mrs. Newberry through the crack of the door while that good lady was in
+her bath.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel, who was big, blonde, and bovine, struggled into the nearest
+dressing-gown and hurried to the breakfast-room, where her husband, over
+a newspaper, was engaged in his matutinal occupation of scolding the
+coffee. Her face a tragic mask, Mrs. Newberry placed the offending
+pasteboard by Preston's plate.</p>
+
+<p>"Preston," said she. "Look at that. <i>Look</i> at it!"</p>
+
+<p>Newberry appeared shorter and thinner than ever as he sat crumpled over
+the newspaper, his grey moustache short and thin and his head covered by
+grey hair, short and thin and worn in a bang. He obeyed his wife's
+request. He expressed no surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Looks like somebody's card," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"It is, Preston," wailed his wife. "It is that awful western person's
+that George Holt would drag to our box&mdash;<i>our</i> box&mdash;last night."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My dear," said Newberry, "Mr.&mdash;er&mdash;what's his name?&mdash;oh, ah:
+Stainton;&mdash;yes&mdash;Mr. Stainton appears to be a man of means. Concerning
+the rich nothing except good."</p>
+
+<p>"But his card, Preston; his card!"</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with his card?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has sent it up&mdash;here&mdash;at this time of day!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hum. Western eccentricity, I suppose. He'll get over all that sort of
+thing in time."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel was hopping heavily from one slippered foot to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"He hasn't merely left it," she distractedly explained. "He's here&mdash;he's
+actually in the house."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's not a burglar, Ethel."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk so, Preston. I know he's not a burglar. But what does he
+want here at this hour?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose he wants to see you."</p>
+
+<p>"Now? <i>What</i> can he want to see <i>me</i> about at 11 A.M.?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you really want to know, my dear, I think that the best way to
+satisfy your curiosity is to go down and ask him."</p>
+
+<p>"How can I?" She spread wide her arms, the more clearly to bring to her
+husband's wandering attention the fact that she was not yet by any means
+dressed to receive callers. "Won't you go?" she pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I?" asked Newberry. "<i>I'm</i> not in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>the least curious&mdash;&mdash;This
+coffee is worse every morning. You really must have Mrs. Dawson
+discharge Jane."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel uttered a mighty sob and fled. She sent word to Stainton that she
+would be down in five minutes to greet him. After half an hour, she
+entered the reception room. Not ten minutes later, she rushed again upon
+her husband, this time in the smoking room, that she called his "study."</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth do you suppose he wants?" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Preston, with a face like a martyred saint's, put down his newspaper. He
+did not, however, take his cigarette from his mouth to reply.</p>
+
+<p>"What who wants?"</p>
+
+<p>Ethel wrung her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"That awful man!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible that you are referring to my friend, Mr.&mdash;er&mdash;Mr.
+Stainton?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I am, Preston."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! He's still here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes. I've only just seen him."</p>
+
+<p>"You made him wait rather long, my dear. I hope you are not keeping him
+waiting again."</p>
+
+<p>"What else could I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"How do I know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Preston, do try to show a little interest. I say: what on earth do you
+suppose he wants?"</p>
+
+<p>"If he was as bored by that performance at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> Metropolitan as I was,"
+said Newberry, yawning, "he wants a drink. Don't <i>you</i> know what he
+wants?"</p>
+
+<p>"He wants&mdash;he wants," Ethel dramatically brought it out, "to take Muriel
+for a ride in his motor."</p>
+
+<p>Preston had been seated in an arm-chair without the slightest indication
+of disturbing himself either for his wife or the visitor. At this
+announcement by Mrs. Newberry he rose with what, for him, was alacrity.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll call her myself," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Preston! Think of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"That is just what I am doing, my dear&mdash;and I think confoundedly well of
+it, let me tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"In his motor!" Mrs. Newberry repeated the phrase as if it were pregnant
+with evil.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with his motor?" snapped Preston. "It's a motor, you
+say, not a monoplane. Mr.&mdash;Mr. Stainton has money enough to buy a safe
+motor&mdash;as motors go."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Preston, consider: Muriel&mdash;alone&mdash;morning! The child isn't even
+really out yet!"</p>
+
+<p>At this, Newberry fronted his wife squarely. For perhaps the first time
+in his life, he suffered the pains of definite assertion.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, understand, Ethel," he said, "let's cut out all this rot about
+Muriel. The girl is <i>not</i> such a child and she is out: she's out of
+school, and that's all the outing she's going to get. In fact, it's high
+time she was in again."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"She can't go back to the convent, Preston."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Stainton doesn't want to motor her back to the convent. No. But if
+we manage things with half a hand, she needn't be much longer at large.
+Now, don't keep my friend Mr. Stansfield waiting any longer. I surmise
+that he has his machine with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He came in it. It's at the door. I couldn't see the make."</p>
+
+<p>"No. Naturally. Well, his bringing it along shows him to be a man of
+expedition. It's what we might expect of a successful miner. And it is
+promising for other reasons, too. Get Muriel, take her down, hand her
+over to him with your blessing&mdash;but be sure you hand her over as your
+dearest treasure&mdash;and then come back here to me."</p>
+
+<p>Saying this, Preston resumed the perusal of his newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel left the room. When she returned, she had the air of seeing blood
+upon her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" asked Preston.</p>
+
+<p>"They're gone."</p>
+
+<p>Preston folded the paper and laid it carefully upon the table that stood
+beside him. The mood of assertion still tore at his vitals.</p>
+
+<p>"Now then," he began, "about this Mr. Stansfield&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Stainton," mildly corrected his wife as she took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> a seat opposite him
+and looked out over the now rapidly filling Madison Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>"Stainton." Newberry accepted the amendment. "What's wrong with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Ethel, her fingers twisting in her lap, "it's not that.
+There's nothing <i>wrong</i> with him."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then!" Preston spoke as if his wife's admission settled the
+matter.</p>
+
+<p>But it did not settle the matter.</p>
+
+<p>"Only he is not&mdash;&mdash;" Ethel added: "Is he quite a gentleman?"</p>
+
+<p>Newberry sighed as one sighs at a child that will not comprehend the
+simplest statement.</p>
+
+<p>"It's hard for art to compete with Nature," said he; "a gentleman is
+man-made, but Nature can do better when she wants."</p>
+
+<p>"We don't really know him."</p>
+
+<p>"I know a good deal about him, Ethel. Enough for present purposes."</p>
+
+<p>"From Mr. Holt?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. When Holt read of his success in the papers, the canny George went
+to his brokers and made inquiries&mdash;thorough inquiries."</p>
+
+<p>"He seems to have got whatever money he has very quickly, Preston."</p>
+
+<p>"That only proves that he is either lucky or crooked. It doesn't prove
+he didn't get it. What makes you think he's not quite a gentleman?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Ethel, "&mdash;&mdash;that."</p>
+
+<p>"Poof!" said Newberry. "He was talking a good deal to Muriel at the
+opera last night. Didn't he behave all right?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I suppose so. I asked her what he talked about, and she
+said she didn't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Very sensible of her, I'm sure. I wouldn't have expected it of her. It
+goes to show that she's not too young to marry."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel permitted herself a fat start.</p>
+
+<p>"O, Preston, you never mean&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my dear, you know very well that we've meant nothing else. You've
+known it ever since I sent you to call Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"And you don't think him too old for her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Old? He's probably not fifty."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Holt said he thought fifty."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well: fifty. Fifty and eighteen. The one has the youth and the
+other supplies the balance. Most suitable. Besides, it's done every day.
+Heavens, Ethel, you mustn't expect everything!"</p>
+
+<p>"But do you think there's nobody else, Preston? She has been away a good
+deal, you know, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." Ethel's eyes sought her husband's and, meeting them, fell.
+"Somebody that the child cares for," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Stuff!" said Preston. "That convent-place has a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> high reputation for
+the way it's conducted. Also, any man of forty can steal a girl from any
+boy of twenty if he only cares to try. The only trouble is that he
+hardly ever cares enough about it to try."</p>
+
+<p>"Fifty," repeated Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>"Fifty,&mdash;granted," continued Preston. "Where we're lucky is that this
+fellow seems to want to try&mdash;supposing there is any other chap, and of
+course there isn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think, Preston"&mdash;Ethel's eyes were downcast&mdash;"that she can learn
+to love him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ethel!" said Preston.</p>
+
+<p>"But, dear," Ethel insisted, "it does seem a little as if this were the
+sort of thing that a girl ought to be left to decide for herself."</p>
+
+<p>Newberry had risen and gone to the mantelpiece to seek a fresh
+cigarette. His wife's words brought him to a stop. He folded his thin
+arms across his chest.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," he said; "we have got to face this thing right now, and
+once and for all. What are the facts in the case? The facts are these:
+Here's Muriel with a pretty face and a good, sound, sensible education
+of the proper homely sort, which includes a healthy ignorance of this
+wicked world. And here's this fellow Stainsfield, or Stainborough, or
+whatever his name is, and I'm sure it makes no difference, a strong,
+fatherly kind of old dodo, comes to New York, 'b'gosh,' with his eyes
+bugging out at the first good-looker they light<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> on. Well, he's not the
+Steel Trust, or a Transatlantic steamship combination, but he's what,
+until our palates were spoiled twenty years or so ago, we'd have called
+a confoundedly rich man. Understand? Then add to it that Muriel hasn't a
+cent of her own and no prospects&mdash;<i>no prospects</i>, mind you. And now see
+whether you'd not better forget to talk sentiment and begin to get busy.
+If you and Muriel don't get busy, it's a hundred-to-one shot some other
+girl will&mdash;and'll get him damned quick. Then Muriel will probably be
+left to get a job as school-teacher or something-or-other nearly as bad.
+He's worth a half-million if he's worth a cent."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel Newberry's large, innocent eyes opened wide. If surprise can be
+placid, they were placidly surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you quite sure about the money, dear?" she asked.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h3>ONE ROAD TO LOVE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Among the little company of persons aware of Jim Stainton's sentimental
+inclinations, or so far as were concerned the people most intimately
+affected by those inclinations, there appeared, thus far, to be a
+singular unanimity of opinion regarding the matter. Stainton, it is to
+be supposed, approved because the inclinations concurred with his pet
+theories. Newberry, although he did not know anything about Stainton's
+pet theories and would in all probability have jeered at them had he
+been enlightened, proved ready to welcome the miner because he had
+decided that the miner should relieve the Newberry household of a quiet
+presence that, its quiescence to the contrary notwithstanding,
+distinctly disturbed the even course of Newberry's existence. Ethel, as
+may be readily believed, found, under her husband's expert guidance, no
+difficulty in reaching the conclusion that, as she put it, "a match of
+this sort would be for the child's best interests."</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, there was George Holt, if one counted him and his verdict.
+Still, even in this singularly imperfect world, where we believe in
+majorities and where they misgovern us, we acknowledge the purging
+benefits<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> of an ever-present party in opposition; and the party in
+opposition to James Stainton was now composed of Mr. George Vanvechten
+Holt. He was a splendid minority of one, but he was not one of those
+most intimately affected, and he was not generally the sort of
+individual noticed. Stainton had saved his life, yet even Holt admitted
+that the life was scarcely worth the saving.</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I care anything about the youngster for her own sake," he
+would say, night after night, at his club, where he had made all the
+club-members he knew an exception to his promise of secrecy; "it's not
+that, and it isn't that my liking for Stainton shuts my eyes to his
+faults. Not a little bit. Tying up little Muriel to a man half a hundred
+years old is like sending virgins to that Minotaur-chap and all that
+sort of thing. And hitching good old Jim to a girl of eighteen is like
+fastening a scared bulldog to the tail of some new-fangled and
+unexploded naval-rocket: you don't know what's inside of it and you
+don't know where it's going to land; all you do know is that it's going
+to be mighty mystifying to the dog. Still, as I say, I'm not personal.
+What makes me sore is the principle of the thing. It's so rottenly
+unprincipled, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Holt, however, always ended by declaring that he would not attempt to
+interfere. He intimated, darkly, that he could, if he would, interfere
+with considerable effect, but he was specific, if darker, in his
+reasons<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> therefor, in his decision not to attempt to save his threatened
+friends or fight for his outraged principles.</p>
+
+<p>The truth was that George had made one more endeavour after the evening
+of the opera. He was severely rebuffed. Because, as he never tired of
+stating, he really liked Stainton and would not forget that the miner
+had saved his life, he recurred, after much painful plucking-up of
+courage, to the amatory subject, which only intoxication had permitted
+him so boldly to pursue on the night previous.</p>
+
+<p>He was seated in Stainton's sitting-room high in the hotel. It was late
+afternoon; the rumble and clatter of the city rose from the distant
+street, and Stainton, full of fresh memories of his motor drive with
+Muriel, was walking backward and forward from his bedroom, slowly
+getting into evening clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"I sure never would have thought you were morbid," said Holt, from his
+seat on the edge of a table, whence he dangled his legs.</p>
+
+<p>"Morbid?" repeated Stainton. "I am not."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;you know: about death and old age and all that sort of thing."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I had explained all that last night."</p>
+
+<p>"It must have been over when I was with you in the West."</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Not when you were the first man to volunteer to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> go down in the shaft
+of 'Better Days' mine after the explosion?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have rarely been more afraid than I was then."</p>
+
+<p>"Or when you played head-nurse in the spotted-fever mess at Sunnyside?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was nearly sick&mdash;scared sick&mdash;myself."</p>
+
+<p>Holt's patent-leather boots flashed in and out of the shadow cast by the
+table-edge.</p>
+
+<p>"Hum," he said. "It don't seem to show a healthy state of mind, does
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had disappeared into his bedroom. From there his answer came,
+partly muffled by the half-closed door.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care to talk any more about it. I made my explanation to you
+last night, because I had promised to make one. That's all."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I was a bit illuminated last night," said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"You were."</p>
+
+<p>"Still, you know, I knew what I was saying."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton did not reply.</p>
+
+<p>"And what I said," Holt supplemented, "is what I think now and what I
+always will think."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well. Let it go at that, George."</p>
+
+<p>Holt made a mighty effort.</p>
+
+<p>"The plain truth is," said he, "that people will call you an old fool to
+buy a piece of undressed kid."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's bulky figure filled the doorway. He was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> in his
+shirt-sleeves, his hands busy with the collar-button at the back of his
+neck.</p>
+
+<p>"That will do," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings&mdash;&mdash;" said Holt.</p>
+
+<p>"Then keep quiet."</p>
+
+<p>"But you ought to know what people will say. Someone's got to tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care what people will say."</p>
+
+<p>"They'll say&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton advanced. His hands were now at his side, idle, but his face
+was completely calm.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"They'll say," concluded Holt, "that you're buying the little girl, and
+that you've been cheated in the transaction&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's hands were raised. They descended heavily upon Holt's
+shoulders. They plucked Holt from his perch and shook him until his
+teeth chattered. Then they dropped him, rather gently, into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said Stainton. His face was firm, and there was a cold blue flame
+playing from under his brows, but he was not even breathing hard. "Now,
+let this end it. If you want to be my friend, let this end your comments
+on my personal affairs. If you do not want to be my friend, go on
+talking as you have been, and I will throw you out of the window."</p>
+
+<p>This incident partially accounts for Holt's resolute<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> refusal thereafter
+to advise Stainton. Advise him further George certainly did not,
+although among his club-fellows he expressed himself as extremely
+anxious to have it remembered that, should anything go wrong with
+Stainton, George Holt had predicted as much.</p>
+
+<p>There remained, however, one person of importance to Stainton's project
+that still remained unconsulted and might have some opinion of more or
+less weight in regard to it. This was Muriel Stannard.</p>
+
+<p>What she thought, or what she would ultimately come to feel about his
+plan, did occupy space in Stainton's cogitations. Notwithstanding his
+romanticism, Stainton was not so blind to fact as to fail to see that
+the girl's mind was as virgin as her body. Indeed, her brain, so far as
+her education might be said to have developed that organ, was less
+advanced than the rest of her physique, and this not because she was not
+intelligent, for now that she was in the world at last he could see her
+daily hastening toward mental maturity, but because her pastors and
+masters had brought her up in the manner supposed to be correct for
+girls of her position. Critics of that manner might say that its
+directors proceed on the theory that, since life is full of serpents,
+the best way to train children for life is not to teach them to
+distinguish between harmless and venomous reptiles, but to keep them in
+such ignorance of the snakes that they will be sure not to know one when
+they see it. Yet Stainton, anything<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> rather than a critic of the
+established order, found himself not displeased with this
+manifestation&mdash;or lack of it. He wanted youth; he wanted his long lost,
+long postponed romance, and chance had put both these things within his
+reach in the person of this dusky-eyed girl. Physically she was what her
+mother had been, mentally she could be trained to complete resemblance.
+He would make of her what he conceived to be the best. And so he loved
+her.</p>
+
+<p>To ascertain her opinion, to predetermine it, Stainton was now
+elaborately preparing. Beginning with that introductory motor ride, in
+which Stainton's cautious manipulation of the automobile seemed to
+Muriel's unspoiled delight a union of skill and daring, he went about
+his courtship in what he believed a frank and regular way; in a way that
+both Preston and Ethel Newberry considered absolutely committal; in a
+way that, consider it as she might, Muriel accepted with every evidence
+of girlish pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>There were more motor drives, with the aunt now playing chaperon: a
+chaperon that conscientiously chaperoned as little as possible. There
+were small theatre parties, small suppers, small dinners. One or two
+mothers of daughters, who dared to be civil to Stainton, were shooed
+away, attacked by Ethel with all the brazen loyalty of a ponderous hen
+defending her chicks from the assault of a terrier. The Newberrys, as in
+duty bound, retaliated upon Stainton's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> theatres, dinners, and suppers
+with two teas and a luncheon. Stainton "came back at them," as George
+Holt phrased it, with more suppers, theatres, and dinners, the dramas
+always carefully selected to suit the immature condition of Muriel's
+soul; and so the whole courtship progressed along those conventional
+lines which lay the road to the altar over a plain of rich foods
+irrigated by vintage wines.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl
+during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her,
+unescorted, through Central Park.</p>
+
+<p>"What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days
+when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the
+clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none
+other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on
+some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away
+to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel,
+her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted
+nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan
+civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing:
+New York, the life here, the city."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I love that, too," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not
+merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an
+accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her
+splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its
+disposal.</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to
+get back here."</p>
+
+<p>"From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so
+romantic."</p>
+
+<p>"Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you get that idea?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has
+Uncle Preston."</p>
+
+<p>"They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers
+published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the
+newspapers say."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the
+time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?"</p>
+
+<p>"Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"But did you do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> disliked to have his
+supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps
+from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather
+of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they
+said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid
+to go, and you captured them by yourself&mdash;three of them."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.</p>
+
+<p>"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half
+so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"</p>
+
+<p>"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the
+newspapers presented them."</p>
+
+<p>"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please
+tell me about a mine."</p>
+
+<p>He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end
+and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He
+abruptly concluded by telling her so.</p>
+
+<p>"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any
+other. What can girls and women care for business?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the
+night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no
+relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that
+matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty
+and her youth.</p>
+
+<p>"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break
+off the match?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I
+think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace
+had told her so."</p>
+
+<p>"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think
+she was horrid."</p>
+
+<p>"And her daughter, Lady&mdash;Lady&mdash;&mdash;" He hesitated for the name.</p>
+
+<p>"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up
+Arthur like that!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed I would not!"</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>would</i> you have done?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's chin became resolute.</p>
+
+<p>"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the
+drawing-room, and I should have put my&mdash;&mdash;" She broke off, rosy with
+embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.</p>
+
+<p>"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had
+partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her
+conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:</p>
+
+<p>"I should just have married him in spite of them all."</p>
+
+<p>Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor
+stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if
+you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.</p>
+
+<p>Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase
+of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers,
+what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the
+early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath,
+our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he
+then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this
+supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the
+acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and
+Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan
+presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should
+admire not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> his wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the
+genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love
+not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the
+real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the
+prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his
+insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that
+thing happened to be.</p>
+
+<p>Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny
+have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her
+aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in
+the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the
+girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's
+fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and
+Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the
+school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet
+known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first
+time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which
+all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was
+frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a
+pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.</p>
+
+<p>"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the
+luncheon-table, looking, however, not at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> the subject of her remarks but
+at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home,
+sat opposite her.</p>
+
+<p>"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am
+happier than ever now."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the
+smile, and Preston would not.</p>
+
+<p>"Why is that?" asked Ethel.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, because."</p>
+
+<p>"Because why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and
+things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"</p>
+
+<p>Ethel's smile faded.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."</p>
+
+<p>"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped.
+"Thompson; the salmon."</p>
+
+<p>"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does
+really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say <i>just</i> like a boy."</p>
+
+<p>"He seems quite young&mdash;he actually seems very young indeed," mused
+Ethel.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."</p>
+
+<p>His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He is fif&mdash;&mdash;" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she
+corrected herself: "He must be nearly&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."</p>
+
+<p>"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip.
+Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."</p>
+
+<p>"You quote him, Aunt Ethel&mdash;often."</p>
+
+<p>"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger
+than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself,
+and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."</p>
+
+<p>The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so
+trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past
+thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or
+fifty."</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better
+make the most of him while you can."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> are several
+women&mdash;women and <i>girls</i>&mdash;anxious to marry him, and one or other of them
+is sure to succeed."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend,
+and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had
+so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke
+so little of women to her.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the
+length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his
+tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of
+the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and
+was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally
+romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in
+like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she
+was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She
+regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his
+conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his
+company for the "good time"&mdash;it was thus that she described it&mdash;which he
+was "showing her."</p>
+
+<p>In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton
+was in love.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>A MAID PERPLEXED</h3>
+
+
+<p>So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in
+their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved
+quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of
+precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the <i>scène à
+faire</i>, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally
+understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and
+found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the
+white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged
+mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening
+that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing
+theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.</p>
+
+<p>That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement,
+Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm
+of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with
+Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the rôle of duenna, and the
+suitor had consoled himself in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> ocular demonstration of the proverb
+that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his
+privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he
+enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that class of
+society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections,
+seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was
+unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry
+an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circumspection.
+Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign,
+and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and
+the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.</p>
+
+<p>The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short
+hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep,
+became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips,
+and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that
+which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that
+the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far
+younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but
+with excitement.</p>
+
+<p>While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the
+glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to
+lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than
+he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> had ever yet seen her&mdash;thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it
+would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young
+enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he
+was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain
+that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at
+the opera, but more desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the
+chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows
+piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from
+her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body
+fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the
+flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow
+lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like
+young red roses after the last shower of Spring.</p>
+
+<p>He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box,
+that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood
+at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the
+gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how
+the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast
+what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the
+distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> which shut the
+heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his
+every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the
+desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the
+demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul
+that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings
+beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would
+either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on
+his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white
+hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her,
+the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes
+with their curving lashes, her parted lips.</p>
+
+<p>She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska
+and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold
+that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing
+not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl
+should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again
+evaded her.</p>
+
+<p>"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."</p>
+
+<p>"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that
+night at the opera. "I did it all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> to win Life. That has always been
+what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted&mdash;I
+scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You
+understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I understand," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living
+as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight.
+I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally
+straight at any sacrifice."</p>
+
+<p>She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the
+violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward
+her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>"And you've won?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back,
+and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would
+not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to
+bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved
+only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.</p>
+
+<p>Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The
+atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his
+eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of
+which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And you've won?"</p>
+
+<p>"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say&mdash;Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes
+fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand
+to finger them. The hand shook.</p>
+
+<p>"For me?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is
+the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to
+many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.</p>
+
+<p>"I have won my fight&mdash;yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain
+the end? It's you who must tell me that."</p>
+
+<p>She saw now.</p>
+
+<p>"How can I help?" she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face.
+"Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life
+means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."</p>
+
+<p>Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other
+Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he
+sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked
+up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had
+heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember," he asked, when his story was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> finished, "how rudely I
+looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?"</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't rude," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have thought it so then."</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I didn't know what to think&mdash;exactly."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me
+stare at you."</p>
+
+<p>Her nether lip trembled.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know my mother," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and
+then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine
+for her. It was really not love at all&mdash;only the rough sketch for what
+might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away,
+when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I
+wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had
+won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living
+original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me."</p>
+
+<p>He came another step nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in
+love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her.
+It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and
+didn't know. Now I am still young&mdash;I have kept myself young&mdash;but I
+<i>know</i>." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled
+to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect&mdash;I never thought&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Even this Stainton had foreseen.</p>
+
+<p>"Then don't hurry now," he said. He drew a chair beside her and quietly
+took her free hand. "Take your time. Take a week, two weeks, a month, if
+you choose."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's so new; it's all so new," said Muriel. "I never
+suspected&mdash;&mdash;Oh, I know girls are always supposed to guess; but really,
+really, I never, <i>never</i>&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>There was genuine pain in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what is expected of most girls," said Stainton; "but of
+you I shall never expect anything but the truth."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at him with eyes perplexed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;yes, that is just what I want to be: honest. And&mdash;don't you
+see?&mdash;that is just why&mdash;I am so uncertain&mdash;that is just why I can't,
+right away, tell you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He pressed her hand and rose. He did not like to hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>"I ask only that you will think it over," he said. "Will you think it
+over, Muriel?"</p>
+
+<p>She bowed her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said she.</p>
+
+<p>"And I may come back in&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"In two weeks?"</p>
+
+<p>"In two weeks." Her voice was low and shaken. "Oh, you don't mind if I
+ask you to go now?" she pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand," said Stainton. "I'll be back two weeks from this
+evening. Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, Mr. Stainton," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>She waited for him to go. She waited until she heard the street door
+close behind him. Then she hurried in retreat toward her own room.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Newberry was lying in ambush on the landing when the girl came
+upstairs&mdash;Mrs. Newberry, broad in white satin, with diamonds at her neck
+and in her hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" asked the aunt.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" cried Muriel. She started. "Aunt Ethel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"You frightened me," Muriel explained. "I didn't see you until you
+spoke."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" persisted Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. That's all," said Muriel. "Nothing&mdash;only that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Ethel became diplomatic:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Stainton didn't stay very long?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not very long, Aunty."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel heard something ominous in her niece's tone.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't&mdash;you don't mean to say you sent him <i>away</i>?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, Aunty. Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>"It's early. You're going to bed so early?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I think I'll go to bed. I'm&mdash;I'm tired."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's early," repeated Mrs. Newberry, who was accustomed to order
+her life according to hours and not to reason.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it?" said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"It's scarcely ten. The library clock just struck."</p>
+
+<p>"I think it struck some time ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Did it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I shall go to bed, Aunty."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that
+when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel
+brushed past her and went to her own room.</p>
+
+<p>Ethel returned to the library&mdash;so called because it contained a few
+hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She
+said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the
+opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel,
+together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When
+Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no
+nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in
+his pleasantest mood.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for
+you to let it alone?"</p>
+
+<p>This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James
+Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult
+to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She
+assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton,
+asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately
+engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a
+French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made
+one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she
+had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's
+manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of
+wifely obedience.</p>
+
+<p>When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will
+that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after
+Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's
+boudoir&mdash;it was a pink boudoir&mdash;where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at
+eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock
+luncheon.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid,
+just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only
+beyond the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before
+mirrors.</p>
+
+<p>"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I want to talk with you."</p>
+
+<p>This was odd. It was so odd that Mrs. Newberry should have scented its
+import; only, it is difficult to scent the import of anything when one
+has supped late the night before, when the first "rat" has not been
+nested upon one's head, and when one has but an eighth part of a day in
+which to make ready for a luncheon.</p>
+
+<p>"Really, Muriel," complained Ethel. "You do choose the most remarkable
+moments for conversation. It's only eleven o'clock! What on earth can
+you want to talk about at such an hour?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel quietly seated herself by the window.</p>
+
+<p>"About Mr. Stainton," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry started so violently that a shower of gilt hairpins
+clattered upon the dressing-table and floor.</p>
+
+<p>"You may go, Marie," she gasped. She waited until the maid had shut the
+door. Then she turned her gaze full upon her niece. "What is it?" she
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>"He wants to marry me."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry floundered to her feet and rushed upon Muriel. Her flowing
+sleeves flew back to her sturdy shoulders. She flung plump arms around
+Muriel's neck.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My dear girl!" said she. She kissed the dear girl on both passive
+cheeks. Then she inquired: "You've had a letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Muriel. "He asked me."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear, he hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. It was&mdash;let me
+see&mdash;yes, it will be two weeks to-morrow evening."</p>
+
+<p>"That was when he asked me, Aunty."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry's embrace relaxed. She looked hurt.</p>
+
+<p>"And you never told me! I think that implies a lack of confidence&mdash;a
+lack of affection, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I wanted to think it over first."</p>
+
+<p>"Think it over! What was there to debate, I should like to know?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good deal, it seemed to me; and anyhow, Aunty, I think this is the
+sort of thing a girl has to decide for herself&mdash;if she can."</p>
+
+<p>"Where ever did you get such notions? A girl never <i>can</i> decide it for
+herself."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's answering smile was rueful.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> couldn't, at any rate," she said, "and so, even if I'm late about
+it, I've come to you."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry was reassured. After all, the thing had happened; Muriel's
+future&mdash;so we fatuous moderns reason&mdash;was at last secured. According to
+the custom of her time and class, Ethel had always taken it for granted
+that a poor girl married to a rich man is as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> safe as a good girl gone
+to Heaven&mdash;and more certainly comfortable. She became radiant. It was
+necessary only that they make such decent speed as would prevent any
+other young woman from interfering.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "I'm glad you <i>have</i> come, because, since long
+engagements aren't fashionable any more, your uncle and I must naturally
+have all the warning possible&mdash;for your uncle will, of course, provide
+the wedding. I think it had better be next month&mdash;yes, next month and at
+St. Bartholomew's."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's cheek paled. She turned again to the window and looked out.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you quite understand," she said. "I'm not sure&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, don't be silly," interrupted Mrs. Newberry. "I won't hear any
+foolish talk about a home wedding or a quiet wedding. It isn't the
+proper thing for a wedding to be quiet; it isn't natural; besides, you
+have been living here in your uncle's house, and you owe something to
+his position."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not it." Muriel's back was still turned; her eyes were fixed on
+the cold rain that was falling.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," asked Mrs. Newberry, in complete bewilderment, "then what <i>is</i>
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sure that I love Mr. Stainton."</p>
+
+<p>The plump Mrs. Newberry again rose. Her face was a pretty blank.</p>
+
+<p>"Love?" she repeated, as if she had heard that word<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> somewhere before
+but could not for the life of her recall where. "<i>Love</i>, did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied Muriel; "I don't know whether I love him."</p>
+
+<p>"What next?" asked Ethel. "Love? You don't know whether you love him!
+The idea! You're too young to know anything about it, my child. Of
+course you love him. You're just too young to know it, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel displayed a wistful face.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm eighteen."</p>
+
+<p>"A mere baby."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I should think I was too young to marry."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Do</i> you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, only&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry waxed wise.</p>
+
+<p>"As a matter of fact, Muriel, haven't you," she enquired, "often thought
+of marrying even when you were younger than you are now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Well</i>, then!" Mrs. Newberry in the past few weeks had acquired a few
+of her husband's mannerisms, together with some of his convictions.</p>
+
+<p>But this convincing argument did not settle matters. Muriel again faced
+the window; she seemed to draw inspiration for her incomprehensible
+stubbornness from the prospect of dripping Madison Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not so easy&mdash;&mdash;" she began.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Isn't he kind?" demanded Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he's kind."</p>
+
+<p>"You certainly think him good-looking, child. In fact, <i>I</i> should call
+him handsome."</p>
+
+<p>"I think he is <i>almost</i> handsome, Aunty."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he is. I have heard lots of women simply <i>rave</i> about him.
+And he is in love with you? You can't deny that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you know it, Aunty?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could anyone help knowing it? He shows it all the time. He can't
+keep his eyes off you."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, why didn't you tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;&mdash;Why, it was so evident that we took it for granted you
+knew."</p>
+
+<p>"We?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your uncle and I, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! There doesn't seem to be any doubt in <i>his</i> mind that he's in love
+with me."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly, Muriel; and he is rich&mdash;quite rich. Why, there are hundreds of
+girls in New York who would give their eyes to catch him. Hundreds of
+them."</p>
+
+<p>"But he is&mdash;&mdash;" Muriel hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's not young, Aunty."</p>
+
+<p>"What has that to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, but I should think it might have a good deal to do with
+it. Don't people say that the young love the young?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And marry them, you mean? Really, my dear, you have such romantic
+notions! In that case, what's to become of the old?"</p>
+
+<p>"They're supposed to have married before they became old, I should
+think. Now, I am only eighteen. I don't know&mdash;I'm only speculating about
+it, and I like Mr. Stainton very much&mdash;but when you think of a man of
+his age marrying&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Again Mrs. Newberry interrupted. She had her position to maintain: her
+position as Preston Newberry's wife.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," she said, "I can guess what is in your mind, but I cannot
+guess how it got there. You shock me."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Aunty&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That is enough. There are <i>some</i> things that a young girl should not
+discuss."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel put her hands to her burning cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you don't understand!" she cried. "You don't understand at all. I
+don't know what you mean! But he's fifty." She almost sobbed. "I don't
+care what Uncle Preston says. I <i>know</i> he is fifty!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a trying moment for Mrs. Newberry, but she met it bravely. She
+considered Muriel. Then, in the glass, she considered her own image.</p>
+
+<p>"Look at me," commanded Mrs. Newberry.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes still suffused with unshed tears, Muriel obeyed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i>," said her aunt&mdash;"do <i>I</i> look old?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not look young, but Muriel loved her, and those whom a child
+loves seldom grow old.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Muriel, loyally.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," confessed Ethel, "<i>I</i> am fifty." She was fifty-two. It was a
+sacrifice, nobly offered, upon the altar of family affection. She saw
+nothing in the future for her niece if Stainton could not be made to
+suffice. "But," she added, "you must never tell anyone. All I want to
+explain to you is that fifty is nothing&mdash;absolutely nothing at all."</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, the common fate of sacrifices made for family affection
+to go unrecognised by the family. Muriel, honest within the limits of
+her limited training, clear-sighted, was unconvinced.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow," she decided, "the question isn't whether he is old or young, I
+suppose. I guess the only question is: Do I love him? I thought all last
+night perhaps you could answer that, but of course I was wrong. I see
+that now. I dare say no person can ever really answer such a question
+but the person that asks it. I was right in the first place: I have to
+find out for myself&mdash;and yet I don't seem able to find out for myself,
+either."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>FIRE AND TOW</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Newberry's arguments were unavailing. Her pleas failed and so did
+her eulogies of Stainton: both of Stainton the hero and Stainton the
+rich man. Her tears sufficed not. There was no course but to recall her
+luncheon engagement. Her incompetence in the matter sharpened her
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>They quarrelled. Muriel, in a tempest of sobbing anger, fled to her own
+room; Mrs. Newberry fled to the luncheon.</p>
+
+<p>Upon her return Ethel found that Muriel had gone out. Preston was in his
+"study," studying the stock reports in the Wall Street edition of his
+evening paper, and to him she straightway unburdened herself.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What</i> do you think of it?" She breathlessly enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you meddled," said her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Preston, the child came to me. I didn't go to her."</p>
+
+<p>"If you didn't, it was no fault of yours. You've been trying to get at
+her for God knows how long. Let her be. For Heaven's sake, let her be,
+Ethel. If you do, she is sure to take him, because I have always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+carefully given her to understand that she may expect nothing from me. I
+have been conscientious about that. And she must know that we are doing
+her a good-sized favour this winter. But if you don't let her alone, she
+is bound to botch the whole affair."</p>
+
+<p>He put aside his newspaper and prepared to go to that one of his clubs
+at which he could obtain the best cocktail. As he was about to leave the
+house, Muriel entered it. Preston smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello," he said. "Been for a walk?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl was flushed and patently troubled.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Uncle Preston," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Hum. Just going myself. How's the weather?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lovely," murmured Muriel. She wanted to hurry to her room.</p>
+
+<p>"What? Why, when I looked out a bit ago, I was sure it was raining."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I believe it is raining. I didn't notice."</p>
+
+<p>Preston chuckled. He put out a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched
+her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"I've always heard that love was blind," he said, "but nowadays it seems
+to be water-proof, too. Look here, my dear: your aunt has been dropping
+a hint or two to me, and I congratulate you."</p>
+
+<p>"On what?" asked Muriel, bristling into immediate rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>Again Preston chuckled.</p>
+
+<p>"Tut, tut!" he said: he always treated her as if she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> were the child
+that he had always maintained to his wife she was not. "You know well
+enough. He's a fine fellow and well-to-do. Even if we could afford to
+keep you on here indefinitely, which of course we can't, it would be a
+good job. Lucky girl!"</p>
+
+<p>He went out after that and left his wife's niece free again to hide
+herself. But not entirely. Ethel, unable to resist her desire for
+finality, soon tapped at Muriel's door.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!" she called.</p>
+
+<p>For some time there was no answer, though Mrs. Newberry made sure that
+she heard sounds within the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Who is there?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's me&mdash;Aunt Ethel."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Aunt Ethel?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Muriel&mdash;are you all right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite, thanks."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you want anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing at <i>all</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing at all, thank you."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Muriel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The girl apparently waited for her aunt to finish the sentence that
+Ethel had not completed.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>Ethel softly tried the door: as she had supposed, it was locked.</p>
+
+<p>"O, Muriel, do open the door and let me in."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"But why? I'm&mdash;I'm dressing."</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;surely you know why, Muriel. Why won't you confide in me?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a long wait for the answer to this question, but the answer,
+when it came, was resolute enough:</p>
+
+<p>"I've nothing to confide. Please go away now, Aunt Ethel, and leave me
+alone. Please do."</p>
+
+<p>Ethel went. She returned, of course, from time to time, whenever she
+could think of a new excuse or a new suggestion; but she was always
+worsted.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel did not descend to dinner that night until she was sure that Mr.
+Newberry, whose deterrent attitude she instinctively counted upon, was
+there with her aunt. She contrived to be left alone not once with Ethel.
+It was the habit of the members of the Newberry household to breakfast
+together only by chance, which meant that they generally ate separately.
+When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she
+had a headache.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What</i> do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her
+husband.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.</p>
+
+<p>"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is
+what <i>you</i> may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a
+mess."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Preston&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."</p>
+
+<p>So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's
+card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of
+whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at
+sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young
+people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of
+most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied.
+All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart
+a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that
+their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much
+Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the
+books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and
+sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> of dreams. But
+she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a
+glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.</p>
+
+<p>What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his
+attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed.
+If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth,
+that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the
+unit of measurement for a life&mdash;a mere figure of speech&mdash;something
+simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name.
+What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in
+its substance? Why should she even ask these questions&mdash;and why, when
+she asked, could she find no answer?</p>
+
+<p>She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her.
+Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps&mdash;as a traveller may see an
+unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash&mdash;she saw this now; the loss
+might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet
+acquired.</p>
+
+<p>Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that
+lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it
+in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl,
+descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now
+ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater
+Ignorance. Companionship,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> affection, kindly feeling&mdash;all these things
+and more&mdash;she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and
+dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual,
+intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes
+it&mdash;this she did not as yet know, had never known.</p>
+
+<p>The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The
+crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy,
+ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there
+since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing.
+She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile,
+how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came
+forward with outstretched hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you thought things over?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for
+pretence was passed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the
+tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make
+up your mind?"</p>
+
+<p>She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> she traced a stupid
+figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"To love me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She
+owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love
+you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all,
+would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."</p>
+
+<p>It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not
+create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her
+face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all
+casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black
+hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen
+her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky
+and bathed in the light of stars.</p>
+
+<p>Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and
+seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered
+passion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation,
+passion mastered him. The rein had snapped.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know&mdash;there are
+things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel?
+Answer!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"</p>
+
+<p>She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any
+man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer,
+she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his
+strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.</p>
+
+<p>The miracle&mdash;oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle&mdash;happened.
+Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully,
+terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole
+body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried
+to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.</p>
+
+<p>"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I
+know now. I love you!"</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"</h3>
+
+
+<p>And so they were married. Mrs. Newberry had her way: they were married
+within the month and within the church.</p>
+
+<p>Preston's troubles, meanwhile, were hard to bear, and were not borne in
+silence. By faith, as has been noted, he was a Presbyterian; but by
+reason of his social position it was incumbent to attend
+occasionally&mdash;so often, in fact, as he went to church at all&mdash;an
+establishment of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion. Yet it appeared,
+when he came to arrange for the wedding of his wife's niece, which was
+the first he had ever arranged for, that there were ecclesiastical
+distinctions about weddings concerning which he had never previously
+dreamed. There were certain churches where one was expected to be a
+regular Sunday attendant; but when it came to a wedding, these would not
+serve: a wedding, to be socially correct, must occur in one of two or
+three churches in which, apparently, nothing else ever occurred. They
+seemed to be set aside for the exclusive business of marrying, and they
+married only exclusive people. Through one's sexton one rented one of
+these as one rents the Berkeley Lyceum, save that, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> matter of the
+wedding church, its rector is thrown in for good measure; then, when one
+proposed to introduce one's friend Buggins, the composer, to play the
+wedding-marches, one was told that only the church's regular organist
+was permitted to play the church's superb organ, and that, if one really
+required music, the regular organist could be hired at so much&mdash;and "so
+much" was not so pleasantly indefinite as it sounded.</p>
+
+<p>"I never before realised what my father-in-law went through for me,"
+said Preston.</p>
+
+<p>"Things are never so hard as you think they'll be," said his wife in an
+effort at comfort.</p>
+
+<p>"Things are always worse," replied the uncomforted Newberry. "Thank the
+Lord, I'll never have to arrange for another marriage. I thought that
+was Heaven's business, anyhow: I thought marriages were made in heaven.
+I'd rather be the advance agent of a minstrel show."</p>
+
+<p>Still, in some fashion or other&mdash;and Mrs. Newberry and the papers were
+satisfied that it was the very best fashion&mdash;the thing was accomplished.
+There was an immediate "Engagement Dinner" given by Ethel; there were
+other dinners given by Jim; there were luncheons given by friends of
+Muriel and the Newberrys; then, at last, there was Stainton's
+bachelor-supper to George Holt and the ushers-to-be, whom Holt had
+collected, held at Sherry's, whence everybody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> except the host departed
+in one of the four socially requisite stages of drunkenness, and so the
+climax, with the hired church, the hired parson, the frock coats, the
+staring eyes, the odour of flowers, the demure bridesmaids, and the
+hired organist playing Wagner and Mendelssohn and "The Voice That
+Breathed O'er Eden."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware
+that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go
+by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the
+young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which
+the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel
+of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of
+the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane
+man would willingly describe as sane. He remembered only that he felt
+white and solemn; that he had an interminable wait in the vestry with
+Holt, a silently reconciled best-man, and a second wait at the altar
+rail, where he was the centre of interest and commiseration until the
+bride appeared, when he fell to an importance scarcely equal to that of
+the clergyman and far below that of the pew opener. Only these things he
+remembered, and that Muriel, with her sweetly serious face admirably set
+off by the white in which she was clad, looked all that he wished her to
+look and strangely spiritual besides. The next event<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> of which he was at
+all certainly conscious was the hurried reception and the swiftly
+following bridal breakfast where Preston Newberry made truly pathetic
+references to some "lamp of sunshine" that had been "filched forever"
+from the Newberry home.</p>
+
+<p>Preston was more than a little relieved. He found it in his heart to
+wish Muriel well.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, youngster," he said, when she came to him in her going-away
+gown. "Good-bye." ("For the sake of goodness, Ethel, stop that
+snivelling!") "He's a fine old buck and he'll be kind to you, I'm sure."
+("My dear, <i>stop</i> it! Hasn't the girl got what you've wanted her to have
+ever since you set eyes on him?")</p>
+
+<p>Muriel heard the asides addressed to Mrs. Newberry and winced at the
+adjective openly applied to Jim, but she bit her lip and tossed her head
+and went away radiant for the first month of their honeymoon in Aiken,
+where she was happy with new and tremendous delights that received and
+asked and gave and demanded and grew.</p>
+
+<p>She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was
+as if her material world had always been at twilight&mdash;a soft, luminous,
+fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless&mdash;and that now, without the
+intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of
+dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She
+opened her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in
+it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave
+them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her
+eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of
+his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have
+questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed
+even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was
+certain that she knew love. She was in love with love.</p>
+
+<p>For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic
+prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her
+loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it&mdash;his eyes shone and
+his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this
+was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to
+the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten
+moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the
+ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young&mdash;he was still young!</p>
+
+<p>"Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her.</p>
+
+<p>This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting
+room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers,
+but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head,
+with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her
+arms about his waist.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so
+sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of
+endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our
+beginning."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him
+to a great tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>"Beginning?" he echoed. "Yes, that's it. It must be the beginning of
+something that will never have an end."</p>
+
+<p>Her dusky eyes glowed.</p>
+
+<p>"Never!" she repeated, and then, as an unreasoned wistfulness shot
+through her, she whispered: "It never will end, will it, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could it, sweetheart?"</p>
+
+<p>"But I mean it will always go on like this&mdash;just like this. I don't want
+us just to grow used to each other, just stupid and merely
+satisfied&mdash;just&mdash;just affectionate and fond."</p>
+
+<p>"We can never come to that. We love too much, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"Then don't let's forget ever," she pleaded, her arms tightening. "It
+must all be honeymoon, forever and forever."</p>
+
+<p>He raised her face and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Always," he said&mdash;"always morning. We will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> never let the shadows
+lengthen; we will hold back the hands of the clock." He kissed her
+again. "You know that we will?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I know&mdash;I know," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>They had no quarrels. There was only one matter in which she deviated so
+much as a hair's breadth from his ideal of her and there was but one
+occasion when she was hurt by any act of his.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these affairs sprang from a conversation started by a
+letter with a blue French twenty-five-centime stamp upon it, which their
+always discreet waiter brought to the rooms one morning with the coffee.
+It had been forwarded from New York.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" asked Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had been reading with his iron-grey brows in a pucker and a
+smile on his lips.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a Frenchman trying to write English," he said. "He doesn't
+succeed."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but what <i>is</i> it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only business, dear."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I ought to see it," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"If it is business, I ought to see it," she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Trouble your little head with such matters? Not much."</p>
+
+<p>She came to him as if to kiss him, then quickly seized the letter and
+ran laughing away. He pursued her,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> laughing, too; but she was more
+agile than her husband, and she managed easily to evade him until her
+eyes had caught enough of the letter to enable her to guess its entire
+contents.</p>
+
+<p>"So they want to buy your mine?" she asked. "They say their expert has
+returned and reported"&mdash;she glanced again at the letter as his fingers
+closed on it&mdash;"reported favourably."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said; "it's a French syndicate, some wealthy men in Lyons, and
+they want to buy the mine."</p>
+
+<p>"But you won't sell?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I can get my figure, I will."</p>
+
+<p>"Your mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Our mine."</p>
+
+<p>For that she kissed him.</p>
+
+<p>"But, if it's ours, I have something to say about it, and I won't let
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her pretty assumption.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I think it would be horrid of you to sell it after all the
+years you spent looking for it."</p>
+
+<p>"I wasn't looking for it on its own account, dear; I was looking for it
+because of what it would bring me."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd take me to see it."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a dull place, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd take me. I wouldn't find it dull."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall take you to France instead."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"To sell the mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"To try."</p>
+
+<p>"Horrid!" she pouted.</p>
+
+<p>"But, dearest," he explained, "I don't want to have a mine on my hands.
+I have you."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I keep you busy?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are a gold mine. Don't you see? I want to be free. If I can get my
+price, we shall be rich."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought we were rich now."</p>
+
+<p>"With a mine run by an agent, yes. But if I sold to this syndicate&mdash;now,
+you mustn't talk about this outside, you know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Or write it home."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, if these people buy, we shall be rich without any more
+agents or any more work. I have had enough of mining to make me certain
+that I don't want to chain any son of mine down to the business."</p>
+
+<p>"Any&mdash;&mdash;" The word turned her suddenly white. In the midst of the
+intimacies of the honeymoon, reference to children painted her cheeks
+with scarlet.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled indulgently. He put a strong arm about her and patted
+her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, any sons, dear," he said. "Did you never think of that? Did you
+never think how sweet it would be if we two that are one should really
+see ourselves made one in a little baby?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To his amazement she burst into tears.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want a baby!" she wailed, her head on his shoulder, her hands
+clasped behind him. "I don't want a baby. No, no, no!"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to persuade her, but he could scarcely make himself heard until
+he abandoned the topic.</p>
+
+<p>"There, there," he said, "it's all right. I wouldn't hurt you, dearest;
+you know I wouldn't. There will be nothing to worry about."</p>
+
+<p>His heart ached because he had hurt her. He told himself that he should
+have remembered that her present nervous condition could not be normal.
+He upbraided himself for making to her, no matter how long he might have
+been married to her, a frank proposition that her sensitive nature
+probably repelled only because of the matter-of-fact way in which he had
+suggested what, he thought, should have been more delicately put. He did
+not change his design; he merely ceased to speak of it. Throughout the
+world the only persons not consulted about the possible bearing of
+children are the only persons able to bear them. Stainton no longer made
+an exception of Muriel. He decided that the best management of these
+matters was to leave them to chance for their occurrence and nature for
+their acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>This conversation took place a week or more after their verbal
+banishment of sunsets. On the night following, Jim at the demand of his
+abounding health,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> fell asleep earlier than usual and slept, as always,
+soundly; but his wife chanced to be nervous and restless. She lay long
+awake and she was lonely. Twice she wished to rouse him for her
+comforting; twice she refrained. When, finally, she did sleep, her sleep
+was heavy, and she awoke late to find him gone. She hurried into the
+sitting-room, but he was not there, and it was quite ten minutes later
+when he returned, fully dressed and glowing, a newspaper in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Where on earth have you been?" she asked. She had crawled back into
+bed, and she looked very beautiful as she lay there, her black hair wide
+upon the pillows and the lacy sleeves of her night-dress brushed high on
+her wide-flung arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Downstairs. You were fast asleep and you looked so comfy I hadn't the
+heart to waken you. It's a wonderful morning&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Jim, I woke up all alone! I was afraid!"</p>
+
+<p>He sat on the bed beside her. He took her in his arms, flattered. He
+gave her the chuckling consolation that the strong, knowing their
+strength, vouchsafe the weak. He was sorry that she should have felt
+badly, but he was immensely proud that she should be dependent.</p>
+
+<p>"Too bad, too bad!" he said. "But it won't happen again. Next time I'll
+either rouse you or else sit tight till your dear eyes open of their own
+accord."</p>
+
+<p>He was still holding the newspaper in one of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> embracing hands. It
+rustled against her back, and, freeing herself, she saw it.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"A newspaper, of course. I thought I should like to see what was going
+on in the world. It suddenly struck me that I hadn't looked at a
+newspaper since I read the notice of our wedding&mdash;five hundred years
+ago."</p>
+
+<p>But Muriel pouted.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," she said, "I don't see why you should begin now."</p>
+
+<p>"One has to begin sometime."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why. Is anything between us different to-day from
+yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not, sweetheart."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I thought we weren't going to be like other people. I thought we
+were always going to be enough to each other."</p>
+
+<p>"We are. Of course we are. But you were asleep, and, anyhow, I said I
+was never going to run away again. Besides, Muriel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why," Muriel maintained.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to quiet her with kisses. He held her close and pressed her
+face to his.</p>
+
+<p>During all that month, these were the only occasions when they so much
+as approached a difference of opinion. They lived, instead, in that
+crowded winter resort, like a man and a girl made one upon a new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> island
+in a deserted sea. They walked, hand in hand, and, as it seemed to them,
+heart to heart, through a wonderful world that was new to them.
+Happiness sparkled in their eyes and trembled at their lips. There were
+times when their happiness almost made them afraid. Heaven was very
+near.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as the month ended, the blasting idea came to Muriel: she was
+going to have a child.</p>
+
+<p>It came like that. Just when everything was perfect, just when love had
+realized itself. The thought lay beside her on a morning that she had
+expected to wake to so differently. Muriel felt as if it were the
+thought that had wakened her.</p>
+
+<p>She cast a frightened look at Stainton, who was lying beside her, his
+iron-grey hair disordered, his mouth slightly open, snoring gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim!" she said. She clutched at his pajama jacket and tried to shake
+him. "Jim! Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>He awoke, startled. He rubbed his eyes:</p>
+
+<p>"Eh? What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw her face.</p>
+
+<p>"My God! What is it, dearie?"</p>
+
+<p>She gasped her fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!" he cried, and held her tight to his heart. His first feeling
+was a flash of gratitude: his desire had been granted; he was to be the
+father of a child.</p>
+
+<p>But Muriel only clung to him and cried. She did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> not want a baby. She
+was horrified at thought of it. She was panic-stricken.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton watched her grief with a sore heart and essayed to soothe it;
+yet, all the while, his heart swelled with a reasonless pride that
+appeared to him supremely reasonable: he had performed the Divine Act;
+within the year he would see a living soul clothed in his own flesh and
+moulded in his own image. Like hers, his eyes, though from a vastly
+different cause, were dimmed by tears.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, my dear!" he whispered. "O, my dear!"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel, broken-hearted, wept hysterically.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton stroked her blue-black hair. All women were like this, he
+reflected; it was a law of nature. It was the same law that, in the
+lower animals, first drove the female to repulse the male and then
+submit to him. In mankind it began by making the woman dread the
+accomplishment of her natural destiny and ended by awakening the
+maternal instinct, seemingly so at variance with its preceding action.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Muriel looked up and saw his expression. Hers grew wild.</p>
+
+<p>"You&mdash;did you know it would be?" she stammered.</p>
+
+<p>"There, there!" said Stainton, stroking her hair.</p>
+
+<p>She drew herself free.</p>
+
+<p>"You did know!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton prepared to yield to the natural law.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I didn't <i>know</i>, dear. How could I be certain?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but you were, you were!" she cried. "You knew. And I didn't. I
+didn't know! I didn't know! And you did&mdash;<i>you</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest," said Stainton. He tried to take her hand.</p>
+
+<p>She was sitting straight up in bed, looking down at him, her hair
+falling over her nightgown.</p>
+
+<p>"And you told me I wouldn't&mdash;&mdash;You told me it wouldn't be!" she accused.</p>
+
+<p>"I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Yes, you did. You said there would be nothing to worry about.
+Those were your very words, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but, dear, there won't be anything to worry about."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing to worry about!" she repeated. She put her fingers to her
+temples. "Not for <i>you</i>, of course!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was hurt: "Dearie, you know that if I could&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And anyhow," she interrupted, "you didn't mean that. You meant me to
+think what I did think."</p>
+
+<p>He felt that, in a sense, she was right: he had meant at least to quiet
+her, to divert her thoughts. He was ashamed of that. He sought to
+comfort her.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you are mistaken," he said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" she said. She got up and, slipperless, began to pace the room.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton struggled to his elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"But, dearie," he said, seeking relief in logic, "you must have known
+that when a girl married, she must expect&mdash;it was expected of her&mdash;it
+was her duty&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She continued to walk, her head bent.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered; "but I didn't know she would have to right away, or
+when she didn't want to, or&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Genuinely amazed and genuinely pained, Stainton swung his legs from the
+covers and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his
+knees, his mouth agape.</p>
+
+<p>"Sweetheart," he asked, "don't you love me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I love you, Jim."&mdash;She was still walking.</p>
+
+<p>"Then what did you think marriage was for?"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped before him. "I thought it was for love," she said; and,
+crumpling at his feet, put her face upon his knees.</p>
+
+<p>He bent over her, stroking her hair, calling her by the names that they
+had invented for each other, waiting for the natural law to assert
+itself again and trying, meanwhile, to alleviate her apprehensions.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps, after all, you are mistaken."</p>
+
+<p>This was the burden of his consolation.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, she was not mistaken, and the succeeding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> days proved it.
+Nor was the natural law swift in asserting itself.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think," he once tried to urge the law, "that it would be
+beautiful if we should have a little baby?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> sha'n't be beautiful!" she wailed. "I shall lose my looks. I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I shall. I know. I have seen it&mdash;on the street&mdash;lots of places. I
+shall grow&mdash;I shall&mdash;&mdash;And all my lovely clothes!&mdash;Oh!"&mdash;She broke off
+and hid her eyes&mdash;"I shall grow vulgar looking and horrid!"</p>
+
+<p>They were walking along a country lane, and Stainton glanced about
+nervously, fearing that her words, spoken in a tone altogether
+unrestrained, would certainly be heard by more ears than his own. The
+road, however, was empty. He drew her aside to a spot where the woods
+met the lane and where, a few paces to the left of the lane, the trees
+hid them. He took her into his arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," he said, "if I could go through this for you, I would; you
+know that."</p>
+
+<p>"I know you can't go through it for me," she wept, "and so it's easy
+enough for you to say."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Jim, "I can't go through it for you, and so you see, it must
+be God's will that it should be as it is to be."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was worn out by the days of worry, but she made one more appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim," she said, "can't you do something else for me?"</p>
+
+<p>He knitted his brows.</p>
+
+<p>"Something else?" he wondered. "I can love you; I can back you up with
+all the love of my body and brain and soul. You may always count on
+that, sweetheart."</p>
+
+<p>"But"&mdash;her eyes looked straight into his&mdash;"can't you <i>do</i> something?"</p>
+
+<p>He understood. He fell back a step, his face grey.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!" he whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"I've read of such things in the papers," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!"</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were so horrified that she hung her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's wrong; I know it's wrong," she said. "But, oh, if you knew how
+afraid I was of this and how I hate and how&mdash;O, Jim, Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>She tottered forward, and his arms received her.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel, my dear wife," he said. "My own dear little girl, to think that
+when God has put a life into our keeping, you&mdash;&mdash;Why, Muriel, that is
+murder!"</p>
+
+<p>That word won Stainton's victory. Muriel succumbed. For her it was like
+the safe passing of one of those physical crises when the patient had
+rather die than face the pain of further living; for him it was the
+sealing of his happiness.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>ANOTHER ROAD</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was a few days later that Muriel, the reconciled, decided that she
+wanted to leave Aiken.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think," she asked, for she had come unconsciously often to
+use phrases characteristic of Jim, "that a change of scene would be good
+for us both?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had not thought so. He had wandered so much in his life that,
+now wandering was no longer a necessity of life, he was tired of it.
+Besides, he was eminently satisfied with Aiken.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he said. "I think it's splendid here. Haven't we
+been&mdash;aren't you happy, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was looking out of the window of their hotel sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I'm happy," she said in a low voice. "At least," she added,
+"I know I ought to be, and I know I never knew what happiness was till I
+had you. It was only that I thought it would be&mdash;perhaps it would be
+good for me&mdash;now&mdash;if we travelled."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton cursed himself for a negligent brute.</p>
+
+<p>"What a beast I am!" he said, his arm encircling her waist. "We shall go
+wherever you want, and we shall go to-morrow."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Muriel smiled ruefully.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," she submitted, "the real reason is only that I've always
+wanted so to travel and have never had the chance before."</p>
+
+<p>But Stainton would hear of no reason but her first. He upbraided himself
+again for his stupidity in not guessing her need before she could have
+given it expression.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been cruel to you!" he declared.</p>
+
+<p>She stopped him with a swift embrace.</p>
+
+<p>"You're never anything," she contritely vowed, "but just darling to me.
+I only thought&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know, I know. Where shall we go, Muriel? How about France? I ought to
+see that syndicate, you know: I ought to meet those men personally. Then
+there's Paris. I have always longed for Paris myself, and now I shall
+have you for my guide there."</p>
+
+<p>"Your guide, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you speak French like a book, and I have forgotten nearly all of
+the little I ever learned."</p>
+
+<p>"I speak school-French," Muriel corrected him.</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate," he assured her, "yours is fluent, and I can only stammer
+in the language. Then, too," he went on, "there will be the trip across.
+That will be good for you. Sea air ought to be good for you." She
+winced, and so he hurried to add: "I think I need a bracer, too.&mdash;Are
+you a good sailor, Muriel?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I've never been on the ocean. Are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I used to be." His eyes darkened. "It's a good many years since I have
+tried the water. But I know I shall be all right. I am in such splendid
+shape. Where is a newspaper? Wait a minute; I'll ring for one. Aren't
+you glad for newspapers now? They carry shipping advertisements, you
+see. We'll look up the sailings. We have found our first five heavens in
+America; we must find the sixth in France, and then we must come back
+here so that our seventh will happen on American soil."</p>
+
+<p>Considering the fact that he did not wish to go, he was
+self-sacrificingly energetic. He was so energetic that they left Aiken
+on the next morning and, three days later, were aboard their steamer.</p>
+
+<p>The Newberrys were out of town, still enjoying the rest that they had
+earned by settling Muriel for life. George Holt was, however, there and
+had come all the way to Hoboken to see them off.</p>
+
+<p>"And as a German steamship captain once said to me when I asked him to
+lunch with me at my club," explained Holt, "it's a terribly long way
+from Hoboken to America."</p>
+
+<p>"It was good of you to come," said Muriel, while the crowd of
+second-class passengers and the friends of passengers jostled about the
+first-class promenade deck. "Don't you wish you were coming along?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Better," said Stainton, already in his steamer cap.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks, no," said Holt, and then, as the siren blew: "If you'd asked my
+advice before you bought your tickets, old man, I'd have told you:
+'Don't go to sea; but if you do go, don't play cards; but if you do play
+cards, cut the cards. They'll cheat you anyhow, but it'll take longer.'"</p>
+
+<p>He waved a plump farewell and bared a bald head and waddled down the
+gang-plank. The band began to play, and Stainton and his wife went to
+their stateroom to unpack: they were travelling without a maid because
+Muriel had said something about wanting to secure one in France.</p>
+
+<p>By sunrise next morning the <i>Friedrich Barbarossa</i> was racing through
+the grey Atlantic with even speed. It was late winter&mdash;it was really
+early spring&mdash;and she had already encountered a storm and heavy seas,
+but the lean ocean express dove through the former and rode the latter
+as easily as if she had been a railway train running on tried rails
+along a perfect roadbed. There was no reason in the world why anybody
+should be sick aboard her; few others were sick; yet, Stainton, on that
+second day out, remained below.</p>
+
+<p>He could not account for it. He did not like to confess it. He
+especially hated to confess, when he awoke to see his wife putting the
+finishing touches to her toilet in the far corner of their big
+stateroom. But this was manifestly a case where discretion must triumph<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+over valour: he no sooner got to his feet than he got off them again.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use," he sighed. "I don't know what it was. I wish they didn't
+have such good dinners on this boat, for it must have been something I
+ate."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was all consolation.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me ring for the steward to bring your breakfast here," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Not if you don't want to kill me! Don't mention food again, please&mdash;I
+wonder if that lobster were just fresh."</p>
+
+<p>She insisted for a long time that she would remain below with him, but
+he overruled her. He said that the open air would be good for her, even
+if she did not seem to need it, and he meant that, although he meant
+also&mdash;what he dared not say&mdash;that he wanted to struggle alone with his
+malady. Finally, therefore, Muriel descended to the big dining saloon
+alone and surprisedly found herself breakfasting with enjoyment, in
+spite of her husband's absence.</p>
+
+<p>She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in
+her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the
+evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy
+novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and
+failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed
+her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters,
+beating to crests<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line
+for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so
+often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She
+went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the
+band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about
+with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and
+resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely,
+but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings,
+oysterplant ménagère, succotash, biscuit japonais and nougat parfait.
+She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward
+motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace passengers walked by
+on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait
+had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road.</p>
+
+<p>He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and
+agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding
+youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy&mdash;a boy not five years
+her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and
+alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache
+above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and
+the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank
+curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own
+interested scrutiny and, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> they answered it with an honest smile,
+whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim
+still slept.</p>
+
+<p>She went on deck again. She knew that the blond young man would be
+there, though how she knew it she could not guess, and yet she argued
+that there was no reason why his presence should banish her from the
+free air.</p>
+
+<p>She sat down. She saw him coming past, on a walk about the deck, and
+looked away. The second time he passed she glanced at him, and he smiled
+and raised his steamer cap. A gust of wind fluttered her rug, and he
+stooped to rearrange it.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," stammered Muriel. "It's not necessary, really. The
+steward&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The young man bowed. It was a bow that, in New York, would have struck
+her as absurdly elaborate; here she liked it.</p>
+
+<p>"But it is, I assure you, a pleasure," he protested.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke English without an accent, but with a precision that, for all
+its ease, betrayed a Teutonic parentage and education.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," repeated Muriel, and she blushed again.</p>
+
+<p>The young man stood before her, his arms folded, swaying in serene
+certainty with the rolling rhythm of the boat.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"May I sit down?" he asked, indicating, with a gesture of his hand, the
+row of empty chairs beside her.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel made, by way of reply, what she conceived to be a social
+masterstroke.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," she answered; "but I am here only for a few moments. I'll
+soon have to be running downstairs&mdash;I mean 'below'&mdash;to look after my
+husband."</p>
+
+<p>The stranger's handsome face expressed concern, yet the concern, it
+immediately appeared, was not because of Muriel's marital state, but
+because of her husband's physical plight.</p>
+
+<p>"I am so sorry," he said, taking Jim's chair. "He is ill then, your
+husband?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel did not seem to like this.</p>
+
+<p>"Not very," said she. "He is"&mdash;she searched for a phrase characteristic
+of Stainton&mdash;"he is just a bit under the weather."</p>
+
+<p>"So," sighed the stranger, unduly comprehending. "Ah, perhaps Madame has
+made more voyages than has he?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, this is the first trip across for both of us."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed? But you seem to be so excellent a sailor! Is it only youth that
+makes you so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know." She was clearly, her will to the contrary, a little
+flattered. "I seem to take naturally to the water."</p>
+
+<p>"But not so your husband!"</p>
+
+<p>"He will be all right to-morrow."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Only to-day he is, your husband, not all right? I am so sorry. Perhaps
+he is not so young as you are?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel felt herself again flushing. She at once became more angry at her
+anger than she was at what, upon reflection, she decided to be nothing
+more than frank curiosity on the part of her interlocutor.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he is young!" she heard herself saying.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger either did not observe her emotions or did not care to show
+that he observed them. He launched at once upon an unrestrained flow of
+ship talk. It seemed that he was an Austrian, though of Hungarian blood
+on his mother's side. He had gone into the army, was an officer&mdash;already
+a captain, she gathered&mdash;and he had been serving for some months as an
+attaché of his country's legation in Washington. Now he had been
+transferred to the legation at Paris. Muriel noted that he spoke with
+many gestures. She tried to dislike these as being un-American, and when
+she found it hard to dislike what were, after all, graceful adjuncts to
+his conversation and frequent aids to his adequate expression, she was
+annoyed and tried to indicate her annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were a soldier?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>With another European bow he produced a silver case engraved with his
+arms, drew from it a card, which he handed to Muriel. The card announced
+him as Captain Franz Esterházy von B. von Klausen.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But yes," he said. "Please."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel slipped the card into her belt.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to like the diplomatic service better," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"I go where I am sent," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you ever go to war?" she persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had to. Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"And fight?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dear lady, but yes. I do not like, though, to fight, for war is what
+one of your great generals said: it is Hell."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you went into the army?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because all my family have for generations done thus. I was born for
+that, I was brought up for that, and when I came to know"&mdash;he extended
+his palms&mdash;"I had to live," he concluded.</p>
+
+<p>This was scarcely Muriel's ideal of a soldier. She changed the
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you know Europe perfectly?" she enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Not Russia," answered von Klausen; "but Germany, France, Spain, Italy
+and England&mdash;yes. You will travel much?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel did not know; very likely they would. They would do whatever Mr.
+Stainton&mdash;Mr. Stainton was her husband&mdash;elected: she always did, always
+wanted to do, whatever her husband elected.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The young man bowed at mention of Jim's name, as if he were being
+introduced.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," he gravely agreed. "Certainly, since he is your
+husband.&mdash;But you must not miss my country, dear lady, as so many
+foolish tourists miss it. It is the Tyrol, my fathers' country: the
+Austrian Tyrol. There is scenery&mdash;the most beautiful scenery in all the
+world: superb, majestic. You love scenery? Please."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel gave a surprised assent.</p>
+
+<p>"Then do not neglect the Tyrol. They call it the Austrian Tyrol, but it
+is really the only real Tyrol. Come to Innsbruck by the way of Zurich.
+That will bring you along the Waldersee, and so, too, you pass Castle
+Lichtenstein and come across the border at just beyond the ruins of
+Gräphang. You will see genuine mountains then, gigantic, snow-capped,
+with forests as dense as&mdash;as what you call a hairbrush&mdash;black,
+impenetrable. To the very tops of some the train climbs; it trembles
+over abysses. You look from the window of it down&mdash;down&mdash;down, a
+thousand feet, fifteen hundred, into valleys exquisite, with pink
+farmhouses or grey in them, the roofs weighted with large stones, the
+sides painted with crucifixes, or ornamented statues of the Blessed
+Virgin."</p>
+
+<p>He loved his country and he made it vivid to her. He rambled on and on.
+Muriel became a more and more fascinated listener. It was not until two
+hours later that she thought, with a guilty start, of Jim.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She excused herself hastily and, leaving the Austrian bowing by the
+rail, ran to the close stateroom and her husband.</p>
+
+<p>He was awake, but still sick.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't bother about me," muttered Stainton as she entered&mdash;"and <i>please</i>
+don't bang the door!"</p>
+
+<p>She considered him compassionately. His hair fell in disorder over his
+haggard face; his cheeks were faintly green.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't I do something for you?" she asked, stepping forward.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton failed in a smile, but feebly motioned her away.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid not," said he&mdash;"unless you stop the ship. All I need is a
+little rest. You had better go back on deck. Really."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel delayed.</p>
+
+<p>"A man spoke to me on deck," she breathlessly confessed. "An Austrian
+diplomat, I think he is. My rug blew, and he rearranged it. Do you
+mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mind?" asked Stainton. "Certainly not.&mdash;How this boat pitches!&mdash;Talk to
+him, by all means. These things are common on shipboard, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was reassured. She returned to the deck, but von Klausen was not
+there, and she did not see him again until evening.</p>
+
+<p>Then, though she still dutifully wished that Jim were with her, she
+found her appetite better than ever.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> She ventured upon a lonely
+cocktail. She ate some Blue Points. Captain von Klausen sent to her
+table, with his card, a pint of champagne, and she ordered potage
+Mogador, duckling balls with turnips, cèpes Provençals, sacher tart, and
+ice cream.</p>
+
+<p>When she reached the promenade-deck, von Klausen was already there. He
+had dined in evening clothes, but these were now hidden by the light
+rain-coat that swathed his lithe young figure from neck to heels. Muriel
+observed that its shoulders fitted to the shoulders of the wearer and
+had none of the deceptiveness of the padded shoulders to which she was
+once familiar in American coats.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen the phosphorus?" he asked, as she met him at the rail.
+His lifted cap showed his wind-tossed blond hair, and his ruddy face
+gleamed with salt spray.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel admitted her ignorance of phosphorus.</p>
+
+<p>"But," said von Klausen, "that is one of the sights of the voyage, and I
+have not often on the Atlantic seen it finer than it is to-night."</p>
+
+<p>He took her forward, by the starboard rail, under the bridge. Behind
+them were the closely curtained windows of the writing-room, forward
+was, only ten feet below them, the now emptied deck reserved for the
+third-class passengers, and beyond that, higher, rose and fell,
+rhythmically, the keen, dark prow. They were quite alone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Look there!" said von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>He pointed over the rail to where the inky surface of the sea was broken
+by the speed of the <i>Friedrich Barbarossa's</i> passage, bursting into
+boiling, hissing, angry patches of bright whiteness.</p>
+
+<p>Timidly Muriel extended her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see it?" asked von Klausen. He stood close beside her.</p>
+
+<p>"I see the waves," said Muriel, "and the white foam."</p>
+
+<p>"But the phosphorus&mdash;you do not see that? There&mdash;and there!"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Look though," said he. "You do not look in just the correct direction.
+Please. Ahead, to the left. No; away a little from the ship&mdash;a little;
+not too much&mdash;where we have hit the water and the water recedes from us.
+It is beautiful&mdash;beautiful! See!"</p>
+
+<p>The great boat rose on a sudden wave. Von Klausen gripped the rail with
+one slim hand; the other, its arm around her waist, he placed about her
+farther arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Now!" he said, and, letting go of the rail, pointed.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes followed his finger, and there, shining green and yellow, now
+clear, now opalescent, from burning cores to nebulous edges, she saw
+what seemed to be live stars smouldering and flaming in the hearts of
+the waves.</p>
+
+<p>"I see," she said. "It is beautiful&mdash;beautiful!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was, she suddenly realised, but repeating his own phrase. Why should
+she not? The phrase was commonplace enough; besides, the phosphorus
+<i>was</i> beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Then she became conscious of his arm about her, became conscious that
+this arm about her had not been unpleasant; was indignant with him,
+silently, and indignant with herself; made certain, in her own mind,
+that he had put his arm around her waist only that he might protect
+her&mdash;and thus soon left him and went to bed without waking Jim.</p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes after an unquiet night, to find that Stainton was
+somewhat improved, though too mindful of his experience of the preceding
+day to trust himself on deck.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll wait," he decided, "till to-morrow or this evening. Yes, I think I
+shall manage it this evening. I'm really in good shape, but I must have
+eaten something that didn't agree with me. You go up, Muriel. If you see
+that Austrian fellow, don't forget to give him my compliments and tell
+him I'll probably have the pleasure of meeting him this evening. What
+did you say he was?"</p>
+
+<p>"His name," said Muriel, "is von Klausen." She hated herself for her
+unreasonable disinclination to mention the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>"H'm&mdash;a diplomat, did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something of the sort."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"As old as most diplomats then, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Muriel; "he's&mdash;he's rather young."</p>
+
+<p>The ship began to descend a lofty wave, and Stainton lay back in his
+berth. His face, with its full day's growth of beard, looked grey.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," he said. "Run along, dear&mdash;and look in about noon."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel obeyed him. Their chairs were well forward, and when she reached
+them she saw von Klausen again seated in that which bore Stainton's
+card.</p>
+
+<p>He rose at sight of her. No motion of the boat seemed ever to affect him
+to awkwardness.</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband," he asked, bareheaded and erect while she seated herself;
+"he is, I trust, better?"</p>
+
+<p>"He hasn't really been sick," she asseverated with what she knew, as she
+said it, to be wholly unnecessary emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>The young Austrian performed one of his ceremonious obeisances.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I shall be so pleased, so honoured, this evening to be presented
+to him, and I so deeply regret his having been ill. It is not good, this
+ocean, for the elderly."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's cheeks warmed.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you call him that?" she demanded. "I told you yesterday that he
+was&mdash;that he was almost young. Why do you call him elderly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive." Von Klausen's wide gesture expressed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> his regret for this
+error. "I had forgotten entirely. It is too bad of me to forget
+entirely."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," laughed Muriel, for she was already condemning her annoyance as
+childishness, "it doesn't matter, because it is so absurd. Only, what
+gave you such an impression?"</p>
+
+<p>"Please?"</p>
+
+<p>"The impression that he was elderly: what gave you that?"</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen manifestly hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know," he said. "I thought that&mdash;I thought that, before we
+sailed, on the deck here I had seen him with you. You and two American
+gentlemen I thought I saw: one young and stout. I thought the gentleman
+young and stout went ashore. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the other that
+went ashore. Perhaps that was your father."</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment's silence. Muriel looked intently at the ragged
+horizon.</p>
+
+<p>"The stout man was Mr. Holt," she said at last. "He is a friend of
+mine&mdash;of ours."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah?" said von Klausen, disinterestedly polite.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband," said Muriel, "is <i>not</i> elderly."</p>
+
+<p>"I ask his pardon," said von Klausen. He produced his bow again. He
+remained quite at his ease, but his manner implied a courteous wonder at
+any person's shame of his years. "He is then&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He is not so much over forty," lied Muriel, without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> the remotest idea
+why she should be thus untruthfully communicative.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen ever so slightly turned his head away. She was immediately
+sure that he did it to conceal a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"That is not old," she hotly contended. She made up her mind now that
+she did not like this graceful young foreigner. "And Jim is not so old
+as his age," she continued&mdash;"not nearly. He has lived half his life in
+our Great West, and he is as strong as a lion&mdash;and as brave."</p>
+
+<p>She felt the folly of her remark as she made it, but von Klausen gave no
+sign of sharing that feeling. He settled himself comfortably in Jim's
+chair. She saw that his face was wholly innocent, his eyes only politely
+eager.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me of him, please," he said. "I have heard of your brave
+Westerners, as you call them, in your United States. I met, once in
+Washington, a Senator from Texas, but he did not seem to me
+quite&mdash;quite&mdash;&mdash;Pray tell me of your husband, dear lady."</p>
+
+<p>She was amazed to find that, offhand, she could not do this. She started
+twice and twice stopped, wondering what, after all, there was to say.
+Then, with a vigorous concentration, she laid hold of all that her aunt
+and uncle had told her of her husband, all that Holt was authority for,
+all that the Sunday supplement of the newspapers had printed. She
+narrated how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> he had rescued the innocent runaway from the lynching
+party at Grand Joining, how he had saved the lives of his camp mates
+during the spotted fever epidemic at Sunnyside; she told of the shooting
+in Alaska, the filibustering expedition, of Jim's slaying with a knife
+the grizzly bear that was about to strip Holt's flesh from his bones;
+she gave in detail the story of Jim's descent into the shaft of the
+"Better Days" mine, and what she had not learned she supplied to the
+history of the train robbers on the Rio Grande. It was all deliberate
+boasting, and when she ended, she felt a little ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen, however, was visibly affected.</p>
+
+<p>"He is a man to admire, your husband," said the Austrian. "Strength and
+bravery, bravery and strength: these, dear lady, are the two things that
+men envy and women love, all the world over. I wish"&mdash;his young smile
+grew crooked&mdash;"I wish I had them."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's red lips parted in surprise:</p>
+
+<p>"But you are a soldier?"</p>
+
+<p>"What of that?" shrugged von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but you are brave!" She was sure of it.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know?" he asked&mdash;"how do I?"</p>
+
+<p>"And you&mdash;you <i>look</i> strong," she continued. Her black eyes passed
+involuntarily over his slim, well-proportioned figure. "Anybody can see
+that you must be strong."</p>
+
+<p>"If I correctly recall my sight of your good husband,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> said the
+captain, "he could break me in two pieces across his knee."</p>
+
+<p>She inwardly acknowledged this possibility, but she did not like to bear
+her new friend belittle himself.</p>
+
+<p>"That's only because Jim is <i>very</i> strong," she explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," said von Klausen, "yet that was not the only kind of strength
+I bore in my mind, dear lady. I thought of the strength&mdash;of moral
+strength, strength of purpose&mdash;whether the purpose is for the good or
+the bad&mdash;which is two-thirds of bravery."</p>
+
+<p>"And haven't you that?"</p>
+
+<p>It might have been because he was altogether so new to her that the
+question came readily. There seemed then nothing strange in the
+discussion of these intimate topics.</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows?" said von Klausen, quietly. "I have not yet been tried.
+Perhaps, should I love something or somebody, I should acquire these
+things." His tone lacked offence because it perfectly achieved the
+impersonal note. "They would come to me then, for I should love that
+cause or person better than my own life or my own welfare. I do not
+know. I have not been tried. I know only that, without the cause or the
+person, I have not real strength; I have not real courage. I have fought
+my duel; I have faced death&mdash;but I know there are forms of it that I
+fear. I am at least brave enough to admit that I am sometimes afraid.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+For the rest, I am not the type of man that women love: I need to be
+cared for, to be thought about, to be helped in the hundred foolish
+little ways&mdash;and women love men who do not take these things, but who
+give them."</p>
+
+<p>His low voice, his simplicity, and most of all his childish manner,
+touched her.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," she said, "that you are not fair to women."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen pointed out across the rail.</p>
+
+<p>"Look there!" said he.</p>
+
+<p>A two-masted fishing boat, storm driven from the Banks to sea, swung
+within three or four hundred yards of them. She could see its dripping
+gunwale contending with the waves, the oil-skinned sailors tottering
+upon its deck.</p>
+
+<p>"Now look there!" said von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>This time be pointed ahead, and ahead she saw, just beyond the charging
+prow of the imperious <i>Friedrich</i>, what seemed to be a thick grey
+curtain. It reached to the heavens and, as the liner approached it,
+opened like three walls: one before the prow, the other two on either
+side. It had all the palpability of heavy cloth.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Fog," said von Klausen, and in a moment, with the great siren of the
+boat shaking their very hearts, it had descended upon them.</p>
+
+<p>The walls fastened. The curtains enveloped them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> The thick, tangible,
+breath-tightening stuff wrapped them in a kind of cocoon. All the clouds
+of the sky seemed to have fallen. Muriel could scarcely distinguish the
+features of the young fellow beside her. And always, reverberating and
+portentous, the siren howled overhead.</p>
+
+<p>"The boat!" she called into von Klausen's ear. "Isn't it odd? Only a
+minute ago it was there. Then I saw only its masts. Now I can't see it
+at all."</p>
+
+<p>He called his answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Once in the Bosphorus&mdash;like this&mdash;fog. I was on the prow&mdash;an express
+boat. We brought up a little, low ship&mdash;crowded with pilgrims. Fog&mdash;shut
+out&mdash;the crash&mdash;I could look down and see&mdash;faces upturned, calling. I
+could <i>see</i> them calling&mdash;could not hear. I am afraid&mdash;I am terribly
+afraid&mdash;of fogs."</p>
+
+<p>She heard his voice break. She caught a glimpse of his face&mdash;the face of
+a frightened child. She felt him trembling as their shoulders touched:
+this soldier who had fought his duel and would not, she knew, fear the
+trial of battle. She was not afraid. Instinctively, she reached out
+toward him, to help, to comfort.</p>
+
+<p>When the fog lifted as suddenly as it had fallen, the little fisherman
+was riding the waves safely and almost gaily far astern. The <i>Friedrich</i>
+sped unconcernedly on.</p>
+
+<p>"There was no real danger, I am sure," von Klausen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> was saying; "these
+Germans I do not like, but they are good sailors&mdash;too good to hurt a
+smaller boat."</p>
+
+<p>Then Muriel discovered that she had been holding his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," she said, "that I had better go and look after Mr.
+Stainton."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+<h2>X</h2>
+
+<h3>"UNWILLING WAR"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Stainton recovered. Only someone in a fundamentally bad condition could
+long remain ill aboard this sea-express in the weather that now befell,
+and Jim's condition was good. Consequently, within another twenty-four
+hours he was wholly himself again and wholly able to enjoy the rest of
+the voyage.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel, meanwhile, had not told him of her last conversation with von
+Klausen and of its termination. She convinced herself that she had taken
+the young man's hand merely to calm his fears; that she had been
+unconscious of the action until the fog had lifted; that von Klausen
+understood this, and that, moreover, the whole episode had endured for
+but a small fraction of time. She could not, in the circumstances, tell
+Jim the truth. The present was, indeed, one of those instances that
+hamper the plain practice of what are accepted in theory as the simple
+virtues; it was a case where the telling of the truth would be the
+conveyance of a falsehood. If she had said: "I reached out and took this
+man's hand and held it while we were passing through a brief curtain of
+fog," Stainton, she made certain, would have supposed that she was
+herself afraid in the fog or that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> she wished to touch von Klausen's
+hand for the sake of the action itself. Now, she argued, either of these
+suppositions would be erroneous. The only way in which to give the true
+value to what she had done would be to repeat what the Austrian had told
+her of his personal terrors, and that, obviously, would have been a
+breach of confidence.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, she thought for some time before she hit upon this
+satisfactory train of logic. She did not, indeed, hit upon it until the
+succeeding morning. She had not forgotten what she felt on the night
+when Jim told her that he loved her. She had felt then that she must
+always be honest with this honest man concerning herself, and she meant,
+even yet, to be loyal to that decision; but she had now, as one has
+said, detected for the first time the fundamental paradox of our moral
+system: that, whereas the code of life is simple, life itself is
+complex; that the real world forever presents difficulties involving the
+ideal law in a cobweb of contradictions; that the best of human beings
+can but rarely do an imperative right to one individual without thereby
+doing a patent wrong to another; that truth at its highest is relative
+and approximate and that, in short, the moral laws are, for those who
+accept them, nothing more than a standard of perfection toward which
+their subjects can but approach and to which reality is hourly enforcing
+exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>Learn her lesson, Muriel, however, at last did. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> came to her in the
+morning after she had wakened from a refreshing, though tardy, sleep,
+rocked by the motion of the ship, which somehow miraculously cleared her
+mental vision. She lay still, repeating it, while Stainton, as she saw
+through her half-opened lids, got up, laboriously shaved, and put on his
+clothes. She knew that he must think her asleep, and she was much too
+preoccupied with the solution of her problem voluntarily to disabuse him
+of this belief.</p>
+
+<p>But Stainton was mindful of the displeasure that he had encountered on
+the morning in Aiken when he went downstairs without her. He bent over
+her in her berth and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to get up, now?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"You go. Don't mind me," she drowsily murmured. "I don't mind."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not this once. Go on, dear. I'll be along presently."</p>
+
+<p>She was left alone. She rose and went to the mirror in the wardrobe
+door. She drew back the curtain from the port-hole and let in the
+morning light. She examined, with anxious care, her face. She looked
+with equal care at her body. By a tacit understanding, she and Jim
+avoided all direct mention of her condition, he because he feared a
+recurrence of her hysterical revolt, she because she had fallen upon one
+of those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> futile moods in which we feel that to speak of an approaching
+catastrophe is to hasten it; but twice a day, when she could do it
+unobserved, she sought, in silent terror, for the tokens that could not
+possibly so soon be seen.</p>
+
+<p>Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That
+accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and
+breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appetite that had
+directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this
+morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that
+made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the
+promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking
+arm-in-arm.</p>
+
+<p>The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an
+experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other
+floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the
+zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large
+and sturdy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his
+sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched
+with every roll of the ship.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that
+it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness
+for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had
+not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion
+that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she
+felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the assumption
+that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally,
+she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that
+her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a
+man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush
+what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian
+had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that
+he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would
+have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his
+stupid mistake.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and
+Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude
+for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon
+installed in a chair beside Stainton's.</p>
+
+<p>"But do I not trespass?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping
+inclination.</p>
+
+<p>"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure.
+You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent
+annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the
+band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about
+their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the
+differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of
+money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and
+standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not
+understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.</p>
+
+<p>As the voyage progressed, Stainton and von Klausen became more and more
+friendly, and Muriel more and more restless, she could not tell why. Her
+husband had passed his entire manhood among men and had acquired, though
+he did not know it, the taste for the discussion of what, because of the
+inferior grade of education that we grant to women, we magnificently
+call manly topics. These he had not enjoyed since his wedding-day, and
+now he was hungry for them. He did not neglect Muriel, and von Klausen
+often made efforts to bring her into their conversations, but her mind
+had never been trained to these subjects and was, moreover, now filled
+with a more intimate concern. For an hour she would sit beside Jim and
+listen to him with some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> admiration, but less comprehension of his
+technical terms, and then for fifteen minutes she would leave the pair
+and walk the deck alone.</p>
+
+<p>"To me it seems," von Klausen was one day saying, "that the great danger
+in your country is the disintegration of the unit of society, the
+break-up of the home."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Stainton, "you're referring to our divorce laws?"</p>
+
+<p>The captain nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, how are they in your country?" asked Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"In Austria the code of 1811 is still in force, and under it there are
+divorces allowed for violence, cruelty, desertion, incompatibility, and
+adultery. Adultery is a crime and is punishable by five years'
+imprisonment."</p>
+
+<p>"That sounds as if your code is pretty broad, too," remarked Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but it is applicable only to persons that are not Catholics, and
+Austria is a Catholic country."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. And what do the Catholics do?"</p>
+
+<p>"They remain married."</p>
+
+<p>"Always?"</p>
+
+<p>"The law allows them the remedy of judicial separation."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was smoking a cigar. He puffed at it thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Judicial separation," he finally said, "has always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> struck me as
+begging the question. It denies liberty and yet winks at license. A good
+marriage ought to be guarded and a bad one broken."</p>
+
+<p>"That," replied von Klausen, "is the American view."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. We have all sorts of views&mdash;and there is one great trouble.
+You can get a divorce for nothing in Nevada, and you can't get it for
+anything in South Carolina. The South Carolina result is that they have
+had to pass a law there removing illegitimacy as a bar to succession."</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless," said von Klausen, "except for Japan, there are more
+divorces in the United States than in any other country in the world. I
+was told, while I was in Washington, that the American statistics
+were&mdash;they showed seventy-nine divorces to every hundred thousand of
+your population. Your divorces increase more rapidly than your
+population; they increase more rapidly than your marriage-rate."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know about that," said Stainton; "although I believe that I
+have seen some such figures given somewhere, but I am clear on one
+point: the man that treats his wife badly ought not to be allowed the
+chance to have a wife any longer." He looked at Muriel, seated at his
+side; he smiled and patted her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair.
+"Don't you think so, dear?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel smiled in answer.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course I do," said she. "Don't you, Captain von Klausen?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian's face remained serious.</p>
+
+<p>"I am of the religion of my country," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Eh?" said Stainton. "Oh, I beg your pardon."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. Please." Von Klausen waived religious immunity. "I govern
+myself one way, but I do not object to hear the reasons why other people
+should choose other ways. Your way&mdash;your American way of divorce&mdash;is one
+of the peculiarities of your great nation, and so I studied it much
+while I lived there. If you permit, sir, to say it: the figures do not
+well bear out the boast that the American husband is the best husband.
+So, Mrs. Stainton?"</p>
+
+<p>"But he is, just the same," protested Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"What do the figures show?" asked Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"That two divorces are granted to wives to every one granted husbands."</p>
+
+<p>"With all the respect to the best wife in the world," chuckled Stainton,
+as he again patted Muriel's hand, "that is largely due to the fact that
+the average American is so good a husband that, innocent as he may be,
+he pretends to be the guilty party."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen's eyes twinkled shrewdly.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it not a little," he enquired, "because the disgrace of being judged
+a guilty husband is easier to bear than the ridicule that is involved in
+being unable to keep the love of one's wife?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it is; perhaps it is," admitted Stainton. "But your figures do
+not prove anything against us as husbands, Captain. The only reason that
+similar figures don't show the men of other countries to be worse
+husbands than we are&mdash;if, indeed, they don't show it&mdash;is that the laws
+of other countries simply do not permit such easy divorce."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what of your population?" asked the Austrian, reverting to his
+previous line of attack. "It declines as divorce rises in your country."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel rose abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I shall take a little walk," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton half-rose. Von Klausen sprang to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Permit me&mdash;&mdash;" began the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Muriel; "please sit still, both of you."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear&mdash;&mdash;" said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to interrupt your talk," the girl said. "Finish that and
+then join me, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"In ten minutes, then," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>The men resumed their chairs. They looked after her strong young body
+as, the wind blowing her skirt about her, she walked away.</p>
+
+<p>"At all events," said Stainton heartily, "there goes the best American
+wife."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen had grown accustomed to the open domesticity of Americans.
+He did not smile.</p>
+
+<p>"She is a charming lady," he agreed. He looked out to sea. "And a
+beautiful." After a moment he added:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> "Do you object, sir, if I say that
+it is delightful, the manner in which the black hair gathers over her
+forehead and that in which she carries her gracious head?"</p>
+
+<p>"Object, Captain? I say you're quite right. I'm a lucky man. Have you
+ever seen more lovely eyes?"</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen was still looking out to sea.</p>
+
+<p>"In all the world I have seen but one pair that was their equal," he
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton pulled at his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"You were saying,"&mdash;he returned to their previous subject&mdash;"that the
+American birth-rate declined as divorce grew. Do you think the increase
+of the one causes the decrease of the other?"</p>
+
+<p>"I admit that the rate falls in times of commercial depression."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course: divorce and birth are both expensive. If you would look into
+the matter a little closer, Captain, I think you would find that the
+growth of child labour and the cost of living have about as much to do
+with the fall in the birth-rate as anything else. Some of our divorces
+are granted to foreigners that come to America because they can't get
+easy divorces in their native lands. Most are given for desertion, which
+generally means that they are arranged by mutual consent. Nearly as many
+result from charges of 'cruelty,' which is as often as not the man's
+habit of whistling in the house when his wife has a
+headache&mdash;'constructive cruelty' we call it, although 'concocted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+cruelty' would be a better term. Adultery comes only next, I am told,
+and then neglect to provide, and drunkenness. The other causes are all
+lower in the list. So you see that when our divorces are not really the
+result of a quiet agreement between the husband and wife&mdash;and every
+judge that signs a decree knows in his heart that nine-tenths are
+that&mdash;they are the result of conduct which, for anybody who does not
+consider marriage a sacrament, abundantly justifies the action."</p>
+
+<p>The talk shifted to Wall Street and continued for half an hour.</p>
+
+<p>"Von Klausen has some antiquated ideas," remarked Stainton to Muriel as
+they were going to bed that night; "but he seems to be a pretty good
+sort of man. I like him."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was standing before the mirror, brushing the blue-black hair that
+fell nearly to her knees.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?" she asked, with no show of interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he has good stuff in him. Of course, he's a mere boy, but he has
+good stuff in him, I'm sure."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why you call him a boy," said Muriel,</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Why, because he <i>is</i> a boy, my dear."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure you seem just as young as he is."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton laughed and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Little Loyalty!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care," said Muriel, "I don't like him."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't? Why, I thought&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I did like him at first, but I don't any more."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? You ought to. He admires you tremendously."</p>
+
+<p>"Does he? How do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"By what he says. He told me to-day that he had never seen but one pair
+of eyes equal to yours."</p>
+
+<p>"Only one? That was nice of him, I'm sure. What else did he say?"</p>
+
+<p>"He said&mdash;oh, lots of things. He said you had beautiful hair and that it
+somehow grew in curves from your forehead, and I said that he was quite
+right."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?"</p>
+
+<p>"All I can remember. How much do you want, anyhow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't like him."</p>
+
+<p>"But why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I suppose because you like him too well. I hardly see you
+any more."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton assured his wife that no man or woman in the world was worth
+her little finger. He clambered into the upper berth and watched her for
+some time as her bared arm rose and fell, wielding the brush. At last
+the sight of that regular motion, added to the gentle rocking of the
+ship, closed his eyes. He had had a full day and was tired. He was
+soundly asleep when he was wakened by her embrace.</p>
+
+<p>She was standing on the ladder and pressing his face to hers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Love me!" she was whispering. "O, Jim, love me!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was still half-asleep,</p>
+
+<p>"I do love you, Muriel," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but&mdash;<i>Love</i> me, Jim!" she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>She clutched him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ouch, my hair!" said Stainton. "You're pulling my hair!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Muriel's tone was all self-reproach. "I'm sorry. Did I hurt you,
+dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he smiled. "No. There, there!" He patted her head. "It's all
+right. Good-night, dearest."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night?" There was a question in the words as she repeated them,
+but she retreated, albeit slowly, down the ladder. "Good-night, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, dear," he responded cheerily, "and&mdash;I do love you, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>She answered from below:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"You do know it, don't you, dear heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>He heard her draw the bedclothes about her. When he awoke in the
+morning, she slept, but he would not breakfast until she was ready to
+breakfast with him, and so he sat, hungry, and waited for the hour that
+she devoted to her toilette. Then they went to the saloon, and
+afterwards to the deck, together.</p>
+
+<p>Neither on that day nor on the day following was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> Muriel alone with von
+Klausen. Indeed, she was not alone with him again until they touched, at
+ten o'clock of a bright morning, at Plymouth, where the grateful green
+and yellow hills rose from the blue water, and the town nestled in a
+long white belt behind a chain of grim, grey men-of-war. The tender had
+stood by, and, now that some of the high stacks of mail-bags, which had
+been filling the stern decks since dawn, were transferred, an endless
+procession of slouching porters out of uniform carried, one brick to
+each man for each trip, large bricks of silver down the gangways and
+deposited them in piles of five, well forward on the tender. Jim had
+gone to the writing-room to scribble a note that might catch a fast boat
+from England to his agent at the mine, and Muriel was left beside the
+rail to talk with the Austrian.</p>
+
+<p>"It has been a delightful voyage, has it not?" he asked, in that precise
+English to which she had now grown accustomed.</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say," answered Muriel. "I don't know. You forget that I have had
+no others with which to compare it."</p>
+
+<p>"But you have not been bored?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"It has surely been pleasant, for I have by it had the opportunity to
+meet you and your brave husband."</p>
+
+<p>"My husband, I know, would say as much of it because he has met you."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Austrian bowed.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor have I failed," he said, "to tell him how much the entire company
+aboard seem to admire his charming wife."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was resting her elbows on the rail; her glance was fixed upon the
+distant town.</p>
+
+<p>"He told me," she responded, "that you thought my eyes about the second
+best within your experience. I hope your experience has been wide."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen flushed.</p>
+
+<p>"My experience," he said, gravely, "has, I regret to tell you, been that
+of most young men."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said Muriel. Her tone showed dislike of all that this implied, but
+she recalled that Jim had had no such experiences as those to which von
+Klausen plainly referred, and she suddenly felt, somehow, that this
+difference between the men did not altogether advance Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, dear lady," the Austrian was going on, "the eyes that I
+thought as beautiful as yours&mdash;I did not say more beautiful&mdash;were eyes
+that have long since been shut."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was now more piqued than before. Had the man been comparing her
+to a dead fiancée to whom he, living, remained faithful?</p>
+
+<p>"Were they Austrian eyes?" she asked, her own eyes full of obtrusive
+indifference.</p>
+
+<p>"No; they were Italian. Had you come to Europe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> three years ago, you
+would have seen them when you went to the Louvre. They were the eyes
+that have been given to the Mona Lisa."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel and he were standing apart from the crowd of passengers that
+watched the unloading of the silver. The girl turned to her companion.
+Her glance was interested enough now, and she saw at once that his was
+serious.</p>
+
+<p>"There is something that I have been wanting to tell you," she began,
+before she was well aware that she spoke&mdash;"something that I don't know
+exactly how to say, or whether I ought to say it at all."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen was openly concerned.</p>
+
+<p>"If you are in doubt," he replied, "perhaps it would be better if you
+first thought more about it."</p>
+
+<p>But his opposition, though totally the reverse to what she had expected,
+clinched her resolve.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said. "I ought to tell you about it. Now that I have started I
+know I ought. It's&mdash;it's about that time in the fog."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen's colour mounted. Then, politely, he pretended to forget the
+incident.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, don't you remember? You must remember."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember. It was a very sudden fog."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "it was about what happened then. I must speak to
+you&mdash;I must explain about that." She was holding tightly to the rail.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen saw her wrists tremble. He made little of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"When you were frightened, and I took your hand to reassure you? Dear
+lady, I trust that you have not supposed that I acted on my
+presumption&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're kind to put it that way," she interrupted. "You're generous. But
+I want to be honest. I have to be honest, because I want you to
+understand&mdash;because you must understand&mdash;just why I behaved as I did,
+and you wouldn't understand&mdash;you couldn't&mdash;if I weren't honest with you.
+Captain von Klausen, you didn't take my hand, and you know it. I took
+yours."</p>
+
+<p>He raised the disputed hand; he raised it in protest.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Stainton, I assure you that it was I who&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it wasn't. And I wasn't frightened by the fog, either. You must
+remember that, from the way I spoke; I showed I didn't even realise what
+a fog means at sea. So how could I be afraid of it? You did know and you
+had just said that you were afraid of fogs. I took your hand. I did it
+before I thought&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Stainton"&mdash;he was painfully anxious to end all
+this&mdash;"before you thought. It was nothing but a kindly&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Before I thought," she pursued, determinedly, her dark eyes steady on
+his. "You had told me of that awful experience of yours in the Bosphorus
+and of the effect it had on you. No wonder it did have such an effect.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+I am not blaming you for that. Only, I saw that you needed help and
+comfort. I was sorry for you. That was all: I was just sorry. I did it
+without thinking. I didn't know I had done it at all till it was all
+over. You see," she concluded, "I just couldn't, now, bear to have you
+misunderstand."</p>
+
+<p>Carefully analysed, it might seem a contradictory explanation, but it
+was no sooner free of her lips than she felt that her soul was free of
+this thing which she had sought to explain.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen was quite as much relieved as Muriel. He accepted it as she
+wished him to accept it.</p>
+
+<p>"Never for a moment did I misunderstand," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," added Muriel, "you will understand why I haven't mentioned it to
+my husband&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband?" The Austrian was all amazement. "Why should you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said Muriel, compressing her full lips and assuming her full
+height, "I always tell Jim everything."</p>
+
+<p>If the shadow of a smile passed beneath his military moustache, she
+could not be sure of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Everything?" said he. "But you have said that this was nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly, and&mdash;don't you see?&mdash;that is one of the reasons why I haven't
+told it. You will&mdash;you will please not refer to it to him, Captain von
+Klausen, because&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Refer to it?" Von Klausen squared his shoulders. "To him? Never!"</p>
+
+<p>His assertion was vehement.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no reason why you shouldn't," Muriel replied; "only, as I say,
+I haven't told him, and the only real reason that I didn't tell him was
+because to do so I should have to tell him, too, that you had been
+afraid; and that isn't my secret: it's yours."</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian's boyish face was now very grave.</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you," he said. "For your thought of me I thank you, and the
+more I thank you because, by keeping my secret, you made it <i>ours</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I don't mean&mdash;&mdash;" said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>She did not finish, for she saw Stainton come from the writing-room and
+stride rapidly toward them. He had written his letter and despatched it.</p>
+
+<p>Although the three stood shoulder to shoulder in the customs-shed at
+Cherbourg later in the day and occupied the same first-class compartment
+in the fast express through the rolling Norman country to Paris, Muriel
+and von Klausen were not then given an opportunity to conclude their
+conversation. The Austrian bade the Staintons good-bye in the swirl of
+porters and chauffeurs at the Gare St. Lazare, and Muriel took it for
+granted that the interruption must be final.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>DR. BOUSSINGAULT</h3>
+
+
+<p>Muriel awoke in their apartments at the Chatham the next morning to find
+herself decidedly out of sorts. Well as she had borne the voyage, she no
+sooner put her feet from her one of the two little canopied beds to the
+floor than she felt again the motion of the ship, and there was a return
+of the nausea that she attributed to the trouble which silently weighed
+upon her. She crawled back to the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't get up," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was worried. He fluttered about her. He wanted to ring for
+servants to bring half-a-dozen things that Muriel would not accept. He
+wanted the smallest details of her symptoms. He wanted to send for a
+doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"Go away," Muriel pleaded. "Please go away."</p>
+
+<p>"But, dearie&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I were back in New York."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton, though he now feared the sea, was ready to undertake the
+return trip on the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," moaned Muriel. "Of course, now we are here, we must see
+things. But I won't have a doctor,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> Jim. Can't you see how it is with
+me? I shall be all right in an hour."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, dearie; all right. I shall sit here by you."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't. I'm horrid when I'm sick."</p>
+
+<p>"Not to me," said Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"But I am. I look so horrid."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you're good, Jim. But I want to be alone, just as you did when you
+were seasick. Go into the sitting-room. Please. I'll call you if I need
+you."</p>
+
+<p>He went into their sitting-room, a room that shone with green and gilt,
+and looked out, across a narrow street, at the grey houses of uniform
+height and listened to the shrill street-sounds of Paris. He was lonely.</p>
+
+<p>Somebody knocked at the door opening on the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in," he called. "I mean: <i>entrez</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>A servant advanced, bearing a tray.</p>
+
+<p>Jim saw that there was a card on the tray. He took it up and read the
+name of Paul Achille Boussingault. He did not remember ever having heard
+the name.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Pour moi?</i>" asked Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said the servant, in a wholly unaccented English.</p>
+
+<p>"Hum," said Jim. "Now I wonder what <i>he</i> wants. Very well, show him up."</p>
+
+<p>He hurried to the bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear," he enquired, "tell me quick: how do you pronounce B-o-u-double
+s-i-n-g-a-u-l-t?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Muriel did not lift the covers that concealed her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Go away," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going, only, dearie&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Go away&mdash;<i>please</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Jim re-entered the sitting-room. Was it Bou-sing-go? He had his doubts
+about that French <i>in</i>. If he remembered rightly, it was a kind of <i>an</i>,
+and the <i>n</i> ended somewhere in the nose. And who was M. Boussingault,
+anyhow?</p>
+
+<p>"M. le docteur Boo-sàn-go," announced the servant.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait. How was that?" asked Jim, and then found himself face to face
+with his visitor.</p>
+
+<p>His visitor was a stocky man, of not more than five feet five or six
+inches in height, inclined to pugginess. He had a leathery complexion,
+and the point of his thin Van Dyck beard was in a straight line from the
+sharper point in which his close-clipped bristling hair ended above his
+nose. It was black hair, and it retreated precipitately on both sides.
+He looked at Jim through eyeglasses bearing a gold chain and bound
+together by a straight bar, which gave the effect of a continuous scowl
+to his heavy brows. He bowed deeply.</p>
+
+<p>"M. James Stainton?" he enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Jim. "Good-morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Good-morning, monsieur. I have the honour to present the compliments of
+my brother, M. Henri Duperré Boussingault, and to ask that you will be
+so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> very good as me to command in the case I can be of any the slightest
+service to you and madame during your visit to Paris."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was at a loss.</p>
+
+<p>"Your brother?" said he.</p>
+
+<p>"M. Henri Boussingault," repeated the visitor. "He has to me written
+from Lyon to attend well to the appearance of your name among the
+distinguished arrivals in the <i>Daily Mail</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The mention of Lyons aided Stainton's memory. He recalled now that the
+name of Henri Boussingault had appeared among those of the Lyonnaise
+syndicate that was interested in the purchase of the mine.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," he said, and his broad teeth showed in a smile. "To be sure.
+This is very kind of you. Won't you sit down?"</p>
+
+<p>Paul Achille Boussingault arranged his coat-tails and sat down with a
+grunt that apparently always accompanied this action on his part. His
+knees were far apart, and his feet scarcely touched the parquet floor.
+He was dressed completely in black, with the ribbon of an order fastened
+in the lapel of his frock-coat. His collar was low and round and
+upright, its junction with the shirt concealed by a small, prim black
+tie.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton took a chair opposite him.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you have a cigar?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"But thanks," said the visitor. "A cigarette only,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> if you do not
+object?" He produced a yellow packet of <i>Marylands</i>, and offered it to
+Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Stainton, lighting the cigarette. He did not like it,
+because, being an American, he did not care for American tobacco; but he
+tried to appear to like it. He wondered what he should talk about. "I
+shall be glad to make use of your kind offer."</p>
+
+<p>"You will honour me," said the Frenchman.</p>
+
+<p>"Um. And are you, too, interested in mining investments?"</p>
+
+<p>The visitor dismissed mines and mining to his brother with a wave of his
+short hand. Stainton noticed that his fingers, though not long, were
+well shaped and tapering, in contradistinction to the spatulate thumbs,
+and that he wore a diamond set in a ring of thick gold.</p>
+
+<p>"Those there are the avocation of my brother. I take no part in these
+affairs of the bourse. You will me forgive if I say, monsieur, that I
+have no traffic with such abominations of our society modern. I am a man
+of science."</p>
+
+<p>"A doctor?" asked Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"Of medicine."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Stainton revolved the idea of taking the visitor to see
+Muriel, but he divined Muriel's attitude toward such an action and
+banished the thought. Her indisposition was, of course, but natural and
+passing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What," asked Jim, "ought we to see first in Paris? We are strangers
+here, you know."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor flung out his short arms. He indulged in an apostrophe to
+Paris that reminded Stainton of some of the orations he had read as
+having been delivered in the councils of the First Republic.
+Boussingault's English was frequently cast in a French mould and
+sometimes so fused that it was mere alloyage; but he never paused for a
+word, and he spoke with a fervour that was almost vehemence. There were
+moments when Jim wondered if the Frenchman suspected him of some slur on
+Paris and conceived it a duty to defend the city. What Jim must see was,
+in brief, everything.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, so soon as the apostrophe ended, Boussingault appeared to
+forget all about it. His sharp eyes travelled over the hotel
+sitting-room, and his mind occupied itself therewith as devotedly as it
+had just been giving itself to the Gallic metropolis.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you Americans," he sighed; "how you love the luxury!"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps we do," said Jim, recalling certain negotiations that he had
+conducted at the hotel's <i>bureau</i>; "but if the price of these rooms is a
+criterion, you French make us pay well for it."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Boussingault's glance journeyed to the partly open doors of the
+bathroom, displaying a tiled whiteness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And without doubt a bath?" he enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"A bath," nodded Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"And me"&mdash;Boussingault shook his bullet-like head&mdash;"I well recall when
+the water-carts stopped at the corners of the streets too narrow for
+their progress, and one called from the high window that one wished to
+buy so much and so much, because one bathed oneself or the servant
+washed the linen to-day."</p>
+
+<p>He talked for a while, again rhapsodically, of the old city, the city of
+his youth, and, when he chanced to touch upon its restaurants, Stainton
+asked him if, that evening or the next, he would dine with Muriel and
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no," said Boussingault. "It is that madame and you, monsieur, shall
+dine with me. To-night? To-morrow night?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton accepted for the following evening.</p>
+
+<p>"And at what spot would you prefer, monsieur?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Jim. "I have eaten <i>sole à la Marguery</i>. We might
+catch that in its native waters: we might dine at Marguery's."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," the Frenchman shrugged, "Marguery is not bad. At least the
+kitchen is tolerable. But you should eat your sole as she swims."</p>
+
+<p>They were not, however, destined to keep the appointment on the day set,
+for, during that morning came a <i>petit bleu</i> from Boussingault,
+postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing
+with fine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> spencerian regrets to the effect that its writer had been
+imperatively summoned to Grenoble for consultation in an illness
+"occurring in a family distinguished."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care if we never see him," said Muriel. "I could hear him
+through the door: he talks too loud."</p>
+
+<p>They consoled themselves and wearied themselves with sightseeing, and
+often this tried Muriel's nerves. Secretly she still watched for the
+appearance of signs to indicate her condition and secretly she tightened
+her stays, long before any signs could appear. She was often sick in the
+mornings, though with decreasing recurrence, and, when she began to feel
+relief by the diminution, she became the more despondent upon
+realisation of its cause. Moreover, even the comfort of <i>petit déjeuner</i>
+in bed did not compensate for those crumbs for which no one could be
+held responsible.</p>
+
+<p>True to his policy to "let nature take her course," Stainton maintained
+a firm reticence upon the subject uppermost in the minds of both, but
+this reticence was applied only to his speech; and his solicitude, his
+patient but patent care, and his evident anxiety often annoyed her,
+since they kept her destiny before her and seemed to her apprehensive
+imagination&mdash;what they were far from being&mdash;no more than the expressions
+of a fear that she might make some physical revelation of her state in a
+public and embarrassing manner.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't think of me!" she one day wept, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> he had put her into a
+<i>taxi-mètre</i> to drive a few hundred yards.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," said Stainton, "I think of nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>"No, you don't think of me," she insisted. "You think only of&mdash;of <i>it</i>.
+You're worried about me as a mother and not as a wife. You are!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton protested, grieved to the heart; but she would not hear him.</p>
+
+<p>"It's as if you were a stock-farmer," she said, the tears in her velvety
+eyes, "and I were only your favorite thoroughbred in foal."</p>
+
+<p>This simile he found revolting. It required all his masculine philosophy
+satisfactorily to account for her use of it, and, even when that had
+been applied, he reprimanded her, with kindness, but with decisiveness
+also. It was some time before she begged his pardon and condemned
+herself; some time before he soothed her and told her, what she hated to
+hear, that her words had risen not from herself but from her condition.</p>
+
+<p>They went to Marguery's, when the doctor returned to Paris, rather worn
+out by their week of sightseeing; but they found the crowded restaurant
+pleasantly diverting. The chatter of the diners, the scurrying of the
+waiters, and the gratification of the leather-covered seat from which,
+across a shining table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made
+them forget for a space the subject that one of them was weary of
+remembering.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then, by some mischance, Stainton hit upon a fatal topic.</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor," he said, "I am sure you can give me some authoritative
+information on a matter that I have read a little of. I mean the
+question of the decrease in the French birth-rate and the efforts to
+stop it and build up not only a larger race but a race of the best
+stock."</p>
+
+<p>He saw instantly that he had struck the little man's hobby. Dr.
+Boussingault sat with one thick knee covered by his serviette and thrust
+into the aisle for the <i>garçons</i> to stumble over. His dark eyes, keen
+and expressive, were shaped like wide almonds and, unobscured by any
+vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his glasses
+in a lively disregard of the phlegmatic indications given by the dark
+bags beneath them.</p>
+
+<p>"The most healthy sign in France to-day," he said. "Absolutely."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean the effort to increase and better the stock?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. One thousand no's. The success in decreasing it."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear sir&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor waved his hands. He drank no alcohol, he said; only some wine
+of the country, red; but of this, heavily diluted by water, he was
+drinking copiously.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Attend, monsieur. I know well, my God, these good people who go to
+England and have international congresses and, between the dinners given
+by Her Grace of Dulpuddle and the lawn parties, when one permits them to
+enter the park of the Castle Cad, indulge in a debauch of scientific
+verbosity. But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard
+one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry,
+and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them
+say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and
+breathed: "<i>I</i> say one word: 'Environment!'&mdash;and they silence
+themselves."</p>
+
+<p>Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed.</p>
+
+<p>"I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their
+purpose is the improvement of the race."</p>
+
+<p>"Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How
+do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good
+the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong
+sons and some robust daughters? <i>Jamais!</i> Rather by to continue the
+present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has
+made unfit, by to encourage breeding&mdash;million thunders, yes, among those
+very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits <i>them</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> talk would soon turn
+to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced
+at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of
+<i>canard sauvage</i> that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she
+must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were
+talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a
+physician. Nevertheless, he wavered.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the
+poor to increase the population?"</p>
+
+<p>The Frenchman's broad, pale lips smiled. He shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"Money? My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot
+say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your
+country and in England these savants&mdash;name of God!&mdash;want what they call
+the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this
+reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault
+leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive
+forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor
+to produce families, they are the <i>propriétaires</i> and those lackeys of
+the <i>propriétaires</i>, the generals of the armies. The <i>propriétaire</i>
+wants much workers, and he wants workers so bound by family
+'responsibilities'"&mdash;the Frenchman hissed the s's of this word&mdash;"that
+they dare not revolt; he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> wants competition for the workers, for she
+lowers the wage. For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to
+the monster, War."</p>
+
+<p>"You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I:
+Boussingault, <i>médecin</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along
+without children, you know."</p>
+
+<p>He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms
+and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse
+into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled.</p>
+
+<p>Jim regarded the neighboring tables, but no one of the company there
+paid any attention to the commanding tones of the physician, probably
+because nearly all the guests of the restaurant were engaged in talk
+that was quite as violent as that of Paul Achille. Muriel might have
+been a thousand miles away.</p>
+
+<p>Now the word "children" again loosed the storm.</p>
+
+<p>"Children?" shouted the doctor. "Let us be reasonable! Let us regard
+with equanimity the children! They ask the poor for the children, these
+<i>propriétaires</i>; but what they would say is servants and <i>filles de
+joie</i> to work for them. They will not pay the man sufficient to make a
+marriage; they pretend not to like that the women bear children without
+marriage&mdash;and they run about and sob for more babies! <i>Bien.</i> In effect,
+then, what is it that the labourer to them replies? He replies:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> 'Give
+me the 'abitable houses, and then I will give you in'abitants&mdash;not
+before.'"</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Boussingault produced a huge handkerchief, shook it, mopped his
+sparkling brow, and resumed absolute immobility.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was now sincerely interested. He had thought somewhat upon
+these matters and, although he saw as yet no personal relevance in them,
+he had an intellectual appetite for their discussion.</p>
+
+<p>"As I see it," he said, "none of these people that are trying to improve
+the breed denies that the poor are in a bad way, but just because the
+poor are in a bad way, they fail to be the stuff by which the race can
+be improved. I am now speaking, you understand, of what you, doctor,
+consider the American and English savants. What they are after is to
+increase the best, and their best raw material is found in the sons of
+the well-to-do, because the well-to-do are the intelligent, are the
+people that do the work of the world."</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault chortled derisively.</p>
+
+<p>"What propelled your ship to France?" he demanded. "An engine, is it
+not? But the engine, it is necessary that it be fed, and think you that
+the man who put the coal in that engine was well-to-do? Who grinds your
+corn, who makes your shoes, who builds your house? Name of God!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am thinking about the directing intelligence, doctor.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> The improper
+character tossed into the human pond sinks to its bottom, and the proper
+character, even if placed at its bottom, rises to the top."</p>
+
+<p>"So you propose to improve the race, monsieur, by breeding from the
+thieving millionaire risen to the top of the pond and by letting the
+Christs sink, as they have always sanken? Do not talk of breeding for
+ability until you give a chance for to develop the ability that now goes
+everywhere to waste. Men and women they will mate in spite of you."</p>
+
+<p>"The process would strengthen marriage," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"But yes," replied the Frenchman. "Marriage is of relations the most
+intimate: they would make it the most public. It was wrong enough, my
+God, when, after centuries of no attention to marriage, the church
+quickly assumed of it the control and made of it a public ceremony. It
+will be more bad when the police assume of it the control and make of it
+a public scandal."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel raised her great, dark eyes to the doctor and then lowered them
+to her plate.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton shifted uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not believe in that sort of thing and never would," he said, "but
+I am sure that marriage is the best friend of the race's future."</p>
+
+<p>"Not so long as it is directed even as it now is. Not so long as the
+diseased 'usband may legally force a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> child on his wife, or the
+wife-merely-lazy may refuse to bear a child to a healthy 'usband. A wife
+can divorce a 'usband because he is sterile through not his own fault,
+but if he is sterile because he wants sterility, she must continue to be
+his wife. You speak well as if to make people to breed it is necessary
+but to go to whip them, or trick them, into a wedding. Marriage does not
+imply parenthood. That relationship is arbitrary."</p>
+
+<p>This was something more than Jim had counted on. A slow flush mounted to
+his iron-grey hair. He saw that Muriel attended entirely to her food,
+and he did not know whether to admire this peace as evidence of her
+self-control or to wonder how she could hear such things and give no
+sign of hearing them.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor, however, ran from bad to worse.</p>
+
+<p>"Most of the children in this world are here by accident. They are not
+wanted, no, because they are too much trouble or too much cost, or they
+are girls, as the case may be. They are not a tie binding their parents'
+love by their presence; generally they are a sword to divide it by
+necessitating economies. What married man, even rich, does not endeavour
+to limit the number of his little ones, <i>hein</i>?" To Jim's horror the
+doctor broadly winked. "What unmarried man does not endeavour to
+suppress his little ones altogether? Both will in private joke the one
+to the other about it, and both fear it should publicly be known.
+Marriage?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> Poof! It is the name of a <i>prix fixe</i> charged for
+respectability."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was not the man to try to evade an issue by an attempt to
+divert the conversation, and he saw that the doctor was not the man to
+be diverted. As the waiter brought the coffee ("No cognac, thank you,"
+said Boussingault; "no alcohol") Jim challenged direct.</p>
+
+<p>"You shock me," declared the American, "by what you tell me about
+children not being wanted. I don't agree with you there. Of course, that
+is sometimes the case in irregular relations, but I think too well of
+humanity to believe that, by married parents of any means at all,
+children are not wanted after they get here."</p>
+
+<p>"None?"</p>
+
+<p>Both men turned: it was Muriel that had spoken. Her face grew scarlet
+under their look.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor's glance was keen.</p>
+
+<p>"I am of madame's mind," said he, quietly.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton strove to pass the embarrassing interruption.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, doctor," he said, and from the corner of his eye saw with
+satisfaction that Muriel busied herself with an intricate ice, "I stick
+to my belief in humanity."</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault flourished his coffee cup and spilled a liberal portion of
+its contents.</p>
+
+<p>"In what world do you live?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"In an eminently sane one," said Stainton.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"<i>Bien</i>; I knew it was not the real world. In your world you know
+nothing, then, of all the ways, direct and indirect, to make women bear
+babies they do not want; in it you know nothing of the child unloved and
+scarcely endured; in it you know nothing of the boy or girl for these
+reasons, or because the mother hated the price of marriage, afflicted
+with morbid nerves and will-atrophy. Those who would improve the race
+must know of these things, but they consider them not. They consider not
+that there is the motherly-physical inclination combined with physical
+ability; that degrees of inclination and ability vary. They make one law
+for all that, by physique only, appear fit. Good, then: the person the
+best fitted for their plan is she who will not let them send her to the
+altar as if she had no proper will. Again, suppose you forbid the
+'unfit' to marry? You straightway increase not only the number of
+illegitimate children, but of illegitimate unfit children, for the
+illegitimate child, in our mad world, has not the whole of a chance. M.
+Stainton, your savants would raise the race by oppressing the
+individuals."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's anxiety was now to end the meal. He felt that matters had
+gone far enough, and he feared that the topic of discussion had proved a
+morbid one for a prospective mother. He murmured something about the
+survival of the fittest.</p>
+
+<p>"The survival of the fittest," roared Boussingault.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> "My good friend,
+who is it that is fitted to survive? He who can? The brute? You say"&mdash;he
+had quite placed poor Stainton in the opposition by this time&mdash;"you say
+that you would rather have for parent a robust burglar than a tubercular
+bishop. Me, Boussingault, I choose the bishop, for it is better to have
+ill health with money to hire Boussingaults than good health without
+money to buy food. 'Defectives'! Holy blue! The prize-fighter in New
+York who murders the little girl is of splendid physique and gives
+extraordinary care to his body. He is scrupulously clean. He does not
+smoke, does not even drink red wine. Of the sixteen children of his
+parents only seven prove, by survival, fitness to survive. He is of
+them&mdash;and he murders the little girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Stainton, smiling, "perhaps sixteen is <i>too</i> many."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me why," said the Frenchman. "Our great Massenet is of a family of
+children"&mdash;he swung his arm and dropped his emptied
+cup&mdash;"countless&mdash;absolutely countless. Environment, that is what you
+forget; environment, and inclination and <i>suitable</i> physique. What to
+do? You should change the economic conditions that breed your
+'defectives' as a refuse-heap breeds flies, but instead you propose to
+spend time and money to try to 'segregate' defectives as fast as you
+manufacture them. 'Segregate' and 'sterilize'? I have yet to hear of one
+of you sterilising a degenerate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> child of your own. You produce them
+not? Often. And you produce the good? Francis Galton left no child at
+all. I, Boussingault, say to you: breed a Florence Nightingale and an
+Isaac Newton and bring them up in a city slum and set them to work in a
+city factory, and their very good breeding will be society's loss.
+Truly. What you will have will not be a philanthropist and a scientist,
+but only a more than commonly seductive <i>fille</i> and a more than commonly
+clever thief. You cannot breed a free race until you have given to the
+possible mothers of it freedom of choice; and you cannot breed a healthy
+race until you have given to papa and mamma and baby proper food and
+surroundings&mdash;until you have given the man working the full pay for his
+toil."</p>
+
+<p>He leaned back in his chair, held his handkerchief before his mouth
+without concealing it, and began to pick his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel rose; she was pale. The two men started also to rise.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't," said Muriel. "I shall be back in a moment."</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest&mdash;&mdash;" began Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's answer was one look. She hurried from the room.</p>
+
+<p>"My wife," said Stainton, resuming his seat, "is not very well."</p>
+
+<p>"You desolate me," replied the physician as he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> grunted his way back
+into his chair. "But now that madame absents herself for a moment, let
+me be explicit."</p>
+
+<p>"Explicit?" said Stainton. "I should have thought&mdash;Why, you have been
+talking as if the very construction of society were a crime!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Boussingault, delightedly, "then you perceive just my point.
+That is it; you put it well: modern society is The Great Crime&mdash;life is
+The Great Sin&mdash;what we have made of Life. Disease, Ignorance, Poverty,
+Wage-slavery, Child-slavery, Lust-slavery, Marriage-slavery! Marriage
+does not produce good children more than bad. Some of the highest types
+of humanity have been produced by the left hand. You ignore the positive
+side of selective breeding. If you can decide what constitutes a 'fit'
+man, how can you limit his racial gifts to the child-bearing capacities
+of one woman? And the woman, her, too; you must provide for selective
+futile polygamy and polyandry. You must be presented to the unmarried
+mother&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Really&mdash;&mdash;" began Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"There is something in these your theories," interposed Boussingault,
+rushing to his conclusion, "but here you go too far and there half-way.
+In Germany, until German bureaucracy captures them, they are the great
+aids to the revolt of Womankind, your theories. Educate for parenthood,
+endow mothers, pension during pregnancy and nursing&mdash;what then? Name of
+God!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> You have more to do than that, my friend&mdash;<i>we</i> have more to do: we
+have to give every child born an equal chance, every man how much he
+earns; we must build a society where no superstition, no economic
+strain, no selfish 'usband keeps childless the woman that wants to be
+and ought to be a mother in marriage or outside; and we must recognise
+of all other women their inalienable right to refuse motherhood!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton rose quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Here comes my wife," he said. "I am afraid we shall have to hurry away,
+doctor."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>MONTMARTRE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Alone in their <i>taxi-mètre</i>, Stainton and Muriel preserved for some time
+an awkward silence. Jim was waiting for some hint from her to indicate
+what would be his safest course. His wife sat rigid, her fists clenched
+in her lap.</p>
+
+<p>"That doctor is a strange type," said Stainton at last.</p>
+
+<p>"Horrid man! He's a <i>horrid</i> man!" gasped Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, of course," said Stainton, seeking to steer her into the
+quiescence of a judicial attitude, "he is all wrong in his
+conclusions&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He picked his teeth," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>Jim had preserved his own good manners to the age of fifty, but his
+years in mining-camps had blunted his observation of the lack of nicety
+in others.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he?" asked Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you <i>see</i> him? He carries a gold toothpick around with him. I
+believe he was proud of it. It's&mdash;that's what made me sick."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," enquired Jim, growing uncomfortable, "it wasn't what he said?"</p>
+
+<p>"Said? You both sat up there and quarrelled&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"We didn't quarrel. The doctor has what seems to be the national manner,
+but we were merely discussing&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You were discussing me!" said Muriel. "I thought I should die. I don't
+know how I bore it; I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Jim slipped his arm around her waist. "My dear, my dear, how could you
+think such a thing? We were talking about a general subject. We
+were&mdash;&mdash;Why, we didn't say anything that could possibly affect you."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care," Muriel declared: "everything that <i>he said</i>&mdash;that
+man&mdash;was awful."</p>
+
+<p>"It was," admitted Stainton, glad that the burden of offence had again
+been shifted to Boussingault's shoulders. "It was, rather. I didn't know
+whether you were paying attention to it at all. To some of it I hoped
+you weren't."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody could help hearing such shouting. I was so afraid there might be
+some English or Americans there."</p>
+
+<p>"Still, you didn't appear to hear,"&mdash;Stainton spoke with relief at
+thought of this,&mdash;"so it was as well as it could be."</p>
+
+<p>"I must have shown it, Jim. I thought my face would burn away."</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate, you didn't talk."</p>
+
+<p>"How <i>could</i> I?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was silent for a few seconds. Then he asked:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What did you mean by your question?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel took some time to reply:</p>
+
+<p>"What question?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know: the only one you asked&mdash;about&mdash;about children not being
+wanted?"</p>
+
+<p>This time Muriel's answer was swift: she took her husband's broad
+shoulders in her arms and, as they rolled down the boulevard, began
+sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>"I never want to see him again!" she vowed. "Never bring him to the
+hotel. I won't be at home if he comes. I won't see him. I won't!"</p>
+
+<p>She suggested changing their hotel. She declared that, even if they did
+change, she could not sleep that night. She begged him to take her
+somewhere to amuse her and get her thoughts away from the dreadful
+Boussingault.</p>
+
+<p>It was Stainton who proposed that they should see Montmartre&mdash;which
+term, when used by the travelling American, means to see two or three
+places in Montmartre conducted largely for Americans, which charge in
+strict accord with the French ideas of the average American's
+pocketbook, and are visible only between the hours of ten o'clock at
+night and four o'clock in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said Jim; "we might go to Montmartre. I think we ought to
+see Montmartre."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" asked Muriel.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It's&mdash;oh, it's a part of Paris. You'll know when we get there."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't remember hearing of it in our French course."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think it's included in the French course of a convent. I hope
+not."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"For the very reason that we ought to go see it&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>He was quite sure that he was sincere in his attitude. They were
+sightseers, and he had always been told that Montmartre was one of the
+sights of Paris. They had seen everything else. They had seen Notre
+Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the markets, the Palais de Justice, the
+Chambre des Députés, the tomb of Napoleon&mdash;everything. They had enjoyed
+the Jardins des Tuileries and the pictures and sculpture of the
+Luxembourg Museum, and they had walked through the weary miles of
+painted canvases in the Louvre, where Muriel lingered before the spot at
+which the Mona Lisa had long hung. They had even permitted themselves
+the horrors of the Morgue. Why should Stainton not complete his
+knowledge of Paris, and why should he not, like most other Americans,
+take his wife, however young she was, to Montmartre with him? Jim had
+once said to Holt that he had, all his life long, kept himself clean.
+The curiosities of his youth had remained unsatisfied.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The strongest impulses are not infrequently those of which one is
+entirely unconscious. At Aiken, Stainton had yielded himself with the
+extravagance of the young man of twenty-five, which he thought he was,
+to the demands of the situation in which he found himself. At sea there
+had necessarily been a quieter period; but this had ended with the
+arrival of the Staintons in Paris. The tension of sightseeing had,
+alone, sufficed to wear them out, and now (though he persuaded himself
+that this was but the inevitable development of the novel into the
+commonplace) he began to fear that the high tide of his emotion might be
+sinking to the low level of habit and affection, that what was true of
+himself was also true of Muriel, and he drew the inference that another
+sort of sightseeing would be good for them both.</p>
+
+<p>So they went to Montmartre.</p>
+
+<p>At the advice of their chauffeur, they commenced with the Bal Tabarin.
+From the motor-car that had hauled them up the long hills of dark and
+tortuous streets, they stepped into a blaze of yellow light, under which
+half a dozen men hurried to them. One held the door of the cab; another,
+as if it were his sole business in life, wielded a folded newspaper as a
+shield to protect Muriel's gown from contamination by the motor's muddy
+tires; two pointed to the scintillating doorway, and two more chattered
+enquiries that Jim could in no wise interpret.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He knew, however, that there was one answer to every question: he doled
+out a handful of francs, in true American fashion, and then handed a
+purple and white bill to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously text-book French though it was, Muriel's French had proved
+really intelligible; she had rapidly acquired the power of comprehending
+a full third of the French addressed to her, and all this struck
+Stainton, who loved to follow the lips that were his, speaking a
+language that was not his and of which he was nearly ignorant, as a
+proof of her superiority. Therefore she now preceded him to the ticket
+window and made their purchase. A moment later a large man in a frock
+coat was ushering them, among capped and aproned maids that begged
+permission to check wraps, up to the double stairway at the end of the
+big ballroom and into a box twenty feet above the floor.</p>
+
+<p>They sat down, conscious of themselves, and ordered a bottle of Ayala,
+presently served to them in goblets to play the rôle of
+wine-glasses&mdash;for one drinks champagne from goblets in Montmartre&mdash;and
+looked down at the dancers on the floor below. From its balcony at the
+other end of the hall a brass band was sending forth a whirlwind of
+quadrille music, and in the centre of the ballroom eight women danced
+the can-can. They were large women, some of them rather fat, and none of
+them rather young. They wore wide straw hats and simple tailored
+shirtwaists and dark skirts of a cut<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> almost severe; but in sharp
+contrast to this exterior, when they danced, they displayed incredible
+yards and yards of lace petticoat and stockings that outshone the
+rainbow.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of it?" asked Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel condemned the Bal Tabarin as she had condemned Boussingault.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it's horrid," she replied. "Aren't they ugly?" But she did not
+take her eyes from the dancers.</p>
+
+<p>All about the dancing-floor, except in that large circular clearing for
+the performers, were little tables where men and women sat and drank
+beer and smoked cigarettes. Along one side was a long bar at which both
+sexes were served. Everyone gave casual heed to the dancing; everyone
+applauded when he was pleased and hissed when he was not. Now and then a
+young woman would rush to a neighbouring table, seize upon a man and
+guide him madly about one corner of the floor in time to the music, and
+now and then it would be a young man that seized upon a woman, at which
+the patrons, if they paid any attention at all to it, smiled
+good-naturedly. At one of the most conspicuous tables were a couple
+kissing above their foaming beer-mugs, and nobody seemed to notice them.
+Clearly, this was a world where one did as one pleased, and, so long as
+one did not trespass upon the individuality of another, none objected.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Something new, isn't it?" asked Jim, rather dubiously.</p>
+
+<p>"It's unbelievable," said Muriel, her face flushed.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we go?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;we might as well wait a little while&mdash;until we've finished our
+champagne."</p>
+
+<p>The quadrille ended. There were ten minutes during which the visitors to
+the place waltzed rapidly, with feet lifting high, about the floor. Down
+the centre two young girls were swaying together in a form of waltzing
+that neither of the Americans had ever seen before. A man and a woman,
+dancing, would embrace violently at every recurrence of a certain
+refrain.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel slipped her hand along the rail of the box. Stainton, whose eyes
+were fixed on the dancers, started at her touch.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold my hand," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>He took her hand in his, lowering it from the view of the spectators.</p>
+
+<p>"No," commanded Muriel: "on the rail, please."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, but isn't that rather&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to be the custom, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>So he held her hand before them all, and soon found himself liking this.</p>
+
+<p>A troupe of girls ran upon the floor and, to the music, began a
+performance in tumbling. The hair of one was loosened, the ribbon that
+held it fell at her slippered feet, and two men, from near-by tables,
+leaped<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> upon it and struggled laughingly for possession of the trophy.</p>
+
+<p>The Staintons were intent upon this when they heard a low laugh behind
+them. They looked about: three women with bright cheeks were peeping
+through the swinging doors of the box. Involuntarily, Jim smiled, and,
+since a smile in Montmartre passes current for an invitation, the
+foremost of the girls entered, shutting out her companions.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Vous êtes Américains?</i>" she enquired.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton's French went as far as that. He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Du nord ou du sud?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Jim was accustomed to thinking that there was but one real America.</p>
+
+<p>"The United States," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Ver' well," laughed the girl in an English prettily accented. "Your
+good 'ealth, sar&mdash;and the good 'ealth of mademoiselle."</p>
+
+<p>She raised from the table Jim's goblet of champagne and drank a little.
+It was evident that her English was now exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>Jim, frankly puzzled, looked at Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall we do?" he wondered.</p>
+
+<p>He thought that Muriel would resent the intrusion, but Muriel did not
+seem to resent it.</p>
+
+<p>"It appears to be the custom," said Muriel again. "I suppose that we had
+better ask her to sit down and have some champagne."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said Stainton, none too willingly. "You ask her, then: the
+French verb 'to sit' always was too much for me."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel offered the invitation; the visitor laughingly accepted; another
+bottle was ordered and, while Jim, unable to understand what was being
+said, leaned over the rail and looked at the dancers, his wife and the
+vermilion-lipped intruder engaged in an encounter of small-talk that
+Muriel began by enjoying as an improvement at once of her French and her
+knowledge of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The visitor, however, so managed the conversation that, though she did
+give Muriel her address in a little street off the Boulevard Clichy, it
+was she who was gathering information. She was extremely polite, but
+extremely inquisitive.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been long in Paris, is it not?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No, not long; only two weeks," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"But in France&mdash;no?"</p>
+
+<p>"We came direct to Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"But you speak French well, mademoiselle."</p>
+
+<p>The compliment pleased Muriel to the extent that she missed the title
+applied to her.</p>
+
+<p>"My knowledge of French is very small," she replied. "I studied the
+language in America."</p>
+
+<p>"In America? Truly? One would never suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"We had a French nun for teacher."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes. And monsieur your sweetheart, he does not speak French&mdash;no?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel started.</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur," she said, a little stiffly, "is my husband."</p>
+
+<p>But the visitor, far from feeling reprimanded, was openly delighted.</p>
+
+<p>"Your husband?" she echoed. "Very good. He is handsome, your husband."</p>
+
+<p>"I think so," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"And it is always good," pursued the guest, "that the husband be much
+older than the wife, is it not?"</p>
+
+<p>Instantly Muriel relapsed. She could not know that the girl spoke
+sincerely. She was among strangers, and, like most of us, instinctively
+suspected all whose native tongue was not her own.</p>
+
+<p>"He is not much older!" she retorted.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;but yes. And it is well. It is so that it is most often arranged in
+France."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt&mdash;but our marriages are not 'arranged' for us in America. We
+choose for ourselves."</p>
+
+<p>The visitor seemed surprised. She raised her long, high brows and looked
+from Stainton to Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"How then," she enquired, "you choose for yourself a man so much older?"</p>
+
+<p>"I say he is <i>not</i> much older, not any older," said Muriel, despising
+herself for having fallen into such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> discussion, yet unable, in an
+alien language, to disentangle herself.</p>
+
+<p>"But madame is a mere girl," said the visitor, seeking only to be
+polite.</p>
+
+<p>"And my husband is young also," declared Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>Something in the tone of this repetition convinced the French girl that
+the subject was not further to be pursued. She essayed another tack.</p>
+
+<p>"And the babies?" she asked. "Is it that you brought with you the
+babies?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's cheeks warmed again, and she looked away.</p>
+
+<p>"We have no children," she responded, shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"No children?" The visitor plainly considered this unbelievable. "You
+have no little babies? Then, why to marry?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Not one?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have none."</p>
+
+<p>"But how unhappy, how unfortunate for monsieur! Perhaps soon&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We have been married only a short time."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" The French girl seemed to rest upon that as the sole reasonable
+explanation. "Then," she said with a note of encouragement in her tone,
+"it is not without hope. After a while you will have the babies."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was angry. She looked to Jim for rescue; but Jim was still
+leaning over the rail, engrossed in the spectacle presented by the
+dancers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I do not want any children," said Muriel, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"No children? You wish no children?" gasped her inquisitor. "You choose
+to marry, and yet you want no children? But why then did madame marry?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel rose.</p>
+
+<p>"For reasons that you cannot understand," she said. "We must go now,"
+she added; and she touched Jim's arm. "Come," she said to him; "let's
+go, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton turned slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the hurry?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be after one o'clock," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"But we are in Montmartre."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;and we have still a great deal of it to see before daylight, I
+believe."</p>
+
+<p>Jim rose.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," he said.</p>
+
+<p>The girl put out her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>S'il vous plaît, monsieur</i>," she said: "<i>la petite monnaie</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had tried to take the extended hand to bid its owner
+good-night, but he noticed, before she began to speak, that it was
+turned palm upward.</p>
+
+<p>"What's this?" he enquired of Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"My cab-fare," said the visitor in French, and Muriel, vaguely
+appreciating the fact that here was another custom of the country,
+translated.</p>
+
+<p>"Give her a five-franc piece," she said. "Something of the sort is
+evidently expected."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So I have to pay her for the privilege of buying her champagne?"
+laughed Jim. "Ask her what I <i>am</i> paying for. I am curious about this."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Do," urged Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>But the girl appeared now to comprehend. She was not embarrassed.</p>
+
+<p>"In brief," she explained, "for my time."</p>
+
+<p>"You pay her," Muriel grudgingly translated, "for her time. But," she
+concluded, "I wouldn't pay her much, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"So that's it!" chuckled Stainton. "Oh, well, I don't want to seem
+stingy after all this discussion of it."</p>
+
+<p>He handed her a ten-franc louis.</p>
+
+<p>The girl's eyes caught the unexpected glint of gold.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, la-la-la!" she gurgled, and, with what seemed one movement, she
+pocketed the money; drank to Jim's health; flung her arms about him with
+a sounding kiss on his mouth, and ran giggling through the
+folding-doors.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton, tingling with a strange excitement and looking decidedly
+foolish, gazed at his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of that?" he choked.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel stood before him trembling, her black eyes ablaze.</p>
+
+<p>"How <i>dared</i> you?" she demanded.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"<i>I?</i>" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth did <i>I</i> do?"</p>
+
+<p>"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear, <i>I</i> didn't do anything. It was the girl&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You permitted it."</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid.
+And she meant it as a compliment."</p>
+
+<p>"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter
+that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."</p>
+
+<p>"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you
+couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."</p>
+
+<p>He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of
+which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most
+gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they
+went.</p>
+
+<p>They climbed the crowded stairs and paused for a moment in the doorway,
+while Jim began to divest himself of his overcoat. Muriel, ahead, was
+looking into the elaborate room.</p>
+
+<p>Pale green and white it was and loud with laughter and music, with the
+popping of many corks and the chatter of persons that seemed to have no
+mission there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> save the common mission of enjoyment. In the centre was a
+cleared space, and there, among handsomely appointed tables, the white
+waistcoated men and radiantly-gowned women loudly applauding, two
+Spanish girls in bright costumes were dancing the sensuous mattchiche.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel saw that, at one of the tables nearest the dancers, was a young
+man who applauded more enthusiastically than any of his neighbours. She
+saw that the girls observed this and liked it. She saw one girl, with an
+especially violent embrace, seize her partner, hold her tight for an
+instant, release her, and then, dashing to the young man, extend her
+arms, to which the young man sprang amid the tolerant laughter of his
+companions. Muriel saw the Spanish girl and the young man continue the
+dance.</p>
+
+<p>Quickly she wheeled to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to go in here," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded.</p>
+
+<p>She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the
+room, in the position that he had thus far maintained.</p>
+
+<p>"I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the
+stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well."</p>
+
+<p>She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced
+to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between
+sobs, to kissing him.</p>
+
+<p>"I love you!&mdash;I love you!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>WORMWOOD</h3>
+
+
+<p>When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through
+which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed,
+often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried
+lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing
+gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to
+return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply,
+bidding her sleep and not bother.</p>
+
+<p>Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that
+opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps
+this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but
+Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of
+his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his
+hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he
+cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the
+turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected
+of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes
+and gladly let him go.</p>
+
+<p>On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he
+was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal
+of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked
+down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that
+he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to
+smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He
+knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their
+surmise and the truth.</p>
+
+<p>He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to
+Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every
+fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours
+more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round
+tables on the sidewalk outside a corner café. Only one of them was in
+use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a
+closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner
+was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and
+his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other
+customer.</p>
+
+<p>A dirty waiter appeared from the café and shuffled forward, adjusting
+his apron.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>B'jour, monsieur</i>," the waiter mumbled.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stainton did not return this salutation.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau</i>," he ordered.</p>
+
+<p>He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago.
+He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter
+would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the
+boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the
+little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink,
+put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the
+glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself
+after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an
+afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.</p>
+
+<p>The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress
+toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind
+inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with
+the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their
+work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their
+play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys
+shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim
+by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the
+papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles;
+the girls annoyed him most because they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> would call one another's
+attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these
+people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been
+doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their
+own hearts; but Jim hated them all.</p>
+
+<p>He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage,
+went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but,
+when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he
+found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.</p>
+
+<p>Was <i>M. le médecin</i> in? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he
+doubted if <i>M. le médecin</i> could as yet receive monsieur. It was early,
+and <i>M. le médecin</i> rarely saw any patients before&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before
+the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily
+bade him enter.</p>
+
+<p>"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and
+as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's
+hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, <i>hein</i>? Did
+the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not
+my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what
+is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend?
+Sit."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and
+pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner
+Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiène Sociale,"
+Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier,
+Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits,
+there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling
+ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and
+there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a
+memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his
+back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample
+mouth were contracted.</p>
+
+<p>"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something
+else. I dare say it's not&mdash;not much. I know that these things may be the
+merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical
+weariness, or&mdash;or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does
+like to have a physician's assurance."</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault peered through his bar-bound <i>pince-nez</i>. He began to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe
+before the <i>déjeuner</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton tried to smile.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life,"
+he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I
+took it on an empty stomach."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.</p>
+
+<p>"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But you do not come here to pass the time, <i>hein</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, doctor."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his
+shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take
+absinthe for the second time in your life."</p>
+
+<p>He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's
+nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had
+come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared
+to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be
+founded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you&mdash;you
+met my wife last evening."</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.</p>
+
+<p>"What then?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think of her?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I think that she is very charming&mdash;and, M. Stainton, very young."</p>
+
+<p>It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk
+even to my physician of&mdash;of certain intimate matters; but"&mdash;he glanced
+at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf&mdash;"from the titles
+of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within
+the limits of your specialty."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he
+could find a suitable one, his vis-à-vis, looking him straight in the
+eyes, had settled the matter:</p>
+
+<p>"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should
+drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of
+excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He
+paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded,
+"she is how old?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his
+anxiety to protect himself.</p>
+
+<p>"She is nearly nineteen."</p>
+
+<p>"Eighteen, <i>bien</i>. And you?"</p>
+
+<p>Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the
+arms of his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Before I married," he said, "only a very short time before I married, I
+had myself looked over carefully<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> by one of the most eminent physicians
+in New York. He assured me that I was in perfect physical condition,
+that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, your <i>biceps
+flexor</i>. How many years are you alive?"</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary."</p>
+
+<p>"And your age?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.</p>
+
+<p>"Fifty," he belligerently declared.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Vous voilà!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is
+it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl
+of eighteen&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I have lived a careful life!"</p>
+
+<p>"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are
+moderate drinkers."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I drink no more than you."</p>
+
+<p>"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."</p>
+
+<p>"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"La-la-la!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely
+abstemious."</p>
+
+<p>It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant
+effort to speak as if he did not.</p>
+
+<p>"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton rose.</p>
+
+<p>"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled
+the more knowingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you are here," said he.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to
+leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he
+showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.</p>
+
+<p>"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as
+restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come
+to consult me."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression&mdash;all my life
+of&mdash;of&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault rose at last. He came round the desk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> and, with a touch of
+genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.</p>
+
+<p>"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he
+comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!'
+The old roué, he comes to me and says&mdash;the same thing. We all some day
+curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of
+merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on
+one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it
+with regard to no man."</p>
+
+<p>"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."</p>
+
+<p>"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.</p>
+
+<p>The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but
+even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make
+him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt,
+I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her
+young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself
+with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts&mdash;you try to live
+downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not
+possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is
+not cruel. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> is not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the
+beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps
+time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember
+your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now&mdash;Poof!
+It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to
+quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her
+respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us.
+Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this
+prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more.
+You must yourself rest."</p>
+
+<p>He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and
+handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same
+strain, as before.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been
+easier."</p>
+
+<p>"In a little while?"</p>
+
+<p>"There will be a child."</p>
+
+<p>Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" he said. "And you&mdash;you&mdash;&mdash;Thousand thunders, these Americans
+here!"</p>
+
+<p>At this Stainton himself grew angry.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."</p>
+
+<p>"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> ceiling. "Hear him! 'It is
+far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the
+great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the '<i>Avis Important</i>'
+he there has posted on the door."</p>
+
+<p>It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain
+and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had
+been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried
+by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame
+Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had
+been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more
+exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of
+maturity.</p>
+
+<p>"A week," he said, patting Stainton's broad, straight back. "One little
+week. We must ourself sever from the so charming lady for so long, for
+we know that, ultimately, an absence will work for even her good. Is it
+not, <i>hein</i>? But the not-knowing profound of mankind! Incredible! Truly.
+Nine-tens of my women patients, they are married, who of themselves know
+not half so much as the savage little girl of ten years. And the men,
+they I think no more wise."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton passed through the now crowded waiting-room and into the sunlit
+street in a mood that wavered between rebellion and submission. He
+walked to the Chatham and, once arrived, walked past the hotel. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> did
+this twice, when, with the realisation that he hesitated from fear of
+Muriel, he mastered his timidity and entered.</p>
+
+<p>His wife was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, but Stainton knew that
+she was not asleep. He went to her and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," he said, "I am going to Lyons."</p>
+
+<p>She did not open her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I think that I ought to go," said Stainton, "and clean up this matter
+of the sale. I shall get the American consul there to recommend a good
+lawyer, and I'll complete the whole transaction as soon as I can."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"It will probably take an entire week," pursued Stainton. He waited. "I
+don't like to leave you alone in Paris, but you'd be frightfully lonely
+in Lyons, and I shall be busy&mdash;very busy. Now, I know you don't like
+Boussingault. I don't like his opinions myself, but he is a leading man
+in his specialty, and his wife is a good woman. She has said that she
+will call on you this afternoon and take you to stay with her."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all," said Stainton, "except that there is a train from the Gare
+de Lyon at noon, and I ought to take it."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then you have been to Dr. Boussingault?" asked Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, dear."</p>
+
+<p>"And he&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He said the&mdash;the change was what I needed."</p>
+
+<p>He busied himself packing a bag. At last he came again to the bed and
+bent over her.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her lips, and he strained her to him. He did not trust
+himself to say more, and he was grateful to her for her refusal to ask
+any further question. She kissed him, her eyes unopened. All that he
+knew was that she kissed him.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel lay quiet for some time. Then she got up and dressed and
+shuddered when she looked at herself in the mirror, and tightened her
+stays. Yet she dressed carefully before going out for a long walk.</p>
+
+<p>In the Tuileries Gardens she watched the gaily costumed maids and wet
+nurses with their little charges. She saw a woman of the working class,
+who was soon to be a mother. She looked away.</p>
+
+<p>She hailed a passing cab.</p>
+
+<p>"Drive me to the Boulevard Clichy," she said in French.</p>
+
+<p>The driver nodded.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel entered the cab. She had an important errand.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the afternoon she returned to the Chatham<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> and left it with a
+suitcase in her hand. She told the unsurprised clerk at the <i>bureau</i>
+that her rooms were to be held for her, but that she would be absent for
+five days.</p>
+
+<p>"If anyone calls," she said, "you will say that I have gone to Lyon with
+monsieur."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>RUNAWAYS</h3>
+
+
+<p>Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better
+spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly
+his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that
+Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to
+be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from
+congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he
+announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before
+received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her
+normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below
+the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.</p>
+
+<p>Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the
+day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to
+meet him, and he embraced her warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to
+have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's
+good to be with you again!"</p>
+
+<p>"What wire?" asked Muriel.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to
+have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me
+before those strangers."</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our
+two selves&mdash;just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now,"
+he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his
+knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my
+reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is
+gone&mdash;going, going, gone&mdash;and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri
+Duperré Boussingault et Cie., for&mdash;&mdash;I told you the figure, didn't
+I&mdash;<i>our</i> figure? Isn't it splendid?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't really object?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I? Of course I am glad."</p>
+
+<p>"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember&mdash;but you showed me how foolish that was."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed happily.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a great converter," he said. "If you could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> only have heard me
+converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel&mdash;and mostly
+through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and
+you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little
+brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On
+Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and
+there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on
+a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should&mdash;&mdash;" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were
+the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind?
+Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you
+wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you
+didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the
+Boussingaults."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel sat upon his knee.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"But, dearest, how&mdash;What?&mdash;Where were you? You mean to say that you
+stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and
+sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.</p>
+
+<p>"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did
+you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," she said. "I&mdash;Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"</p>
+
+<p>"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then
+you never got my letters?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel! And you pretended&mdash;Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She
+said she would call the afternoon that I left."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose she did."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see
+her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't see her. I left word at the <i>bureau</i> that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> was out. I left
+word that I had gone to Lyons with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking
+right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would
+know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that
+you weren't with me."</p>
+
+<p>She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.</p>
+
+<p>Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.</p>
+
+<p>"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and
+were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a
+fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand,
+dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"I was. Yes, I was."</p>
+
+<p>"You are the best man in the world, only&mdash;only&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt,
+dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I had to."</p>
+
+<p>"Out of consideration for me."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and
+so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+anything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave,
+lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in
+your condition!"</p>
+
+<p>She drew from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim&mdash;&mdash;" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Jim&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults.
+Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't tell him, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll see; we'll see."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him
+again."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am&mdash;I dare say I am
+as bad&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not.
+Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in
+the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or
+interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and
+soon"&mdash;he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child&mdash;"in
+a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Don't!" said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am
+going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear
+of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly
+always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make
+a tour of the shops."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her face with a troubled smile.</p>
+
+<p>"I have everything I want," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared
+to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."</p>
+
+<p>"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."</p>
+
+<p>"All?" smiled her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already
+that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them.
+You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad
+you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get
+some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those&mdash;some little
+things&mdash;some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival
+of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know
+I am."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's voice faltered.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So soon&mdash;&mdash;" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city
+where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come
+along."</p>
+
+<p>She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after
+shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes.
+She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she
+endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed
+her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which
+he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as
+he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop
+clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as
+this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the
+approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last
+broke down and fainted in their <i>taxi-mètre</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept
+long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains
+and stood looking out upon a grey day.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to think it over," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I
+want to go to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been
+like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."</p>
+
+<p>He softened.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you well?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't call me that," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, Muriel?"</p>
+
+<p>"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim&mdash;&mdash;" She put her
+hand in his&mdash;"I'm horrid, I know&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You're never that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired
+of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can
+pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again Muriel took refuge at the window.</p>
+
+<p>"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think so."</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be cold, dear."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm
+weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."</p>
+
+<p>She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make
+arrangements. In an hour he was back.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of
+mail sent on as far as Neuchâtel. We can get a train in forty-five
+minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a
+ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English&mdash;and here are the tickets.
+Can you be ready?"</p>
+
+<p>She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly
+distracting journey.</p>
+
+<p>The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their
+train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard,
+then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over
+fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white
+strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without
+deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old
+red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel
+would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church
+would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the
+tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier
+and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward
+and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds
+about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchâtel with the white Sentis to
+the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.</p>
+
+<p>But a day at Neuchâtel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted
+to move on. She made enquiries.</p>
+
+<p>"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor
+was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly
+protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done
+almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no
+business and nothing else to do."</p>
+
+<p>So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne,
+through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg,
+past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of
+Königsfelden,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary
+had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by
+John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden
+and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to
+Zurich.</p>
+
+<p>They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of
+their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on
+their way to the Gross-Münster, Muriel said:</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here.
+Let's go on to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back
+to the hotel this minute and lie down."</p>
+
+<p>She would not hear of that.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe
+Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you
+know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"</p>
+
+<p>Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon
+the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her
+unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than
+he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> to sleep, eight hours
+later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few
+real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to
+loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."</p>
+
+<p>"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."</p>
+
+<p>"We've seen it, haven't we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to
+Innsbruck."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to
+know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed
+and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am
+about done up."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan
+to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that
+Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded
+Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruins<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> of Gräphang and, on the
+great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.</p>
+
+<p>Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of
+their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring
+moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer,
+saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had
+the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last
+there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a
+sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.</p>
+
+<p>"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte
+and Twain and Do-<i>nel</i>li."</p>
+
+<p>"Our what?" asked Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"Please?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't catch that last name."</p>
+
+<p>"Donelli&mdash;Ignatius Donelli."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly&mdash;yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know
+of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian left the train just before they reached the
+six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight
+after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel moved uneasily. Von Klausen's name had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> not been mentioned more
+than twice between them since they had left the <i>Friedrich Barbarossa</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton reflected.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed
+rather to neglect us in Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>My</i> Austrian? Why mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."</p>
+
+<p>He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to
+quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all
+Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the
+Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then
+across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by
+way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale
+spring sunshine and where, in rôles of gallants to the fashionable
+ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of
+light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel
+said that the women were dowdy and their escorts ef<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>feminate; she
+scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the
+copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediæval
+roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene
+Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the
+Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb
+of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton
+was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf.
+So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure
+these things&mdash;and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was again in tears.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear.
+Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm tired of looking and waiting&mdash;we've been doing that ever since
+we went away. Let's go back to Paris."</p>
+
+<p>Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she
+had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them
+both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions&mdash;and now
+she wanted to go back to Paris!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"I know; but now it will be spring there&mdash;real spring&mdash;and everyone says
+that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet the climate&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think"&mdash;Stainton put his hand upon hers&mdash;"do you think that you
+can rest there: really rest?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak a word
+of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful. I did my
+best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German, either, and
+so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been
+hurrying&mdash;hurrying&mdash;hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked
+sixty years old.</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that
+pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know <i>what's</i> the matter with me;
+but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back
+home."</p>
+
+<p>This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more
+quartered at the Chatham.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>"NOT AT HOME"</h3>
+
+
+<p>"A gentleman to see madame."</p>
+
+<p>The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the
+barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four
+hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up"
+at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris,
+there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's
+nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of
+Captain von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not at home," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added:
+"This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that
+madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and
+it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed
+disappointed."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not at home," repeated Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself
+out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat
+wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the
+sitting-room<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> again opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen
+downstairs and had brought him along.</p>
+
+<p>In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and
+his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it.
+Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an
+air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed
+utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had
+Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have
+protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young
+fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a
+schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented
+Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Muriel was annoyed. She was annoyed lest they had fallen
+in with the servant, which they had not done, and been told that she was
+out. She was annoyed with Jim because he had brought to call upon her a
+man that, only a few days before, she had told him she disliked. And she
+was distinctly annoyed with von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the interview passed off pleasantly enough. Jim was never the man to
+observe under a woman's conventional politeness, even when that
+politeness was ominously intensified, the fires of her disapproval, and
+von Klausen, if indeed he saw more than the husband, at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> least appeared
+to see no more. He remained to tea.</p>
+
+<p>"Why on earth did you bring <i>him</i> here?" asked Muriel as soon as the
+door had closed on the Austrian.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, did you mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told you that I didn't like him."</p>
+
+<p>"I know, but you didn't seem to mind."</p>
+
+<p>"I managed not to be rude to your guest, that's all. Jim, you must have
+remembered that I said I didn't like him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do remember," Stainton confessed; "but the fact is that I
+brought him because I couldn't very well get out of bringing him. He was
+so extremely glad to see me that I couldn't merely drop him in the
+lobby."</p>
+
+<p>"How did he know that we were here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told him on the boat that we were to stop here."</p>
+
+<p>"But we have been and gone and returned since then."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I suppose he found us out in the same way that Boussingault did:
+in the hotel news of the <i>Daily Mail</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you might have told him that I wasn't at home. That's what I told
+the servant when his card was sent up."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Muriel, I might have tried that, and, as a matter of fact, I did
+think of it; but then he would have hung on to me downstairs, and I knew
+you would be lonely up here without me."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Muriel turned away to observe herself in a long mirror.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I don't like him," she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, dear, but what was I to do. Besides, he is really a very good
+fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you
+have for your prejudice?"</p>
+
+<p>"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she
+hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's
+generally good ground for it."</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a
+mere boy."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than
+I am."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you so very aged, my dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Well said," he declared; "your young husband has been so weather-beaten
+that he has been a pretty poor sort of spouse lately. We won't worry any
+more about von Klausen."</p>
+
+<p>Yet to worry about von Klausen they were forced. They seemed, during the
+next ten days, to meet him everywhere, and he was always so polite that
+his invitations could not be contumeliously refused. He took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> them to
+the opera and to supper afterwards, and they, at last, had to ask him to
+dine.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the midst of this dinner at Les Fleurs that Stainton, begging
+his guest's pardon, glanced at a letter that had been handed him as he
+and Muriel that evening left the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello," he said, "these French business-men are not so slow, after all.
+They have drawn the final papers, and I am to sign them to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"So," he said, "I shall have to break our agreement this once, Muriel,
+and leave you alone for the morning. Will you forgive me?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't be bored?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'll be bored, of course, but I shall make the best of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Permit me," interposed von Klausen, "to offer my services to Mrs.
+Stainton."</p>
+
+<p>"Your services?" asked Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"To occupy you during your husband's absence. It is unendurable to think
+of you as wholly deserted&mdash;is it not, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian was addressing Jim. Stainton and his wife exchanged a quick
+glance. Jim was thinking of her expression of dislike for the Captain;
+Muriel was annoyed because her husband had neglected to read<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> his letter
+before they joined von Klausen: she was in the mood for revenge.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she'll make out," said Stainton. "Won't you, Muriel?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," replied Muriel. "It will be very dull."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I renew my offer," said von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Captain," protested Jim, apparently blind to everything but his
+wife's prejudice, "we couldn't think of imposing on you."</p>
+
+<p>"An imposition&mdash;Mr. Stainton! How an imposition? A privilege, I assure
+you, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"But your duties at the Embassy?"</p>
+
+<p>"One can sacrifice much for one's friends, Mr. Stainton; as it
+fortunately happens, I shall be all at liberty to-morrow morning. The
+spring is come upon us early. It will, I am sure, be delightful weather.
+If Mrs. Stainton will permit me the pleasure of driving her through the
+Bois&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Muriel. "You are very kind. I'll go."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton looked perplexedly at his wife.</p>
+
+<p>He did not, however, again broach the matter until they were safely in
+their own rooms at the hotel and were ready for bed.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you'll forgive me," he at last said.</p>
+
+<p>"For what?"</p>
+
+<p>"For getting you into that confounded engagement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> with young von
+Klausen. It was stupid of me. I don't know how I ever blundered into
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"It's of no consequence. I dare say I can stand him for once."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you can, dear. Still, I know how you dislike the Captain, and
+so I hope you'll pardon&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense," yawned Muriel. "Don't think about it any more. And do turn
+out the light. I'm awfully sleepy."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>IN THE BOIS</h3>
+
+
+<p>That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely
+begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and
+so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the Forêt de Rouvray and the
+Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets
+and the Champs Elysées, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic
+commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman
+seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and
+turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence
+fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the
+horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" she enquired.</p>
+
+<p>"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the
+most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality
+of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you
+have been good enough to visit."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to
+contradict him. She looked out at the Lac Inférieur, with its shaded
+banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in
+imitation of a Swiss <i>chalet</i>. She was resolved to prefer this to his
+Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the
+Austrian Tyrol as his own.</p>
+
+<p>"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.</p>
+
+<p>"Better? But&mdash;why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and
+inviting."</p>
+
+<p>"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen,
+smiling.</p>
+
+<p>He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself
+fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain
+turned to the driver.</p>
+
+<p>"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.</p>
+
+<p>There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the
+undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.</p>
+
+<p>"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after
+your return from your visit to my country."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said
+this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her
+companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have
+not been thinking much about you one way or the other."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry," said von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."</p>
+
+<p>"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at
+his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.</p>
+
+<p>"How dared you?" she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a
+reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you shan't know."</p>
+
+<p>"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to
+plead in his own defence?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are not accused&mdash;and you aren't judged."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how
+is that possible?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none.
+Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To
+accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in
+another of them."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel bit her red under-lip.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go back," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."</p>
+
+<p>They walked a few steps forward.</p>
+
+<p>"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are
+presumptuous."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."</p>
+
+<p>"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."</p>
+
+<p>"What nonsense!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret,
+madame."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's eyes flashed.</p>
+
+<p>"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident
+that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen bowed.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to
+the reference."</p>
+
+<p>"I did not."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close
+acquaintanceship."</p>
+
+<p>"I required nothing&mdash;and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was
+the merest trifle."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to
+your husband."</p>
+
+<p>She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky
+cheeks were aflame.</p>
+
+<p>"How low of you!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.</p>
+
+<p>"To mention the truth?" he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"To bring up such a trifle&mdash;to trade on such a confidence&mdash;to make of an
+impulsive action and of the consequences of that action&mdash;you know&mdash;I
+told you at the time, and you must know&mdash;that I didn't mention the
+circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been
+to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you
+would not want your terror known."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;so you did think of me, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."</p>
+
+<p>They were now half-way along the Lac Inférieur. Under the arching trees
+in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring
+morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the
+Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling
+companion. His lithe figure trembled, his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> pink cheeks burned; in his
+blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched
+my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always&mdash;think of me deeply. I
+cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must
+listen. I tell you now, once and forever&mdash;I tell you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise
+understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there
+was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly
+unloosed&mdash;the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite
+of all the hampering harness of convention&mdash;and she was undeniably
+curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain
+sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory
+knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this
+soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage
+and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been
+goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion
+against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent
+opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something
+else&mdash;something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the
+young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of
+ancestral training, which, once unleashed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> shatters every barrier of
+elaborately conceived convention.</p>
+
+<p>Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the
+last, it will have its word.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop!" said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do
+not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only
+a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and
+slowly; now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically
+Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the
+Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence
+for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was
+evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her
+soul&mdash;and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful
+consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the
+moment before.</p>
+
+<p>She raised a trembling hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as
+ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would&mdash;I believe
+he would kill you."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but
+the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands
+fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.</p>
+
+<p>"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some
+phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no
+man that lives."</p>
+
+<p>"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered:
+"afraid and ashamed."</p>
+
+<p>"Not afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the
+splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way.
+Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."</p>
+
+<p>It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result.
+Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so
+deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley
+in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he
+did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and
+the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was
+somehow inexplicably true.</p>
+
+<p>Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him.
+His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he
+was pleading<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could
+not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was
+doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the
+result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty
+had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak
+began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth
+which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard
+his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself
+murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry&mdash;very sorry. We will never
+speak of it again&mdash;not to ourselves&mdash;and not to anybody else."</p>
+
+<p>"But we shall be friends?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was
+before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his
+manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had
+previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will
+never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a
+herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.</p>
+
+<p>When one is young such promises are lightly made.</p>
+
+<p>"Never," he vowed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this
+affair to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never again, dear lady."</p>
+
+<p>"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in&mdash;in that
+way."</p>
+
+<p>He pressed her hand ever so slightly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."</p>
+
+<p>"But the thoughts are wrong."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I
+cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only
+master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The
+good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he
+has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions.
+I shall remember always his words."</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and
+their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them
+to fall, upon trivial things.</p>
+
+<p>"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the
+subject of her fevered trip with Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"We didn't get anywhere near it. I&mdash;we were in a hurry to get back to
+Paris. We&mdash;we thought it would be warmer in Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we
+crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had
+driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came
+right back here."</p>
+
+<p>"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it.
+It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world
+goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit
+at a table before one of the cafés, of an evening in summer or of a
+Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebière or the rue
+Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime&mdash;you and
+your husband."</p>
+
+<p>"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and
+I."</p>
+
+<p>"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and
+more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons
+seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."</p>
+
+<p>She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.</p>
+
+<p>"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has
+sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau&mdash;the particular point
+that I mean&mdash;a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are
+set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises
+almost to the clouds. Nearly at its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> top, a precipice below and a
+precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That
+cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelène spent, in penance,
+the last thirty years of her life."</p>
+
+<p>He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been there, then?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers
+and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot&mdash;the silent chapel; the long,
+fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to
+the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below,
+and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CALL OF YOUTH</h3>
+
+
+<p>That evening there came the beginning of the end.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with
+preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate
+any sort of fête of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had
+not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von
+Klausen had promised his two American friends, the <i>grand boulevard</i>
+would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the
+Madelaine.</p>
+
+<p>"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with
+Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to
+luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The
+streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be
+masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."</p>
+
+<p>He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of
+the dull routine of the Embassy.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own
+part, though she told herself religiously<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> that she had done no wrong,
+she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and
+kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been
+preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm
+over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she
+glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.</p>
+
+<p>"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention
+had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description
+of the evening before the fête. If he felt somewhat worn from the now
+unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome
+this chance for novel amusement.</p>
+
+<p>"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our
+pilot, Captain?"</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"If," he said, "you will do me the honour&mdash;you and Mrs. Stainton&mdash;to
+dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot
+and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the
+boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no
+alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of
+her drive this morning?"</p>
+
+<p>Jim, too, looked at Muriel.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the
+Austrian's.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.</p>
+
+<p>"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This
+juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the
+signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the
+movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all."
+He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during
+the remainder of the afternoon&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not
+stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with
+her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to
+face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own
+thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely
+knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to
+waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious
+if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every
+minute. You <i>are</i> sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by
+motoring to Versailles and back."</p>
+
+<p>So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in
+time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odéon and dined on
+<i>croûte consommé</i>, <i>filet</i> of cod, and <i>canard sauvage à la presse</i>.
+After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than
+he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.</p>
+
+<p>When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from
+the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had
+predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from
+house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and
+threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as
+riotously happy as only a fête-day crowd in Paris can be.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue
+Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of
+merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of
+confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue
+Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton
+was lost.</p>
+
+<p>They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood
+on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on
+this side, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered
+their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and
+though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away,
+Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts,
+he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.</p>
+
+<p>Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the
+fête-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel
+began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said&mdash;and, as he had to bend to
+her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a
+loose strand of her dark hair&mdash;"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall
+find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."</p>
+
+<p>"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in
+order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her
+fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man
+grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll
+go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves&mdash;at once&mdash;at once!
+Call a cab."</p>
+
+<p>Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her,
+bending to her ear.</p>
+
+<p>"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far&mdash;if you are not too tired?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, no, I'm not too tired&mdash;or I won't be if we can only hurry."</p>
+
+<p>They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.</p>
+
+<p>"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are
+afraid&mdash;of me?"</p>
+
+<p>His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine
+sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this
+morning."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Not afraid</i>&mdash;even then. And now&mdash;well, I remember the talk we had
+afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."</p>
+
+<p>Again his lips were near her neck.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never forget it," he vowed.</p>
+
+<p>Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her
+words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she
+dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed.
+She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they
+had reached the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they
+met.</p>
+
+<p>The servant thought not.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask at the <i>bureau</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had not yet come back.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be
+better that we await him in your sitting-room."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the
+hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now
+a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor
+errors&mdash;perhaps the greatest&mdash;that they inspire us with the fear that
+the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had
+never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her.
+She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than
+withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world
+would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with
+the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she
+became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted
+eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not
+precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method
+of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been
+roused.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the
+servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will
+say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my&mdash;in the
+sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on
+their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen
+shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this
+silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her
+wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It
+was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and
+she sought refuge in platitude.</p>
+
+<p>"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she
+added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."</p>
+
+<p>There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish
+than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes
+narrowed.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.</p>
+
+<p>"Only what has happened to us. He&mdash;I think he will be here soon."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that.
+She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence.
+She wished devoutly that Jim would return.</p>
+
+<p>"It&mdash;it is rather close here," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes
+from her. He did not move.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered. "Will you&mdash;will you be so good as to open the
+window?"</p>
+
+<p>He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice,
+and he turned to the window.</p>
+
+<p>The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to
+draw them from the glass. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between
+them. Then something went wrong with the knob that controls the bolt. He
+shook the knob. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a
+tinkle of falling glass.</p>
+
+<p>Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was
+trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.</p>
+
+<p>"You are hurt?" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."</p>
+
+<p>The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.</p>
+
+<p>"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the
+knuckles&mdash;a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white
+fingers and marked them with a bright stain.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had
+begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature;
+the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black
+hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm
+and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things
+they had never seen before.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with
+electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.</p>
+
+<p>The circuit was complete.</p>
+
+<p>"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a
+voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:</p>
+
+<p>"I love you!"</p>
+
+<p>She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond
+reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when
+they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips,
+in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast
+there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to
+the force in her own true being.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.</p>
+
+<p>"But Jim&mdash;&mdash;You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is
+far, far too good for either of us."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost
+merry kiss.</p>
+
+<p>"He need never know," said the Austrian.</p>
+
+<p>She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.</p>
+
+<p>"You&mdash;you&mdash;&mdash;" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could
+never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go!"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She
+pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with
+hate and shame.</p>
+
+<p>"Go!"</p>
+
+<p>"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."</p>
+
+<p>"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the
+word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across
+her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"But, Muriel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring
+for the servants."</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again,
+I'll ring."</p>
+
+<p>He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave
+him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He
+shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.</p>
+
+<p>Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination,
+Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried
+to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which
+only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into
+the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his
+day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the
+boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!" he cried.</p>
+
+<p>She opened her heavy eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim!"</p>
+
+<p>He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father
+strokes the hair of his weary child.</p>
+
+<p>"My poor little girl!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Had she thought at all coherently about his coming,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> she had not meant
+to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had
+occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth,
+or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him
+while he did that.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you
+anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought&mdash;I hardly
+know what I thought."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached
+for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel started.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's&mdash;&mdash;" She
+laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It
+stuck&mdash;the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his
+wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the
+pieces from the floor."</p>
+
+<p>She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to
+her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of
+marital ethics.</p>
+
+<p>After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to
+draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of
+deception. Truth became impossible.</p>
+
+<p>She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> it became, the more
+bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that
+she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her
+relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration
+of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen
+had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far
+below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy
+against her lover and heightened her affection&mdash;call it love as she
+would, it would now be no more than affection&mdash;for Jim. She wanted to
+tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that
+barred her way.</p>
+
+<p>She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."</p>
+
+<p>At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood
+had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for
+motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is
+really no reason for you to worry."</p>
+
+<p>She did not look up, but she shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not," she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her
+cheek, which her hands left bare.</p>
+
+<p>"There, there," he said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."</p>
+
+<p>He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"What&mdash;what&mdash;&mdash;" he stammered.</p>
+
+<p>"O, Jim!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What&mdash;how? When? You don't
+mean&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control
+himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his
+reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy
+of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he
+began again:</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"</p>
+
+<p>He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the
+edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its
+fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite
+Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.</p>
+
+<p>"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey
+brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"</p>
+
+<p>Her head sank lower in her hands.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You
+must know! How did this happen?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her
+only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her
+breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Answer me!" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her
+face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into
+a sheet.</p>
+
+<p>"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a
+drive. Coming back&mdash;here at the hotel&mdash;I fell from the cab&mdash;getting out.
+I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor&mdash;<i>not</i>
+Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said
+it was easy&mdash;They said I would be all right in a week.&mdash;I thought I
+was&mdash;But I have suffered&mdash;O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't,
+please, think&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She crashed to the floor at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers
+while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their
+mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He
+stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head
+against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to
+murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew
+it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have
+had rest, and instead&mdash;&mdash;Why didn't you tell me? Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid," she said, simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"</p>
+
+<p>Her words were a fresh stab.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I knew how much you wanted&mdash;&mdash;And I was afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me
+what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."</p>
+
+<p>"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the
+place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time,
+perhaps&mdash;&mdash;Only now&mdash;oh, take me away!"</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to
+our own country. Back home."</p>
+
+<p>But at that she shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than
+Paris. Don't you see? We left<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> there happy, expecting&mdash;&mdash;Not there. No,
+I couldn't bear that."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking
+her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand,
+brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.</p>
+
+<p>She drew the hand from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."</p>
+
+<p>"It is&mdash;there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk
+about getting away."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we
+were in Italy."</p>
+
+<p>"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell
+you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."</p>
+
+<p>"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not
+anything I have said about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not that. I don't know. Something before that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you lost me in the crowd?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the
+boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I&mdash;I don't
+like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."</p>
+
+<p>He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both
+that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in
+unfamiliar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> surroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are
+familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be
+remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those
+which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.</p>
+
+<p>New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would
+do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris
+and different from New York.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to
+be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It
+was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her
+effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning they left for Marseilles.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>OUR LADY OF PROTECTION</h3>
+
+
+<p>For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel,
+because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to
+the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however,
+was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned
+and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the
+Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by
+taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road
+beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had
+ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing
+that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's take it," said Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of
+hotels.</p>
+
+<p>"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may
+want to be getting back home when&mdash;when all's well again."</p>
+
+<p>"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are
+willing to pay them a little more than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> they would ask on a long lease,"
+Muriel serenely assured him.</p>
+
+<p>Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a
+small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it
+to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at
+once.</p>
+
+<p>They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their
+rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of
+fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of
+business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for
+the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for
+Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because
+she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to
+banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to
+which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own
+reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It
+annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her
+shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put
+roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders
+and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for
+excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she
+was heartily sorry for Jim.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to
+press once more the question of their return to New York. They were
+sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their
+villa, and were looking over the blue bay.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"</p>
+
+<p>His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have
+thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to
+see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," she granted.</p>
+
+<p>On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out
+the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill
+on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern
+monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open
+elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed
+the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which
+stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.</p>
+
+<p>The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a
+quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of
+storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of
+the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other
+ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at
+the little tiles,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers
+answered or to the making of other prayers.</p>
+
+<p>"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping
+before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused,
+"that these people wanted."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."</p>
+
+<p>His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."</p>
+
+<p>"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze
+out there."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's lips tightened.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," she said.</p>
+
+<p>She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled
+to the side overlooking the bay.</p>
+
+<p>Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a
+panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping
+in the <i>vieux port</i>, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed
+houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from
+the foot of the wall and for miles to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> the left, across the Cité Chabas
+and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point,
+where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in
+terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From
+dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas
+on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue;
+the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the
+waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of
+land where towers the Château d'If.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The
+breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen
+below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape&mdash;of a
+landscape of which she had only heard:</p>
+
+<p>"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away;
+the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the
+distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and
+was saved."</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel!"</p>
+
+<p>It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and
+had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner
+serious.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you come here?"</p>
+
+<p>The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her
+weapons of defence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning
+after you departed&mdash;because I had to see you, whether you wished me or
+not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and
+they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your
+hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on
+the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come
+here."</p>
+
+<p>His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her
+poise.</p>
+
+<p>"How dared you come?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."</p>
+
+<p>"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"</p>
+
+<p>"You must." He came nearer to her.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she
+demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that
+you have told him nothing."</p>
+
+<p>She eyed him menacingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you so sure of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> if you have told
+him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider
+me?&mdash;But of course you don't!"</p>
+
+<p>"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have
+come to say&mdash;perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear
+that I should cause you annoyance&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You annoy me now."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you have not told him&mdash;&mdash;Well, what I have to say is my excuse.
+If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste
+in saying it."</p>
+
+<p>He moved still nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"I have told him," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes,
+her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.</p>
+
+<p>"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said
+von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to
+tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied.
+I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I
+have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was
+in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I
+know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> and the absence
+from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do
+not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that
+word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now&mdash;now, <i>ach</i>, I know I
+love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred
+as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in
+your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my
+punishment&mdash;for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and
+I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still
+be hopeless."</p>
+
+<p>She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it
+rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the
+cold.</p>
+
+<p>"Hopeless?" she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes
+of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."</p>
+
+<p>She remembered her teaching in the convent school.</p>
+
+<p>"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact,
+you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning
+the corner of the promenade.</p>
+
+<p>"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything.
+Wait. There will be another<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> chance for us: I must have one word alone
+with you before&mdash;before&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our
+lives."</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see
+you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive
+glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to
+the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience
+with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so
+the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The
+Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself
+altogether at the best.</p>
+
+<p>"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been
+homesick for a long time without knowing."</p>
+
+<p>"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little
+dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have
+one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we
+are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that
+both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then you are returning soon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Three weeks from to-day."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel looked at Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed,
+didn't we, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She
+could only nod.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not
+mention it to me when we met to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled
+pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a
+departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in
+three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious
+manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there
+were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her
+were not the sense of her deception of him.</p>
+
+<p>"I forgot," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing,
+my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the
+Captain for a few minutes with his <i>dubonais</i>. We have an outside<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+stateroom on the upper deck of the <i>Prinzess Wilhelmina</i>, and we sail
+from Genoa."</p>
+
+<p>He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the
+southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced
+another surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains
+to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here
+until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."</p>
+
+<p>This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's
+not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you
+had to to run right off to dress, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Why must you go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Those French purchasers again."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were through with them."</p>
+
+<p>"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they
+have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I
+wrote to them and fixed a price on that."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean that you tricked them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of
+doing business."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't say you had written them."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, when do I bore you with business<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> affairs?" Stainton turned to
+von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But
+perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening
+and see that she is not too much depressed."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately
+shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he
+was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone
+there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and
+she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house.
+Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and
+the Austrian left without naming his hotel.</p>
+
+<p>When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing,
+although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company.
+She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you going away to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>Jim was surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I think you might have told me when <i>he</i> wasn't here."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, you gave me no chance."</p>
+
+<p>"And you booked passage back, Jim?"</p>
+
+<p>"Passage home, yes."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Muriel's mouth drooped.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked
+searchingly into hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know, Jim, but I never promised&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how
+to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that,
+within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in
+France or America.</p>
+
+<p>"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want
+to leave early. We had better go to bed."</p>
+
+<p>She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to
+Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet
+she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule
+never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded
+that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent,
+and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and
+watched him climb aboard his train.</p>
+
+<p>She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried
+to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none.
+As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> afraid. When
+nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew
+afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed
+him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown
+into her drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>"You shouldn't," she said&mdash;"you shouldn't have come!"</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young
+and handsome.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Because of Jim."</p>
+
+<p>"He invited me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know, but&mdash;&mdash;" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted
+her fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."</p>
+
+<p>"He was queer. His manner&mdash;I don't know. Only I had not promised to go
+home in three weeks."</p>
+
+<p>"No?"</p>
+
+<p>"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons
+and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of
+business. I know that; surely you should know it better."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That business wasn't like him."</p>
+
+<p>"It was very&mdash;shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself.
+Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married
+man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife
+in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once
+more!'"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this
+was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa,
+the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare
+shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.</p>
+
+<p>The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the
+walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half
+hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say
+good-bye forever.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la
+Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love
+for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had
+asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the
+characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love
+for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether.
+This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not
+have with the sanction of holy authority<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> he would not now attempt at
+all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and
+of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he
+had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more
+than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one
+might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon
+a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.</p>
+
+<p>They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet
+Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now
+think of as so right might end by being very wrong."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be
+right."</p>
+
+<p>"Not the ruin of our lives?"</p>
+
+<p>"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your
+husband's&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't
+honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is
+good and kind and brave; but somehow&mdash;I don't know why: I don't know
+why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did
+love him."</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless, you are married to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A divorce is always wrong."</p>
+
+<p>"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the
+marriage a real one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of
+any faith is binding."</p>
+
+<p>"But marriage is a contract."</p>
+
+<p>"Marriage is a sacrament."</p>
+
+<p>They would get so far&mdash;always darting down this byway and that of
+casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against
+the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom&mdash;and then she would come back
+to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her
+great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from
+taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile,
+and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one
+in a passion of abnegation.</p>
+
+<p>But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it
+must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued
+proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung,
+with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding
+interview.</p>
+
+<p>In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel started.</p>
+
+<p>"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling
+bell.</p>
+
+<p>"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in
+that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of
+man.</p>
+
+<p>Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind
+rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the
+Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.</p>
+
+<p>"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"</p>
+
+<p>With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He
+told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they
+occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as
+passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to
+chastity.</p>
+
+<p>To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past
+seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded
+it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force
+balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim
+had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had
+once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving
+how much stronger was her hold on him.</p>
+
+<p>"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment
+more and they would go on, forever, apart.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with
+pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan
+Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer,
+fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her
+wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high,
+curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were
+damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars.
+He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled
+her in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that Stainton entered the room.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>HUSBAND AND WIFE</h3>
+
+
+<p>They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each
+was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the
+door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one
+glance. Each turned toward the husband.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled heartily.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed
+her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see
+you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you.
+But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your
+country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."</p>
+
+<p>"When&mdash;&mdash;" began Muriel.</p>
+
+<p>"I got as far as Montélimart when they caught me with one of their blue
+telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have
+to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what
+train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles
+and landed at Lyons before I heard that&mdash;I wasn't wanted."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Muriel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> had been on the verge
+of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian,
+nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to
+court it quite another.</p>
+
+<p>"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored
+your good wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my
+good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last
+distinctly to say:</p>
+
+<p>"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.</p>
+
+<p>"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.</p>
+
+<p>"You have said, sir, that it is late."</p>
+
+<p>"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."</p>
+
+<p>The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the
+drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an
+explanation."</p>
+
+<p>She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his
+approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't touch me!" she cried.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely,
+what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual rôle of fond
+protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even
+pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she
+could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened
+by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there
+cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.</p>
+
+<p>Jim stopped short.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well,
+you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>Tradition always shows us the wronged husband in a towering rage, in the
+throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for
+either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife
+the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of
+their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is
+contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his
+senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to
+pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you sit down?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel sat down.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"About my trip to Lyons?"</p>
+
+<p>"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."</p>
+
+<p>"I have some right, I think, to come home."</p>
+
+<p>"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an
+'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has
+been in my mind for some time."</p>
+
+<p>"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your
+suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at
+the first?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"</p>
+
+<p>"Love affair? There has been no love affair."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he
+stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't
+for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I
+tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that
+night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the
+Spanish dancer&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames
+of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved,
+with an upward motion, slowly around her.</p>
+
+<p>"You saw that!"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and,
+naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe
+what it was."</p>
+
+<p>The wife fought for her self-control and won it.</p>
+
+<p>"Deceit! Deceit even then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did
+not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris&mdash;and I
+understood later why you wanted to go back."</p>
+
+<p>He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your
+illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did
+not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy,
+too, there came the night of the fête. I could tell when von Klausen and
+you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the
+air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the
+boulevards: I separated myself from you."</p>
+
+<p>He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once
+beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.</p>
+
+<p>"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> give me a fair chance?
+You threw me into his arms&mdash;or tried to&mdash;and you call that a fair
+chance?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which
+clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he
+smiled quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger;
+your love for me&mdash;or failing your love, your moral strength&mdash;need not
+assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself
+to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."</p>
+
+<p>"You coward!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be
+a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full
+opportunity. Otherwise the fear&mdash;a very small one then&mdash;would have
+continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives,
+his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."</p>
+
+<p>"You dare to say that!"</p>
+
+<p>He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the
+room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing
+its point.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is
+that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all
+upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went
+on, "a woman compromises herself with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> X, at least after she has become
+a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself
+with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only
+exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner
+or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y
+and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their
+personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though
+this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she
+should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has
+managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a
+few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks
+were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the
+low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a
+lightning-flash on a darkened sea.</p>
+
+<p>"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she
+declared.</p>
+
+<p>He raised a steady hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Only a moment more, please," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:</p>
+
+<p>"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I
+took you away from Paris again&mdash;the next day, wasn't it?&mdash;because you
+wanted to go,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen
+was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am
+by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian
+turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I
+decided to make an end of it. Now"&mdash;he spoke as if he were concluding an
+affair of business&mdash;"I have made that end."</p>
+
+<p>"How have you made that end?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled wanly.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear&mdash;&mdash;" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't call me that."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you
+are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."</p>
+
+<p>"How have you made an end?"</p>
+
+<p>"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that you think&mdash;that you dare to think that I&mdash;that the
+Captain and&mdash;that we&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know.
+Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the
+preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this
+house&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"At your invitation!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained
+alone with you in this room until<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> after midnight&mdash;I say, given all
+these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I
+wanted&mdash;the evidence of seeing you in his arms&mdash;no man in his senses
+would for one moment doubt&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her
+disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will
+never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You
+unclean-minded old man!"</p>
+
+<p>He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own
+high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been
+so long festering in her mind&mdash;at first unguessed, then vehemently
+denied, but always there and always becoming more and more
+poisonous&mdash;the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned
+to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in
+a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had
+achieved maturity.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you listen to me," she commanded.</p>
+
+<p>Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> He gripped its
+back and leaned across the back toward her.</p>
+
+<p>So they stood, facing each other.</p>
+
+<p>"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible
+alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and
+hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and
+trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to
+hope&mdash;actually to hope!&mdash;for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young,
+and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one
+minute your wife."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.</p>
+
+<p>"You were a good imitation," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife,
+anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and
+couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real,
+so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what
+was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what
+you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an
+admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was
+it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And
+me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house,
+and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"For a time you were a good imitation."</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I
+tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I
+soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things
+would change, that they were so bad they must change&mdash;and they
+wouldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper
+lip.</p>
+
+<p>"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't
+you remember, at the very start, how I <i>said</i> I wanted to be honest? But
+somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened,
+seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why
+does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie,
+and so all we did was lies and lies."</p>
+
+<p>"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to
+give&mdash;not what I gave you&mdash;not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What
+was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you
+always <i>knew</i> that <i>you</i> had all <i>you</i> wanted. Well, you had. But did
+you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as
+a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I
+sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> sinned against Nature. I let
+myself be married to a man three times my age&mdash;and this is Nature's
+punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and
+then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger,
+and because I <i>was</i> hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that
+was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"&mdash;she
+flashed it out at him&mdash;"what happened to me while you were selling the
+mine was not an accident!"</p>
+
+<p>This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger
+and horror struggled for him.</p>
+
+<p>"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that
+girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and
+I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that
+I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to
+have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't
+want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think
+I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the
+time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go
+crazy&mdash;<i>crazy</i>! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother
+against my will!"</p>
+
+<p>He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her
+deed. He could not try to indicate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> the injury that she had most likely
+done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:</p>
+
+<p>"You loved him&mdash;then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't love you."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you love him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied
+to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But
+then, when I did <i>that</i> thing, I only knew what I've told you."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself,
+but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.</p>
+
+<p>"But I love him now," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.</p>
+
+<p>"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing&mdash;nothing. I was no
+more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so
+little, were fit to be my husband."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton half turned.</p>
+
+<p>"And he?" Jim asked.</p>
+
+<p>"He loves me: you only liked having me."</p>
+
+<p>He turned slowly away again.</p>
+
+<p>She thought that she heard him whisper:</p>
+
+<p>"No child!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost
+everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a
+baby, a little dead baby.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> It will never leave me: it's the little
+ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of
+going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an
+hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a
+candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face.
+One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with
+him. She was right; he was growing old.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XX</h2>
+
+<h3>HUSBAND AND LOVER</h3>
+
+
+<p>At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and
+flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling
+clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or
+less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me,
+I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But, monsieur&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."</p>
+
+<p>"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried
+to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion
+flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."</p>
+
+<p>"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to
+monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> him and, as the maid
+left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth
+time when the domestic reappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his
+question.</p>
+
+<p>The maid presented a card.</p>
+
+<p>"Show Captain von Klausen up here," said Jim.</p>
+
+<p>A moment later, husband and lover stood alone together.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-morning," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>He held out his hand, and von Klausen, after a swift hesitation, took
+it.</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian's expression was disturbed. He was unshaven. It was obvious
+that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. The sight seemed, somehow,
+to restore his host's self-confidence.</p>
+
+<p>"You will please to pardon for this early intrusion&mdash;&mdash;" von Klausen
+began.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You are always so pleasant, Captain," he said, "that you never intrude.
+Besides, the earlier the better. As it happens, I was just this moment
+thinking of you."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen bowed. There was a brief pause, the Austrian's blue eyes
+wandering about the room in an endeavour to escape Stainton's glance,
+and Stainton's eyes fastened thoughtfully upon the Austrian.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well?" asked the husband.</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen coughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Madame is&mdash;is&mdash;&mdash;" he started, but stopped short.</p>
+
+<p>"You asked for me. Did you expect to find her up at this time of day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no&mdash;no: certainly not. Pardon me. I forgot the hour."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you often forget the hour, don't you, Captain?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian braced himself. He raised his chin defiantly. He met the
+issue directly.</p>
+
+<p>"You refer," he asked, "to my late call of last evening&mdash;yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"More or less. I am rather curious about that call."</p>
+
+<p>"Sir, there is nothing about it to excite your curiosity. You asked me
+to call. There is nothing of my call that you may not learn from your
+wife."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt. Of course not; but it may be that I prefer to ask you."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen was in a corner. Anger he could have met with anger, but
+here was something that he did not comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>"I can answer no question," he said, stiffly, "that you have not asked
+of Mrs. Stainton."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that I haven't asked her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know that you have."</p>
+
+<p>"You are sure of that?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What do you wish to say, Mr. Stainton?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean: are you sure that you haven't seen her since you left here last
+night?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian's face expressed a bewilderment that Stainton could not
+mistrust.</p>
+
+<p>"How is that possible?" inquired von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course!" Stainton, convinced, shrugged his shoulders. "However,
+I do want to make a few inquiries of you."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I prefer to wait until your wife descends, so that you may make
+them in her presence."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton still held in his left hand the letter that Muriel had
+addressed to him. He tapped it upon the knuckles of his right hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid," he said, "that I can't conveniently wait so long. Captain
+von Klausen, are you in love with my wife?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian rose precipitately. His blond moustache bristled.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir!" said he.</p>
+
+<p>"I merely wanted to know."</p>
+
+<p>"At your question I am amazed, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I really had a good reason for asking."</p>
+
+<p>"In my country no reason suffices for such a question."</p>
+
+<p>"Hum. Well, you see, neither my wife nor I belong to your country, and
+you are not in your country now. However, there is no need for you to
+get excited,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> Captain. I am sorry if I seem to have intruded on your
+confidence with a lady; but, to tell you the truth, as my wife has
+admitted that she is in love with you, I was not unnaturally somewhat
+curious to discover whether you reciprocated her affection."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen's eyes protruded. This husband was, obviously, mad. He might
+have been driven mad by his discovery. The discovery seemed a thing
+accomplished. With a great in-taking of breath, the Austrian made
+answer:</p>
+
+<p>"You have loved your wife. Why should <i>I</i> be ashamed to say that I love
+her?"</p>
+
+<p>If von Klausen expected an explosion, he was disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Stainton, calmly, "that is one way of looking at it."</p>
+
+<p>"Please?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind. You say you love her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton looked at him narrowly, from under heavy brows. He regularly
+tapped his knuckles with the envelope.</p>
+
+<p>"For a day?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean: is this a world-without-end business so far as you are
+concerned, or is it one of your little amusements by the way?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian clenched his teeth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to insult me, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"I assure you that I mean nothing of the sort."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you insult your wife!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. I am sorry that you should suppose I could think ill of
+her."</p>
+
+<p>"If you do not think ill of her, you have no right to ask such a
+question as this which you have asked."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not impossible that I should be a trifle interested, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot understand, sir, how you can have the calmness&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? She is my wife, you see. What I want to know is whether you
+are genuinely, sincerely in love with her. You know what I mean. As
+between man and man now: is this a for-ever-and-ever affair with you?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian's bewilderment found vent in a long sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"It is," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Good," said Stainton. He thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets
+and bent forward. "If I let her get a divorce from me, will you marry
+her?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you make a joke?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't consider this a joking matter, Captain. I ask you a frank
+question and I want a frank answer."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen doubted his ears, but he replied:</p>
+
+<p>"I would desire nothing better, but my faith forbids."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You're sincere in that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Absolutely."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean about your faith, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever else may be charged against me, sir, heresy or infidelity may
+not be charged."</p>
+
+<p>"Have a cigar," said Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>He produced his cigar-case, gave the Austrian a cigar, held a steady
+match while his guest secured a light, and then, with a cigar between
+his teeth, began to walk rapidly up and down the room, puffing quietly,
+his hands clasped behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," he said. "I am the kind of man that lives to look ahead and
+prepare for all contingencies. I do not always succeed, but I see no
+harm in trying. Well. When I first began to think about this thing, I
+said I would be prepared for the worst, if the worst came. I remembered
+your prejudices, and I had a fellow do some research work for me at the
+Bibliothèque Nationale, and yesterday I spent some time in the seminary
+library at Avignon. My dear fellow, you haven't got a leg to stand on."</p>
+
+<p>"No leg?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in your objections to divorce and remarriage."</p>
+
+<p>"The Church&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Was founded by, or at any rate pretends allegiance to, Jesus of
+Nazareth. Now, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said&mdash;it's not
+certain&mdash;something that may seem to bear out your theories; but that
+something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> which may be twisted to your way was said just about two
+thousand years ago to a small, outlying, semi-barbarous province. Are
+you going to try to apply it to civilisation to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian had philosophically seated himself in the chair against
+which Jim had leaned the night before.</p>
+
+<p>"I apply the Sermon on the Mount," said von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you? I didn't think you did. But we'll pass that. Your faith bases
+its argument on the interpretation of that text made by the Early
+Church, and the Christian Fathers interpreted it in just about two dozen
+different ways."</p>
+
+<p>"So?" said von Klausen: he would humour this lunatic.</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place, at the beginning of the Christian Era marriage in
+Rome was a private partnership that the parties could dissolve by mutual
+consent, or by one notifying the other, as in any other partnership;
+that was part of Roman law, and for centuries neither the Church nor its
+Fathers disputed that law. In all the history of the first phase of
+Christianity in Rome you can't find one time when the whole Church
+accepted the idea that marriage was indissoluble. Once or twice the
+Church tried to get the law to require the Church's sanction before
+decree of divorce would be legally valid, but that was not a denial of
+divorce; it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> was a recognition and an endeavour to capture the control
+and exploitation of divorces."</p>
+
+<p>"That matters nothing," said von Klausen. "These things were determined
+otherwise. With all my heart I wish not, but they were."</p>
+
+<p>"How? The Church began by having nothing to do with marriages. Weddings
+were not held in the churches and so of course marriage was not
+considered a sacrament. I can give you chapter and verse for everything
+I say. About the only early council that tried to interfere with the law
+was the Council of 416, or some time near that. It tried to make Rome
+abolish divorce, but no emperor listened to it till early in the ninth
+century&mdash;Charlemagne, and he practised divorce himself. Only a little
+earlier&mdash;I think it was in 870&mdash;the Church officially allowed
+dissolution of marriage. In the Middle Ages the episcopal courts allowed
+divorce and were supported by the popes."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage
+indissoluble?"</p>
+
+<p>"I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the
+Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble, <i>anathema sit</i>. The
+Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the
+Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He
+shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do,"
+he said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said.</p>
+
+<p>"I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed
+divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom
+tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so
+afraid of women that he&mdash;he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce
+for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was
+careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming."</p>
+
+<p>"St. Augustine is the authority in this matter."</p>
+
+<p>"And no one other person ever said so many contradictory things about
+it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs
+without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't
+condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery;
+in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in
+the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to
+bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take
+their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton paused to relight his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage."</p>
+
+<p>"Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the
+other."</p>
+
+<p>Von Klausen shrugged.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after
+the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow
+him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in
+everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly
+blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her
+husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced
+person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was
+weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate
+the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation.
+Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more
+than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine
+himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it."</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual
+interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only
+intellectual.</p>
+
+<p>"It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted;
+"it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a
+sacrament."</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an
+act of the flesh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Then how can what is done by the flesh be a sacrament?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know. I know that it is. The Church,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> whether early or late,
+has spoken and it has said that marriage is a sacrament indissoluble
+save by the death of the husband or the wife."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton put down his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"Captain," he said, "you are in earnest, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian flushed, but did not flinch.</p>
+
+<p>"I am," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"You love her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Truly?"</p>
+
+<p>"With heart and soul, both."</p>
+
+<p>"And there is no changing your faith?"</p>
+
+<p>"No way."</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't any short-cut, any quick trail over the mountain, any
+bridle-path? A fellow cannot get an Indulgence&mdash;nothing of that sort?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish&mdash;I wish deeply that one might; but&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Jim with a little sigh, "I suppose not nowadays. I looked
+that up, too. Public opinion is pretty strong, and as wrong as usual."
+He seemed to shake the subject from him. "And," he ended, "now that I
+have bored you with my cheap pedantry, I remember that I have been a bad
+host: I have not asked you your errand."</p>
+
+<p>What change was coming over the madman now?</p>
+
+<p>"My errand?" asked von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. You come here at about 9 A.M., and I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> take up your valuable
+time with a discussion of ecclesiastical polity. What was it that you
+wanted to see me about?"</p>
+
+<p>What the Austrian had wanted he had long since learned. He had no sooner
+left the villa on the night previous than he began to doubt whether his
+supposition that Stainton was unsuspicious was quite so well founded as
+he had at first imagined. He recalled a certain constraint in the
+husband's deportment, and then he imagined other tokens that had not
+been displayed. In the end, he decided to return to Muriel's home at the
+earliest possible moment, discover whether there were any real danger
+and, if there was, face its consequences. Now, however he learned that
+Muriel had made some sort of confession to Stainton and that Stainton
+had received that confession in a manner inexplicable to von Klausen.
+Confronted with Jim's abrupt question, he did not know what to say, and
+so he found himself saying:</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to see Mrs. Stainton."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton whistled.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you could," he answered. "Indeed, indeed, I wish you could, my
+boy; but I am sorry to say that it is out of the question."</p>
+
+<p>"You forbid it?" Von Klausen wished that these confounded Americans
+could be brought to see the simplicity of settling complex difficulties
+by the code of honour.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I didn't say that I forbade it; I said it was out of the question. I
+meant that it was out of the question."</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian bent forward, hot anger in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you dare to deprive her of her liberty?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, my dear sir, she has taken her liberty. She has gone
+away."</p>
+
+<p>The thing seemed incredible to von Klausen:</p>
+
+<p>"Away from Marseilles?"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"That's it," he agreed.</p>
+
+<p>There shot through von Klausen's mind the thought that this lunatic had
+killed her. If so, he would surely kill the lunatic or be killed in the
+attempt.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe it," he said. "I believe that you are&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Captain von Klausen, I have learned all that I want to know about your
+religious faith, and I am not in the slightest degree interested in the
+question of your other beliefs. I say to you that my wife has gone away,
+and I am afraid that, whether you like it or not, you are obliged, for
+the present, to accept my word."</p>
+
+<p>"I will not accept your word!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, but I don't see what else you can very well do. Of course,
+you might watch the house, but the Corniche gets very hot by midday."</p>
+
+<p>"You joke. You can joke about such a thing!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I have never been so serious as I am now."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton emphasised his words with a gesture of his left hand, in which
+he held the now crumpled letter.</p>
+
+<p>"That letter!" said von Klausen with sudden inspiration. "It is from
+her!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you have intercepted a letter from her to me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not in the habit of reading my wife's personal letters to other
+people&mdash;when she writes any. This note is addressed to me, and it is
+this note that tells me of her departure."</p>
+
+<p>"It tells you where she is going?"</p>
+
+<p>"It tells me that and more. It tells me that she is sorry for a wound
+she thinks she has inflicted on my feelings, and she proposed to look
+for rest in a certain secluded place."</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian's blue eyes brightened.</p>
+
+<p>"A secluded place?" he repeated, excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly; but I shall not tell you its name. I shall keep that to myself
+until I have had another interview with my wife."</p>
+
+<p>The Captain looked closely at Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean to follow and chastise her?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"There," said Stainton, quietly, "I think we reach a point where the
+matter becomes entirely my own affair."</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MAN AND HIS GOD</h3>
+
+
+<p>If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very
+small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:</p>
+
+<p>"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus (5
+fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) Gémenos to the (4 hrs.)
+Hôtellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the
+(5&frac12; M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad
+road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the Hôtellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on
+the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, &frac34; hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of
+the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees&mdash;The Ste.
+Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen
+retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is
+still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the
+mountains among which it lies."</p>
+
+<p>So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or
+else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists
+spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which
+hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> last
+residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant
+had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the
+earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it
+might quite as well be across the celestial border.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had
+written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking
+reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.</p>
+
+<p>The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died
+away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to
+have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the
+difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning
+herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her
+because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy
+which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.</p>
+
+<p>She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but
+she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with
+his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before
+recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least
+won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before,
+assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised
+herself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> to him in that long ago and far away New York&mdash;how tall and
+strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master,
+of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed
+her to his breast&mdash;how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure
+that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed
+her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of
+such short life?</p>
+
+<p>In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand
+little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point
+its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to
+him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in
+character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her
+anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement,
+as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of
+any physical contact with him made her shiver.</p>
+
+<p>Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She
+was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a
+sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it
+could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as
+his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral
+rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> primal impulses
+she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage
+trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding,
+wanted to hide and suffer alone.</p>
+
+<p>She had some money in her purse&mdash;a thousand francs. She wrote the note
+to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that
+she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes
+and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram
+to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.</p>
+
+<p>It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind
+a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas,
+they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged
+mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became
+sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only
+thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes,
+looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath
+her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the
+gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view,
+only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to
+gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer
+precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed
+to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> showed
+even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they
+rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide
+plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came,
+among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hôtellerie that had for many
+years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of
+its builders.</p>
+
+<p>They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid
+sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell
+of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church
+inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.</p>
+
+<p>A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon
+her knees and prayed.</p>
+
+<p>She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after
+her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.</p>
+
+<p>She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a
+gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill
+became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn
+path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant
+boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since
+they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags
+above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached
+at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of
+smooth rock that leaned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> far forward from the clouds as if it were about
+to fall.</p>
+
+<p>Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting
+steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of
+the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted
+natural balcony, was the grotto.</p>
+
+<p>Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were
+open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of
+the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the
+cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an
+irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the
+low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primæval forest,
+to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered
+von Klausen's words:</p>
+
+<p>"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the
+snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant
+sheep-bells, and the memory&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.</p>
+
+<p>He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see
+that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she
+noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.</p>
+
+<p>"You followed?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He nodded briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you follow me?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>It was fully a minute before he regained his breath; but when he spoke
+he spoke calmly and gently.</p>
+
+<p>"I came," he said, "to say some things that I should have said last
+night."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel braced herself against the parapet.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said she.</p>
+
+<p>He understood her.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mean to scold you, dear," began Stainton.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes regarded her wistfully, and she turned away, glancing first
+over the precipice where, below them, the treetops tossed and then up,
+far up, straight up, to the awful height of sheer cliff overhead where,
+somewhere just beyond her sight, there nestled, she knew, the little
+chapel of St. Pilon.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait and you will understand."</p>
+
+<p>She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear.
+She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as
+punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry
+with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for,
+but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you&mdash;I promised to
+love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be
+loved, you deserve it. And yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come
+back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with
+you. If you want me to, we can start right away."</p>
+
+<p>But Stainton would not yet hear of that.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps
+something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and
+heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor
+little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"</p>
+
+<p>"I could never do that, Muriel."</p>
+
+<p>"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you&mdash;you, my husband&mdash;and I
+do&mdash;I do&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not
+utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:</p>
+
+<p>"You do love him?"</p>
+
+<p>She bowed her dark head in assent.</p>
+
+<p>"You are very sure?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Very, very sure."</p>
+
+<p>"So that it was not"&mdash;he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to
+put the question&mdash;"it was not merely passion?"</p>
+
+<p>Muriel looked straight into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only
+twice even so much as kissed him."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to
+him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been
+baser.</p>
+
+<p>There was a long pause.</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see."</p>
+
+<p>He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them.</p>
+
+<p>"And&mdash;von Klausen," he presently pursued&mdash;"you will let me ask it, won't
+you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure
+that his love for you is&mdash;is of the same sort that yours is for him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the same evidence."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me."</p>
+
+<p>She gave a short cry.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he hurt?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I
+didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by
+motor-bus, to learn&mdash;what I have learned; and to say&mdash;what I am about to
+say."</p>
+
+<p>"You told him where I was?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving
+a note in which you told me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> that you were bound for a certain secluded
+spot to be alone."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel clasped her white hands in distress.</p>
+
+<p>"He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me
+of this place&mdash;told me only the other day in much those words."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled a little.</p>
+
+<p>"I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should."</p>
+
+<p>"But he will follow!"</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt."</p>
+
+<p>"You&mdash;you&mdash;why do you speak so?"</p>
+
+<p>"He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably
+come the whole way by motor."</p>
+
+<p>"He will&mdash;he will! He will know that you have come&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I told him that I meant to."</p>
+
+<p>"And he will think you mean to punish me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And&mdash;oh, don't you see?&mdash;he will come to protect me!"</p>
+
+<p>The husband again put his hand timidly upon her arm.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," he said, "that is just what I wanted him to do&mdash;and what I
+feared he might not do if I told him that I wanted it. The worst thing
+about this whole tragedy is that it is unnecessary, a quite useless
+tragedy. I've thought a great deal since you spoke<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> out plainly to me,
+and I am beginning to see&mdash;even I, who wish not to see it&mdash;that you were
+not so far from right; for if man's stupidity hadn't devised for itself
+a wholly crooked and muddled system for the conduct of his life, this
+sort of now common catastrophe simply couldn't happen. Listen."</p>
+
+<p>He plucked at her sleeve, and she turned her pale face toward him.</p>
+
+<p>"All my life," he went on, "I've been afraid of two things: old age
+and&mdash;something else. Perhaps I've learned better in the last few hours.
+I've tried to learn that only the laws of man are horrible and bad and
+that no natural law can be, if we face it for what it is, either
+repellent or wrong. Before, I tried to be young. I trained myself to be
+young. I denied my youth, believing that I could strengthen and prolong
+it. I decided that youth was a state of mind&mdash;that it could be retained
+by an effort of the will. I postponed love with that in mind, and I
+postponed too long. Then, when I never doubted myself, I married you."</p>
+
+<p>He released her arm.</p>
+
+<p>"I married you," he continued; "and so, from sinning against myself, I
+began to sin against another. Much that you said last night was right. I
+have been selfish. I have robbed you of your youth, and I've given you
+nothing in return but what a man might give to spoil a child or to
+flatter a mistress. It wasn't a marriage. I see that now. The white heat
+of passion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> fused together two pieces of greatly differing metals, but
+when the passion cooled, the welding wouldn't hold: the joint snapped. I
+thought I could hold you. Hold you&mdash;as if that could be love which must
+be held! I took a low advantage of your ignorance of life. I came to
+you, who knew nothing, and said: 'I will teach you'&mdash;but&mdash;I was giving
+you the half-sunshine of the sunset when your just portion was the blaze
+of noon. I was keeping youth from youth."</p>
+
+<p>Her large eyes were tender with tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean it?" she asked. "Do you really mean&mdash;all this?"</p>
+
+<p>"As I never meant anything else in my life. I violated nature and must
+pay the price."</p>
+
+<p>Throughout all time and lands, he now felt, youth calls to youth,
+generation to generation, and not all the laws upon the statute-books of
+all the world can silence it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've thought that you were ignorant," he was saying; "perhaps you were
+wiser than I. You are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling it. I was
+the one that was ignorant. I was the one that was wrong."</p>
+
+<p>Out of sheer generosity, though her brain and heart cried assent to his
+every word, she tried to protest. But the youth in her heart clamoured
+that he was speaking truth.</p>
+
+<p>"And so," he concluded, "now that I am sure that you truly love each
+other, I mean to step aside."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She looked at him blankly.</p>
+
+<p>"Step aside?" she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean to make what reparation is possible: I must."</p>
+
+<p>Muriel's face quivered.</p>
+
+<p>"So that I&mdash;that we&mdash;&mdash;" she started.</p>
+
+<p>"So that you and von Klausen may marry."</p>
+
+<p>"But we can't anyhow! Oh&mdash;that's the horror of it! That's why the thing
+can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a
+sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of
+pain.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and
+now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am
+only wondering&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases
+of the colloquial.</p>
+
+<p>"Look there!" he broke off.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the
+tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was
+bounding: fevered, lithe, young.</p>
+
+<p>Muriel clutched the parapet.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Franz!" she said.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought
+I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the Hôtellerie. He must
+have left the car there and come right on."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what
+shall I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"See him, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll
+just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it
+all over again? I'm tired&mdash;I'm so tired!"</p>
+
+<p>Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not
+take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward
+translate into a good-bye.</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around
+to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."</p>
+
+<p>"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life&mdash;you've said so
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more
+appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of
+the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke
+enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this
+cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to
+Marseilles&mdash;Try it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> Muriel&mdash;for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't
+pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never
+say die!"</p>
+
+<p>He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer.
+He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down
+the steps.</p>
+
+<p>She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young
+head and shoulders came above the steps.</p>
+
+<p>"Franz!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian hurried to her.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led
+around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from
+his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep
+behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease
+with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the
+mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of
+bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously,
+his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the
+Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most
+men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from
+towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven
+by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of
+finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> the
+sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was
+the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He
+was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St.
+Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that
+end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the
+death that he had all his life feared.</p>
+
+<p>He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the
+panorama of the Chaîne de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles,
+from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full
+sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue,
+cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The
+summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices
+were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and
+there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or
+the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining
+half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke
+that was blue.</p>
+
+<p>He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single
+room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the
+edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the
+chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it
+and the drop; looked over and then instinctively<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> fell on his knees and
+so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.</p>
+
+<p>He saw below him&mdash;far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue
+rock&mdash;the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of
+the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the
+parapet, the precipice continue to the primæval forest, the trees of
+which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him.
+Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.</p>
+
+<p>He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open.
+He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father
+after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body
+below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed
+in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman
+thing....</p>
+
+<p>Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped
+down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around
+the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.</p>
+
+<p>He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed
+unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one
+argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried
+to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful
+was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that
+thought his thoughts lost all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> order. He recalled how happy he had been
+with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised
+that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the
+child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at
+the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to
+lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fortitude. His
+father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to
+live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean
+old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the
+affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was
+right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?</p>
+
+<p>He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that
+he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and
+like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly
+all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell&mdash;a foot, over a
+stone.</p>
+
+<p>He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again
+to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he
+gained the edge, looked over&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>One little push would do it; one leap.</p>
+
+<p>His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> before him until his
+fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in
+his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the
+chapel and to safety.</p>
+
+<p>He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure
+was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined.
+He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not
+die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back
+to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love,
+to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a
+woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine
+that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she,
+unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what
+Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he
+would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If
+passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an
+animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him
+detest each other.</p>
+
+<p>The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They
+must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an
+unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical
+immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a
+secret, a secret of which they might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> never rid themselves. He,
+unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and
+thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and
+loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that
+he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.</p>
+
+<p>He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain
+might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had
+so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in
+it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pass. He came down
+in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way
+on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.</p>
+
+<p>They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward
+them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von
+Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly
+ridiculous."</p>
+
+<p>Stainton was thinking:</p>
+
+<p>"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I
+must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."</p>
+
+<p>What he said was:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I
+had a little tumble."</p>
+
+<p>They both started forward.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Are you hurt?" they asked, and they asked it together.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no; I'm all right. Quite all right." He looked at Muriel. "You
+can't fix it up?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at von Klausen.</p>
+
+<p>"You"&mdash;he wet his lips with his thick tongue&mdash;"you won't change your
+prejudices?"</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian flushed.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot change my religion," said he.</p>
+
+<p>Stainton clumsily drew his watch from his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said Stainton, "you and I must be hurrying, Muriel. I'm sorry,
+Captain; but the bus leaves the Hôtellerie in half an hour, and we've
+got to hurry to catch it. Good-bye. Muriel, come on."</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>The CROWN NOVELS</h2>
+
+
+<h3>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h3>
+
+
+<p><b>HER SOUL AND HER BODY, by Louise Closser Hale</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The struggle between the spirit and the flesh of a young girl early in
+life compelled to make her own way. Exposed to the temptations of life
+in a big city, the contest between her better and lower natures is
+described with psychological analysis and tender sympathy. Absorbingly
+interesting.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>HELL'S PLAYGROUND, by Ida Vera Simonton</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">This book deals with primal conditions in a land where "there ain't no
+ten commandments"; where savagery, naked and unashamed, is not confined
+to the blacks. It is a record of the life in the African tropics and it
+is a powerful and fascinating story of a scene that has rarely been
+depicted in fiction.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE MYSTERY OF No. 47, by J. Storer Clouston</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">This is a most ingenious detective story&mdash;a thriller in every sense of
+the word. The reader is led cleverly on until he is at a loss to know
+what to expect, and, completely baffled, is unable to lay the book down
+until he has finished the story and satisfied his perplexity.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE SENTENCE OF SILENCE, by Reginald Wright Kauffman</b></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Author of "The House of Bondage," etc.</span></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">By "The Sentence of Silence" is meant that sentence of reticence
+pronounced upon the subject of sex. That which means the continuance of
+the human race is the one thing of which no one is permitted to speak.
+In this book the subject is dealt with frankly.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG, by Reginald Wright Kauffman</b></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Author of "The House of Bondage," etc.</span></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The inexpressible conditions of human bondage of many young girls and
+women in our cities demand fearless and uncompromising warfare. The
+terrible peril that lingers just around the corner from every American
+home must be stamped out with relentless purpose.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>TO-MORROW, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Author of "Life's Shop Window," etc.</span></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Critics agree that this is Victoria Cross' greatest novel. Those who
+have read "Life's Shop Window," "Five Nights," "Anna Lombard," and
+similar books by this author will ask no further recommendation.
+"To-morrow" is a real novel&mdash;not a collection of short stories.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>TO-DAY, by George H. Broadhurst and Abraham S. Schomer</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">If you want real human interest, real heart throbs, be sure to read
+"To-Day."</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">If you loved your wife and she committed the greatest wrong, would you
+forgive her?</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Get your answer in the sensational novel hit of the year.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>AT BAY, by Page Philips</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Who was the culprit?</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The police accused a prominent society girl, and Aline Graham herself
+thought she was guilty. This remarkable detective story unravels the
+mystery in a series of thrilling scenes.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, by Owen Davis</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Sometimes a respectable father revolts from the bondage imposed upon him
+by an extravagant wife and family.</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Charles Nelson needed affection. Lacking it at home, he sought it
+elsewhere, thereby stumbling into a most amazing entanglement.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE SECRET OF THE NIGHT, by Gaston Leroux</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Rouletabille has returned! The hero of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room!"
+He appears again in the most successful mystery story of the year.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE APPLE OF DISCORD, by Henry C. Rowland</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Calvert Lanier, and his floating studio, obtrudes himself upon an
+exclusive summer colony and succeeds in kissing the three most exclusive
+and fairest members of the colony, and later, gets all at sea, in more
+senses than one, with two of them.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>RUNNING SANDS, by Reginald Wright Kauffman</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">In the skillful hands of the author this novel runs admirably and
+convincingly true to life; it reveals a depth of insight into human
+nature, a grasp of the real forces of life.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>SIMPLY WOMEN, by Marcel Prévost</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"Marcel Prévost, of whom a critic remarked that his forte was the
+analysis of the souls and bodies of a type half virgin and half
+courtesan, is now available in a volume of selections admirably
+translated by R. I. Brandon-Vauvillez."&mdash;<i>San Francisco Chronicle.</i></p>
+
+
+<p><b>GUARDIAN ANGELS, by Marcel Prévost</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"'Guardian Angels' is elegance and irony&mdash;and only for those youths who
+are dedicated to sex hygiene and eugenic lore."&mdash;<i>New York Times.</i></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A true picture of Parisian life with all its glitter and fascination.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>WHOSO FINDETH A WIFE, by J. Wesley Putnam</b></p>
+
+<p class="center">Being an answer to Hall Caine's "The Woman Thou Gavest Me"</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Elizabeth Ferris marries without love. How she comes to a broader
+conception of life and to love her husband in time to prevent a tragedy
+is told in this story.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE ADVENTURES OF A NICE YOUNG MAN, by Aix. Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
+Up-to-Date</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A handsome young man, employed as a lady's private secretary, is bound
+to meet with interesting adventures.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>HER REASON, Anonymous</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A frank exposure of Modern Marriage. "Her Reason" shows the deplorable
+results of the process at work to-day among the rich, whose daughters
+are annually offered for sale in the markets of the world.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>LIFE OF MY HEART, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">How Love revenges herself on those who disregard her plainest promptings
+is the theme of this novel, full of humor, pathos, and fidelity to the
+facts of life.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The self-sacrifice of woman in love. The heroine gives herself to a man
+for his own sake. He is her hero, her god, and she declines to marry him
+until satisfied that he cannot live without her.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE LAW OF LIFE, by Carl Werner</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Helen Willoughby is beautiful and attractive. Among her lovers there are
+two, both strong, both determined to win her, who presently enter into a
+bitter rivalry for her hand.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>THE LIFE SENTENCE, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A beautifully written story, full of life, nature, passion, and pathos.
+A splendid vitality glows throughout this novel, whose characters are
+depicted with graphic intensity. "The Life Sentence" proclaims anew the
+author's power of insight into human nature.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE LURE OF THE FLAME, by Mark Danger</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"The book carries a lesson for women that all should learn.</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"It is the experience of one who abandoned the path of virtue. The
+downward path, at first attractive, was swift and fatal. The author has
+handled a difficult subject with great force and boldness and has
+eliminated much that is defiling without losing its
+effectiveness."&mdash;<i>Boston Globe.</i></p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE FRUIT OF FOLLY, by Violet Craig</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Throbbing with human emotion, this book is the record of one woman's
+mistake. The principal scenes are laid in present day New York, and no
+more powerful commentary on life in our big centers has been written in
+a long time.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>A WORLD OF WOMEN, by J. D. Beresford</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Romantic and dramatic are the situations in this novel. The book is like
+a dream-garden peopled with women of moving humanity who find themselves
+in a situation never before conceived. As a result, their impulses and
+emotions find vent in entirely original ways.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE WHIP, by Richard Parker</b></p>
+
+<p class="center">Novelised from Cecil Raleigh's great Drury Lane melodrama of the same
+name.<br />
+BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTURES PROM THE PLAY</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">This big love story of English sporting society is crammed full of
+dramatic incidents. "The Whip" strikes an answering chord of sympathy
+and interest in every reader. England and America have voted it the big
+hit of the decade.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>ROMANCE, by Acton Davies</b></p>
+
+<p class="center">The World's Greatest Love Story<br />
+Based on Edward Sheldon's Play - Fully Illustrated</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Filled to overflowing with the emotional glamor of love, "Romance" is
+the romance of a famous grand opera singer and a young clergyman.
+Despite their different callings they are drawn together by a profound
+and sincere love. In the hour of trial the woman rises to sublime
+heights of self-denial.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>THE DANGEROUS AGE, by Karin Michaelis</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Here is a woman's soul laid bare with absolute frankness. Europe went
+mad about the book, which has been translated into twelve languages. It
+betrays the freemasonry of womanhood.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>MY ACTOR HUSBAND, Anonymous</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The reader will be startled by the amazing truths set forth and the
+completeness of their revelations. Life behind the scenes is stripped
+bare of all its glamor. Young women whom the stage attracts should read
+this story. There is a ringing damnation in it.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>MRS. DRUMMOND'S VOCATION, by Mark Ryce</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Lily Drummond is an unmoral (not immoral) heroine. She was not a bad
+girl at heart; but when chance opened up for her the view of a life she
+had never known or dreamed of, her absence of moral responsibility did
+the rest.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>DOWNWARD: "A Slice of Life," by Maud Churton Braby</b></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Author of "Modern Marriange and How to Bear It."</span></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"'Downward' belongs to that great modern school of fiction built upon
+woman's downfall. * * * I cordially commend this bit of fiction to the
+thousands of young women who are yearning to see what they call
+life."&mdash;<i>James L. Ford in the N. Y. Herald.</i></p>
+
+
+<p><b>TWO APACHES OF PARIS, by Alice and Claude Askew</b></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Authors of "The Shulamite," "The Rod of Justice," etc.</span></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">All primal struggles originate with the daughters of Eve.</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">This story of Paris and London tells of the wild, fierce life of the
+flesh, of a woman with the beauty of consummate vice to whom a man gave
+himself, body and soul.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE VISITS OF ELIZABETH, by Elinor Glyn</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">One of Mrs. Glyn's biggest successes. Elizabeth is a charming young
+woman who is always saying and doing droll and daring things, both
+shocking and amusing.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>BEYOND THE ROCKS, by Elinor Glyn</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"One of Mrs. Glyn's highly sensational and somewhat erotic
+novels."&mdash;<i>Boston Transcript.</i></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The scenes are laid in Paris and London; and a country-house party also
+figures, affording the author some daring situations, which she has
+handled deftly.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE REFLECTIONS OF AMBROSINE, by Elinor Glyn</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The story of the awakening of a young girl, whose maidenly emotions are
+set forth as Elinor Glyn alone knows how.</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"Gratitude and power and self-control! * * * in nature I find there is a
+stronger force than all these things, and that is the touch of the one
+we love."&mdash;Ambrosine.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>THE VICISSITUDES OF EVANGELINE, by Elinor Glyn</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"One of Mrs. Glyn's most pungent tales of feminine idiosyncracy and
+caprice."&mdash;<i>Boston Transcript.</i></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Evangeline is a delightful heroine with glorious red hair and amazing
+eyes that looked a thousand unsaid challenges.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>DAYBREAK: a Prologue to "Three Weeks"</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"Daybreak" is a prologue to "Three Weeks" and forms the first of the
+series, although published last. It is a highly interesting account of a
+love episode that took place during the youth of the famous Queen of
+"Three Weeks."</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A story of the Balkans, this is one of the timely novels of the year.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>ONE DAY: a Sequel to "Three Weeks"</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"There is a note of sincerity in this book that is lacking in the
+first."&mdash;<i>Boston Globe.</i></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"One Day" is the sequel you have been waiting for since reading "Three
+Weeks," and is a story which points a moral, a clear, well-written
+exposition of the doctrine, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."</p>
+
+
+<p><b>HIGH NOON: a New Sequel to "Three Weeks"</b></p>
+
+<p class="center">A Modern Romeo and Juliet</p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A powerful, stirring love-story of twenty years after. Abounding in
+beautiful descriptions and delicate pathos, this charming love idyl will
+instantly appeal to the million and a quarter people who have read and
+enjoyed "Three Weeks."</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE DIARY OF MY HONEYMOON</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A woman who sets out to unburden her soul upon intimate things is bound
+to touch upon happenings which are seldom the subject of writing at all;
+but whatever may be said of the views of the anonymous author, the
+"Diary" is a work of throbbing and intense humanity, the moral of which
+is sound throughout and plain to see.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE INDISCRETION OF LADY USHER: a Sequel to "The Diary of My Honeymoon"</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">"Another purpose novel dealing with the question of marriage and dealing
+very plainly,&mdash;one of the most interesting among the many books on these
+lines which are at present attracting so much attention."&mdash;<i>Cleveland
+Town Topics.</i></p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>THE SPIDER'S WEB, by Reginald Wright Kauffman</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A splendid story, in every way equal to the "House of Bondage," written
+in the author's best manner.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>LITTLE LOST SISTER, by Virginia Brooks</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Gripping, vital, true, intense, it is a page from the life of a
+beautiful girl.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>SPARROWS, by Horace W. C. Newte</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The story of an unprotected girl, of which the reader will not skip a
+single page.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE OTHER MAN'S WIFE, by Frank Richardson</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">The duel of sex is here, and it is described without bias, as fearlessly
+stated as it is exquisitely conceived.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>SALLY BISHOP, by E. Temple Thurston</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">There have been few stories so sweet, so moving, so tender, so
+convincing as this life-record of a London girl.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE PRICE, by Gertie de S. Wentworth-James</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Dealing with woman's life under modern conditions, the author writes of
+the heights and the depths of existence.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>DAUGHTERS OF THE RICH, by Edgar Saltus</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A story of great strength and almost photographic intensity, wise,
+witty, yet touchingly pathetic.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>HAGAR REVELLY, by Daniel Carson Goodman</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A truthful presentation of the real reasons why some girls go wrong and
+others do not.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>UNCLOTHED, by Daniel Carson Goodman</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A novel for the woman of thirty, this book is an honest attempt to be
+honest.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE, by Upton Sinclair</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A novel which deals with a husband and a wife, which for efficiency and
+truth is unexcelled.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="medium" />
+<h2>FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES</h2>
+
+
+<p><b>SIX WOMEN, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A half-dozen of the most vivid love stories that ever lit up the dusk of
+a tired civilization.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">It tears the garments of conventionality from woman, presenting her as
+she must appear to the divine eye.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>PAULA, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Here the author's fervid energy combines with a sense of humor to make a
+book both vital and attractive.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE RELIGION OF EVELYN HASTINGS, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A study of passion, but it is passion that ennobles and brings
+happiness.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>SIX CHAPTERS OF A MAN'S LIFE, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">There is no mistaking the earnestness of the morality which it enforces.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Here the author presents a stirring story of love, intrigue and
+adventure, woven about a proud, independent, reckless heroine.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A striking, well-told story, fascinating in its hold on the reader.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>ANNA LOMBARD, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">A bold, brilliant, defiant presentation of the relations of men and
+women.</p>
+
+
+<p><b>THE ETERNAL FIRES, by Victoria Cross</b></p>
+
+<p class="blurb">Given the soul of a maiden waiting for love, the plot as it unfolds
+shows how the heroine finds one worthy of her.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York</h3>
+
+<p class="center">Send for Illustrated Catalogue</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<div id="notes">
+<h2>Transcriber's Notes</h2>
+
+
+<p>Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.</p>
+
+<p>The following spelling variants have been retained as printed:</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Lyon" and "Lyons"</span><br />
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"nearby" and "near-by"</span><br />
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"treetops" and "tree-tops"</span><br />
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"sha'n't" and "shan't"</span><br />
+
+<p>On page <a href="#Page_333">333</a>, an asterisk * appears; however, there is no corresponding
+note in this book.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNNING SANDS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38753-h.htm or 38753-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/7/5/38753/
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Kerry Tani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/38753.txt b/38753.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d53f785
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38753.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11777 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+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: Running Sands
+
+Author: Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+Release Date: February 3, 2012 [EBook #38753]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNNING SANDS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Kerry Tani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS
+
+
+BY
+
+REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+"The House of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," etc.
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
+
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+BRUNER KAUFFMAN
+
+Brother and Friend
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and
+in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this
+Woman in holy Matrimony....
+
+"It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in
+the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name....
+
+"It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication;
+that such persons as have not the gift of continence might marry, and
+keep themselves undefiled....
+
+"It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one
+ought to have of the other....
+
+"Into which holy estate these two persons come now to be joined...."
+
+--The Book of Common Prayer.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                 PAGE
+
+      I "WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"   1
+
+     II YOUNG BLOOD                        20
+
+    III EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!                34
+
+     IV THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE             59
+
+      V ONE ROAD TO LOVE                   72
+
+     VI A MAID PERPLEXED                   88
+
+    VII FIRE AND TOW                      106
+
+   VIII "THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"   115
+
+     IX ANOTHER ROAD                      133
+
+      X "UNWILLING WAR"                   156
+
+     XI DR. BOUSSINGAULT                  176
+
+    XII MONTMARTRE                        198
+
+   XIII WORMWOOD                          215
+
+    XIV RUNAWAYS                          230
+
+     XV "NOT AT HOME"                     247
+
+    XVI IN THE BOIS                       254
+
+   XVII THE CALL OF YOUTH                 266
+
+  XVIII OUR LADY OF PROTECTION            285
+
+    XIX HUSBAND AND WIFE                  304
+
+     XX HUSBAND AND LOVER                 318
+
+    XXI THE MAN AND HIS GOD               333
+
+
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"
+
+
+Stainton decided that he would go to the Metropolitan Opera House that
+night to hear _Madama Butterfly_. He did not care for operatic music,
+but he hoped to learn. He did not expect to meet anyone he knew, but he
+trusted that he might come to know someone he met. There was, at any
+rate, no spot in the Great American Desert, where he had found his
+fortune, quite so lonely as this crowded lobby of the Astor, the hotel
+at which he was now stopping--so he decided upon the Metropolitan and
+_Madama Butterfly_.
+
+A page was passing, uttering shrill demands for a man whose name seemed
+to be "Mr. Kerrghrrr." Stainton laid a large, but hesitating, hand upon
+the boy's shoulder.
+
+"Where can I buy a ticket for to-night's opera?" he enquired.
+
+The page ceased his vocal rumble and looked up with wounded reproof at
+the tall cause of this interruption.
+
+"News-stand," he said, and immediately escaped to resume the summons of
+"Mr. Kerghrrr."
+
+Stainton followed the direction that the page's eyes had indicated. Over
+the booth where newspapers might be purchased for twice the price that
+he would have to pay for them in the street, fifteen yards away, he saw
+a sign announcing the fact that opera and theatre tickets were here for
+sale. He approached, somewhat awkwardly, and, over a protruding ledge of
+red and blue covered magazines on which were portrayed the pink and
+white prettiness of impossibly insipid girls, confronted a suave clerk,
+who appeared tremendously knowing.
+
+"You have tickets for the opera?" asked Stainton.
+
+"Yessir."
+
+"For the Metropolitan Opera House?"
+
+"Yessir. How many?"
+
+"There are----It's _Madama Butterfly_ to-night, I think the paper said?"
+
+"Yessir. What part of the house do you want?"
+
+"I don't know," said Stainton. "That's a good show, isn't it?"
+
+The clerk was too well fitted for his business to smile at such a query.
+He had, besides, perception enough to discern something beyond the
+humorous in this broad-shouldered, grave man of anywhere from forty to
+fifty, who was evidently so strong in physique and yet so clearly
+helpless in the commonplaces of city-life.
+
+"It's the best production of that opera for the whole season," the clerk
+made answer. "Caruso sings _Pinkerton_ and----"
+
+"So I understand," said Stainton, quickly.
+
+The clerk nimbly shifted the quality of his information.
+
+"And anyhow," he went urbanely on, "the Metropolitan audience is always
+a show in itself, you know. Everybody that is anybody is there; for a
+steady thing it beats the Horseshow in Madison Square Garden. You'll be
+wanting seats in the orchestra, of course?"
+
+"One," corrected Stainton. "Shall I?" he added.
+
+"Oh, yes. That is, if you're a stranger in New York. I----Pardon me,
+sir, but I suppose you are a stranger?"
+
+"Very much of a stranger."
+
+"Then I can recommend this seat, sir." The clerk disappeared behind a
+hanging vine of magazines more glorious than the slopes of the Cote d'Or
+in autumn, and immediately reappeared with a ticket projecting from a
+narrow envelope. "Fifth row," he said. "Second from the aisle. Not on
+the side with the brasses, either. You can see all the boxes from it."
+
+Jim Stainton's heavy, iron-grey eyebrows came together in a puzzled
+meeting. Under them, however, his iron-grey eyes twinkled.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "but I want to see the stage, you know."
+
+"Oh," the clerk reassured him, "of course you'll see the stage
+perfectly."
+
+Stainton accepted the ticket.
+
+"Very well," he said. "Take it out of that."
+
+For many a hard year he had been used, by compulsion of desperate
+circumstance, to counting his two-bit pieces, and now, precisely because
+all that had passed, he enjoyed sharply the luxury of counting nothing,
+not even the double-eagles. He laid a yellow-backed bill on the glass
+counter and received, without regarding it, the change that the now
+thoroughly deferential clerk deftly returned to him. Doubtless he was
+paying a heavy commission to the hotel's ticket-agent; perhaps he was
+obtaining less change than, under the terms of that commission, he was
+entitled to; but certainly about none of these things did he care. Toil
+had at last granted him success, toil and good luck; and success had
+immediately given him the right to emancipation from financial trifling.
+There are two times in a man's life when no man counts its cost: the
+time of his serious wooing and that of his ultimate illness. Stainton
+had come to New York with a twofold purpose; he had come to bury the man
+that he had been, and he had come to woo.
+
+He went to his elaborate rooms to dress. For the last decade and more,
+he had not worn evening-clothes a score of times, and he now donned the
+black suit, fresh from a Fifth Avenue tailor's shop, with a care that
+was in part the result of this scant experience and in part the
+consequence of a fear of just how ridiculous the new outfit would make
+him seem. He endangered the shirt when he came to fasten it; he was
+sure that he had unnecessarily wrinkled the white waistcoat, and the tie
+occupied his bungling fingers for a full five minutes.
+
+His apprehensions, nevertheless, were unjustified. Something, when the
+toilet was completed, rather like a man of fashion appeared to have been
+made by the man of the needle out of the man of the pick: if the miner
+had not wholly vanished, at least the familiar of Broadway had joined
+him. Stainton, critically surveying himself in the pier-glass and
+secretly criticising his attitude of criticism, saw nothing that, to his
+unaccustomed and therefore exacting eye, presented opportunity for
+objection. The figure was heavier, more stalwart than, as he had been
+told, was for that season the mode, but the mode, that season, exacted a
+slimness that indicated the weakling. The clothes themselves were, on
+the other hand, perfection and to the point of perfection they fitted.
+The face--
+
+Jim Stainton, with suspended breath, drew the hanging electric-lamp
+nearer, leaned forward and studied the reflection of that face closely.
+
+He saw a large, well-proportioned head, the head of a man serious,
+perhaps, but admirably poised. The black hair was only sparsely
+sprinkled with gray. The deep line between the thick brows might be the
+furrow of concentration rather than the mark of years. The rugged
+features--earnest eyes of steel, strong nose, compressed lips and
+square, clean-shaven chin--were all features that, whatever the life
+they had faced, betokened stamina from the beginning. Hot suns had
+burnished his cheeks, but a hard career had entailed those abstinences
+which are among the surest warders of youth. Experience had
+strengthened, but time had been kind.
+
+"I am still young," he thought. "I am fifty, but I don't look forty, and
+I have the physique of twenty-five."
+
+He walked to the window and flung it wide.
+
+Below him swirled the yellow evening life of the third greatest among
+the world's great thoroughfares. Looking down from the height of his
+hotel was to Stainton like looking down upon a riverside furnace through
+its roof. Molten streams, swelling from the darker channels to the
+north, flowed along their appointed alleyways and broke and divided,
+hissing and spluttering against the pier that was the Times Building.
+And as the steam rises from the red waste that runs from the furnace
+into the river, there now rose to Stainton's desert-starved ears the
+clanging of cable-cars, the rattle of carriages, the tooting of the
+purring motors--all the humming chorus of the night-wakeful thing that
+men call New York.
+
+He stretched his arms apart to it. He wanted to enfold it, to inhale its
+breath, to mix with it and become lost in it. He had come back. After
+all these years, he had come back, and he had come back a victor
+unscarred.
+
+"I'm still young," he repeated, raising his head and spreading his
+nostrils to the damp air of the city-evening. And "Still young!" he
+continued to whisper on his way down in the elevator and through the
+crowded dining-room to his seat at a glittering table.
+
+A ready waiter detached himself from a group of his fellows and
+dexterously steered a rapid course, between seated diners and laden
+serving-tables, to Stainton's broad shoulder.
+
+Stainton was studying, with less difficulty than he had anticipated, the
+menu.
+
+"Soup, sir?" suggested the waiter.
+
+"Yes; consomme," said Stainton.
+
+"And a little fish, sir?"
+
+"No, thank you; no fish."
+
+"Those bass are very nice, sir. I can recommend them."
+
+"No, thank you, I think not. I want a steak, sirloin."
+
+"Rare, sir?"
+
+"Medium."
+
+"Yes, sir. And shall we say potatoes _au gratin_?"
+
+"No. Boiled potatoes. And French peas."
+
+"A little cauliflower with sauce _Hollandaise_?"
+
+"No. Only the steak, potatoes, and peas."
+
+The waiter raised his brows ever so slightly.
+
+"And what salad, sir?" he asked.
+
+"No salad, thank you."
+
+"Er--and about dessert?"
+
+"Nothing. After the meal you may bring me a demi-tasse."
+
+The waiter suppressed surprise. A New Yorker may dine simply, but that a
+still obvious stranger in New York should dine upon less than five
+courses--that was beyond his experience.
+
+"What cocktail, sir?" he enquired.
+
+"None," said Stainton.
+
+"Very good, sir. Shall I send the wine-card?"
+
+"No."
+
+Stainton spoke briefly this time, even sharply, and his tone had the
+effect that he desired for it. He ate his dinner undisturbed.
+
+A more pleasant disturbance than that of the waiter was, however, in
+store for him. As he left the dining-room and returned to the lobby,
+ready now for the opera, there brushed by him, _en route_ from the
+bar-room, a stout man of about thirty-five, with a round face and a high
+hat perched at the extreme rear of a head almost completely bald.
+
+The two looked at each other.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the stranger.
+
+"I beg your par----" Stainton began to echo.
+
+But he did not finish, for the stranger, suddenly a stranger no longer,
+was fairly shouting:
+
+"Hello, hello, hello! What in the name of all that's----"
+
+Stainton's lips broke into a delighted smile, which showed square, white
+teeth.
+
+"Holt," he said: "George Holt!"
+
+"Alive and well--thanks to you, old man." Holt seized the proffered hand
+and began to pump it. "And you!" he continued. "Think of it! _You!_ I
+saw about your luck in the papers, and I meant to write. Upon my soul, I
+did. I don't know how it was I didn't----"
+
+"Oh, that's all right."
+
+"But I was glad. I never was so glad. And you're here--here in little
+old New York?"
+
+"So it seems."
+
+"For good? Of course it is. Everybody comes here to spend his money."
+
+"Well, I hope it's not for harm."
+
+Holt ceased pumping, dropped the hand, put both his hands on Stainton's
+shoulders, and held him at arm's length.
+
+"Great Scott, but it's good to see you again," he said. "Five years,
+isn't it?"
+
+"All of that."
+
+"And then I was out there in the last of the Wild and Woolly, and we
+were sworn brother-adventurers and all that, and you saved my life----"
+
+"Nonsense."
+
+"Yes, you did--saved my life, by the great horn spoon, just as the
+knife-claws of that big grizzly were raised to rip out what passes with
+me for a heart. I'll never forget it as long as I live."
+
+Stainton wished it forgotten.
+
+"How's the world treating you?" he asked.
+
+"So, so; I mean, badly. In fact, it's not treating me at all; I have to
+pay for myself, and just enough to pay and none to save, at that. But
+you--you! Oh, you lucky beast, you!" He shook Stainton by the shoulders
+and again studied his smiling face. "Good old Jim!" he said.
+
+Stainton's smile went somewhat awry.
+
+"Old?" he echoed. "Oh, I don't know."
+
+"What? No, of course not." Holt thrust a playful thumb between
+Stainton's ribs. "Young as ever, eh? So am I. Still, you know, time does
+pass. Oh, well, what of it? I certainly am glad to see you."
+
+He hooked his arm into Stainton's. "Come on and have a drink."
+
+"Thank you, no," said Stainton; "I scarcely ever take anything, you
+know."
+
+Holt, unlike the waiter, showed his disapproval.
+
+"I know you scarcely ever did out there." He jerked his round face in
+what he supposed was a westerly direction. "But that's over now. You
+don't have to be careful now. What's the good of being rich if you have
+to be careful?"
+
+"Still, I am careful," said Stainton, quietly.
+
+"But on this occasion? Surely not on this occasion, Jim!"
+
+The miner laughed freely now.
+
+"You always were a wonder at discovering occasions, George," he said.
+"Your occasions were as frequent as saints' days and other holidays in a
+Mexican peon's calendar."
+
+"And still are, thank the Lord. But to-night----Even you've got to admit
+to-night, Jim. It isn't every day in the year that a man that's saved my
+life turns up in New York with a newly discovered, warranted pure, gold
+mine in his pocket."
+
+This was so clearly true that Stainton capitulated, or at least
+compromised by going to the bar and drinking a thimbleful of white-mint
+while Holt, chattering like a cheerful magpie--if a magpie can be
+cheerful--consumed two long glasses of Irish whiskey with a little
+aerated water added.
+
+Holt made endless plans for his friend. He would "put up" Stainton's
+name at his club. He would introduce him to this personage and to that.
+He would--
+
+"Oh, by Jove, yes, and the women!" he interrupted himself. "You've got
+to go gently there, Jim."
+
+A bright tint showed on Stainton's cheeks.
+
+"I never----" he began.
+
+"Oh, not _them_!" said Holt, dismissing the entire half-world with a
+light gesture. "I know you didn't--the more fool you. But what I mean is
+the--you know: the all-righters. They'll be setting their caps at you
+worse than any of the other sort. You've got to remember that you're a
+catch."
+
+This was all very pleasant, and Stainton was too honest with himself not
+to admit so much.
+
+"Marriage," he admitted, "isn't beyond my calculations."
+
+"Exactly. Now, you leave that little matter to me, Jim. I know----"
+
+"I think that, if you don't much mind, I shall leave it to myself. There
+is no hurry, you see."
+
+"Um; yes. I do see. But if there's no hurry, just you wait--just you
+wait, old man, till you have seen what I can show you. New York is the
+biggest bond-market and marriage-market in the world." He looked at his
+watch. "Hello," he said: "I'll be late. Now, look here: where'll you be
+after the opera? I've got to go there. I hate it, but I have to."
+
+"The opera?" repeated Stainton. "The Metropolitan?"
+
+"Yes, sure."
+
+"But I'm going there myself."
+
+"The devil you are. Where are you?"
+
+Stainton produced his ticket.
+
+Holt glanced at it and shook his head.
+
+"Too close to hear," he said. "But what's the difference? We've all
+heard the confounded thing so often----"
+
+"I have not," said Stainton.
+
+"Eh? What? But it's _Madama Butterfly_, you know--Oh, yes, of course: I
+forgot. Still, what'll interest you, once you get there, will be what
+interests everybody else--and that's not the stage and not the
+orchestra. Now, look here: I'm with the Newberrys, you know--the Preston
+Newberrys----"
+
+"I don't know," said Stainton.
+
+"Well, you will, my boy; you will. That's just the point. We'll call a
+taxi and motor there together--it's just a step to the Metropolitan--and
+then, after the first act, I'll come round to you and take you over to
+meet 'em. What do you say?"
+
+Stainton said what he was expected to say, which was, of course, that he
+would be delighted to meet any friends of Holt, and so it befell that
+the two men went to the opera-house together and parted at the door only
+with the certainty of meeting soon again.
+
+Yet, the miner was still glowing with the thrill of his new life. "I'm
+young!" he repeated to himself as he was shown to his seat. And he felt
+young. He felt that he had never yet lived and that he was now about to
+live; and he thanked Heaven that he had kept himself trained for the
+experience.
+
+He had dined slowly, as befits a man that has earned his leisure, and
+his conversation with Holt had not been hurried. Consequently, when he
+reached his place, the first act of _Madama Butterfly_ was already well
+over. With the voice of Apollo and the figure of an elephant, the tenor,
+bursting through the uniform of a naval officer with a corpulence that
+would endanger a battleship, was engaged in that vocal assault upon a
+fortress of heavy orchestration which is the penance of all that have to
+sing the role of "Pinkerton." Stainton listened and tried to enjoy. He
+listened until the curtain fell at length upon the beginning of the
+inevitable tragedy, until the lights flashed up about him, and he found
+himself looking straight into the eyes of a young girl in a lower box
+not thirty feet away.
+
+About him swept the broad curve of boxes that has been called "The
+Diamond Horseshoe," filled with wonderful toilettes and beautiful women,
+but Stainton did not see these. In the particular box toward which he
+was looking there were three other people: there was a matronly woman in
+what appeared to be brocade; there was a sleek, weary-eyed, elderly man,
+and there was another man faintly suggested in the background, as the
+lover of the mistress is faintly suggested in Da Vinci's
+masterpiece--but Stainton was no more conscious of this trio than he was
+of the gowns and women of the broad horseshoe. He saw, or was conscious
+of seeing, only that girl.
+
+And she was leaning far over the rail, at pause where, when their eyes
+met, his intense gaze had arrested her: a young girl, scarcely eighteen
+years old, her delicate, oval face full of the joy of life, aglow with
+the excitement, the novelty of place, people, music. The light was upon
+her--upon her slim, softly white-clad body trembling at the unguessed
+portal of womanhood just as it trembled also under his gaze. She had
+wonderful hair, which waved without artifice, as blue-black as a
+thunder-cloud in May; she had level brows and eyes large and dark and
+tender. Her lips were damp, the lower one now timidly indrawn. While he
+looked at her, there awoke in Stainton the Neolithic man, the savage and
+poet that sang what he felt and was unashamed to feel and sing: she was
+like a Spring evening in the woods: warm and dusky and clothed in the
+light of stars.
+
+Stainton did not move, yet his heart seemed twisting in his breast. Was
+he mad? Was he alive, sane, awake and in New York of to-day? If so, if
+he were himself, then were the old stories true, and did the dead walk?
+Sitting there, stonily, there floated through his brain a line from a
+well-conceived and ill-executed poem:
+
+"At Paris it was, at the opera there ..."
+
+The girl was the one to break the spell. When Stainton would have ceased
+looking, he could never know. But the girl flushed yet more deeply and
+turned away, with a quick movement that was almost a reprimand but not
+enough of a reprimand to be an acknowledgment that she was aware of him.
+
+Jim, his own cheeks burning at the realisation of his insolence, but his
+heart tumultuous for that other reason, himself started. He shifted
+clumsily in his chair and so became conscious of another movement in the
+box.
+
+A man--the man that had been, at Stainton's first glimpse of the party,
+dimly outlined--was disentangling himself from the background, was
+bending forward to make vehement signs in Stainton's direction, was
+finally, and with no end of effort on Stainton's part, assuming
+recognisable shape. It was George Holt.
+
+Holt waved his hand again and nodded toward the lobby. Then, as Stainton
+nodded a tardy comprehension, he faded once more into the background of
+the box.
+
+They met a few moments later in the corridor.
+
+"I see you found your friends," said Stainton. At least temporarily, he
+had regained his self-control.
+
+"My who? Oh, the Newberrys? Of course. Come over; you must meet them."
+
+"The Newberrys?" Stainton looked a misapprehension.
+
+"Yes, I told you, you know. Good old Preston Newberry and his wife."
+
+"I thought," urged Stainton, "that I saw a girl----"
+
+"Oh, _that_?" asked Holt, recollecting with some difficulty a person of
+such small importance. "That's their little Boston ward."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"Something or other. I forget. Stannard: that's it--Muriel Stannard.
+She's just out of her----"
+
+He stopped and blinked, his narrow eyes directed at Stainton, who had
+lifted to his face a hand that visibly trembled.
+
+"What's the trouble?" asked Holt. "Too used to the desert to stand our
+nifty opera-house air? Don't wonder. Come out and have a drink. Plenty
+of time."
+
+"No," said Stainton. He achieved a smile. "I'm all right. Why in the
+world did you think I wasn't? I'm just----She's eighteen, isn't she?"
+
+"Who? Mrs. New----Oh, the girl? Yes, I imagine she is about that. But
+she's an orphan and hasn't a cent and is too young to mix in, anyhow.
+Don't you bother: she won't interfere. Come along, if you won't have a
+drink, and meet the Newberrys. Mrs. Preston is every bit as good as a
+Bronx cocktail, though she wouldn't be seen in the Bronx for a thousand
+of 'em."
+
+Stainton replied with compressed lips.
+
+"I should like to meet Miss--Miss Stannard," he said.
+
+"Miss Stannard? The youngster?" Holt broke into a laugh. "Bless my soul!
+Why, she's not even out yet; and you mean to say----"
+
+But Stainton's firm fingers had closed so sharply about Holt's arm that,
+while the pain of the unexpected grip shot through him, Holt's laughter
+ended in a gasp.
+
+"Don't joke about this," commanded Stainton. "You remember that we used
+to be friends."
+
+"Sure. Aren't we friends now? What's hit you, Jim? We're friends still,
+I hope. You don't think I'm likely to forget what you once did for me,
+do you?"
+
+"Very well, then: don't joke about Miss Stannard."
+
+"No offence intended," said the perplexed Holt; "but why in thunder
+shouldn't I joke about her?"
+
+Stainton's grip loosened, and his eyes twinkled.
+
+"After all," he said, "it must have seemed strange to you----"
+
+"Strange? It looked like the asylum!" said Holt.
+
+"And so," Stainton continued, "I dare say that I do owe you an
+explanation." He put out his hand again, but Holt dodged.
+
+"No more of that!" said Holt.
+
+"All right," Stainton answered. He laid a hand on Holt's shoulder. "Can
+you keep a secret, George?"
+
+The clubman blinked in anticipation.
+
+"Seems to me we've had a few together," he said.
+
+"Then," said Stainton, "I'll tell you why I was a little sensitive about
+comments on Miss Stannard: I am going to marry her."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+YOUNG BLOOD
+
+
+Holt's jaw fell.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he stammered; "but I didn't know you even knew
+her."
+
+"I have never met her," said Stainton.
+
+"What? Oh, quit your jollying."
+
+"I have never met her."
+
+"Then--well, you _don't_ need a drink, after all."
+
+"After all--that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall
+explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present
+me all round."
+
+Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Caesars had been driven
+mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of
+stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He
+recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country
+was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits
+in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of
+these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few
+years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came
+the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's
+unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West,
+been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt
+recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold
+mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate
+than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day,
+rich. He wondered if--
+
+But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.
+
+"No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds
+queer, I know----"
+
+"Sounds! Sounds----"
+
+"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll
+explain--later."
+
+"You can't," said Holt.
+
+"Can't what?"
+
+"Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy
+himself."
+
+Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which
+is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen
+again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction.
+
+"Mr. Holt has just been telling us of your splendid bravery and how you
+saved his life," said Mrs. Newberry.
+
+She was a stout, uncertain nonentity, whose chief endeavours in her
+narrow world were to seem as slim as she would like to be and as certain
+of her social position as was proper for a woman of moderate
+antecedents, who had married a membership in Manhattan's three most
+difficult clubs. What, of course, she had been thinking was not at all
+about Stainton's bravery: it was, rather, that Stainton had become quite
+rich quite romantically, and that he was not the rough diamond which
+tradition demanded.
+
+Stainton took all this for granted and, knowing not what to say in
+reply, bowed and said nothing.
+
+"Glad to know you," was what Newberry said: and he presently added: "The
+cast's in rotten voice to-night. Sit down."
+
+Newberry, the sleek, weary-eyed elderly man, whom Stainton had barely
+noticed in his first survey of the box, was the membership in New York's
+three most difficult clubs. He had inherited money without brains, had
+sought to adjust matters by marrying brains without money, and had been
+intellectually disappointed.
+
+To him in turn Stainton bowed in silence. His eyes were on the girl, and
+the girl's slim back was set resolutely toward him.
+
+There was an awkward pause. Nobody seemed to remember Muriel. At length
+Holt, still in terror, blundered forward.
+
+"Miss Muriel----" he began.
+
+The girl turned. The glory of her warm eyes brushed Stainton's face and
+passed it.
+
+"I am Miss Stannard," she said. "It is good of you to join us. Do sit
+down, Mr. Stainton."
+
+Stainton sat down. He sat down directly behind her, and at last,
+politely unencouraging though she at first managed to remain, he
+succeeded in gaining some sort of conversational opening.
+
+What did he say there, for the early ten minutes of their talk? He was
+unable at any later date to recall one word of it. Everything, he was
+sure, that was clumsy. As a matter of fact, his own speech was probably
+by no means so uncouth as his torturing fancy declared it, hers by no
+means so brilliant as his memory, which retained no souvenirs, insisted.
+More likely than not, their talk fulfilled the requirements of
+convention. Convention requires the commonplace.
+
+Nobody paid any but sporadic attention to the opera. To the left of the
+girl and Stainton, Mrs. Newberry and her husband, a Dido matched to a
+Don Juan, exchanged low monosyllables with each other and darting
+exchanges of talk, like rallies at badminton, with Holt. Sometimes they
+were ill-mannered enough to converse in whispers, near Stainton's
+shoulder, but mostly Mrs. Newberry was laboriously conventional, out of
+a constant fear of being adjudged plebeian, and now and again, to
+Stainton's huge disgust, she would lean to confer a word on her niece
+and her niece's companion.
+
+"I hope you care for opera," she said to Stainton in one of these
+sallies.
+
+"I hope to," replied the miner, guardedly.
+
+"Though of course," pursued Mrs. Newberry, "this is rather an off
+evening. The cast led us to expect so much, but they all seem to be in
+such poor voice."
+
+Stainton made a civil noise.
+
+"Apart from the music," his hostess continued, "I dare say that the
+stage doesn't appeal to you."
+
+"I have had very little chance to know it," said Stainton, "but I am
+fond of it."
+
+"Indeed?" Mrs. Newberry's tone indicated that she was mildly interested
+in meeting a tamed adventurer. "But I should suppose that it would all
+seem so false to you. It must seem false, I should think, to anyone that
+has known so much of--of Real Life, you know; and dear Mr. Holt has
+given us _such_ descriptions of your romantic career."
+
+Stainton's disavowal of this apparent praise of his career was earnest,
+but not convincing.
+
+"My life has seemed dull to me," he said, with a deadly glance at dear
+Mr. Holt, grinning in the background.
+
+Holt tried to change the subject.
+
+"At all events, this is a romantic episode for you, isn't it?" he asked.
+
+"What do you mean?" snapped Stainton.
+
+"Oh," Holt hurried to explain, "all this." He indicated the audience
+with the sweep of a plump hand.
+
+"It is new," granted Stainton.
+
+Holt edged his chair forward.
+
+"Of course it is, and whatever's new's romantic. That's all romance is,
+isn't it, Miss Muriel?"
+
+The girl had been listening to the music, her dark eyes, veiled by their
+long lashes, fixed on nothing.
+
+"Is it?" she enquired.
+
+"Sure it is," said Holt. "Now, Jim, you're in the crowd you read about.
+You ought to get us to point 'em out to you."
+
+"The woman just next," whispered Mrs. Newberry--"the one in
+forget-me-not blue, draped with chiffon and crystal trimmings--don't you
+see? The bodice is finished with crystal fringe----"
+
+"I'm afraid----" said Stainton.
+
+Preston Newberry explained.
+
+"Girl with yellow hair," said he.
+
+"Oh!" said Stainton.
+
+"That," Mrs. Newberry went on, "is Dora van Rooz. She was a Huyghens,
+you know."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't read the society-columns," Stainton apologised.
+
+"Dora's not confining herself to them," said Newberry. "She and van Rooz
+are calling each other names in the divorce-court now."
+
+"And just beyond," Mrs. Newberry ran on, "in the American beauty satin
+veiled in ninon--there: her waist is embroidered with beads and rows of
+silver lace; you can't see very well in this light."
+
+"Girl with the fine nose," Preston elucidated.
+
+"I see."
+
+"That's Mrs. Billy Merton. You must have heard of her. She divorced Clem
+Davis last month and married Billy the next day."
+
+She rattled on for some time, ceasing her chatter only for brief pauses,
+at intervals unconsciously regulated by her long acquaintance with the
+opera and its finer moments. The strains of the beautiful music seemed
+to Stainton to be a loveliness unworthily draping, on the stage, the
+story of a base man's perfidy; and the pleasant indiscretions of the
+fashionable opera-gowns to be clothing, in the audience, none but women
+that had already stripped their souls in one or other of the scandalous
+rituals imposed by modern law for the dissolution of the most private of
+relationships.
+
+He made but brief answers, and he was unfeignedly relieved when his poor
+responsiveness forced Mrs. Newberry to retreat and left him free again
+with Muriel. He looked frank admiration at her level brows, her dark
+eyes, and her full lips. Here, he assured himself, was innocence: her
+face was her young soul made visible.
+
+Perhaps, as she pretended, it was his distress at her aunt's garrulity;
+for it must have been evident to her. Perhaps it was the dropped hint of
+his adventurous life; for women are all Desdemonas at heart. Perhaps it
+was only his patent worship of her beauty; since we are all assailable
+through this sort of compliment to whatever of our charms we are least
+responsible for. Perhaps it was all or none of these things. In any
+case, as Mrs. Newberry retired to a continuation of her gossip with
+Holt, broken only by the terser remarks of Newberry, Muriel bent a
+little closer to Stainton.
+
+"You don't care a bit about such things, do you?" she enquired.
+
+Her tone was lower than when she had last spoken. It was low enough to
+draw the curtain of confidence between them and their companions, with
+that subtle quality that takes account of but one listener.
+
+Stainton's pulses leaped.
+
+"About what things?" was all that he was at first able to say.
+
+The girl smiled. Stainton thought her smile wistful.
+
+"The sort that fill these boxes," said Muriel: "the sort, I dare say,
+that uncle and aunt and Mr. Holt and I are."
+
+He heard a shimmering sprite of regret in her voice: regret not that he
+did not care for these people, but that these people should be what they
+were.
+
+"Don't include yourself in this lot," he answered.
+
+He was immediately aware that his reply was scarcely courteous to his
+hosts, and so was she.
+
+"You are hard on them," she said.
+
+"Hadn't you just been hard on them, too?" he countered.
+
+"Ah, yes, but they are my relatives. At least Uncle Preston and Aunt
+Ethel are. Family criticism is permitted everywhere."
+
+He did not like her schoolgirlish attempt at epigram, and he showed his
+disapproval.
+
+"Now you are trying to be of a piece with them," he said.
+
+The glance that she gave him was no longer calm: there was a flash of
+flame in it.
+
+"You talk as if you had known me for years."
+
+"For thirty years."
+
+"Yes?" She did not understand.
+
+"I have known you for thirty years."
+
+What sort of man was this? "But I am only eighteen," she said.
+
+"Nevertheless, I have known you for thirty years."
+
+She gave an empty glance at her programme.
+
+"Since you were in pinafores," she said, still looking down.
+
+Stainton bit his lip. There had been no malice in her tone, yet all
+children are cruel, he reflected, and the modern child's cruelty is
+ingenious. Was there anything in that speech for her to be sorry for,
+and, if there were, would she be sorry?
+
+"Some day," he said quietly, "I shall try to explain."
+
+She regarded him again, this time with altered gaze.
+
+"Some day," she said, "I hope you will tell me about that romantic
+career that Aunt Ethel was talking of."
+
+Was she sorry? Was she interested?
+
+"It's not romantic," he protested. "It isn't in the least romantic. It's
+just a story of hard work and disappointment, and hard work and
+success."
+
+"But Mr. Holt told us that in one month you were condemned to
+death for piracy in Central America and acted--what do they call
+it?--floor-manager for a firemen's ball in Denver."
+
+"George has been dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse. He never
+knew me till he met me in the West five or six years ago. I was
+condemned for piracy _in absentio_ by a Spanish-American court because I
+had a job as cook on a filibustering ship that was wrecked off Yucatan
+and never got any nearer to shore, and I was floor-manager at the
+firemen's ball because--well, because I happened to belong to a
+fire-company."
+
+"But you did have adventures in Alaska and Colorado and New Mexico?"
+
+"Oh, I've knocked about a bit."
+
+"And----" Her lips were parted, her eyes large. She no longer heard the
+voices on the stage. "Did you ever----Mr. Holt said you once shot----"
+
+"Yes," said Stainton, gravely, "I think I once killed a man."
+
+She clasped her hands on the railing of the box.
+
+"Tell me about it," she commanded. Her tone was a compliment.
+
+"There's nothing to tell. It was in an Alaskan mining-camp. The man was
+drunk and armed. He attacked me, and I had to defend myself. He shot
+twice before I shot at all, but I hit and he didn't. I'm sorry I had to
+do it to remain alive, but I'm not sorry to have remained alive."
+
+"Oh," she cried, petulantly, "you are _so_ matter-of-fact!"
+
+"Not nearly so matter-of-fact as you suppose. Not in the important
+things. In business, in everyday life, a man has to be matter-of-fact.
+It's the only method to get what you want."
+
+"Do you really think so?" She appealed to him now as to a well of
+knowledge. Perhaps, he reflected, she had about her ordinarily few wells
+to which she was permitted so to appeal. "Then maybe that is why I don't
+get what I want."
+
+"Surely you have all you want."
+
+She shook her raven hair. "Not any of it."
+
+"And you want?"
+
+"Lots of things."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+She smiled, but was firm. "No, I sha'n't tell you."
+
+"Not one?"
+
+"Not now."
+
+"Perhaps they are not always the sort of things that you ought to have."
+
+"Yes, they are."
+
+"All of them?"
+
+Her nod was positive: "All."
+
+"But, whether you ought to have them or not, are you equally sure that
+they would be worth possessing?"
+
+"How can I know till I have had them?"
+
+"Easily. There are two ways of learning the value of anything we want:
+one is to get it, the other to lose it."
+
+"We're crabbed against the things we miss."
+
+"Are we? I don't know. Even if we are, there's a good deal to be said in
+favour of the comfort that lies in the philosophy of sour grapes."
+
+She did not wholly follow him, but she was clear on the chief point. "It
+doesn't make me feel any more contented," she said, "to believe that I
+wouldn't have been happy if I had got something that I wanted to get and
+didn't."
+
+Stainton shook his head.
+
+"Some time," he said, "that belief will be your greatest comfort."
+
+Muriel looked away. She was revolving this problem in her youthful mind,
+and when she replied it was by the _argumentum ad hominem_, which is an
+excellent argument and generally _ab femina_.
+
+"You have been successful," she began. "If you had not been, would it
+have made you more contented to believe that success wouldn't have
+brought you happiness?"
+
+"I was thinking," said Stainton, "of something in the past, something
+that I didn't get, and something that was not a business matter." He
+spoke slowly.
+
+She understood.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said, softly.
+
+"No, no," he smiled. "In point of fact, whenever I failed in prospecting
+I did try to think that money would not have made me happy. But you may
+be right, for I always started prospecting again."
+
+"And now?"
+
+"Oh, now," said Stainton, with a concluding smile, "I am trying hard to
+resist the manifold temptations of good fortune."
+
+As he spoke, the curtain was falling on the tragic termination of
+_Madama Butterfly_. The Newberrys and their guests rose as the curtain
+fell, and Stainton held her cloak for Muriel. Newberry was gasping his
+way into his own coat, and Holt was holding for Mrs. Newberry a gorgeous
+Japanese kimono absurdly reminiscent of the opera to which they had not
+listened; but Muriel's cloak was a simple and beautiful garment in
+Stainton's eyes, a grey garment lined with satin of the colour of
+old-fashioned roses. As she got into it--"Oh, it's quite easy," she
+said--his awkward hand was brushed by her cheek, and he bent his head,
+certain of being unobserved in that hurry to depart wherewith the
+average American opera-audience expresses its opinion of the average
+operatic performance, and inhaled the perfume of her hair. His hands
+shook.
+
+With Holt he saw their hosts to their motor.
+
+"Aren't you coming home with us for supper?" asked Mrs. Newberry.
+
+But Holt, who was abominably curious, wished to quiz Stainton, and
+Stainton, with the wisdom of his years, knew that enough had been done
+for an initial evening.
+
+"No, thanks," Stainton allowed Holt to say; "we've just met after five
+years, you know, and we've got no end of things to talk about."
+
+Ethel Newberry leaned forward and pressed Stainton's hand.
+
+"You will look us up soon?" she politely enquired.
+
+"Indeed, yes," said Stainton.
+
+"Always glad to see you," said Newberry.
+
+Muriel said nothing, but Stainton pressed warmly the little hand that
+she unreservedly offered.
+
+"Good-night," said Stainton.
+
+"Good-night," said Muriel.
+
+No, thought Stainton, as he reluctantly turned away with Holt, in spite
+of her caustic reference to his age, she must be merely an impulsive,
+innocent girl. He was glad to come to this determination, glad, however,
+simply because it was what he concluded must be a final answer to a
+question that had already become annoying.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!
+
+
+As the motor swerved away from them, making for the up-channel of
+Broadway, Holt seized Stainton's arm, and began to pilot him through the
+crowd.
+
+"Now," said he, "will you _please_ tell me what the----"
+
+"No," said Stainton, "I won't. Not yet."
+
+"But you promised----"
+
+"I know that. Only wait until we get to a quieter place than this. You
+can scarcely expect me to call out such things for all New York to
+hear."
+
+They freed themselves of the whirlpool around the opera-house and began
+to walk northward.
+
+Stainton was looking about him with the eyes of a man that has been for
+years in prison and has but just returned to his native town. He was not
+a New Yorker by birth, and he had never known the city well, but he had
+always loved it and through all his western exile he had dreamed of this
+triumphal return. He soon seemed to have forgotten the puzzle that he
+had agreed to explain to his friend.
+
+"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street,
+pausing now and again to rest on this or that building new to him
+although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's
+new--all new.--What's that place, the one over there on the corner?"
+
+Holt grudgingly told him.
+
+"Fresh?" asked Stainton.
+
+"Five years old," said Holt.
+
+"And that?--And that?"
+
+Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.
+
+"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.
+
+"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"
+
+"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You
+know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years,
+he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is
+true of some cities and most of all of New York."
+
+Holt slapped him on the back.
+
+"Good old Jim!" said Holt.
+
+The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.
+
+"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't
+call me old. I'm not."
+
+"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger
+than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."
+
+Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he
+had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily
+converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed,
+be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at
+thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered
+Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as
+"Old Stainton"!
+
+"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man
+doesn't object to being called old."
+
+The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the
+Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat
+and hear the sad story of your life."
+
+They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker
+to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given
+time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder
+at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where
+bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into
+the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded
+khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of
+Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country
+road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long
+remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was
+drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly
+sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne.
+
+"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a
+suffering fellow-creature!"
+
+Stainton considered.
+
+"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of
+it in a moment of excitement----"
+
+"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."
+
+"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself----"
+
+"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.
+
+"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."
+
+"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.
+
+"You are the best judge of that, George."
+
+Holt smiled.
+
+"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you
+were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton
+is sane."
+
+"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men
+that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."
+
+"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions
+from what I am going to tell you."
+
+Holt groaned.
+
+"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake _tell_ it!"
+
+Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.
+
+"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's
+biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart
+and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you
+may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of
+those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the
+smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My
+mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice,
+but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be
+rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What
+he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon
+of me."
+
+"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.
+
+Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.
+
+"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they
+have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That
+tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to
+assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own,
+has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in
+revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly
+the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus
+be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."
+
+"I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me."
+
+"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious
+malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he
+was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he
+couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another
+life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature
+for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I
+was afraid."
+
+"Afraid? _You!_" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he
+said.
+
+"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the
+twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."
+
+"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age,
+it looks to me as if----"
+
+"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I
+think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father--he
+drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned
+way--was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and
+yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily
+demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I
+dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid
+senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that
+time I saw him--I, a mere boy--become, day by day, a doting idiot.
+
+"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.
+
+"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end.
+Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going
+on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the
+moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and
+malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though
+here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my
+boy; old age.'"
+
+Stainton wet his lips with wine.
+
+"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and
+I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been
+some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in
+my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing
+to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an
+institution--which shows that I was very young indeed,--and so I simply
+nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.
+
+"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It
+was--it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just
+couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I
+kept saying to myself:
+
+"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going
+on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick
+of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of
+the years to come.'"
+
+Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.
+
+"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."
+
+Holt shuffled his feet.
+
+"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.
+
+"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed:
+"One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as
+they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent
+we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant
+odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing,
+steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of
+controlling. These things go, slowly--very slowly--in each of us, and
+when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess
+that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and
+comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it----"
+
+He stopped again, and again went on:
+
+"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see
+anybody die, Holt?"
+
+Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.
+
+"No," he admitted.
+
+"Not your parents?"
+
+"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my
+first trip abroad."
+
+"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk
+about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that.
+Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees:
+it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are
+disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.--There is no dignity in
+terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father----I was looking towards
+him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a
+razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He
+cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I
+remember the queer gurgle and the----
+
+"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old
+age? I lay awake nights, I tell you--nights and nights--interminable
+nights, thinking, shaking.
+
+"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There
+was a girl--it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from
+Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a
+cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day,
+when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into
+the cold black water we both went.
+
+"It seemed to me that I was hours going down--down, and that I was still
+longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies
+of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and
+it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking
+again, and just then she--the girl I was in love with--flung an arm
+toward me. I shoved her away.
+
+"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't
+very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would
+have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a
+lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much
+afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she
+neither forgot nor forgave.
+
+"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me
+over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She
+married the cousin and eighteen years ago--so I heard long after her
+marriage--she died as my mother had died--in childbirth."
+
+Stainton slowly refilled his glass.
+
+Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's
+narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was
+accustomed to be interested.
+
+"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.
+
+"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people
+thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the
+shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do.
+First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live
+in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In
+order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age
+gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee
+you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"
+
+"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."
+
+"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.
+
+"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."
+
+"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run
+away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at
+the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves,
+walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your
+yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping
+from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a
+different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."
+
+"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"
+
+"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death.
+I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did.
+I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I
+would deliberately court destruction--or appear to. The outcome was
+that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you
+admired me for."
+
+"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd
+become a brave man."
+
+"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his
+cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever
+was."
+
+"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did
+even better with the other scarecrow."
+
+"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in
+another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained
+like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk----"
+
+"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the
+dance-hall at Durango?"
+
+"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got
+myself--you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights--into the
+shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers,
+is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully,
+but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig.
+"Tap that," he said.
+
+He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's
+congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it,
+at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the
+wine.
+
+"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New
+York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest
+disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."
+
+"Well?" asked Holt.
+
+"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over
+twenty-five."
+
+Holt nodded approval.
+
+"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body;
+that's a cinch," said he.
+
+"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than
+anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love
+disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and
+then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in
+spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was
+saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the
+philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate,
+I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is
+the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to
+yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I _believe_ in the world; I
+believe in Man.'"
+
+Holt smiled.
+
+"Wait till you know New York," said he.
+
+"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."
+
+"And so----" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and
+reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.
+
+"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as
+soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went
+to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the
+opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago;
+that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint
+faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old
+sweetheart's daughter. And it was."
+
+"What? Muriel Stannard?"
+
+"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."
+
+Holt whistled softly.
+
+"Well?" asked he.
+
+"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."
+
+For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his
+dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:
+
+"But, Jim----"
+
+There he stopped.
+
+Stainton looked at him enquiringly.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"But, Jim, you--you----Oh, what's the use!"
+
+"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it
+is all simple enough."
+
+Holt took a deep pull at his glass.
+
+"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."
+
+Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."
+
+"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did
+understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't,
+and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his
+stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his
+own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a
+what-do-y'-call-it--anchorite--and had opium-dreams without the fun of a
+smoke."
+
+Stainton stiffened.
+
+"I didn't ask your advice," said he.
+
+"You wanted it," Holt ventured.
+
+"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging
+his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most
+city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when
+you see it, you can't enjoy it."
+
+"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes. "Perhaps I am, but that
+rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know,
+but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."
+
+Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him,
+wanted to quote Cicero: "_Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te
+dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis._"
+All that he said, however, was:
+
+"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good
+woman in the face."
+
+"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.
+
+Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the
+merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.
+
+"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to
+proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a
+ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that
+can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with the _entree_, somebody
+that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a
+man in livery."
+
+"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To
+make clowns of your fellow men--really I think that's a sin against
+God."
+
+"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a
+girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two
+people who haven't anything to do but tell each other how much they
+love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin
+to want something else to talk about."
+
+"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he
+should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so
+long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on:
+"There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained
+for love only."
+
+"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle
+than it is now, and that's going some. What _was_ it ordained for?
+Babies?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New
+York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't
+thinking babies."
+
+"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."
+
+"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a
+fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here,
+Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know
+what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without
+spoiling the game."
+
+"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will
+object?"
+
+"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."
+
+"Then what do you mean?"
+
+Holt interpreted.
+
+"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and
+that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."
+
+Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better,
+seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt
+of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.
+
+"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this
+marrying-talk, aren't you?"
+
+"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you
+refer to it in that way."
+
+"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it
+won't do, you know. Really."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."
+
+Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his
+glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the
+board.
+
+"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me
+to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."
+
+"O, Hell!" said Holt.
+
+Stainton's brows drew close together.
+
+"I mean what I say," he declared.
+
+"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean what _he_ said?"
+
+"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I
+suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would
+have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed
+treatment--his treatment."
+
+"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet--not by several
+thousand graveyards full."
+
+"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances--really. I have my
+own feelings to go by."
+
+"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old
+as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels--per_haps_."
+
+"A man is as old as his arteries--and a few other units of his physical
+economy."
+
+"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the--what is
+it?--units of _her_ physical economy."
+
+Stainton bit his under lip.
+
+"A girl is mature at eighteen--mature enough. I won't talk of that,
+George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something
+better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge
+of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than
+hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of
+twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done
+something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and
+unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."
+
+"You mean you believe you have."
+
+"I know it."
+
+"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've
+committed yourself, Jim."
+
+Stainton shook his great head.
+
+"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health--mental, moral,
+physical and every other way--understand me: _every other way_--than you
+were ten years ago."
+
+"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody
+knows that; but you----"
+
+"I have never been a waster."
+
+"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."
+
+"You don't mean that."
+
+"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now
+and then."
+
+"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."
+
+"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close
+room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just
+come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant
+you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad
+ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your
+brain is used to 'em. So's your body--only more so. Well, what's going
+to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden--habits of a lifetime,
+mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"
+
+"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under
+the age of forty-five."
+
+"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good
+a girl of eighteen."
+
+Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes
+narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his
+mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended
+gently. Stainton chuckled.
+
+"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you
+because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He
+hesitated. "That is, unless----" He frowned again, but only
+slightly--"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen
+to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"
+
+Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed
+heartily.
+
+"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've
+got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too
+much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can
+give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."
+
+"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and
+will soon find a good woman to supply them. I thank you for your
+interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and,
+in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell
+you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage
+between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."
+
+"Between fifty and eighteen?"
+
+"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."
+
+"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think
+that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"
+
+"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off
+with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an
+irresponsible boy of her own years."
+
+"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more
+irresponsible than the girl?"
+
+"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."
+
+"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed
+Holt. "Is _that_ marriage?"
+
+"An important part of it."
+
+"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an
+easy business."
+
+"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of
+a fool."
+
+"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered
+his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was
+already thickening his speech.
+
+"All," said Stainton.
+
+"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd
+better reckon a little on God, Jim?"
+
+Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of
+drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their
+libations.
+
+"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or
+failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually
+unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"
+
+Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober
+moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups,
+however, were sometimes theological.
+
+"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.
+
+"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices
+made infinite."
+
+"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really
+'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"
+
+"Reason," suggested Stainton.
+
+"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for--for--lemme
+see: for reason."
+
+"Philosophy?"
+
+"To quick for that, too."
+
+"Instinct, perhaps."
+
+"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does
+something--high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in--partly. Not
+altogether. Partly's something else; something from--from----" Holt
+groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved
+an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."
+
+Stainton rose.
+
+"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an
+early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.
+
+"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.
+
+"It is late," repeated Stainton.
+
+Holt shook his head.
+
+"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his
+feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's
+Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things.
+Birds mating in--in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."
+
+"Come on," said Stainton.
+
+But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's
+neck.
+
+"I'm--I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'--an' God
+knows I love you." Easy tears were running down his puffed cheeks.
+"Only you _are_ old, Jim. You know you are."
+
+Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.
+
+"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way,
+you know."
+
+Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.
+
+"So you really mean--mean to do--to do----? You know what I mean?"
+
+"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that
+night: "I intend to marry her."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE
+
+
+Mrs. Preston Newberry had risen to the distinction of that name several
+months before Stainton, as a young Harvard undergraduate, came to know
+and love her sister. Very likely she had never heard of Jim until his
+triumphal march to New York, and certainly, if she had ever heard of
+him, she had long ago forgotten his name. Her early married life had
+completely occupied itself in an endeavour to live up to her new title,
+and, since this effort was not crowned with a success so secure as to
+dispense with the necessity of careful watching (for eternal vigilance
+is the price of more things than liberty), her present existence was
+sufficiently employed to make her regard the care of her niece with
+resignation rather than with joy.
+
+Muriel's father had not survived his wife beyond a decade. In that
+period he managed to spend all the money that the previous portion of
+his mature career had been devoted to acquiring, and Muriel's
+grandparents on both sides had long since passed to the sphere of
+celestial compensations; the girl had, therefore, in some measure, been
+forced upon her aunt. A timid little girl with long dark hair that
+nearly concealed her face, she was brought to New York.
+
+"And now," Mrs. Newberry had remarked to her husband, "the question is:
+what are we to do with her?"
+
+It may be that she had entertained from her early reading of the novels
+of Mrs. Humphry Ward a vague hope that Preston would propose to make
+Muriel the child-light of their otherwise now definitely childless home.
+If, however, such an expectation had formed, it was speedily shattered:
+Preston, like many another husband, inclined to the opinion that one
+member of his wife's family was enough in his house. He expressed this
+opinion in his usual manner: briefly, but not directly.
+
+"How the hell do I know?" he asked.
+
+When Ethel--Ethel was really the stout Mrs. Newberry's Christian
+name--when Ethel had evinced a disposition to discuss in further detail
+the question of Muriel's future, Newberry had done what he usually did
+when Ethel began any discussion: he recalled an engagement at one of the
+three of New York's most difficult clubs.
+
+It was a procedure that seldom failed. He disliked deciding anything,
+even where his own pleasures were involved; and so, he was accustomed to
+presenting the problem to his wife much as he presented her with an
+allowance, recalling an engagement at one of the clubs, going out and
+not returning until he was sure that Ethel had gone to bed "to sleep on
+it." In this way, even when the subject proved a hard mattress,
+Preston's couch remained downy, and Ethel would meet him, over the
+breakfast eggcups, with the riddle solved.
+
+In the instance of the disposal of Muriel, the matter proceeded as
+always. Mrs. Newberry came downstairs next morning in her newest and
+pinkest kimono, an embroidered importation from Japan, whose wing-like
+sleeves showed plumper arms and wrists than such a garment is made to
+display. Though her eyes were red, she smiled.
+
+"You won't mind paying the child's school bills?" she quavered.
+
+"Not if the school's far enough away," said Preston.
+
+"I had thought----" began his wife.
+
+"Because," said Preston, "it would be wrong to the girl to bring her up
+at one of these New York finishing-schools. They inculcate extravagant
+ideals; they're full of a lot of the little children of the rich, and
+Muriel might acquire there a notion that she was to inherit some of my
+money--which she isn't."
+
+Ethel Newberry considered this hint final. She dropped at once to the
+last of the dozen institutions of instruction that she had made into a
+mental list, and Muriel was sent to a convent school.
+
+"Though we are not Catholics," said Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Excellent discipline," said Preston. "Is it far away?"
+
+"Nearly in Philadelphia."
+
+"Oh, well, at holiday time----"
+
+"She can"--Ethel brightened--"she can come----"
+
+"Yes, she can have you come to see her," said Preston.
+
+Muriel passed eight years at this school. So long as Mrs. Newberry's
+conscience was able to conquer her desires, the young pupil's aunt would
+run over to Philadelphia for the short vacations; the long ones were, as
+often as could be arranged, spent by Muriel, by invitation, at the home
+of one or another of her classmates. Now, however, the girl had
+graduated and had remained as a post-graduate as long as the curriculum
+permitted.
+
+"She'll have to come out," said Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Of the school," asked Preston, "or into society?"
+
+"Both. The one entails the other."
+
+"What's the hurry?"
+
+"Good heavens, Preston; if she stays there much longer she'll become a
+nun!"
+
+"Suppose she does?" asked Newberry, who was a Presbyterian. "I'm
+surprised to hear you refer to a pious life as if it were a smash-up."
+
+Nevertheless, in the end, he agreed that Muriel should pass the present
+winter under his hospitable roof ("Though, further than that," he
+mentally vowed, "I'll be damned if I endure"). So, Muriel had, without
+too much effort on her guardians' part, been taken about with them on
+numerous occasions lately, most recently to the Metropolitan, where
+Stainton had met her.
+
+It was on the morning after this meeting that, with commendable
+promptness, but at a deplorably early hour--to be exact, at eleven
+o'clock--Stainton called at the Newberrys'. His card was presented to
+Mrs. Newberry through the crack of the door while that good lady was in
+her bath.
+
+Ethel, who was big, blonde, and bovine, struggled into the nearest
+dressing-gown and hurried to the breakfast-room, where her husband, over
+a newspaper, was engaged in his matutinal occupation of scolding the
+coffee. Her face a tragic mask, Mrs. Newberry placed the offending
+pasteboard by Preston's plate.
+
+"Preston," said she. "Look at that. _Look_ at it!"
+
+Newberry appeared shorter and thinner than ever as he sat crumpled over
+the newspaper, his grey moustache short and thin and his head covered by
+grey hair, short and thin and worn in a bang. He obeyed his wife's
+request. He expressed no surprise.
+
+"Looks like somebody's card," he said.
+
+"It is, Preston," wailed his wife. "It is that awful western person's
+that George Holt would drag to our box--_our_ box--last night."
+
+"My dear," said Newberry, "Mr.--er--what's his name?--oh, ah:
+Stainton;--yes--Mr. Stainton appears to be a man of means. Concerning
+the rich nothing except good."
+
+"But his card, Preston; his card!"
+
+"What's the matter with his card?"
+
+"He has sent it up--here--at this time of day!"
+
+"Hum. Western eccentricity, I suppose. He'll get over all that sort of
+thing in time."
+
+Ethel was hopping heavily from one slippered foot to the other.
+
+"He hasn't merely left it," she distractedly explained. "He's here--he's
+actually in the house."
+
+"Well, he's not a burglar, Ethel."
+
+"Don't talk so, Preston. I know he's not a burglar. But what does he
+want here at this hour?"
+
+"I suppose he wants to see you."
+
+"Now? _What_ can he want to see _me_ about at 11 A.M.?"
+
+"If you really want to know, my dear, I think that the best way to
+satisfy your curiosity is to go down and ask him."
+
+"How can I?" She spread wide her arms, the more clearly to bring to her
+husband's wandering attention the fact that she was not yet by any means
+dressed to receive callers. "Won't you go?" she pleaded.
+
+"Why should I?" asked Newberry. "_I'm_ not in the least curious----This
+coffee is worse every morning. You really must have Mrs. Dawson
+discharge Jane."
+
+Ethel uttered a mighty sob and fled. She sent word to Stainton that she
+would be down in five minutes to greet him. After half an hour, she
+entered the reception room. Not ten minutes later, she rushed again upon
+her husband, this time in the smoking room, that she called his "study."
+
+"What on earth do you suppose he wants?" she cried.
+
+Preston, with a face like a martyred saint's, put down his newspaper. He
+did not, however, take his cigarette from his mouth to reply.
+
+"What who wants?"
+
+Ethel wrung her hands.
+
+"That awful man!" she said.
+
+"Is it possible that you are referring to my friend, Mr.--er--Mr.
+Stainton?"
+
+"Of course I am, Preston."
+
+"Oh! He's still here?"
+
+"Why, yes. I've only just seen him."
+
+"You made him wait rather long, my dear. I hope you are not keeping him
+waiting again."
+
+"What else could I do?"
+
+"How do I know?"
+
+"Preston, do try to show a little interest. I say: what on earth do you
+suppose he wants?"
+
+"If he was as bored by that performance at the Metropolitan as I was,"
+said Newberry, yawning, "he wants a drink. Don't _you_ know what he
+wants?"
+
+"He wants--he wants," Ethel dramatically brought it out, "to take Muriel
+for a ride in his motor."
+
+Preston had been seated in an arm-chair without the slightest indication
+of disturbing himself either for his wife or the visitor. At this
+announcement by Mrs. Newberry he rose with what, for him, was alacrity.
+
+"I'll call her myself," he said.
+
+"But, Preston! Think of it!"
+
+"That is just what I am doing, my dear--and I think confoundedly well of
+it, let me tell you."
+
+"In his motor!" Mrs. Newberry repeated the phrase as if it were pregnant
+with evil.
+
+"What's the matter with his motor?" snapped Preston. "It's a motor, you
+say, not a monoplane. Mr.--Mr. Stainton has money enough to buy a safe
+motor--as motors go."
+
+"Oh, Preston, consider: Muriel--alone--morning! The child isn't even
+really out yet!"
+
+At this, Newberry fronted his wife squarely. For perhaps the first time
+in his life, he suffered the pains of definite assertion.
+
+"Now, understand, Ethel," he said, "let's cut out all this rot about
+Muriel. The girl is _not_ such a child and she is out: she's out of
+school, and that's all the outing she's going to get. In fact, it's high
+time she was in again."
+
+"She can't go back to the convent, Preston."
+
+"Mr. Stainton doesn't want to motor her back to the convent. No. But if
+we manage things with half a hand, she needn't be much longer at large.
+Now, don't keep my friend Mr. Stansfield waiting any longer. I surmise
+that he has his machine with him?"
+
+"He came in it. It's at the door. I couldn't see the make."
+
+"No. Naturally. Well, his bringing it along shows him to be a man of
+expedition. It's what we might expect of a successful miner. And it is
+promising for other reasons, too. Get Muriel, take her down, hand her
+over to him with your blessing--but be sure you hand her over as your
+dearest treasure--and then come back here to me."
+
+Saying this, Preston resumed the perusal of his newspaper.
+
+Ethel left the room. When she returned, she had the air of seeing blood
+upon her hands.
+
+"Well?" asked Preston.
+
+"They're gone."
+
+Preston folded the paper and laid it carefully upon the table that stood
+beside him. The mood of assertion still tore at his vitals.
+
+"Now then," he began, "about this Mr. Stansfield----"
+
+"Stainton," mildly corrected his wife as she took a seat opposite him
+and looked out over the now rapidly filling Madison Avenue.
+
+"Stainton." Newberry accepted the amendment. "What's wrong with him?"
+
+"Oh," said Ethel, her fingers twisting in her lap, "it's not that.
+There's nothing _wrong_ with him."
+
+"Well, then!" Preston spoke as if his wife's admission settled the
+matter.
+
+But it did not settle the matter.
+
+"Only he is not----" Ethel added: "Is he quite a gentleman?"
+
+Newberry sighed as one sighs at a child that will not comprehend the
+simplest statement.
+
+"It's hard for art to compete with Nature," said he; "a gentleman is
+man-made, but Nature can do better when she wants."
+
+"We don't really know him."
+
+"I know a good deal about him, Ethel. Enough for present purposes."
+
+"From Mr. Holt?"
+
+"Yes. When Holt read of his success in the papers, the canny George went
+to his brokers and made inquiries--thorough inquiries."
+
+"He seems to have got whatever money he has very quickly, Preston."
+
+"That only proves that he is either lucky or crooked. It doesn't prove
+he didn't get it. What makes you think he's not quite a gentleman?"
+
+"Well," said Ethel, "----that."
+
+"Poof!" said Newberry. "He was talking a good deal to Muriel at the
+opera last night. Didn't he behave all right?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose so. I asked her what he talked about, and she
+said she didn't know."
+
+"Very sensible of her, I'm sure. I wouldn't have expected it of her. It
+goes to show that she's not too young to marry."
+
+Ethel permitted herself a fat start.
+
+"O, Preston, you never mean----"
+
+"Now, my dear, you know very well that we've meant nothing else. You've
+known it ever since I sent you to call Muriel."
+
+"And you don't think him too old for her?"
+
+"Old? He's probably not fifty."
+
+"Mr. Holt said he thought fifty."
+
+"Very well: fifty. Fifty and eighteen. The one has the youth and the
+other supplies the balance. Most suitable. Besides, it's done every day.
+Heavens, Ethel, you mustn't expect everything!"
+
+"But do you think there's nobody else, Preston? She has been away a good
+deal, you know, and----"
+
+"Somebody else?"
+
+"Yes." Ethel's eyes sought her husband's and, meeting them, fell.
+"Somebody that the child cares for," she murmured.
+
+"Stuff!" said Preston. "That convent-place has a high reputation for
+the way it's conducted. Also, any man of forty can steal a girl from any
+boy of twenty if he only cares to try. The only trouble is that he
+hardly ever cares enough about it to try."
+
+"Fifty," repeated Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Fifty,--granted," continued Preston. "Where we're lucky is that this
+fellow seems to want to try--supposing there is any other chap, and of
+course there isn't."
+
+"Do you think, Preston"--Ethel's eyes were downcast--"that she can learn
+to love him?"
+
+"Ethel!" said Preston.
+
+"But, dear," Ethel insisted, "it does seem a little as if this were the
+sort of thing that a girl ought to be left to decide for herself."
+
+Newberry had risen and gone to the mantelpiece to seek a fresh
+cigarette. His wife's words brought him to a stop. He folded his thin
+arms across his chest.
+
+"Look here," he said; "we have got to face this thing right now, and
+once and for all. What are the facts in the case? The facts are these:
+Here's Muriel with a pretty face and a good, sound, sensible education
+of the proper homely sort, which includes a healthy ignorance of this
+wicked world. And here's this fellow Stainsfield, or Stainborough, or
+whatever his name is, and I'm sure it makes no difference, a strong,
+fatherly kind of old dodo, comes to New York, 'b'gosh,' with his eyes
+bugging out at the first good-looker they light on. Well, he's not the
+Steel Trust, or a Transatlantic steamship combination, but he's what,
+until our palates were spoiled twenty years or so ago, we'd have called
+a confoundedly rich man. Understand? Then add to it that Muriel hasn't a
+cent of her own and no prospects--_no prospects_, mind you. And now see
+whether you'd not better forget to talk sentiment and begin to get busy.
+If you and Muriel don't get busy, it's a hundred-to-one shot some other
+girl will--and'll get him damned quick. Then Muriel will probably be
+left to get a job as school-teacher or something-or-other nearly as bad.
+He's worth a half-million if he's worth a cent."
+
+Ethel Newberry's large, innocent eyes opened wide. If surprise can be
+placid, they were placidly surprised.
+
+"Are you quite sure about the money, dear?" she asked.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ONE ROAD TO LOVE
+
+
+Among the little company of persons aware of Jim Stainton's sentimental
+inclinations, or so far as were concerned the people most intimately
+affected by those inclinations, there appeared, thus far, to be a
+singular unanimity of opinion regarding the matter. Stainton, it is to
+be supposed, approved because the inclinations concurred with his pet
+theories. Newberry, although he did not know anything about Stainton's
+pet theories and would in all probability have jeered at them had he
+been enlightened, proved ready to welcome the miner because he had
+decided that the miner should relieve the Newberry household of a quiet
+presence that, its quiescence to the contrary notwithstanding,
+distinctly disturbed the even course of Newberry's existence. Ethel, as
+may be readily believed, found, under her husband's expert guidance, no
+difficulty in reaching the conclusion that, as she put it, "a match of
+this sort would be for the child's best interests."
+
+To be sure, there was George Holt, if one counted him and his verdict.
+Still, even in this singularly imperfect world, where we believe in
+majorities and where they misgovern us, we acknowledge the purging
+benefits of an ever-present party in opposition; and the party in
+opposition to James Stainton was now composed of Mr. George Vanvechten
+Holt. He was a splendid minority of one, but he was not one of those
+most intimately affected, and he was not generally the sort of
+individual noticed. Stainton had saved his life, yet even Holt admitted
+that the life was scarcely worth the saving.
+
+"Not that I care anything about the youngster for her own sake," he
+would say, night after night, at his club, where he had made all the
+club-members he knew an exception to his promise of secrecy; "it's not
+that, and it isn't that my liking for Stainton shuts my eyes to his
+faults. Not a little bit. Tying up little Muriel to a man half a hundred
+years old is like sending virgins to that Minotaur-chap and all that
+sort of thing. And hitching good old Jim to a girl of eighteen is like
+fastening a scared bulldog to the tail of some new-fangled and
+unexploded naval-rocket: you don't know what's inside of it and you
+don't know where it's going to land; all you do know is that it's going
+to be mighty mystifying to the dog. Still, as I say, I'm not personal.
+What makes me sore is the principle of the thing. It's so rottenly
+unprincipled, you know."
+
+Holt, however, always ended by declaring that he would not attempt to
+interfere. He intimated, darkly, that he could, if he would, interfere
+with considerable effect, but he was specific, if darker, in his
+reasons therefor, in his decision not to attempt to save his threatened
+friends or fight for his outraged principles.
+
+The truth was that George had made one more endeavour after the evening
+of the opera. He was severely rebuffed. Because, as he never tired of
+stating, he really liked Stainton and would not forget that the miner
+had saved his life, he recurred, after much painful plucking-up of
+courage, to the amatory subject, which only intoxication had permitted
+him so boldly to pursue on the night previous.
+
+He was seated in Stainton's sitting-room high in the hotel. It was late
+afternoon; the rumble and clatter of the city rose from the distant
+street, and Stainton, full of fresh memories of his motor drive with
+Muriel, was walking backward and forward from his bedroom, slowly
+getting into evening clothes.
+
+"I sure never would have thought you were morbid," said Holt, from his
+seat on the edge of a table, whence he dangled his legs.
+
+"Morbid?" repeated Stainton. "I am not."
+
+"I mean--you know: about death and old age and all that sort of thing."
+
+"I thought I had explained all that last night."
+
+"It must have been over when I was with you in the West."
+
+"It wasn't."
+
+"Not when you were the first man to volunteer to go down in the shaft
+of 'Better Days' mine after the explosion?"
+
+"I have rarely been more afraid than I was then."
+
+"Or when you played head-nurse in the spotted-fever mess at Sunnyside?"
+
+"I was nearly sick--scared sick--myself."
+
+Holt's patent-leather boots flashed in and out of the shadow cast by the
+table-edge.
+
+"Hum," he said. "It don't seem to show a healthy state of mind, does
+it?"
+
+Stainton had disappeared into his bedroom. From there his answer came,
+partly muffled by the half-closed door.
+
+"I don't care to talk any more about it. I made my explanation to you
+last night, because I had promised to make one. That's all."
+
+"I'm afraid I was a bit illuminated last night," said Holt.
+
+"You were."
+
+"Still, you know, I knew what I was saying."
+
+Stainton did not reply.
+
+"And what I said," Holt supplemented, "is what I think now and what I
+always will think."
+
+"Very well. Let it go at that, George."
+
+Holt made a mighty effort.
+
+"The plain truth is," said he, "that people will call you an old fool to
+buy a piece of undressed kid."
+
+Stainton's bulky figure filled the doorway. He was in his
+shirt-sleeves, his hands busy with the collar-button at the back of his
+neck.
+
+"That will do," he said.
+
+"I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings----" said Holt.
+
+"Then keep quiet."
+
+"But you ought to know what people will say. Someone's got to tell you."
+
+"I don't care what people will say."
+
+"They'll say----"
+
+Stainton advanced. His hands were now at his side, idle, but his face
+was completely calm.
+
+"Never mind," he said.
+
+"They'll say," concluded Holt, "that you're buying the little girl, and
+that you've been cheated in the transaction----"
+
+Stainton's hands were raised. They descended heavily upon Holt's
+shoulders. They plucked Holt from his perch and shook him until his
+teeth chattered. Then they dropped him, rather gently, into a chair.
+
+"Now," said Stainton. His face was firm, and there was a cold blue flame
+playing from under his brows, but he was not even breathing hard. "Now,
+let this end it. If you want to be my friend, let this end your comments
+on my personal affairs. If you do not want to be my friend, go on
+talking as you have been, and I will throw you out of the window."
+
+This incident partially accounts for Holt's resolute refusal thereafter
+to advise Stainton. Advise him further George certainly did not,
+although among his club-fellows he expressed himself as extremely
+anxious to have it remembered that, should anything go wrong with
+Stainton, George Holt had predicted as much.
+
+There remained, however, one person of importance to Stainton's project
+that still remained unconsulted and might have some opinion of more or
+less weight in regard to it. This was Muriel Stannard.
+
+What she thought, or what she would ultimately come to feel about his
+plan, did occupy space in Stainton's cogitations. Notwithstanding his
+romanticism, Stainton was not so blind to fact as to fail to see that
+the girl's mind was as virgin as her body. Indeed, her brain, so far as
+her education might be said to have developed that organ, was less
+advanced than the rest of her physique, and this not because she was not
+intelligent, for now that she was in the world at last he could see her
+daily hastening toward mental maturity, but because her pastors and
+masters had brought her up in the manner supposed to be correct for
+girls of her position. Critics of that manner might say that its
+directors proceed on the theory that, since life is full of serpents,
+the best way to train children for life is not to teach them to
+distinguish between harmless and venomous reptiles, but to keep them in
+such ignorance of the snakes that they will be sure not to know one when
+they see it. Yet Stainton, anything rather than a critic of the
+established order, found himself not displeased with this
+manifestation--or lack of it. He wanted youth; he wanted his long lost,
+long postponed romance, and chance had put both these things within his
+reach in the person of this dusky-eyed girl. Physically she was what her
+mother had been, mentally she could be trained to complete resemblance.
+He would make of her what he conceived to be the best. And so he loved
+her.
+
+To ascertain her opinion, to predetermine it, Stainton was now
+elaborately preparing. Beginning with that introductory motor ride, in
+which Stainton's cautious manipulation of the automobile seemed to
+Muriel's unspoiled delight a union of skill and daring, he went about
+his courtship in what he believed a frank and regular way; in a way that
+both Preston and Ethel Newberry considered absolutely committal; in a
+way that, consider it as she might, Muriel accepted with every evidence
+of girlish pleasure.
+
+There were more motor drives, with the aunt now playing chaperon: a
+chaperon that conscientiously chaperoned as little as possible. There
+were small theatre parties, small suppers, small dinners. One or two
+mothers of daughters, who dared to be civil to Stainton, were shooed
+away, attacked by Ethel with all the brazen loyalty of a ponderous hen
+defending her chicks from the assault of a terrier. The Newberrys, as in
+duty bound, retaliated upon Stainton's theatres, dinners, and suppers
+with two teas and a luncheon. Stainton "came back at them," as George
+Holt phrased it, with more suppers, theatres, and dinners, the dramas
+always carefully selected to suit the immature condition of Muriel's
+soul; and so the whole courtship progressed along those conventional
+lines which lay the road to the altar over a plain of rich foods
+irrigated by vintage wines.
+
+"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl
+during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her,
+unescorted, through Central Park.
+
+"What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!"
+
+It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days
+when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the
+clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none
+other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on
+some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away
+to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel,
+her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted
+nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan
+civilisation.
+
+"Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing:
+New York, the life here, the city."
+
+"I love that, too," said Muriel.
+
+To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not
+merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an
+accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her
+splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its
+disposal.
+
+"So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to
+get back here."
+
+"From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so
+romantic."
+
+"Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them."
+
+"Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she
+said.
+
+Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent.
+
+"How did you get that idea?" he asked.
+
+"Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has
+Uncle Preston."
+
+"They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers
+published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the
+newspapers say."
+
+"I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the
+time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?"
+
+"Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton.
+
+"But did you do it?"
+
+"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly disliked to have his
+supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps
+from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather
+of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"
+
+"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they
+said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid
+to go, and you captured them by yourself--three of them."
+
+Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.
+
+"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half
+so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"
+
+"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"
+
+"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the
+newspapers presented them."
+
+"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please
+tell me about a mine."
+
+He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end
+and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He
+abruptly concluded by telling her so.
+
+"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any
+other. What can girls and women care for business?"
+
+So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the
+night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no
+relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that
+matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty
+and her youth.
+
+"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break
+off the match?"
+
+"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I
+think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."
+
+"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace
+had told her so."
+
+"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think
+she was horrid."
+
+"And her daughter, Lady--Lady----" He hesitated for the name.
+
+"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up
+Arthur like that!"
+
+Stainton smiled gravely.
+
+"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"
+
+"Indeed I would not!"
+
+"What _would_ you have done?"
+
+Muriel's chin became resolute.
+
+"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the
+drawing-room, and I should have put my----" She broke off, rosy with
+embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.
+
+But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.
+
+"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.
+
+"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."
+
+Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had
+partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her
+conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:
+
+"I should just have married him in spite of them all."
+
+Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor
+stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if
+you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.
+
+Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase
+of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers,
+what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the
+early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath,
+our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he
+then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this
+supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the
+acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and
+Stainton.
+
+Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan
+presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should
+admire not his wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the
+genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love
+not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the
+real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the
+prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his
+insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that
+thing happened to be.
+
+Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny
+have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her
+aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in
+the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the
+girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's
+fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and
+Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the
+school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet
+known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first
+time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which
+all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was
+frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a
+pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.
+
+"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the
+luncheon-table, looking, however, not at the subject of her remarks but
+at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home,
+sat opposite her.
+
+"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am
+happier than ever now."
+
+Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the
+smile, and Preston would not.
+
+"Why is that?" asked Ethel.
+
+"Oh, because."
+
+"Because why?"
+
+"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and
+things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"
+
+Ethel's smile faded.
+
+"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."
+
+"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped.
+"Thompson; the salmon."
+
+"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.
+
+"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does
+really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"
+
+"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say _just_ like a boy."
+
+"He seems quite young--he actually seems very young indeed," mused
+Ethel.
+
+"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."
+
+His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.
+
+"He is fif----" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she
+corrected herself: "He must be nearly----"
+
+"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.
+
+"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said----"
+
+"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."
+
+"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip.
+Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."
+
+"You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often."
+
+"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger
+than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself,
+and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."
+
+The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so
+trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past
+thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.
+
+"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or
+fifty."
+
+"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better
+make the most of him while you can."
+
+"I don't see why," said Muriel.
+
+"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several
+women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them
+is sure to succeed."
+
+Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend,
+and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had
+so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke
+so little of women to her.
+
+Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the
+length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his
+tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of
+the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and
+was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally
+romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in
+like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she
+was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She
+regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his
+conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his
+company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he
+was "showing her."
+
+In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton
+was in love.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A MAID PERPLEXED
+
+
+So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in
+their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved
+quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of
+precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scene a
+faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally
+understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and
+found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.
+
+Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the
+white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged
+mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening
+that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing
+theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.
+
+That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement,
+Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm
+of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with
+Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the role of duenna, and the
+suitor had consoled himself in the ocular demonstration of the proverb
+that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his
+privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he
+enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that class of
+society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections,
+seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was
+unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry
+an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circumspection.
+Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign,
+and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and
+the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.
+
+The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short
+hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep,
+became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips,
+and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that
+which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that
+the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far
+younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but
+with excitement.
+
+While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the
+glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to
+lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than
+he had ever yet seen her--thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it
+would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young
+enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he
+was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain
+that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at
+the opera, but more desirable.
+
+Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the
+chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows
+piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from
+her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body
+fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the
+flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow
+lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like
+young red roses after the last shower of Spring.
+
+He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box,
+that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood
+at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the
+gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how
+the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast
+what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the
+distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush, which shut the
+heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his
+every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the
+desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the
+demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul
+that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings
+beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would
+either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on
+his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white
+hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her,
+the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes
+with their curving lashes, her parted lips.
+
+She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska
+and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold
+that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing
+not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl
+should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again
+evaded her.
+
+"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."
+
+"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"
+
+"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that
+night at the opera. "I did it all to win Life. That has always been
+what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted--I
+scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You
+understand?"
+
+"I think I understand," she said.
+
+"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living
+as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight.
+I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally
+straight at any sacrifice."
+
+She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the
+violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward
+her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.
+
+"And you've won?" she asked.
+
+He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back,
+and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would
+not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to
+bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved
+only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.
+
+Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The
+atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his
+eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of
+which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:
+
+"And you've won?"
+
+"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel."
+
+It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes
+fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand
+to finger them. The hand shook.
+
+"For me?" she asked.
+
+If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is
+the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to
+many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.
+
+"I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain
+the end? It's you who must tell me that."
+
+She saw now.
+
+"How can I help?" she faltered.
+
+"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face.
+"Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life
+means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."
+
+Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other
+Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he
+sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked
+up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had
+heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her
+eyes.
+
+"Do you remember," he asked, when his story was finished, "how rudely I
+looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?"
+
+"It wasn't rude," she said.
+
+"You must have thought it so then."
+
+"I--I didn't know what to think--exactly."
+
+"Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me
+stare at you."
+
+Her nether lip trembled.
+
+"I didn't know my mother," she said.
+
+"No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and
+then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine
+for her. It was really not love at all--only the rough sketch for what
+might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away,
+when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I
+wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had
+won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living
+original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me."
+
+He came another step nearer.
+
+"I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in
+love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her.
+It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and
+didn't know. Now I am still young--I have kept myself young--but I
+_know_." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said.
+
+The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled
+to the floor.
+
+"I--I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect--I never thought----"
+
+Even this Stainton had foreseen.
+
+"Then don't hurry now," he said. He drew a chair beside her and quietly
+took her free hand. "Take your time. Take a week, two weeks, a month, if
+you choose."
+
+"But it's so new; it's all so new," said Muriel. "I never
+suspected----Oh, I know girls are always supposed to guess; but really,
+really, I never, _never_----"
+
+There was genuine pain in her voice.
+
+"I don't know what is expected of most girls," said Stainton; "but of
+you I shall never expect anything but the truth."
+
+She looked up at him with eyes perplexed.
+
+"Yes--yes, that is just what I want to be: honest. And--don't you
+see?--that is just why--I am so uncertain--that is just why I can't,
+right away, tell you----"
+
+He pressed her hand and rose. He did not like to hurt her.
+
+"I ask only that you will think it over," he said. "Will you think it
+over, Muriel?"
+
+She bowed her head.
+
+"Yes," said she.
+
+"And I may come back in----"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"In two weeks?"
+
+"In two weeks." Her voice was low and shaken. "Oh, you don't mind if I
+ask you to go now?" she pleaded.
+
+"I understand," said Stainton. "I'll be back two weeks from this
+evening. Good-night."
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Stainton," said Muriel.
+
+She waited for him to go. She waited until she heard the street door
+close behind him. Then she hurried in retreat toward her own room.
+
+But Mrs. Newberry was lying in ambush on the landing when the girl came
+upstairs--Mrs. Newberry, broad in white satin, with diamonds at her neck
+and in her hair.
+
+"Well?" asked the aunt.
+
+"Oh!" cried Muriel. She started. "Aunt Ethel!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You frightened me," Muriel explained. "I didn't see you until you
+spoke."
+
+"Well?" persisted Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Nothing. That's all," said Muriel. "Nothing--only that----"
+
+Ethel became diplomatic:
+
+"Mr. Stainton didn't stay very long?"
+
+"Not very long, Aunty."
+
+Ethel heard something ominous in her niece's tone.
+
+"You didn't--you don't mean to say you sent him _away_?"
+
+"No, Aunty. Good-night."
+
+"It's early. You're going to bed so early?"
+
+"Yes, I think I'll go to bed. I'm--I'm tired."
+
+"But it's early," repeated Mrs. Newberry, who was accustomed to order
+her life according to hours and not to reason.
+
+"Is it?" said Muriel.
+
+"It's scarcely ten. The library clock just struck."
+
+"I think it struck some time ago."
+
+"Did it?"
+
+"I think I shall go to bed, Aunty."
+
+Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that
+when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel
+brushed past her and went to her own room.
+
+Ethel returned to the library--so called because it contained a few
+hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She
+said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the
+opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel,
+together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.
+
+Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When
+Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no
+nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.
+
+"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."
+
+Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in
+his pleasantest mood.
+
+"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for
+you to let it alone?"
+
+This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James
+Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult
+to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She
+assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton,
+asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately
+engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a
+French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made
+one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she
+had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's
+manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of
+wifely obedience.
+
+When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will
+that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after
+Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's
+boudoir--it was a pink boudoir--where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at
+eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock
+luncheon.
+
+"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid,
+just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only
+beyond the ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before
+mirrors.
+
+"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"
+
+"Because I want to talk with you."
+
+This was odd. It was so odd that Mrs. Newberry should have scented its
+import; only, it is difficult to scent the import of anything when one
+has supped late the night before, when the first "rat" has not been
+nested upon one's head, and when one has but an eighth part of a day in
+which to make ready for a luncheon.
+
+"Really, Muriel," complained Ethel. "You do choose the most remarkable
+moments for conversation. It's only eleven o'clock! What on earth can
+you want to talk about at such an hour?"
+
+Muriel quietly seated herself by the window.
+
+"About Mr. Stainton," she said.
+
+Mrs. Newberry started so violently that a shower of gilt hairpins
+clattered upon the dressing-table and floor.
+
+"You may go, Marie," she gasped. She waited until the maid had shut the
+door. Then she turned her gaze full upon her niece. "What is it?" she
+cried.
+
+"He wants to marry me."
+
+Mrs. Newberry floundered to her feet and rushed upon Muriel. Her flowing
+sleeves flew back to her sturdy shoulders. She flung plump arms around
+Muriel's neck.
+
+"My dear girl!" said she. She kissed the dear girl on both passive
+cheeks. Then she inquired: "You've had a letter?"
+
+"No," said Muriel. "He asked me."
+
+"But, my dear, he hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. It was--let me
+see--yes, it will be two weeks to-morrow evening."
+
+"That was when he asked me, Aunty."
+
+Mrs. Newberry's embrace relaxed. She looked hurt.
+
+"And you never told me! I think that implies a lack of confidence--a
+lack of affection, Muriel."
+
+"I don't know. I wanted to think it over first."
+
+"Think it over! What was there to debate, I should like to know?"
+
+"A good deal, it seemed to me; and anyhow, Aunty, I think this is the
+sort of thing a girl has to decide for herself--if she can."
+
+"Where ever did you get such notions? A girl never _can_ decide it for
+herself."
+
+Muriel's answering smile was rueful.
+
+"_I_ couldn't, at any rate," she said, "and so, even if I'm late about
+it, I've come to you."
+
+Mrs. Newberry was reassured. After all, the thing had happened; Muriel's
+future--so we fatuous moderns reason--was at last secured. According to
+the custom of her time and class, Ethel had always taken it for granted
+that a poor girl married to a rich man is as safe as a good girl gone
+to Heaven--and more certainly comfortable. She became radiant. It was
+necessary only that they make such decent speed as would prevent any
+other young woman from interfering.
+
+"Well," she said, "I'm glad you _have_ come, because, since long
+engagements aren't fashionable any more, your uncle and I must naturally
+have all the warning possible--for your uncle will, of course, provide
+the wedding. I think it had better be next month--yes, next month and at
+St. Bartholomew's."
+
+Muriel's cheek paled. She turned again to the window and looked out.
+
+"I don't think you quite understand," she said. "I'm not sure----"
+
+"Now, don't be silly," interrupted Mrs. Newberry. "I won't hear any
+foolish talk about a home wedding or a quiet wedding. It isn't the
+proper thing for a wedding to be quiet; it isn't natural; besides, you
+have been living here in your uncle's house, and you owe something to
+his position."
+
+"That's not it." Muriel's back was still turned; her eyes were fixed on
+the cold rain that was falling.
+
+"Well," asked Mrs. Newberry, in complete bewilderment, "then what _is_
+it?"
+
+"I am not sure that I love Mr. Stainton."
+
+The plump Mrs. Newberry again rose. Her face was a pretty blank.
+
+"Love?" she repeated, as if she had heard that word somewhere before
+but could not for the life of her recall where. "_Love_, did you say?"
+
+"Yes," replied Muriel; "I don't know whether I love him."
+
+"What next?" asked Ethel. "Love? You don't know whether you love him!
+The idea! You're too young to know anything about it, my child. Of
+course you love him. You're just too young to know it, that's all."
+
+Muriel displayed a wistful face.
+
+"I'm eighteen."
+
+"A mere baby."
+
+"Then I should think I was too young to marry."
+
+"_Do_ you think so?"
+
+"No, only----"
+
+Mrs. Newberry waxed wise.
+
+"As a matter of fact, Muriel, haven't you," she enquired, "often thought
+of marrying even when you were younger than you are now?"
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"_Well_, then!" Mrs. Newberry in the past few weeks had acquired a few
+of her husband's mannerisms, together with some of his convictions.
+
+But this convincing argument did not settle matters. Muriel again faced
+the window; she seemed to draw inspiration for her incomprehensible
+stubbornness from the prospect of dripping Madison Avenue.
+
+"It's not so easy----" she began.
+
+"Isn't he kind?" demanded Mrs. Newberry.
+
+"Yes, he's kind."
+
+"You certainly think him good-looking, child. In fact, _I_ should call
+him handsome."
+
+"I think he is _almost_ handsome, Aunty."
+
+"Of course he is. I have heard lots of women simply _rave_ about him.
+And he is in love with you? You can't deny that?"
+
+"Did you know it, Aunty?"
+
+"How could anyone help knowing it? He shows it all the time. He can't
+keep his eyes off you."
+
+"Then, why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Because----Why, it was so evident that we took it for granted you
+knew."
+
+"We?"
+
+"Your uncle and I, yes."
+
+"Oh! There doesn't seem to be any doubt in _his_ mind that he's in love
+with me."
+
+"Exactly, Muriel; and he is rich--quite rich. Why, there are hundreds of
+girls in New York who would give their eyes to catch him. Hundreds of
+them."
+
+"But he is----" Muriel hesitated.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"He's not young, Aunty."
+
+"What has that to do with it?"
+
+"I don't know, but I should think it might have a good deal to do with
+it. Don't people say that the young love the young?"
+
+"And marry them, you mean? Really, my dear, you have such romantic
+notions! In that case, what's to become of the old?"
+
+"They're supposed to have married before they became old, I should
+think. Now, I am only eighteen. I don't know--I'm only speculating about
+it, and I like Mr. Stainton very much--but when you think of a man of
+his age marrying----"
+
+Again Mrs. Newberry interrupted. She had her position to maintain: her
+position as Preston Newberry's wife.
+
+"Muriel," she said, "I can guess what is in your mind, but I cannot
+guess how it got there. You shock me."
+
+"But, Aunty----"
+
+"That is enough. There are _some_ things that a young girl should not
+discuss."
+
+Muriel put her hands to her burning cheeks.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand!" she cried. "You don't understand at all. I
+don't know what you mean! But he's fifty." She almost sobbed. "I don't
+care what Uncle Preston says. I _know_ he is fifty!"
+
+It was a trying moment for Mrs. Newberry, but she met it bravely. She
+considered Muriel. Then, in the glass, she considered her own image.
+
+"Look at me," commanded Mrs. Newberry.
+
+Her eyes still suffused with unshed tears, Muriel obeyed.
+
+"_I_," said her aunt--"do _I_ look old?"
+
+She did not look young, but Muriel loved her, and those whom a child
+loves seldom grow old.
+
+"No," said Muriel, loyally.
+
+"Well," confessed Ethel, "_I_ am fifty." She was fifty-two. It was a
+sacrifice, nobly offered, upon the altar of family affection. She saw
+nothing in the future for her niece if Stainton could not be made to
+suffice. "But," she added, "you must never tell anyone. All I want to
+explain to you is that fifty is nothing--absolutely nothing at all."
+
+It is, however, the common fate of sacrifices made for family affection
+to go unrecognised by the family. Muriel, honest within the limits of
+her limited training, clear-sighted, was unconvinced.
+
+"Anyhow," she decided, "the question isn't whether he is old or young, I
+suppose. I guess the only question is: Do I love him? I thought all last
+night perhaps you could answer that, but of course I was wrong. I see
+that now. I dare say no person can ever really answer such a question
+but the person that asks it. I was right in the first place: I have to
+find out for myself--and yet I don't seem able to find out for myself,
+either."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FIRE AND TOW
+
+
+Mrs. Newberry's arguments were unavailing. Her pleas failed and so did
+her eulogies of Stainton: both of Stainton the hero and Stainton the
+rich man. Her tears sufficed not. There was no course but to recall her
+luncheon engagement. Her incompetence in the matter sharpened her
+tongue.
+
+They quarrelled. Muriel, in a tempest of sobbing anger, fled to her own
+room; Mrs. Newberry fled to the luncheon.
+
+Upon her return Ethel found that Muriel had gone out. Preston was in his
+"study," studying the stock reports in the Wall Street edition of his
+evening paper, and to him she straightway unburdened herself.
+
+"_What_ do you think of it?" She breathlessly enquired.
+
+"I think you meddled," said her husband.
+
+"But, Preston, the child came to me. I didn't go to her."
+
+"If you didn't, it was no fault of yours. You've been trying to get at
+her for God knows how long. Let her be. For Heaven's sake, let her be,
+Ethel. If you do, she is sure to take him, because I have always
+carefully given her to understand that she may expect nothing from me. I
+have been conscientious about that. And she must know that we are doing
+her a good-sized favour this winter. But if you don't let her alone, she
+is bound to botch the whole affair."
+
+He put aside his newspaper and prepared to go to that one of his clubs
+at which he could obtain the best cocktail. As he was about to leave the
+house, Muriel entered it. Preston smiled.
+
+"Hello," he said. "Been for a walk?"
+
+The girl was flushed and patently troubled.
+
+"Yes, Uncle Preston," she said.
+
+"Hum. Just going myself. How's the weather?"
+
+"Lovely," murmured Muriel. She wanted to hurry to her room.
+
+"What? Why, when I looked out a bit ago, I was sure it was raining."
+
+"Oh, yes; I believe it is raining. I didn't notice."
+
+Preston chuckled. He put out a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched
+her cheek.
+
+"I've always heard that love was blind," he said, "but nowadays it seems
+to be water-proof, too. Look here, my dear: your aunt has been dropping
+a hint or two to me, and I congratulate you."
+
+"On what?" asked Muriel, bristling into immediate rebellion.
+
+Again Preston chuckled.
+
+"Tut, tut!" he said: he always treated her as if she were the child
+that he had always maintained to his wife she was not. "You know well
+enough. He's a fine fellow and well-to-do. Even if we could afford to
+keep you on here indefinitely, which of course we can't, it would be a
+good job. Lucky girl!"
+
+He went out after that and left his wife's niece free again to hide
+herself. But not entirely. Ethel, unable to resist her desire for
+finality, soon tapped at Muriel's door.
+
+"Muriel!" she called.
+
+For some time there was no answer, though Mrs. Newberry made sure that
+she heard sounds within the room.
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+"Yes. Who is there?"
+
+"It's me--Aunt Ethel."
+
+"Yes, Aunt Ethel?"
+
+"Well, Muriel--are you all right?"
+
+"Quite, thanks."
+
+"Don't you want anything?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nothing at _all_?"
+
+"Nothing at all, thank you."
+
+Ethel hesitated.
+
+"But, Muriel----"
+
+The girl apparently waited for her aunt to finish the sentence that
+Ethel had not completed.
+
+"Muriel----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+Ethel softly tried the door: as she had supposed, it was locked.
+
+"O, Muriel, do open the door and let me in."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because, Muriel."
+
+"But why? I'm--I'm dressing."
+
+"But--surely you know why, Muriel. Why won't you confide in me?"
+
+There was a long wait for the answer to this question, but the answer,
+when it came, was resolute enough:
+
+"I've nothing to confide. Please go away now, Aunt Ethel, and leave me
+alone. Please do."
+
+Ethel went. She returned, of course, from time to time, whenever she
+could think of a new excuse or a new suggestion; but she was always
+worsted.
+
+Muriel did not descend to dinner that night until she was sure that Mr.
+Newberry, whose deterrent attitude she instinctively counted upon, was
+there with her aunt. She contrived to be left alone not once with Ethel.
+It was the habit of the members of the Newberry household to breakfast
+together only by chance, which meant that they generally ate separately.
+When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she
+had a headache.
+
+"_What_ do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her
+husband.
+
+"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.
+
+"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"
+
+"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is
+what _you_ may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a
+mess."
+
+"But, Preston----"
+
+"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."
+
+So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's
+card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of
+whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at
+sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.
+
+Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young
+people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of
+most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied.
+All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart
+a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that
+their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much
+Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the
+books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and
+sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff of dreams. But
+she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a
+glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.
+
+What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his
+attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed.
+If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth,
+that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the
+unit of measurement for a life--a mere figure of speech--something
+simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name.
+What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in
+its substance? Why should she even ask these questions--and why, when
+she asked, could she find no answer?
+
+She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her.
+Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps--as a traveller may see an
+unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash--she saw this now; the loss
+might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet
+acquired.
+
+Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that
+lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it
+in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl,
+descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now
+ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater
+Ignorance. Companionship, affection, kindly feeling--all these things
+and more--she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and
+dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual,
+intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes
+it--this she did not as yet know, had never known.
+
+The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The
+crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy,
+ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.
+
+Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there
+since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing.
+She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile,
+how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came
+forward with outstretched hands.
+
+"Have you thought things over?" he asked.
+
+There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for
+pretence was passed.
+
+"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet--and yet----"
+
+His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the
+tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.
+
+"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make
+up your mind?"
+
+She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug she traced a stupid
+figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.
+
+"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard----"
+
+"To love me?"
+
+"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She
+owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love
+you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all,
+would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."
+
+It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not
+create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her
+face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all
+casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black
+hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen
+her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky
+and bathed in the light of stars.
+
+Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and
+seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered
+passion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation,
+passion mastered him. The rein had snapped.
+
+"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know--there are
+things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel?
+Answer! Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"
+
+She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any
+man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer,
+she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his
+strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.
+
+The miracle--oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle--happened.
+Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully,
+terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole
+body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried
+to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.
+
+"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I
+know now. I love you!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+"THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"
+
+
+And so they were married. Mrs. Newberry had her way: they were married
+within the month and within the church.
+
+Preston's troubles, meanwhile, were hard to bear, and were not borne in
+silence. By faith, as has been noted, he was a Presbyterian; but by
+reason of his social position it was incumbent to attend
+occasionally--so often, in fact, as he went to church at all--an
+establishment of the Protestant Episcopal persuasion. Yet it appeared,
+when he came to arrange for the wedding of his wife's niece, which was
+the first he had ever arranged for, that there were ecclesiastical
+distinctions about weddings concerning which he had never previously
+dreamed. There were certain churches where one was expected to be a
+regular Sunday attendant; but when it came to a wedding, these would not
+serve: a wedding, to be socially correct, must occur in one of two or
+three churches in which, apparently, nothing else ever occurred. They
+seemed to be set aside for the exclusive business of marrying, and they
+married only exclusive people. Through one's sexton one rented one of
+these as one rents the Berkeley Lyceum, save that, in the matter of the
+wedding church, its rector is thrown in for good measure; then, when one
+proposed to introduce one's friend Buggins, the composer, to play the
+wedding-marches, one was told that only the church's regular organist
+was permitted to play the church's superb organ, and that, if one really
+required music, the regular organist could be hired at so much--and "so
+much" was not so pleasantly indefinite as it sounded.
+
+"I never before realised what my father-in-law went through for me,"
+said Preston.
+
+"Things are never so hard as you think they'll be," said his wife in an
+effort at comfort.
+
+"Things are always worse," replied the uncomforted Newberry. "Thank the
+Lord, I'll never have to arrange for another marriage. I thought that
+was Heaven's business, anyhow: I thought marriages were made in heaven.
+I'd rather be the advance agent of a minstrel show."
+
+Still, in some fashion or other--and Mrs. Newberry and the papers were
+satisfied that it was the very best fashion--the thing was accomplished.
+There was an immediate "Engagement Dinner" given by Ethel; there were
+other dinners given by Jim; there were luncheons given by friends of
+Muriel and the Newberrys; then, at last, there was Stainton's
+bachelor-supper to George Holt and the ushers-to-be, whom Holt had
+collected, held at Sherry's, whence everybody except the host departed
+in one of the four socially requisite stages of drunkenness, and so the
+climax, with the hired church, the hired parson, the frock coats, the
+staring eyes, the odour of flowers, the demure bridesmaids, and the
+hired organist playing Wagner and Mendelssohn and "The Voice That
+Breathed O'er Eden."
+
+Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware
+that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go
+by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the
+young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which
+the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel
+of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of
+the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane
+man would willingly describe as sane. He remembered only that he felt
+white and solemn; that he had an interminable wait in the vestry with
+Holt, a silently reconciled best-man, and a second wait at the altar
+rail, where he was the centre of interest and commiseration until the
+bride appeared, when he fell to an importance scarcely equal to that of
+the clergyman and far below that of the pew opener. Only these things he
+remembered, and that Muriel, with her sweetly serious face admirably set
+off by the white in which she was clad, looked all that he wished her to
+look and strangely spiritual besides. The next event of which he was at
+all certainly conscious was the hurried reception and the swiftly
+following bridal breakfast where Preston Newberry made truly pathetic
+references to some "lamp of sunshine" that had been "filched forever"
+from the Newberry home.
+
+Preston was more than a little relieved. He found it in his heart to
+wish Muriel well.
+
+"Good-bye, youngster," he said, when she came to him in her going-away
+gown. "Good-bye." ("For the sake of goodness, Ethel, stop that
+snivelling!") "He's a fine old buck and he'll be kind to you, I'm sure."
+("My dear, _stop_ it! Hasn't the girl got what you've wanted her to have
+ever since you set eyes on him?")
+
+Muriel heard the asides addressed to Mrs. Newberry and winced at the
+adjective openly applied to Jim, but she bit her lip and tossed her head
+and went away radiant for the first month of their honeymoon in Aiken,
+where she was happy with new and tremendous delights that received and
+asked and gave and demanded and grew.
+
+She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was
+as if her material world had always been at twilight--a soft, luminous,
+fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless--and that now, without the
+intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of
+dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She
+opened her arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in
+it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave
+them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her
+eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of
+his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have
+questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed
+even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was
+certain that she knew love. She was in love with love.
+
+For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic
+prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her
+loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it--his eyes shone and
+his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this
+was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to
+the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten
+moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the
+ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young--he was still young!
+
+"Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her.
+
+This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting
+room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers,
+but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head,
+with its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her
+arms about his waist.
+
+"No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so
+sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of
+endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our
+beginning."
+
+He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him
+to a great tenderness.
+
+"Beginning?" he echoed. "Yes, that's it. It must be the beginning of
+something that will never have an end."
+
+Her dusky eyes glowed.
+
+"Never!" she repeated, and then, as an unreasoned wistfulness shot
+through her, she whispered: "It never will end, will it, Jim?"
+
+"How could it, sweetheart?"
+
+"But I mean it will always go on like this--just like this. I don't want
+us just to grow used to each other, just stupid and merely
+satisfied--just--just affectionate and fond."
+
+"We can never come to that. We love too much, Muriel."
+
+"Then don't let's forget ever," she pleaded, her arms tightening. "It
+must all be honeymoon, forever and forever."
+
+He raised her face and kissed her.
+
+"Always," he said--"always morning. We will never let the shadows
+lengthen; we will hold back the hands of the clock." He kissed her
+again. "You know that we will?" he asked.
+
+"I know--I know," she answered.
+
+They had no quarrels. There was only one matter in which she deviated so
+much as a hair's breadth from his ideal of her and there was but one
+occasion when she was hurt by any act of his.
+
+The first of these affairs sprang from a conversation started by a
+letter with a blue French twenty-five-centime stamp upon it, which their
+always discreet waiter brought to the rooms one morning with the coffee.
+It had been forwarded from New York.
+
+"What's that?" asked Muriel.
+
+Stainton had been reading with his iron-grey brows in a pucker and a
+smile on his lips.
+
+"It is a Frenchman trying to write English," he said. "He doesn't
+succeed."
+
+"Yes, but what _is_ it?"
+
+"Only business, dear."
+
+"Then I ought to see it," said Muriel.
+
+Stainton laughed.
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+"If it is business, I ought to see it," she repeated.
+
+"Trouble your little head with such matters? Not much."
+
+She came to him as if to kiss him, then quickly seized the letter and
+ran laughing away. He pursued her, laughing, too; but she was more
+agile than her husband, and she managed easily to evade him until her
+eyes had caught enough of the letter to enable her to guess its entire
+contents.
+
+"So they want to buy your mine?" she asked. "They say their expert has
+returned and reported"--she glanced again at the letter as his fingers
+closed on it--"reported favourably."
+
+"Yes," he said; "it's a French syndicate, some wealthy men in Lyons, and
+they want to buy the mine."
+
+"But you won't sell?"
+
+"If I can get my figure, I will."
+
+"Your mine?"
+
+"Our mine."
+
+For that she kissed him.
+
+"But, if it's ours, I have something to say about it, and I won't let
+you."
+
+"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her pretty assumption.
+
+"Because I think it would be horrid of you to sell it after all the
+years you spent looking for it."
+
+"I wasn't looking for it on its own account, dear; I was looking for it
+because of what it would bring me."
+
+"I wish you'd take me to see it."
+
+"It's a dull place, Muriel."
+
+"I wish you'd take me. I wouldn't find it dull."
+
+"I shall take you to France instead."
+
+"To sell the mine?"
+
+"To try."
+
+"Horrid!" she pouted.
+
+"But, dearest," he explained, "I don't want to have a mine on my hands.
+I have you."
+
+"Do I keep you busy?"
+
+"You are a gold mine. Don't you see? I want to be free. If I can get my
+price, we shall be rich."
+
+"I thought we were rich now."
+
+"With a mine run by an agent, yes. But if I sold to this syndicate--now,
+you mustn't talk about this outside, you know----"
+
+"Of course I know."
+
+"Or write it home."
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Well, then, if these people buy, we shall be rich without any more
+agents or any more work. I have had enough of mining to make me certain
+that I don't want to chain any son of mine down to the business."
+
+"Any----" The word turned her suddenly white. In the midst of the
+intimacies of the honeymoon, reference to children painted her cheeks
+with scarlet.
+
+Stainton smiled indulgently. He put a strong arm about her and patted
+her shoulder.
+
+"Yes, any sons, dear," he said. "Did you never think of that? Did you
+never think how sweet it would be if we two that are one should really
+see ourselves made one in a little baby?"
+
+To his amazement she burst into tears.
+
+"I don't want a baby!" she wailed, her head on his shoulder, her hands
+clasped behind him. "I don't want a baby. No, no, no!"
+
+He tried to persuade her, but he could scarcely make himself heard until
+he abandoned the topic.
+
+"There, there," he said, "it's all right. I wouldn't hurt you, dearest;
+you know I wouldn't. There will be nothing to worry about."
+
+His heart ached because he had hurt her. He told himself that he should
+have remembered that her present nervous condition could not be normal.
+He upbraided himself for making to her, no matter how long he might have
+been married to her, a frank proposition that her sensitive nature
+probably repelled only because of the matter-of-fact way in which he had
+suggested what, he thought, should have been more delicately put. He did
+not change his design; he merely ceased to speak of it. Throughout the
+world the only persons not consulted about the possible bearing of
+children are the only persons able to bear them. Stainton no longer made
+an exception of Muriel. He decided that the best management of these
+matters was to leave them to chance for their occurrence and nature for
+their acceptance.
+
+This conversation took place a week or more after their verbal
+banishment of sunsets. On the night following, Jim at the demand of his
+abounding health, fell asleep earlier than usual and slept, as always,
+soundly; but his wife chanced to be nervous and restless. She lay long
+awake and she was lonely. Twice she wished to rouse him for her
+comforting; twice she refrained. When, finally, she did sleep, her sleep
+was heavy, and she awoke late to find him gone. She hurried into the
+sitting-room, but he was not there, and it was quite ten minutes later
+when he returned, fully dressed and glowing, a newspaper in his hand.
+
+"Where on earth have you been?" she asked. She had crawled back into
+bed, and she looked very beautiful as she lay there, her black hair wide
+upon the pillows and the lacy sleeves of her night-dress brushed high on
+her wide-flung arms.
+
+"Downstairs. You were fast asleep and you looked so comfy I hadn't the
+heart to waken you. It's a wonderful morning----"
+
+"But, Jim, I woke up all alone! I was afraid!"
+
+He sat on the bed beside her. He took her in his arms, flattered. He
+gave her the chuckling consolation that the strong, knowing their
+strength, vouchsafe the weak. He was sorry that she should have felt
+badly, but he was immensely proud that she should be dependent.
+
+"Too bad, too bad!" he said. "But it won't happen again. Next time I'll
+either rouse you or else sit tight till your dear eyes open of their own
+accord."
+
+He was still holding the newspaper in one of his embracing hands. It
+rustled against her back, and, freeing herself, she saw it.
+
+"What's that?" she asked.
+
+"A newspaper, of course. I thought I should like to see what was going
+on in the world. It suddenly struck me that I hadn't looked at a
+newspaper since I read the notice of our wedding--five hundred years
+ago."
+
+But Muriel pouted.
+
+"Then," she said, "I don't see why you should begin now."
+
+"One has to begin sometime."
+
+"I don't see why. Is anything between us different to-day from
+yesterday?"
+
+"Certainly not, sweetheart."
+
+"Well, I thought we weren't going to be like other people. I thought we
+were always going to be enough to each other."
+
+"We are. Of course we are. But you were asleep, and, anyhow, I said I
+was never going to run away again. Besides, Muriel----"
+
+"I don't see why," Muriel maintained.
+
+He tried to quiet her with kisses. He held her close and pressed her
+face to his.
+
+During all that month, these were the only occasions when they so much
+as approached a difference of opinion. They lived, instead, in that
+crowded winter resort, like a man and a girl made one upon a new island
+in a deserted sea. They walked, hand in hand, and, as it seemed to them,
+heart to heart, through a wonderful world that was new to them.
+Happiness sparkled in their eyes and trembled at their lips. There were
+times when their happiness almost made them afraid. Heaven was very
+near.
+
+Then, as the month ended, the blasting idea came to Muriel: she was
+going to have a child.
+
+It came like that. Just when everything was perfect, just when love had
+realized itself. The thought lay beside her on a morning that she had
+expected to wake to so differently. Muriel felt as if it were the
+thought that had wakened her.
+
+She cast a frightened look at Stainton, who was lying beside her, his
+iron-grey hair disordered, his mouth slightly open, snoring gently.
+
+"Jim!" she said. She clutched at his pajama jacket and tried to shake
+him. "Jim! Jim!"
+
+He awoke, startled. He rubbed his eyes:
+
+"Eh? What?"
+
+"Jim!"
+
+Then he saw her face.
+
+"My God! What is it, dearie?"
+
+She gasped her fear.
+
+"Muriel!" he cried, and held her tight to his heart. His first feeling
+was a flash of gratitude: his desire had been granted; he was to be the
+father of a child.
+
+But Muriel only clung to him and cried. She did not want a baby. She
+was horrified at thought of it. She was panic-stricken.
+
+Stainton watched her grief with a sore heart and essayed to soothe it;
+yet, all the while, his heart swelled with a reasonless pride that
+appeared to him supremely reasonable: he had performed the Divine Act;
+within the year he would see a living soul clothed in his own flesh and
+moulded in his own image. Like hers, his eyes, though from a vastly
+different cause, were dimmed by tears.
+
+"My dear, my dear!" he whispered. "O, my dear!"
+
+Muriel, broken-hearted, wept hysterically.
+
+Stainton stroked her blue-black hair. All women were like this, he
+reflected; it was a law of nature. It was the same law that, in the
+lower animals, first drove the female to repulse the male and then
+submit to him. In mankind it began by making the woman dread the
+accomplishment of her natural destiny and ended by awakening the
+maternal instinct, seemingly so at variance with its preceding action.
+
+Suddenly Muriel looked up and saw his expression. Hers grew wild.
+
+"You--did you know it would be?" she stammered.
+
+"There, there!" said Stainton, stroking her hair.
+
+She drew herself free.
+
+"You did know!"
+
+Stainton prepared to yield to the natural law.
+
+"Of course, I didn't _know_, dear. How could I be certain?"
+
+"Oh, but you were, you were!" she cried. "You knew. And I didn't. I
+didn't know! I didn't know! And you did--_you_!"
+
+"Dearest," said Stainton. He tried to take her hand.
+
+She was sitting straight up in bed, looking down at him, her hair
+falling over her nightgown.
+
+"And you told me I wouldn't----You told me it wouldn't be!" she accused.
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes. Yes, you did. You said there would be nothing to worry about.
+Those were your very words, Jim."
+
+"Well, but, dear, there won't be anything to worry about."
+
+"Nothing to worry about!" she repeated. She put her fingers to her
+temples. "Not for _you_, of course!"
+
+Stainton was hurt: "Dearie, you know that if I could----"
+
+"And anyhow," she interrupted, "you didn't mean that. You meant me to
+think what I did think."
+
+He felt that, in a sense, she was right: he had meant at least to quiet
+her, to divert her thoughts. He was ashamed of that. He sought to
+comfort her.
+
+"Perhaps you are mistaken," he said.
+
+"No, no!" she said. She got up and, slipperless, began to pace the room.
+
+Stainton struggled to his elbow.
+
+"But, dearie," he said, seeking relief in logic, "you must have known
+that when a girl married, she must expect--it was expected of her--it
+was her duty----"
+
+She continued to walk, her head bent.
+
+"Yes," she answered; "but I didn't know she would have to right away, or
+when she didn't want to, or----"
+
+Genuinely amazed and genuinely pained, Stainton swung his legs from the
+covers and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his
+knees, his mouth agape.
+
+"Sweetheart," he asked, "don't you love me?"
+
+"Of course, I love you, Jim."--She was still walking.
+
+"Then what did you think marriage was for?"
+
+She stopped before him. "I thought it was for love," she said; and,
+crumpling at his feet, put her face upon his knees.
+
+He bent over her, stroking her hair, calling her by the names that they
+had invented for each other, waiting for the natural law to assert
+itself again and trying, meanwhile, to alleviate her apprehensions.
+
+"Perhaps, after all, you are mistaken."
+
+This was the burden of his consolation.
+
+Nevertheless, she was not mistaken, and the succeeding days proved it.
+Nor was the natural law swift in asserting itself.
+
+"Don't you think," he once tried to urge the law, "that it would be
+beautiful if we should have a little baby?"
+
+"_I_ sha'n't be beautiful!" she wailed. "I shall lose my looks. I----"
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+"Yes, I shall. I know. I have seen it--on the street--lots of places. I
+shall grow--I shall----And all my lovely clothes!--Oh!"--She broke off
+and hid her eyes--"I shall grow vulgar looking and horrid!"
+
+They were walking along a country lane, and Stainton glanced about
+nervously, fearing that her words, spoken in a tone altogether
+unrestrained, would certainly be heard by more ears than his own. The
+road, however, was empty. He drew her aside to a spot where the woods
+met the lane and where, a few paces to the left of the lane, the trees
+hid them. He took her into his arms.
+
+"Muriel," he said, "if I could go through this for you, I would; you
+know that."
+
+"I know you can't go through it for me," she wept, "and so it's easy
+enough for you to say."
+
+"No," said Jim, "I can't go through it for you, and so you see, it must
+be God's will that it should be as it is to be."
+
+She was worn out by the days of worry, but she made one more appeal.
+
+"Jim," she said, "can't you do something else for me?"
+
+He knitted his brows.
+
+"Something else?" he wondered. "I can love you; I can back you up with
+all the love of my body and brain and soul. You may always count on
+that, sweetheart."
+
+"But"--her eyes looked straight into his--"can't you _do_ something?"
+
+He understood. He fell back a step, his face grey.
+
+"Muriel!" he whispered.
+
+"I've read of such things in the papers," she said.
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+His eyes were so horrified that she hung her head.
+
+"Oh, it's wrong; I know it's wrong," she said. "But, oh, if you knew how
+afraid I was of this and how I hate and how--O, Jim, Jim!"
+
+She tottered forward, and his arms received her.
+
+"Muriel, my dear wife," he said. "My own dear little girl, to think that
+when God has put a life into our keeping, you----Why, Muriel, that is
+murder!"
+
+That word won Stainton's victory. Muriel succumbed. For her it was like
+the safe passing of one of those physical crises when the patient had
+rather die than face the pain of further living; for him it was the
+sealing of his happiness.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ANOTHER ROAD
+
+
+It was a few days later that Muriel, the reconciled, decided that she
+wanted to leave Aiken.
+
+"Don't you think," she asked, for she had come unconsciously often to
+use phrases characteristic of Jim, "that a change of scene would be good
+for us both?"
+
+Stainton had not thought so. He had wandered so much in his life that,
+now wandering was no longer a necessity of life, he was tired of it.
+Besides, he was eminently satisfied with Aiken.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "I think it's splendid here. Haven't we
+been--aren't you happy, dear?"
+
+Muriel was looking out of the window of their hotel sitting-room.
+
+"Of course I'm happy," she said in a low voice. "At least," she added,
+"I know I ought to be, and I know I never knew what happiness was till I
+had you. It was only that I thought it would be--perhaps it would be
+good for me--now--if we travelled."
+
+Stainton cursed himself for a negligent brute.
+
+"What a beast I am!" he said, his arm encircling her waist. "We shall go
+wherever you want, and we shall go to-morrow."
+
+Muriel smiled ruefully.
+
+"Perhaps," she submitted, "the real reason is only that I've always
+wanted so to travel and have never had the chance before."
+
+But Stainton would hear of no reason but her first. He upbraided himself
+again for his stupidity in not guessing her need before she could have
+given it expression.
+
+"I've been cruel to you!" he declared.
+
+She stopped him with a swift embrace.
+
+"You're never anything," she contritely vowed, "but just darling to me.
+I only thought----"
+
+"I know, I know. Where shall we go, Muriel? How about France? I ought to
+see that syndicate, you know: I ought to meet those men personally. Then
+there's Paris. I have always longed for Paris myself, and now I shall
+have you for my guide there."
+
+"Your guide, Jim?"
+
+"Well, you speak French like a book, and I have forgotten nearly all of
+the little I ever learned."
+
+"I speak school-French," Muriel corrected him.
+
+"At any rate," he assured her, "yours is fluent, and I can only stammer
+in the language. Then, too," he went on, "there will be the trip across.
+That will be good for you. Sea air ought to be good for you." She
+winced, and so he hurried to add: "I think I need a bracer, too.--Are
+you a good sailor, Muriel?"
+
+"I don't know. I've never been on the ocean. Are you?"
+
+"I used to be." His eyes darkened. "It's a good many years since I have
+tried the water. But I know I shall be all right. I am in such splendid
+shape. Where is a newspaper? Wait a minute; I'll ring for one. Aren't
+you glad for newspapers now? They carry shipping advertisements, you
+see. We'll look up the sailings. We have found our first five heavens in
+America; we must find the sixth in France, and then we must come back
+here so that our seventh will happen on American soil."
+
+Considering the fact that he did not wish to go, he was
+self-sacrificingly energetic. He was so energetic that they left Aiken
+on the next morning and, three days later, were aboard their steamer.
+
+The Newberrys were out of town, still enjoying the rest that they had
+earned by settling Muriel for life. George Holt was, however, there and
+had come all the way to Hoboken to see them off.
+
+"And as a German steamship captain once said to me when I asked him to
+lunch with me at my club," explained Holt, "it's a terribly long way
+from Hoboken to America."
+
+"It was good of you to come," said Muriel, while the crowd of
+second-class passengers and the friends of passengers jostled about the
+first-class promenade deck. "Don't you wish you were coming along?"
+
+"Better," said Stainton, already in his steamer cap.
+
+"Thanks, no," said Holt, and then, as the siren blew: "If you'd asked my
+advice before you bought your tickets, old man, I'd have told you:
+'Don't go to sea; but if you do go, don't play cards; but if you do play
+cards, cut the cards. They'll cheat you anyhow, but it'll take longer.'"
+
+He waved a plump farewell and bared a bald head and waddled down the
+gang-plank. The band began to play, and Stainton and his wife went to
+their stateroom to unpack: they were travelling without a maid because
+Muriel had said something about wanting to secure one in France.
+
+By sunrise next morning the _Friedrich Barbarossa_ was racing through
+the grey Atlantic with even speed. It was late winter--it was really
+early spring--and she had already encountered a storm and heavy seas,
+but the lean ocean express dove through the former and rode the latter
+as easily as if she had been a railway train running on tried rails
+along a perfect roadbed. There was no reason in the world why anybody
+should be sick aboard her; few others were sick; yet, Stainton, on that
+second day out, remained below.
+
+He could not account for it. He did not like to confess it. He
+especially hated to confess, when he awoke to see his wife putting the
+finishing touches to her toilet in the far corner of their big
+stateroom. But this was manifestly a case where discretion must triumph
+over valour: he no sooner got to his feet than he got off them again.
+
+"It's no use," he sighed. "I don't know what it was. I wish they didn't
+have such good dinners on this boat, for it must have been something I
+ate."
+
+Muriel was all consolation.
+
+"Let me ring for the steward to bring your breakfast here," she said.
+
+"Not if you don't want to kill me! Don't mention food again, please--I
+wonder if that lobster were just fresh."
+
+She insisted for a long time that she would remain below with him, but
+he overruled her. He said that the open air would be good for her, even
+if she did not seem to need it, and he meant that, although he meant
+also--what he dared not say--that he wanted to struggle alone with his
+malady. Finally, therefore, Muriel descended to the big dining saloon
+alone and surprisedly found herself breakfasting with enjoyment, in
+spite of her husband's absence.
+
+She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in
+her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the
+evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy
+novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and
+failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed
+her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters,
+beating to crests of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line
+for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so
+often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She
+went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the
+band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about
+with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and
+resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely,
+but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings,
+oysterplant menagere, succotash, biscuit japonais and nougat parfait.
+She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward
+motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace passengers walked by
+on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait
+had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road.
+
+He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and
+agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding
+youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy--a boy not five years
+her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and
+alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache
+above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and
+the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank
+curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own
+interested scrutiny and, when they answered it with an honest smile,
+whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks.
+
+Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim
+still slept.
+
+She went on deck again. She knew that the blond young man would be
+there, though how she knew it she could not guess, and yet she argued
+that there was no reason why his presence should banish her from the
+free air.
+
+She sat down. She saw him coming past, on a walk about the deck, and
+looked away. The second time he passed she glanced at him, and he smiled
+and raised his steamer cap. A gust of wind fluttered her rug, and he
+stooped to rearrange it.
+
+"Thank you," stammered Muriel. "It's not necessary, really. The
+steward----"
+
+The young man bowed. It was a bow that, in New York, would have struck
+her as absurdly elaborate; here she liked it.
+
+"But it is, I assure you, a pleasure," he protested.
+
+He spoke English without an accent, but with a precision that, for all
+its ease, betrayed a Teutonic parentage and education.
+
+"Thank you," repeated Muriel, and she blushed again.
+
+The young man stood before her, his arms folded, swaying in serene
+certainty with the rolling rhythm of the boat.
+
+"May I sit down?" he asked, indicating, with a gesture of his hand, the
+row of empty chairs beside her.
+
+Muriel made, by way of reply, what she conceived to be a social
+masterstroke.
+
+"Certainly," she answered; "but I am here only for a few moments. I'll
+soon have to be running downstairs--I mean 'below'--to look after my
+husband."
+
+The stranger's handsome face expressed concern, yet the concern, it
+immediately appeared, was not because of Muriel's marital state, but
+because of her husband's physical plight.
+
+"I am so sorry," he said, taking Jim's chair. "He is ill then, your
+husband?"
+
+Muriel did not seem to like this.
+
+"Not very," said she. "He is"--she searched for a phrase characteristic
+of Stainton--"he is just a bit under the weather."
+
+"So," sighed the stranger, unduly comprehending. "Ah, perhaps Madame has
+made more voyages than has he?"
+
+"No, this is the first trip across for both of us."
+
+"Indeed? But you seem to be so excellent a sailor! Is it only youth that
+makes you so?"
+
+"I don't know." She was clearly, her will to the contrary, a little
+flattered. "I seem to take naturally to the water."
+
+"But not so your husband!"
+
+"He will be all right to-morrow."
+
+"Only to-day he is, your husband, not all right? I am so sorry. Perhaps
+he is not so young as you are?"
+
+Muriel felt herself again flushing. She at once became more angry at her
+anger than she was at what, upon reflection, she decided to be nothing
+more than frank curiosity on the part of her interlocutor.
+
+"Of course he is young!" she heard herself saying.
+
+The stranger either did not observe her emotions or did not care to show
+that he observed them. He launched at once upon an unrestrained flow of
+ship talk. It seemed that he was an Austrian, though of Hungarian blood
+on his mother's side. He had gone into the army, was an officer--already
+a captain, she gathered--and he had been serving for some months as an
+attache of his country's legation in Washington. Now he had been
+transferred to the legation at Paris. Muriel noted that he spoke with
+many gestures. She tried to dislike these as being un-American, and when
+she found it hard to dislike what were, after all, graceful adjuncts to
+his conversation and frequent aids to his adequate expression, she was
+annoyed and tried to indicate her annoyance.
+
+"I thought you were a soldier?" she said.
+
+With another European bow he produced a silver case engraved with his
+arms, drew from it a card, which he handed to Muriel. The card announced
+him as Captain Franz Esterhazy von B. von Klausen.
+
+"But yes," he said. "Please."
+
+Muriel slipped the card into her belt.
+
+"You seem to like the diplomatic service better," she said.
+
+Von Klausen shrugged.
+
+"I go where I am sent," said he.
+
+"Would you ever go to war?" she persisted.
+
+"If I had to. Why not?"
+
+"And fight?"
+
+"Dear lady, but yes. I do not like, though, to fight, for war is what
+one of your great generals said: it is Hell."
+
+"Yet you went into the army?"
+
+"Because all my family have for generations done thus. I was born for
+that, I was brought up for that, and when I came to know"--he extended
+his palms--"I had to live," he concluded.
+
+This was scarcely Muriel's ideal of a soldier. She changed the
+conversation.
+
+"Of course you know Europe perfectly?" she enquired.
+
+"Not Russia," answered von Klausen; "but Germany, France, Spain, Italy
+and England--yes. You will travel much?"
+
+Muriel did not know; very likely they would. They would do whatever Mr.
+Stainton--Mr. Stainton was her husband--elected: she always did, always
+wanted to do, whatever her husband elected.
+
+The young man bowed at mention of Jim's name, as if he were being
+introduced.
+
+"Certainly," he gravely agreed. "Certainly, since he is your
+husband.--But you must not miss my country, dear lady, as so many
+foolish tourists miss it. It is the Tyrol, my fathers' country: the
+Austrian Tyrol. There is scenery--the most beautiful scenery in all the
+world: superb, majestic. You love scenery? Please."
+
+Muriel gave a surprised assent.
+
+"Then do not neglect the Tyrol. They call it the Austrian Tyrol, but it
+is really the only real Tyrol. Come to Innsbruck by the way of Zurich.
+That will bring you along the Waldersee, and so, too, you pass Castle
+Lichtenstein and come across the border at just beyond the ruins of
+Graephang. You will see genuine mountains then, gigantic, snow-capped,
+with forests as dense as--as what you call a hairbrush--black,
+impenetrable. To the very tops of some the train climbs; it trembles
+over abysses. You look from the window of it down--down--down, a
+thousand feet, fifteen hundred, into valleys exquisite, with pink
+farmhouses or grey in them, the roofs weighted with large stones, the
+sides painted with crucifixes, or ornamented statues of the Blessed
+Virgin."
+
+He loved his country and he made it vivid to her. He rambled on and on.
+Muriel became a more and more fascinated listener. It was not until two
+hours later that she thought, with a guilty start, of Jim.
+
+She excused herself hastily and, leaving the Austrian bowing by the
+rail, ran to the close stateroom and her husband.
+
+He was awake, but still sick.
+
+"Don't bother about me," muttered Stainton as she entered--"and _please_
+don't bang the door!"
+
+She considered him compassionately. His hair fell in disorder over his
+haggard face; his cheeks were faintly green.
+
+"Can't I do something for you?" she asked, stepping forward.
+
+Stainton failed in a smile, but feebly motioned her away.
+
+"I am afraid not," said he--"unless you stop the ship. All I need is a
+little rest. You had better go back on deck. Really."
+
+Muriel delayed.
+
+"A man spoke to me on deck," she breathlessly confessed. "An Austrian
+diplomat, I think he is. My rug blew, and he rearranged it. Do you
+mind?"
+
+"Mind?" asked Stainton. "Certainly not.--How this boat pitches!--Talk to
+him, by all means. These things are common on shipboard, I believe."
+
+Muriel was reassured. She returned to the deck, but von Klausen was not
+there, and she did not see him again until evening.
+
+Then, though she still dutifully wished that Jim were with her, she
+found her appetite better than ever. She ventured upon a lonely
+cocktail. She ate some Blue Points. Captain von Klausen sent to her
+table, with his card, a pint of champagne, and she ordered potage
+Mogador, duckling balls with turnips, cepes Provencals, sacher tart, and
+ice cream.
+
+When she reached the promenade-deck, von Klausen was already there. He
+had dined in evening clothes, but these were now hidden by the light
+rain-coat that swathed his lithe young figure from neck to heels. Muriel
+observed that its shoulders fitted to the shoulders of the wearer and
+had none of the deceptiveness of the padded shoulders to which she was
+once familiar in American coats.
+
+"Have you seen the phosphorus?" he asked, as she met him at the rail.
+His lifted cap showed his wind-tossed blond hair, and his ruddy face
+gleamed with salt spray.
+
+Muriel admitted her ignorance of phosphorus.
+
+"But," said von Klausen, "that is one of the sights of the voyage, and I
+have not often on the Atlantic seen it finer than it is to-night."
+
+He took her forward, by the starboard rail, under the bridge. Behind
+them were the closely curtained windows of the writing-room, forward
+was, only ten feet below them, the now emptied deck reserved for the
+third-class passengers, and beyond that, higher, rose and fell,
+rhythmically, the keen, dark prow. They were quite alone.
+
+"Look there!" said von Klausen.
+
+He pointed over the rail to where the inky surface of the sea was broken
+by the speed of the _Friedrich Barbarossa's_ passage, bursting into
+boiling, hissing, angry patches of bright whiteness.
+
+Timidly Muriel extended her head.
+
+"Do you see it?" asked von Klausen. He stood close beside her.
+
+"I see the waves," said Muriel, "and the white foam."
+
+"But the phosphorus--you do not see that? There--and there!"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Look though," said he. "You do not look in just the correct direction.
+Please. Ahead, to the left. No; away a little from the ship--a little;
+not too much--where we have hit the water and the water recedes from us.
+It is beautiful--beautiful! See!"
+
+The great boat rose on a sudden wave. Von Klausen gripped the rail with
+one slim hand; the other, its arm around her waist, he placed about her
+farther arm.
+
+"Now!" he said, and, letting go of the rail, pointed.
+
+Her eyes followed his finger, and there, shining green and yellow, now
+clear, now opalescent, from burning cores to nebulous edges, she saw
+what seemed to be live stars smouldering and flaming in the hearts of
+the waves.
+
+"I see," she said. "It is beautiful--beautiful!"
+
+She was, she suddenly realised, but repeating his own phrase. Why should
+she not? The phrase was commonplace enough; besides, the phosphorus
+_was_ beautiful.
+
+Then she became conscious of his arm about her, became conscious that
+this arm about her had not been unpleasant; was indignant with him,
+silently, and indignant with herself; made certain, in her own mind,
+that he had put his arm around her waist only that he might protect
+her--and thus soon left him and went to bed without waking Jim.
+
+She opened her eyes after an unquiet night, to find that Stainton was
+somewhat improved, though too mindful of his experience of the preceding
+day to trust himself on deck.
+
+"I'll wait," he decided, "till to-morrow or this evening. Yes, I think I
+shall manage it this evening. I'm really in good shape, but I must have
+eaten something that didn't agree with me. You go up, Muriel. If you see
+that Austrian fellow, don't forget to give him my compliments and tell
+him I'll probably have the pleasure of meeting him this evening. What
+did you say he was?"
+
+"His name," said Muriel, "is von Klausen." She hated herself for her
+unreasonable disinclination to mention the Captain.
+
+"H'm--a diplomat, did you say?"
+
+"Something of the sort."
+
+"As old as most diplomats then, I suppose?"
+
+"No," said Muriel; "he's--he's rather young."
+
+The ship began to descend a lofty wave, and Stainton lay back in his
+berth. His face, with its full day's growth of beard, looked grey.
+
+"All right," he said. "Run along, dear--and look in about noon."
+
+Muriel obeyed him. Their chairs were well forward, and when she reached
+them she saw von Klausen again seated in that which bore Stainton's
+card.
+
+He rose at sight of her. No motion of the boat seemed ever to affect him
+to awkwardness.
+
+"Your husband," he asked, bareheaded and erect while she seated herself;
+"he is, I trust, better?"
+
+"He hasn't really been sick," she asseverated with what she knew, as she
+said it, to be wholly unnecessary emphasis.
+
+The young Austrian performed one of his ceremonious obeisances.
+
+"Then I shall be so pleased, so honoured, this evening to be presented
+to him, and I so deeply regret his having been ill. It is not good, this
+ocean, for the elderly."
+
+Muriel's cheeks warmed.
+
+"Why do you call him that?" she demanded. "I told you yesterday that he
+was--that he was almost young. Why do you call him elderly?"
+
+"Forgive." Von Klausen's wide gesture expressed his regret for this
+error. "I had forgotten entirely. It is too bad of me to forget
+entirely."
+
+"Oh," laughed Muriel, for she was already condemning her annoyance as
+childishness, "it doesn't matter, because it is so absurd. Only, what
+gave you such an impression?"
+
+"Please?"
+
+"The impression that he was elderly: what gave you that?"
+
+Von Klausen manifestly hesitated.
+
+"I do not know," he said. "I thought that--I thought that, before we
+sailed, on the deck here I had seen him with you. You and two American
+gentlemen I thought I saw: one young and stout. I thought the gentleman
+young and stout went ashore. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the other that
+went ashore. Perhaps that was your father."
+
+There was a moment's silence. Muriel looked intently at the ragged
+horizon.
+
+"The stout man was Mr. Holt," she said at last. "He is a friend of
+mine--of ours."
+
+"Ah?" said von Klausen, disinterestedly polite.
+
+"My husband," said Muriel, "is _not_ elderly."
+
+"I ask his pardon," said von Klausen. He produced his bow again. He
+remained quite at his ease, but his manner implied a courteous wonder at
+any person's shame of his years. "He is then----"
+
+"He is not so much over forty," lied Muriel, without the remotest idea
+why she should be thus untruthfully communicative.
+
+Von Klausen ever so slightly turned his head away. She was immediately
+sure that he did it to conceal a smile.
+
+"That is not old," she hotly contended. She made up her mind now that
+she did not like this graceful young foreigner. "And Jim is not so old
+as his age," she continued--"not nearly. He has lived half his life in
+our Great West, and he is as strong as a lion--and as brave."
+
+She felt the folly of her remark as she made it, but von Klausen gave no
+sign of sharing that feeling. He settled himself comfortably in Jim's
+chair. She saw that his face was wholly innocent, his eyes only politely
+eager.
+
+"Tell me of him, please," he said. "I have heard of your brave
+Westerners, as you call them, in your United States. I met, once in
+Washington, a Senator from Texas, but he did not seem to me
+quite--quite----Pray tell me of your husband, dear lady."
+
+She was amazed to find that, offhand, she could not do this. She started
+twice and twice stopped, wondering what, after all, there was to say.
+Then, with a vigorous concentration, she laid hold of all that her aunt
+and uncle had told her of her husband, all that Holt was authority for,
+all that the Sunday supplement of the newspapers had printed. She
+narrated how he had rescued the innocent runaway from the lynching
+party at Grand Joining, how he had saved the lives of his camp mates
+during the spotted fever epidemic at Sunnyside; she told of the shooting
+in Alaska, the filibustering expedition, of Jim's slaying with a knife
+the grizzly bear that was about to strip Holt's flesh from his bones;
+she gave in detail the story of Jim's descent into the shaft of the
+"Better Days" mine, and what she had not learned she supplied to the
+history of the train robbers on the Rio Grande. It was all deliberate
+boasting, and when she ended, she felt a little ashamed.
+
+Von Klausen, however, was visibly affected.
+
+"He is a man to admire, your husband," said the Austrian. "Strength and
+bravery, bravery and strength: these, dear lady, are the two things that
+men envy and women love, all the world over. I wish"--his young smile
+grew crooked--"I wish I had them."
+
+Muriel's red lips parted in surprise:
+
+"But you are a soldier?"
+
+"What of that?" shrugged von Klausen.
+
+"Oh, but you are brave!" She was sure of it.
+
+"How do you know?" he asked--"how do I?"
+
+"And you--you _look_ strong," she continued. Her black eyes passed
+involuntarily over his slim, well-proportioned figure. "Anybody can see
+that you must be strong."
+
+"If I correctly recall my sight of your good husband," said the
+captain, "he could break me in two pieces across his knee."
+
+She inwardly acknowledged this possibility, but she did not like to bear
+her new friend belittle himself.
+
+"That's only because Jim is _very_ strong," she explained.
+
+"Perhaps," said von Klausen, "yet that was not the only kind of strength
+I bore in my mind, dear lady. I thought of the strength--of moral
+strength, strength of purpose--whether the purpose is for the good or
+the bad--which is two-thirds of bravery."
+
+"And haven't you that?"
+
+It might have been because he was altogether so new to her that the
+question came readily. There seemed then nothing strange in the
+discussion of these intimate topics.
+
+"Who knows?" said von Klausen, quietly. "I have not yet been tried.
+Perhaps, should I love something or somebody, I should acquire these
+things." His tone lacked offence because it perfectly achieved the
+impersonal note. "They would come to me then, for I should love that
+cause or person better than my own life or my own welfare. I do not
+know. I have not been tried. I know only that, without the cause or the
+person, I have not real strength; I have not real courage. I have fought
+my duel; I have faced death--but I know there are forms of it that I
+fear. I am at least brave enough to admit that I am sometimes afraid.
+For the rest, I am not the type of man that women love: I need to be
+cared for, to be thought about, to be helped in the hundred foolish
+little ways--and women love men who do not take these things, but who
+give them."
+
+His low voice, his simplicity, and most of all his childish manner,
+touched her.
+
+"I think," she said, "that you are not fair to women."
+
+Von Klausen pointed out across the rail.
+
+"Look there!" said he.
+
+A two-masted fishing boat, storm driven from the Banks to sea, swung
+within three or four hundred yards of them. She could see its dripping
+gunwale contending with the waves, the oil-skinned sailors tottering
+upon its deck.
+
+"Now look there!" said von Klausen.
+
+This time be pointed ahead, and ahead she saw, just beyond the charging
+prow of the imperious _Friedrich_, what seemed to be a thick grey
+curtain. It reached to the heavens and, as the liner approached it,
+opened like three walls: one before the prow, the other two on either
+side. It had all the palpability of heavy cloth.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"Fog," said von Klausen, and in a moment, with the great siren of the
+boat shaking their very hearts, it had descended upon them.
+
+The walls fastened. The curtains enveloped them. The thick, tangible,
+breath-tightening stuff wrapped them in a kind of cocoon. All the clouds
+of the sky seemed to have fallen. Muriel could scarcely distinguish the
+features of the young fellow beside her. And always, reverberating and
+portentous, the siren howled overhead.
+
+"The boat!" she called into von Klausen's ear. "Isn't it odd? Only a
+minute ago it was there. Then I saw only its masts. Now I can't see it
+at all."
+
+He called his answer.
+
+"Once in the Bosphorus--like this--fog. I was on the prow--an express
+boat. We brought up a little, low ship--crowded with pilgrims. Fog--shut
+out--the crash--I could look down and see--faces upturned, calling. I
+could _see_ them calling--could not hear. I am afraid--I am terribly
+afraid--of fogs."
+
+She heard his voice break. She caught a glimpse of his face--the face of
+a frightened child. She felt him trembling as their shoulders touched:
+this soldier who had fought his duel and would not, she knew, fear the
+trial of battle. She was not afraid. Instinctively, she reached out
+toward him, to help, to comfort.
+
+When the fog lifted as suddenly as it had fallen, the little fisherman
+was riding the waves safely and almost gaily far astern. The _Friedrich_
+sped unconcernedly on.
+
+"There was no real danger, I am sure," von Klausen was saying; "these
+Germans I do not like, but they are good sailors--too good to hurt a
+smaller boat."
+
+Then Muriel discovered that she had been holding his hand.
+
+"I think," she said, "that I had better go and look after Mr.
+Stainton."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+"UNWILLING WAR"
+
+
+Stainton recovered. Only someone in a fundamentally bad condition could
+long remain ill aboard this sea-express in the weather that now befell,
+and Jim's condition was good. Consequently, within another twenty-four
+hours he was wholly himself again and wholly able to enjoy the rest of
+the voyage.
+
+Muriel, meanwhile, had not told him of her last conversation with von
+Klausen and of its termination. She convinced herself that she had taken
+the young man's hand merely to calm his fears; that she had been
+unconscious of the action until the fog had lifted; that von Klausen
+understood this, and that, moreover, the whole episode had endured for
+but a small fraction of time. She could not, in the circumstances, tell
+Jim the truth. The present was, indeed, one of those instances that
+hamper the plain practice of what are accepted in theory as the simple
+virtues; it was a case where the telling of the truth would be the
+conveyance of a falsehood. If she had said: "I reached out and took this
+man's hand and held it while we were passing through a brief curtain of
+fog," Stainton, she made certain, would have supposed that she was
+herself afraid in the fog or that she wished to touch von Klausen's
+hand for the sake of the action itself. Now, she argued, either of these
+suppositions would be erroneous. The only way in which to give the true
+value to what she had done would be to repeat what the Austrian had told
+her of his personal terrors, and that, obviously, would have been a
+breach of confidence.
+
+Nevertheless, she thought for some time before she hit upon this
+satisfactory train of logic. She did not, indeed, hit upon it until the
+succeeding morning. She had not forgotten what she felt on the night
+when Jim told her that he loved her. She had felt then that she must
+always be honest with this honest man concerning herself, and she meant,
+even yet, to be loyal to that decision; but she had now, as one has
+said, detected for the first time the fundamental paradox of our moral
+system: that, whereas the code of life is simple, life itself is
+complex; that the real world forever presents difficulties involving the
+ideal law in a cobweb of contradictions; that the best of human beings
+can but rarely do an imperative right to one individual without thereby
+doing a patent wrong to another; that truth at its highest is relative
+and approximate and that, in short, the moral laws are, for those who
+accept them, nothing more than a standard of perfection toward which
+their subjects can but approach and to which reality is hourly enforcing
+exceptions.
+
+Learn her lesson, Muriel, however, at last did. It came to her in the
+morning after she had wakened from a refreshing, though tardy, sleep,
+rocked by the motion of the ship, which somehow miraculously cleared her
+mental vision. She lay still, repeating it, while Stainton, as she saw
+through her half-opened lids, got up, laboriously shaved, and put on his
+clothes. She knew that he must think her asleep, and she was much too
+preoccupied with the solution of her problem voluntarily to disabuse him
+of this belief.
+
+But Stainton was mindful of the displeasure that he had encountered on
+the morning in Aiken when he went downstairs without her. He bent over
+her in her berth and kissed her.
+
+"Are you going to get up, now?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You go. Don't mind me," she drowsily murmured. "I don't mind."
+
+"Sure not?"
+
+"Not this once. Go on, dear. I'll be along presently."
+
+She was left alone. She rose and went to the mirror in the wardrobe
+door. She drew back the curtain from the port-hole and let in the
+morning light. She examined, with anxious care, her face. She looked
+with equal care at her body. By a tacit understanding, she and Jim
+avoided all direct mention of her condition, he because he feared a
+recurrence of her hysterical revolt, she because she had fallen upon one
+of those futile moods in which we feel that to speak of an approaching
+catastrophe is to hasten it; but twice a day, when she could do it
+unobserved, she sought, in silent terror, for the tokens that could not
+possibly so soon be seen.
+
+Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That
+accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and
+breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appetite that had
+directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this
+morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that
+made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the
+promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking
+arm-in-arm.
+
+The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an
+experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other
+floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the
+zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large
+and sturdy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his
+sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched
+with every roll of the ship.
+
+Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that
+it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness
+for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The
+next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had
+not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion
+that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she
+felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the assumption
+that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally,
+she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that
+her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a
+man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush
+what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian
+had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that
+he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would
+have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his
+stupid mistake.
+
+Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and
+Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude
+for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon
+installed in a chair beside Stainton's.
+
+"But do I not trespass?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping
+inclination.
+
+"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure.
+You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."
+
+Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:
+
+"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"
+
+"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent
+annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."
+
+Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the
+band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about
+their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the
+differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of
+money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and
+standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not
+understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.
+
+As the voyage progressed, Stainton and von Klausen became more and more
+friendly, and Muriel more and more restless, she could not tell why. Her
+husband had passed his entire manhood among men and had acquired, though
+he did not know it, the taste for the discussion of what, because of the
+inferior grade of education that we grant to women, we magnificently
+call manly topics. These he had not enjoyed since his wedding-day, and
+now he was hungry for them. He did not neglect Muriel, and von Klausen
+often made efforts to bring her into their conversations, but her mind
+had never been trained to these subjects and was, moreover, now filled
+with a more intimate concern. For an hour she would sit beside Jim and
+listen to him with some admiration, but less comprehension of his
+technical terms, and then for fifteen minutes she would leave the pair
+and walk the deck alone.
+
+"To me it seems," von Klausen was one day saying, "that the great danger
+in your country is the disintegration of the unit of society, the
+break-up of the home."
+
+"Oh," said Stainton, "you're referring to our divorce laws?"
+
+The captain nodded.
+
+"Well, how are they in your country?" asked Jim.
+
+"In Austria the code of 1811 is still in force, and under it there are
+divorces allowed for violence, cruelty, desertion, incompatibility, and
+adultery. Adultery is a crime and is punishable by five years'
+imprisonment."
+
+"That sounds as if your code is pretty broad, too," remarked Stainton.
+
+"Ah, but it is applicable only to persons that are not Catholics, and
+Austria is a Catholic country."
+
+"I see. And what do the Catholics do?"
+
+"They remain married."
+
+"Always?"
+
+"The law allows them the remedy of judicial separation."
+
+Stainton was smoking a cigar. He puffed at it thoughtfully.
+
+"Judicial separation," he finally said, "has always struck me as
+begging the question. It denies liberty and yet winks at license. A good
+marriage ought to be guarded and a bad one broken."
+
+"That," replied von Klausen, "is the American view."
+
+"Not at all. We have all sorts of views--and there is one great trouble.
+You can get a divorce for nothing in Nevada, and you can't get it for
+anything in South Carolina. The South Carolina result is that they have
+had to pass a law there removing illegitimacy as a bar to succession."
+
+"Nevertheless," said von Klausen, "except for Japan, there are more
+divorces in the United States than in any other country in the world. I
+was told, while I was in Washington, that the American statistics
+were--they showed seventy-nine divorces to every hundred thousand of
+your population. Your divorces increase more rapidly than your
+population; they increase more rapidly than your marriage-rate."
+
+"I don't know about that," said Stainton; "although I believe that I
+have seen some such figures given somewhere, but I am clear on one
+point: the man that treats his wife badly ought not to be allowed the
+chance to have a wife any longer." He looked at Muriel, seated at his
+side; he smiled and patted her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair.
+"Don't you think so, dear?" he asked.
+
+Muriel smiled in answer.
+
+"Of course I do," said she. "Don't you, Captain von Klausen?"
+
+The Austrian's face remained serious.
+
+"I am of the religion of my country," he said.
+
+"Eh?" said Stainton. "Oh, I beg your pardon."
+
+"Not at all. Please." Von Klausen waived religious immunity. "I govern
+myself one way, but I do not object to hear the reasons why other people
+should choose other ways. Your way--your American way of divorce--is one
+of the peculiarities of your great nation, and so I studied it much
+while I lived there. If you permit, sir, to say it: the figures do not
+well bear out the boast that the American husband is the best husband.
+So, Mrs. Stainton?"
+
+"But he is, just the same," protested Muriel.
+
+"What do the figures show?" asked Jim.
+
+"That two divorces are granted to wives to every one granted husbands."
+
+"With all the respect to the best wife in the world," chuckled Stainton,
+as he again patted Muriel's hand, "that is largely due to the fact that
+the average American is so good a husband that, innocent as he may be,
+he pretends to be the guilty party."
+
+Von Klausen's eyes twinkled shrewdly.
+
+"Is it not a little," he enquired, "because the disgrace of being judged
+a guilty husband is easier to bear than the ridicule that is involved in
+being unable to keep the love of one's wife?"
+
+"Perhaps it is; perhaps it is," admitted Stainton. "But your figures do
+not prove anything against us as husbands, Captain. The only reason that
+similar figures don't show the men of other countries to be worse
+husbands than we are--if, indeed, they don't show it--is that the laws
+of other countries simply do not permit such easy divorce."
+
+"Then what of your population?" asked the Austrian, reverting to his
+previous line of attack. "It declines as divorce rises in your country."
+
+Muriel rose abruptly.
+
+"I think I shall take a little walk," she said.
+
+Stainton half-rose. Von Klausen sprang to his feet.
+
+"Permit me----" began the Captain.
+
+"No, no," said Muriel; "please sit still, both of you."
+
+"But, my dear----" said Stainton.
+
+"I don't want to interrupt your talk," the girl said. "Finish that and
+then join me, Jim."
+
+"In ten minutes, then," said Stainton.
+
+The men resumed their chairs. They looked after her strong young body
+as, the wind blowing her skirt about her, she walked away.
+
+"At all events," said Stainton heartily, "there goes the best American
+wife."
+
+Von Klausen had grown accustomed to the open domesticity of Americans.
+He did not smile.
+
+"She is a charming lady," he agreed. He looked out to sea. "And a
+beautiful." After a moment he added: "Do you object, sir, if I say that
+it is delightful, the manner in which the black hair gathers over her
+forehead and that in which she carries her gracious head?"
+
+"Object, Captain? I say you're quite right. I'm a lucky man. Have you
+ever seen more lovely eyes?"
+
+Von Klausen was still looking out to sea.
+
+"In all the world I have seen but one pair that was their equal," he
+answered.
+
+Stainton pulled at his cigar.
+
+"You were saying,"--he returned to their previous subject--"that the
+American birth-rate declined as divorce grew. Do you think the increase
+of the one causes the decrease of the other?"
+
+"I admit that the rate falls in times of commercial depression."
+
+"Of course: divorce and birth are both expensive. If you would look into
+the matter a little closer, Captain, I think you would find that the
+growth of child labour and the cost of living have about as much to do
+with the fall in the birth-rate as anything else. Some of our divorces
+are granted to foreigners that come to America because they can't get
+easy divorces in their native lands. Most are given for desertion, which
+generally means that they are arranged by mutual consent. Nearly as
+many result from charges of 'cruelty,' which is as often as not
+the man's habit of whistling in the house when his wife has a
+headache--'constructive cruelty' we call it, although 'concocted
+cruelty' would be a better term. Adultery comes only next, I am told,
+and then neglect to provide, and drunkenness. The other causes are all
+lower in the list. So you see that when our divorces are not really the
+result of a quiet agreement between the husband and wife--and every
+judge that signs a decree knows in his heart that nine-tenths are
+that--they are the result of conduct which, for anybody who does not
+consider marriage a sacrament, abundantly justifies the action."
+
+The talk shifted to Wall Street and continued for half an hour.
+
+"Von Klausen has some antiquated ideas," remarked Stainton to Muriel as
+they were going to bed that night; "but he seems to be a pretty good
+sort of man. I like him."
+
+Muriel was standing before the mirror, brushing the blue-black hair that
+fell nearly to her knees.
+
+"Do you?" she asked, with no show of interest.
+
+"Yes, he has good stuff in him. Of course, he's a mere boy, but he has
+good stuff in him, I'm sure."
+
+"I don't see why you call him a boy," said Muriel,
+
+"Why? Why, because he _is_ a boy, my dear."
+
+"I'm sure you seem just as young as he is."
+
+Stainton laughed and kissed her.
+
+"Little Loyalty!"
+
+"I don't care," said Muriel, "I don't like him."
+
+"You don't? Why, I thought----"
+
+"I did like him at first, but I don't any more."
+
+"Why not? You ought to. He admires you tremendously."
+
+"Does he? How do you know?"
+
+"By what he says. He told me to-day that he had never seen but one pair
+of eyes equal to yours."
+
+"Only one? That was nice of him, I'm sure. What else did he say?"
+
+"He said--oh, lots of things. He said you had beautiful hair and that it
+somehow grew in curves from your forehead, and I said that he was quite
+right."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"All I can remember. How much do you want, anyhow?"
+
+"Well, I don't like him."
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose because you like him too well. I hardly see you
+any more."
+
+Stainton assured his wife that no man or woman in the world was worth
+her little finger. He clambered into the upper berth and watched her for
+some time as her bared arm rose and fell, wielding the brush. At last
+the sight of that regular motion, added to the gentle rocking of the
+ship, closed his eyes. He had had a full day and was tired. He was
+soundly asleep when he was wakened by her embrace.
+
+She was standing on the ladder and pressing his face to hers.
+
+"Love me!" she was whispering. "O, Jim, love me!"
+
+Stainton was still half-asleep,
+
+"I do love you, Muriel," he said.
+
+"Yes, but--_Love_ me, Jim!" she whispered.
+
+She clutched him suddenly.
+
+"Ouch, my hair!" said Stainton. "You're pulling my hair!"
+
+"Oh!" Muriel's tone was all self-reproach. "I'm sorry. Did I hurt you,
+dear?"
+
+"No," he smiled. "No. There, there!" He patted her head. "It's all
+right. Good-night, dearest."
+
+"Good-night?" There was a question in the words as she repeated them,
+but she retreated, albeit slowly, down the ladder. "Good-night, Jim."
+
+"Good-night, dear," he responded cheerily, "and--I do love you, you
+know."
+
+She answered from below:
+
+"Yes, Jim."
+
+"You do know it, don't you, dear heart?"
+
+"Yes, Jim."
+
+He heard her draw the bedclothes about her. When he awoke in the
+morning, she slept, but he would not breakfast until she was ready to
+breakfast with him, and so he sat, hungry, and waited for the hour that
+she devoted to her toilette. Then they went to the saloon, and
+afterwards to the deck, together.
+
+Neither on that day nor on the day following was Muriel alone with von
+Klausen. Indeed, she was not alone with him again until they touched, at
+ten o'clock of a bright morning, at Plymouth, where the grateful green
+and yellow hills rose from the blue water, and the town nestled in a
+long white belt behind a chain of grim, grey men-of-war. The tender had
+stood by, and, now that some of the high stacks of mail-bags, which had
+been filling the stern decks since dawn, were transferred, an endless
+procession of slouching porters out of uniform carried, one brick to
+each man for each trip, large bricks of silver down the gangways and
+deposited them in piles of five, well forward on the tender. Jim had
+gone to the writing-room to scribble a note that might catch a fast boat
+from England to his agent at the mine, and Muriel was left beside the
+rail to talk with the Austrian.
+
+"It has been a delightful voyage, has it not?" he asked, in that precise
+English to which she had now grown accustomed.
+
+"I dare say," answered Muriel. "I don't know. You forget that I have had
+no others with which to compare it."
+
+"But you have not been bored?"
+
+"No."
+
+"It has surely been pleasant, for I have by it had the opportunity to
+meet you and your brave husband."
+
+"My husband, I know, would say as much of it because he has met you."
+
+The Austrian bowed.
+
+"Nor have I failed," he said, "to tell him how much the entire company
+aboard seem to admire his charming wife."
+
+Muriel was resting her elbows on the rail; her glance was fixed upon the
+distant town.
+
+"He told me," she responded, "that you thought my eyes about the second
+best within your experience. I hope your experience has been wide."
+
+Von Klausen flushed.
+
+"My experience," he said, gravely, "has, I regret to tell you, been that
+of most young men."
+
+"Oh!" said Muriel. Her tone showed dislike of all that this implied, but
+she recalled that Jim had had no such experiences as those to which von
+Klausen plainly referred, and she suddenly felt, somehow, that this
+difference between the men did not altogether advance Stainton.
+
+"Nevertheless, dear lady," the Austrian was going on, "the eyes that I
+thought as beautiful as yours--I did not say more beautiful--were eyes
+that have long since been shut."
+
+Muriel was now more piqued than before. Had the man been comparing her
+to a dead fiancee to whom he, living, remained faithful?
+
+"Were they Austrian eyes?" she asked, her own eyes full of obtrusive
+indifference.
+
+"No; they were Italian. Had you come to Europe three years ago, you
+would have seen them when you went to the Louvre. They were the eyes
+that have been given to the Mona Lisa."
+
+Muriel and he were standing apart from the crowd of passengers that
+watched the unloading of the silver. The girl turned to her companion.
+Her glance was interested enough now, and she saw at once that his was
+serious.
+
+"There is something that I have been wanting to tell you," she began,
+before she was well aware that she spoke--"something that I don't know
+exactly how to say, or whether I ought to say it at all."
+
+Von Klausen was openly concerned.
+
+"If you are in doubt," he replied, "perhaps it would be better if you
+first thought more about it."
+
+But his opposition, though totally the reverse to what she had expected,
+clinched her resolve.
+
+"No," she said. "I ought to tell you about it. Now that I have started I
+know I ought. It's--it's about that time in the fog."
+
+Von Klausen's colour mounted. Then, politely, he pretended to forget the
+incident.
+
+"Yes, don't you remember? You must remember."
+
+"I remember. It was a very sudden fog."
+
+"Well," she said, "it was about what happened then. I must speak to
+you--I must explain about that." She was holding tightly to the rail.
+
+Von Klausen saw her wrists tremble. He made little of the subject.
+
+"When you were frightened, and I took your hand to reassure you? Dear
+lady, I trust that you have not supposed that I acted on my
+presumption----"
+
+"You're kind to put it that way," she interrupted. "You're generous. But
+I want to be honest. I have to be honest, because I want you to
+understand--because you must understand--just why I behaved as I did,
+and you wouldn't understand--you couldn't--if I weren't honest with you.
+Captain von Klausen, you didn't take my hand, and you know it. I took
+yours."
+
+He raised the disputed hand; he raised it in protest.
+
+"Mrs. Stainton, I assure you that it was I who----"
+
+"No, it wasn't. And I wasn't frightened by the fog, either. You must
+remember that, from the way I spoke; I showed I didn't even realise what
+a fog means at sea. So how could I be afraid of it? You did know and you
+had just said that you were afraid of fogs. I took your hand. I did it
+before I thought----"
+
+"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Stainton"--he was painfully anxious to end all
+this--"before you thought. It was nothing but a kindly----"
+
+"Before I thought," she pursued, determinedly, her dark eyes steady on
+his. "You had told me of that awful experience of yours in the Bosphorus
+and of the effect it had on you. No wonder it did have such an effect.
+I am not blaming you for that. Only, I saw that you needed help and
+comfort. I was sorry for you. That was all: I was just sorry. I did it
+without thinking. I didn't know I had done it at all till it was all
+over. You see," she concluded, "I just couldn't, now, bear to have you
+misunderstand."
+
+Carefully analysed, it might seem a contradictory explanation, but it
+was no sooner free of her lips than she felt that her soul was free of
+this thing which she had sought to explain.
+
+Von Klausen was quite as much relieved as Muriel. He accepted it as she
+wished him to accept it.
+
+"Never for a moment did I misunderstand," said he.
+
+"Then," added Muriel, "you will understand why I haven't mentioned it to
+my husband----"
+
+"Your husband?" The Austrian was all amazement. "Why should you?"
+
+"Because," said Muriel, compressing her full lips and assuming her full
+height, "I always tell Jim everything."
+
+If the shadow of a smile passed beneath his military moustache, she
+could not be sure of it.
+
+"Everything?" said he. "But you have said that this was nothing."
+
+"Exactly, and--don't you see?--that is one of the reasons why I haven't
+told it. You will--you will please not refer to it to him, Captain von
+Klausen, because----"
+
+"Refer to it?" Von Klausen squared his shoulders. "To him? Never!"
+
+His assertion was vehement.
+
+"There is no reason why you shouldn't," Muriel replied; "only, as I say,
+I haven't told him, and the only real reason that I didn't tell him was
+because to do so I should have to tell him, too, that you had been
+afraid; and that isn't my secret: it's yours."
+
+The Austrian's boyish face was now very grave.
+
+"I thank you," he said. "For your thought of me I thank you, and the
+more I thank you because, by keeping my secret, you made it _ours_."
+
+"Oh, but I don't mean----" said Muriel.
+
+She did not finish, for she saw Stainton come from the writing-room and
+stride rapidly toward them. He had written his letter and despatched it.
+
+Although the three stood shoulder to shoulder in the customs-shed at
+Cherbourg later in the day and occupied the same first-class compartment
+in the fast express through the rolling Norman country to Paris, Muriel
+and von Klausen were not then given an opportunity to conclude their
+conversation. The Austrian bade the Staintons good-bye in the swirl of
+porters and chauffeurs at the Gare St. Lazare, and Muriel took it for
+granted that the interruption must be final.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+DR. BOUSSINGAULT
+
+
+Muriel awoke in their apartments at the Chatham the next morning to find
+herself decidedly out of sorts. Well as she had borne the voyage, she no
+sooner put her feet from her one of the two little canopied beds to the
+floor than she felt again the motion of the ship, and there was a return
+of the nausea that she attributed to the trouble which silently weighed
+upon her. She crawled back to the bed.
+
+"I can't get up," she said.
+
+Stainton was worried. He fluttered about her. He wanted to ring for
+servants to bring half-a-dozen things that Muriel would not accept. He
+wanted the smallest details of her symptoms. He wanted to send for a
+doctor.
+
+"Go away," Muriel pleaded. "Please go away."
+
+"But, dearie----"
+
+"I wish I were back in New York."
+
+Stainton, though he now feared the sea, was ready to undertake the
+return trip on the morrow.
+
+"No, no," moaned Muriel. "Of course, now we are here, we must see
+things. But I won't have a doctor, Jim. Can't you see how it is with
+me? I shall be all right in an hour."
+
+"All right, dearie; all right. I shall sit here by you."
+
+"Please don't. I'm horrid when I'm sick."
+
+"Not to me," said Jim.
+
+"But I am. I look so horrid."
+
+"I don't see it."
+
+"Oh, you're good, Jim. But I want to be alone, just as you did when you
+were seasick. Go into the sitting-room. Please. I'll call you if I need
+you."
+
+He went into their sitting-room, a room that shone with green and gilt,
+and looked out, across a narrow street, at the grey houses of uniform
+height and listened to the shrill street-sounds of Paris. He was lonely.
+
+Somebody knocked at the door opening on the hall.
+
+"Come in," he called. "I mean: _entrez_!"
+
+A servant advanced, bearing a tray.
+
+Jim saw that there was a card on the tray. He took it up and read the
+name of Paul Achille Boussingault. He did not remember ever having heard
+the name.
+
+"_Pour moi?_" asked Jim.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the servant, in a wholly unaccented English.
+
+"Hum," said Jim. "Now I wonder what _he_ wants. Very well, show him up."
+
+He hurried to the bedroom.
+
+"Dear," he enquired, "tell me quick: how do you pronounce B-o-u-double
+s-i-n-g-a-u-l-t?"
+
+Muriel did not lift the covers that concealed her face.
+
+"Go away," she said.
+
+"I am going, only, dearie----"
+
+"Go away--_please_!"
+
+Jim re-entered the sitting-room. Was it Bou-sing-go? He had his doubts
+about that French _in_. If he remembered rightly, it was a kind of _an_,
+and the _n_ ended somewhere in the nose. And who was M. Boussingault,
+anyhow?
+
+"M. le docteur Boo-san-go," announced the servant.
+
+"Wait. How was that?" asked Jim, and then found himself face to face
+with his visitor.
+
+His visitor was a stocky man, of not more than five feet five or six
+inches in height, inclined to pugginess. He had a leathery complexion,
+and the point of his thin Van Dyck beard was in a straight line from the
+sharper point in which his close-clipped bristling hair ended above his
+nose. It was black hair, and it retreated precipitately on both sides.
+He looked at Jim through eyeglasses bearing a gold chain and bound
+together by a straight bar, which gave the effect of a continuous scowl
+to his heavy brows. He bowed deeply.
+
+"M. James Stainton?" he enquired.
+
+"Yes," said Jim. "Good-morning."
+
+"Good-morning, monsieur. I have the honour to present the compliments of
+my brother, M. Henri Duperre Boussingault, and to ask that you will be
+so very good as me to command in the case I can be of any the slightest
+service to you and madame during your visit to Paris."
+
+Stainton was at a loss.
+
+"Your brother?" said he.
+
+"M. Henri Boussingault," repeated the visitor. "He has to me written
+from Lyon to attend well to the appearance of your name among the
+distinguished arrivals in the _Daily Mail_."
+
+The mention of Lyons aided Stainton's memory. He recalled now that the
+name of Henri Boussingault had appeared among those of the Lyonnaise
+syndicate that was interested in the purchase of the mine.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said, and his broad teeth showed in a smile. "To be sure.
+This is very kind of you. Won't you sit down?"
+
+Paul Achille Boussingault arranged his coat-tails and sat down with a
+grunt that apparently always accompanied this action on his part. His
+knees were far apart, and his feet scarcely touched the parquet floor.
+He was dressed completely in black, with the ribbon of an order fastened
+in the lapel of his frock-coat. His collar was low and round and
+upright, its junction with the shirt concealed by a small, prim black
+tie.
+
+Stainton took a chair opposite him.
+
+"Won't you have a cigar?" he asked.
+
+"But thanks," said the visitor. "A cigarette only, if you do not
+object?" He produced a yellow packet of _Marylands_, and offered it to
+Jim.
+
+"Thank you," said Stainton, lighting the cigarette. He did not like it,
+because, being an American, he did not care for American tobacco; but he
+tried to appear to like it. He wondered what he should talk about. "I
+shall be glad to make use of your kind offer."
+
+"You will honour me," said the Frenchman.
+
+"Um. And are you, too, interested in mining investments?"
+
+The visitor dismissed mines and mining to his brother with a wave of his
+short hand. Stainton noticed that his fingers, though not long, were
+well shaped and tapering, in contradistinction to the spatulate thumbs,
+and that he wore a diamond set in a ring of thick gold.
+
+"Those there are the avocation of my brother. I take no part in these
+affairs of the bourse. You will me forgive if I say, monsieur, that I
+have no traffic with such abominations of our society modern. I am a man
+of science."
+
+"A doctor?" asked Jim.
+
+"Of medicine."
+
+For a moment Stainton revolved the idea of taking the visitor to see
+Muriel, but he divined Muriel's attitude toward such an action and
+banished the thought. Her indisposition was, of course, but natural and
+passing.
+
+"What," asked Jim, "ought we to see first in Paris? We are strangers
+here, you know."
+
+The doctor flung out his short arms. He indulged in an apostrophe to
+Paris that reminded Stainton of some of the orations he had read as
+having been delivered in the councils of the First Republic.
+Boussingault's English was frequently cast in a French mould and
+sometimes so fused that it was mere alloyage; but he never paused for a
+word, and he spoke with a fervour that was almost vehemence. There were
+moments when Jim wondered if the Frenchman suspected him of some slur on
+Paris and conceived it a duty to defend the city. What Jim must see was,
+in brief, everything.
+
+Nevertheless, so soon as the apostrophe ended, Boussingault appeared to
+forget all about it. His sharp eyes travelled over the hotel
+sitting-room, and his mind occupied itself therewith as devotedly as it
+had just been giving itself to the Gallic metropolis.
+
+"Ah, you Americans," he sighed; "how you love the luxury!"
+
+"Perhaps we do," said Jim, recalling certain negotiations that he had
+conducted at the hotel's _bureau_; "but if the price of these rooms is a
+criterion, you French make us pay well for it."
+
+Dr. Boussingault's glance journeyed to the partly open doors of the
+bathroom, displaying a tiled whiteness.
+
+"And without doubt a bath?" he enquired.
+
+"A bath," nodded Stainton.
+
+"And me"--Boussingault shook his bullet-like head--"I well recall when
+the water-carts stopped at the corners of the streets too narrow for
+their progress, and one called from the high window that one wished to
+buy so much and so much, because one bathed oneself or the servant
+washed the linen to-day."
+
+He talked for a while, again rhapsodically, of the old city, the city of
+his youth, and, when he chanced to touch upon its restaurants, Stainton
+asked him if, that evening or the next, he would dine with Muriel and
+himself.
+
+"Ah, no," said Boussingault. "It is that madame and you, monsieur, shall
+dine with me. To-night? To-morrow night?"
+
+Stainton accepted for the following evening.
+
+"And at what spot would you prefer, monsieur?"
+
+"I don't know," said Jim. "I have eaten _sole a la Marguery_. We might
+catch that in its native waters: we might dine at Marguery's."
+
+"Well," the Frenchman shrugged, "Marguery is not bad. At least the
+kitchen is tolerable. But you should eat your sole as she swims."
+
+They were not, however, destined to keep the appointment on the day set,
+for, during that morning came a _petit bleu_ from Boussingault,
+postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing
+with fine spencerian regrets to the effect that its writer had been
+imperatively summoned to Grenoble for consultation in an illness
+"occurring in a family distinguished."
+
+"I don't care if we never see him," said Muriel. "I could hear him
+through the door: he talks too loud."
+
+They consoled themselves and wearied themselves with sightseeing, and
+often this tried Muriel's nerves. Secretly she still watched for the
+appearance of signs to indicate her condition and secretly she tightened
+her stays, long before any signs could appear. She was often sick in the
+mornings, though with decreasing recurrence, and, when she began to feel
+relief by the diminution, she became the more despondent upon
+realisation of its cause. Moreover, even the comfort of _petit dejeuner_
+in bed did not compensate for those crumbs for which no one could be
+held responsible.
+
+True to his policy to "let nature take her course," Stainton maintained
+a firm reticence upon the subject uppermost in the minds of both, but
+this reticence was applied only to his speech; and his solicitude, his
+patient but patent care, and his evident anxiety often annoyed her,
+since they kept her destiny before her and seemed to her apprehensive
+imagination--what they were far from being--no more than the expressions
+of a fear that she might make some physical revelation of her state in a
+public and embarrassing manner.
+
+"You don't think of me!" she one day wept, when he had put her into a
+_taxi-metre_ to drive a few hundred yards.
+
+"Muriel," said Stainton, "I think of nothing else."
+
+"No, you don't think of me," she insisted. "You think only of--of _it_.
+You're worried about me as a mother and not as a wife. You are!"
+
+Stainton protested, grieved to the heart; but she would not hear him.
+
+"It's as if you were a stock-farmer," she said, the tears in her velvety
+eyes, "and I were only your favorite thoroughbred in foal."
+
+This simile he found revolting. It required all his masculine philosophy
+satisfactorily to account for her use of it, and, even when that had
+been applied, he reprimanded her, with kindness, but with decisiveness
+also. It was some time before she begged his pardon and condemned
+herself; some time before he soothed her and told her, what she hated to
+hear, that her words had risen not from herself but from her condition.
+
+They went to Marguery's, when the doctor returned to Paris, rather worn
+out by their week of sightseeing; but they found the crowded restaurant
+pleasantly diverting. The chatter of the diners, the scurrying of the
+waiters, and the gratification of the leather-covered seat from which,
+across a shining table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made
+them forget for a space the subject that one of them was weary of
+remembering.
+
+Then, by some mischance, Stainton hit upon a fatal topic.
+
+"Doctor," he said, "I am sure you can give me some authoritative
+information on a matter that I have read a little of. I mean the
+question of the decrease in the French birth-rate and the efforts to
+stop it and build up not only a larger race but a race of the best
+stock."
+
+He saw instantly that he had struck the little man's hobby. Dr.
+Boussingault sat with one thick knee covered by his serviette and thrust
+into the aisle for the _garcons_ to stumble over. His dark eyes, keen
+and expressive, were shaped like wide almonds and, unobscured by any
+vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his glasses
+in a lively disregard of the phlegmatic indications given by the dark
+bags beneath them.
+
+"The most healthy sign in France to-day," he said. "Absolutely."
+
+"You mean the effort to increase and better the stock?"
+
+"No. One thousand no's. The success in decreasing it."
+
+"My dear sir----"
+
+The doctor waved his hands. He drank no alcohol, he said; only some wine
+of the country, red; but of this, heavily diluted by water, he was
+drinking copiously.
+
+"Attend, monsieur. I know well, my God, these good people who go to
+England and have international congresses and, between the dinners given
+by Her Grace of Dulpuddle and the lawn parties, when one permits them to
+enter the park of the Castle Cad, indulge in a debauch of scientific
+verbosity. But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard
+one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry,
+and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them
+say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and
+breathed: "_I_ say one word: 'Environment!'--and they silence
+themselves."
+
+Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed.
+
+"I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their
+purpose is the improvement of the race."
+
+"Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How
+do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good
+the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong
+sons and some robust daughters? _Jamais!_ Rather by to continue the
+present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has
+made unfit, by to encourage breeding--million thunders, yes, among those
+very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits _them_!"
+
+Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the talk would soon turn
+to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced
+at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of
+_canard sauvage_ that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she
+must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were
+talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a
+physician. Nevertheless, he wavered.
+
+"I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the
+poor to increase the population?"
+
+The Frenchman's broad, pale lips smiled. He shrugged.
+
+"Money? My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot
+say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your
+country and in England these savants--name of God!--want what they call
+the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this
+reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault
+leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive
+forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor
+to produce families, they are the _proprietaires_ and those lackeys of
+the _proprietaires_, the generals of the armies. The _proprietaire_
+wants much workers, and he wants workers so bound by family
+'responsibilities'"--the Frenchman hissed the s's of this word--"that
+they dare not revolt; he wants competition for the workers, for she
+lowers the wage. For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to
+the monster, War."
+
+"You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton.
+
+"Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I:
+Boussingault, _medecin_!"
+
+"At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along
+without children, you know."
+
+He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms
+and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse
+into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled.
+
+Jim regarded the neighboring tables, but no one of the company there
+paid any attention to the commanding tones of the physician, probably
+because nearly all the guests of the restaurant were engaged in talk
+that was quite as violent as that of Paul Achille. Muriel might have
+been a thousand miles away.
+
+Now the word "children" again loosed the storm.
+
+"Children?" shouted the doctor. "Let us be reasonable! Let us regard
+with equanimity the children! They ask the poor for the children, these
+_proprietaires_; but what they would say is servants and _filles de
+joie_ to work for them. They will not pay the man sufficient to make a
+marriage; they pretend not to like that the women bear children without
+marriage--and they run about and sob for more babies! _Bien._ In effect,
+then, what is it that the labourer to them replies? He replies: 'Give
+me the 'abitable houses, and then I will give you in'abitants--not
+before.'"
+
+Dr. Boussingault produced a huge handkerchief, shook it, mopped his
+sparkling brow, and resumed absolute immobility.
+
+Stainton was now sincerely interested. He had thought somewhat upon
+these matters and, although he saw as yet no personal relevance in them,
+he had an intellectual appetite for their discussion.
+
+"As I see it," he said, "none of these people that are trying to improve
+the breed denies that the poor are in a bad way, but just because the
+poor are in a bad way, they fail to be the stuff by which the race can
+be improved. I am now speaking, you understand, of what you, doctor,
+consider the American and English savants. What they are after is to
+increase the best, and their best raw material is found in the sons of
+the well-to-do, because the well-to-do are the intelligent, are the
+people that do the work of the world."
+
+Boussingault chortled derisively.
+
+"What propelled your ship to France?" he demanded. "An engine, is it
+not? But the engine, it is necessary that it be fed, and think you that
+the man who put the coal in that engine was well-to-do? Who grinds your
+corn, who makes your shoes, who builds your house? Name of God!"
+
+"I am thinking about the directing intelligence, doctor. The improper
+character tossed into the human pond sinks to its bottom, and the proper
+character, even if placed at its bottom, rises to the top."
+
+"So you propose to improve the race, monsieur, by breeding from the
+thieving millionaire risen to the top of the pond and by letting the
+Christs sink, as they have always sanken? Do not talk of breeding for
+ability until you give a chance for to develop the ability that now goes
+everywhere to waste. Men and women they will mate in spite of you."
+
+"The process would strengthen marriage," said Stainton.
+
+"But yes," replied the Frenchman. "Marriage is of relations the most
+intimate: they would make it the most public. It was wrong enough, my
+God, when, after centuries of no attention to marriage, the church
+quickly assumed of it the control and made of it a public ceremony. It
+will be more bad when the police assume of it the control and make of it
+a public scandal."
+
+Muriel raised her great, dark eyes to the doctor and then lowered them
+to her plate.
+
+Stainton shifted uneasily.
+
+"I do not believe in that sort of thing and never would," he said, "but
+I am sure that marriage is the best friend of the race's future."
+
+"Not so long as it is directed even as it now is. Not so long as the
+diseased 'usband may legally force a child on his wife, or the
+wife-merely-lazy may refuse to bear a child to a healthy 'usband. A wife
+can divorce a 'usband because he is sterile through not his own fault,
+but if he is sterile because he wants sterility, she must continue to be
+his wife. You speak well as if to make people to breed it is necessary
+but to go to whip them, or trick them, into a wedding. Marriage does not
+imply parenthood. That relationship is arbitrary."
+
+This was something more than Jim had counted on. A slow flush mounted to
+his iron-grey hair. He saw that Muriel attended entirely to her food,
+and he did not know whether to admire this peace as evidence of her
+self-control or to wonder how she could hear such things and give no
+sign of hearing them.
+
+The doctor, however, ran from bad to worse.
+
+"Most of the children in this world are here by accident. They are not
+wanted, no, because they are too much trouble or too much cost, or they
+are girls, as the case may be. They are not a tie binding their parents'
+love by their presence; generally they are a sword to divide it by
+necessitating economies. What married man, even rich, does not endeavour
+to limit the number of his little ones, _hein_?" To Jim's horror the
+doctor broadly winked. "What unmarried man does not endeavour to
+suppress his little ones altogether? Both will in private joke the one
+to the other about it, and both fear it should publicly be known.
+Marriage? Poof! It is the name of a _prix fixe_ charged for
+respectability."
+
+Stainton was not the man to try to evade an issue by an attempt to
+divert the conversation, and he saw that the doctor was not the man to
+be diverted. As the waiter brought the coffee ("No cognac, thank you,"
+said Boussingault; "no alcohol") Jim challenged direct.
+
+"You shock me," declared the American, "by what you tell me about
+children not being wanted. I don't agree with you there. Of course, that
+is sometimes the case in irregular relations, but I think too well of
+humanity to believe that, by married parents of any means at all,
+children are not wanted after they get here."
+
+"None?"
+
+Both men turned: it was Muriel that had spoken. Her face grew scarlet
+under their look.
+
+The doctor's glance was keen.
+
+"I am of madame's mind," said he, quietly.
+
+Stainton strove to pass the embarrassing interruption.
+
+"Well, doctor," he said, and from the corner of his eye saw with
+satisfaction that Muriel busied herself with an intricate ice, "I stick
+to my belief in humanity."
+
+Boussingault flourished his coffee cup and spilled a liberal portion of
+its contents.
+
+"In what world do you live?" he asked.
+
+"In an eminently sane one," said Stainton.
+
+"_Bien_; I knew it was not the real world. In your world you know
+nothing, then, of all the ways, direct and indirect, to make women bear
+babies they do not want; in it you know nothing of the child unloved and
+scarcely endured; in it you know nothing of the boy or girl for these
+reasons, or because the mother hated the price of marriage, afflicted
+with morbid nerves and will-atrophy. Those who would improve the race
+must know of these things, but they consider them not. They consider not
+that there is the motherly-physical inclination combined with physical
+ability; that degrees of inclination and ability vary. They make one law
+for all that, by physique only, appear fit. Good, then: the person the
+best fitted for their plan is she who will not let them send her to the
+altar as if she had no proper will. Again, suppose you forbid the
+'unfit' to marry? You straightway increase not only the number of
+illegitimate children, but of illegitimate unfit children, for the
+illegitimate child, in our mad world, has not the whole of a chance. M.
+Stainton, your savants would raise the race by oppressing the
+individuals."
+
+Stainton's anxiety was now to end the meal. He felt that matters had
+gone far enough, and he feared that the topic of discussion had proved a
+morbid one for a prospective mother. He murmured something about the
+survival of the fittest.
+
+"The survival of the fittest," roared Boussingault. "My good friend,
+who is it that is fitted to survive? He who can? The brute? You say"--he
+had quite placed poor Stainton in the opposition by this time--"you say
+that you would rather have for parent a robust burglar than a tubercular
+bishop. Me, Boussingault, I choose the bishop, for it is better to have
+ill health with money to hire Boussingaults than good health without
+money to buy food. 'Defectives'! Holy blue! The prize-fighter in New
+York who murders the little girl is of splendid physique and gives
+extraordinary care to his body. He is scrupulously clean. He does not
+smoke, does not even drink red wine. Of the sixteen children of his
+parents only seven prove, by survival, fitness to survive. He is of
+them--and he murders the little girl."
+
+"Well," said Stainton, smiling, "perhaps sixteen is _too_ many."
+
+"Tell me why," said the Frenchman. "Our great Massenet is of a
+family of children"--he swung his arm and dropped his emptied
+cup--"countless--absolutely countless. Environment, that is what you
+forget; environment, and inclination and _suitable_ physique. What to
+do? You should change the economic conditions that breed your
+'defectives' as a refuse-heap breeds flies, but instead you propose to
+spend time and money to try to 'segregate' defectives as fast as you
+manufacture them. 'Segregate' and 'sterilize'? I have yet to hear of one
+of you sterilising a degenerate child of your own. You produce them
+not? Often. And you produce the good? Francis Galton left no child at
+all. I, Boussingault, say to you: breed a Florence Nightingale and an
+Isaac Newton and bring them up in a city slum and set them to work in a
+city factory, and their very good breeding will be society's loss.
+Truly. What you will have will not be a philanthropist and a scientist,
+but only a more than commonly seductive _fille_ and a more than commonly
+clever thief. You cannot breed a free race until you have given to the
+possible mothers of it freedom of choice; and you cannot breed a healthy
+race until you have given to papa and mamma and baby proper food and
+surroundings--until you have given the man working the full pay for his
+toil."
+
+He leaned back in his chair, held his handkerchief before his mouth
+without concealing it, and began to pick his teeth.
+
+Muriel rose; she was pale. The two men started also to rise.
+
+"Please don't," said Muriel. "I shall be back in a moment."
+
+"Dearest----" began Stainton.
+
+Muriel's answer was one look. She hurried from the room.
+
+"My wife," said Stainton, resuming his seat, "is not very well."
+
+"You desolate me," replied the physician as he grunted his way back
+into his chair. "But now that madame absents herself for a moment, let
+me be explicit."
+
+"Explicit?" said Stainton. "I should have thought--Why, you have been
+talking as if the very construction of society were a crime!"
+
+"Ah," said Boussingault, delightedly, "then you perceive just my point.
+That is it; you put it well: modern society is The Great Crime--life is
+The Great Sin--what we have made of Life. Disease, Ignorance, Poverty,
+Wage-slavery, Child-slavery, Lust-slavery, Marriage-slavery! Marriage
+does not produce good children more than bad. Some of the highest types
+of humanity have been produced by the left hand. You ignore the positive
+side of selective breeding. If you can decide what constitutes a 'fit'
+man, how can you limit his racial gifts to the child-bearing capacities
+of one woman? And the woman, her, too; you must provide for selective
+futile polygamy and polyandry. You must be presented to the unmarried
+mother----"
+
+"Really----" began Stainton.
+
+"There is something in these your theories," interposed Boussingault,
+rushing to his conclusion, "but here you go too far and there half-way.
+In Germany, until German bureaucracy captures them, they are the great
+aids to the revolt of Womankind, your theories. Educate for parenthood,
+endow mothers, pension during pregnancy and nursing--what then? Name of
+God! You have more to do than that, my friend--_we_ have more to do: we
+have to give every child born an equal chance, every man how much he
+earns; we must build a society where no superstition, no economic
+strain, no selfish 'usband keeps childless the woman that wants to be
+and ought to be a mother in marriage or outside; and we must recognise
+of all other women their inalienable right to refuse motherhood!"
+
+Stainton rose quickly.
+
+"Here comes my wife," he said. "I am afraid we shall have to hurry away,
+doctor."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MONTMARTRE
+
+
+Alone in their _taxi-metre_, Stainton and Muriel preserved for some time
+an awkward silence. Jim was waiting for some hint from her to indicate
+what would be his safest course. His wife sat rigid, her fists clenched
+in her lap.
+
+"That doctor is a strange type," said Stainton at last.
+
+"Horrid man! He's a _horrid_ man!" gasped Muriel.
+
+"Well, of course," said Stainton, seeking to steer her into the
+quiescence of a judicial attitude, "he is all wrong in his
+conclusions----"
+
+"He picked his teeth," said Muriel.
+
+Jim had preserved his own good manners to the age of fifty, but his
+years in mining-camps had blunted his observation of the lack of nicety
+in others.
+
+"Did he?" asked Jim.
+
+"Didn't you _see_ him? He carries a gold toothpick around with him. I
+believe he was proud of it. It's--that's what made me sick."
+
+"Then," enquired Jim, growing uncomfortable, "it wasn't what he said?"
+
+"Said? You both sat up there and quarrelled----"
+
+"We didn't quarrel. The doctor has what seems to be the national manner,
+but we were merely discussing----"
+
+"You were discussing me!" said Muriel. "I thought I should die. I don't
+know how I bore it; I----"
+
+Jim slipped his arm around her waist. "My dear, my dear, how could you
+think such a thing? We were talking about a general subject. We
+were----Why, we didn't say anything that could possibly affect you."
+
+"I don't care," Muriel declared: "everything that _he said_--that
+man--was awful."
+
+"It was," admitted Stainton, glad that the burden of offence had again
+been shifted to Boussingault's shoulders. "It was, rather. I didn't know
+whether you were paying attention to it at all. To some of it I hoped
+you weren't."
+
+"Nobody could help hearing such shouting. I was so afraid there might be
+some English or Americans there."
+
+"Still, you didn't appear to hear,"--Stainton spoke with relief at
+thought of this,--"so it was as well as it could be."
+
+"I must have shown it, Jim. I thought my face would burn away."
+
+"At any rate, you didn't talk."
+
+"How _could_ I?"
+
+Stainton was silent for a few seconds. Then he asked:
+
+"What did you mean by your question?"
+
+Muriel took some time to reply:
+
+"What question?"
+
+"You know: the only one you asked--about--about children not being
+wanted?"
+
+This time Muriel's answer was swift: she took her husband's broad
+shoulders in her arms and, as they rolled down the boulevard, began
+sobbing.
+
+"I never want to see him again!" she vowed. "Never bring him to the
+hotel. I won't be at home if he comes. I won't see him. I won't!"
+
+She suggested changing their hotel. She declared that, even if they did
+change, she could not sleep that night. She begged him to take her
+somewhere to amuse her and get her thoughts away from the dreadful
+Boussingault.
+
+It was Stainton who proposed that they should see Montmartre--which
+term, when used by the travelling American, means to see two or three
+places in Montmartre conducted largely for Americans, which charge in
+strict accord with the French ideas of the average American's
+pocketbook, and are visible only between the hours of ten o'clock at
+night and four o'clock in the morning.
+
+"Very well," said Jim; "we might go to Montmartre. I think we ought to
+see Montmartre."
+
+"What's that?" asked Muriel.
+
+"It's--oh, it's a part of Paris. You'll know when we get there."
+
+"I don't remember hearing of it in our French course."
+
+"I don't think it's included in the French course of a convent. I hope
+not."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For the very reason that we ought to go see it--now."
+
+He was quite sure that he was sincere in his attitude. They were
+sightseers, and he had always been told that Montmartre was one of the
+sights of Paris. They had seen everything else. They had seen Notre
+Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the markets, the Palais de Justice, the
+Chambre des Deputes, the tomb of Napoleon--everything. They had enjoyed
+the Jardins des Tuileries and the pictures and sculpture of the
+Luxembourg Museum, and they had walked through the weary miles of
+painted canvases in the Louvre, where Muriel lingered before the spot at
+which the Mona Lisa had long hung. They had even permitted themselves
+the horrors of the Morgue. Why should Stainton not complete his
+knowledge of Paris, and why should he not, like most other Americans,
+take his wife, however young she was, to Montmartre with him? Jim had
+once said to Holt that he had, all his life long, kept himself clean.
+The curiosities of his youth had remained unsatisfied.
+
+The strongest impulses are not infrequently those of which one is
+entirely unconscious. At Aiken, Stainton had yielded himself with the
+extravagance of the young man of twenty-five, which he thought he was,
+to the demands of the situation in which he found himself. At sea there
+had necessarily been a quieter period; but this had ended with the
+arrival of the Staintons in Paris. The tension of sightseeing had,
+alone, sufficed to wear them out, and now (though he persuaded himself
+that this was but the inevitable development of the novel into the
+commonplace) he began to fear that the high tide of his emotion might be
+sinking to the low level of habit and affection, that what was true of
+himself was also true of Muriel, and he drew the inference that another
+sort of sightseeing would be good for them both.
+
+So they went to Montmartre.
+
+At the advice of their chauffeur, they commenced with the Bal Tabarin.
+From the motor-car that had hauled them up the long hills of dark and
+tortuous streets, they stepped into a blaze of yellow light, under which
+half a dozen men hurried to them. One held the door of the cab; another,
+as if it were his sole business in life, wielded a folded newspaper as a
+shield to protect Muriel's gown from contamination by the motor's muddy
+tires; two pointed to the scintillating doorway, and two more chattered
+enquiries that Jim could in no wise interpret.
+
+He knew, however, that there was one answer to every question: he doled
+out a handful of francs, in true American fashion, and then handed a
+purple and white bill to his wife.
+
+Curiously text-book French though it was, Muriel's French had proved
+really intelligible; she had rapidly acquired the power of comprehending
+a full third of the French addressed to her, and all this struck
+Stainton, who loved to follow the lips that were his, speaking a
+language that was not his and of which he was nearly ignorant, as a
+proof of her superiority. Therefore she now preceded him to the ticket
+window and made their purchase. A moment later a large man in a frock
+coat was ushering them, among capped and aproned maids that begged
+permission to check wraps, up to the double stairway at the end of the
+big ballroom and into a box twenty feet above the floor.
+
+They sat down, conscious of themselves, and ordered a bottle of
+Ayala, presently served to them in goblets to play the role of
+wine-glasses--for one drinks champagne from goblets in Montmartre--and
+looked down at the dancers on the floor below. From its balcony at the
+other end of the hall a brass band was sending forth a whirlwind of
+quadrille music, and in the centre of the ballroom eight women danced
+the can-can. They were large women, some of them rather fat, and none of
+them rather young. They wore wide straw hats and simple tailored
+shirtwaists and dark skirts of a cut almost severe; but in sharp
+contrast to this exterior, when they danced, they displayed incredible
+yards and yards of lace petticoat and stockings that outshone the
+rainbow.
+
+"What do you think of it?" asked Stainton.
+
+Muriel condemned the Bal Tabarin as she had condemned Boussingault.
+
+"I think it's horrid," she replied. "Aren't they ugly?" But she did not
+take her eyes from the dancers.
+
+All about the dancing-floor, except in that large circular clearing for
+the performers, were little tables where men and women sat and drank
+beer and smoked cigarettes. Along one side was a long bar at which both
+sexes were served. Everyone gave casual heed to the dancing; everyone
+applauded when he was pleased and hissed when he was not. Now and then a
+young woman would rush to a neighbouring table, seize upon a man and
+guide him madly about one corner of the floor in time to the music, and
+now and then it would be a young man that seized upon a woman, at which
+the patrons, if they paid any attention at all to it, smiled
+good-naturedly. At one of the most conspicuous tables were a couple
+kissing above their foaming beer-mugs, and nobody seemed to notice them.
+Clearly, this was a world where one did as one pleased, and, so long as
+one did not trespass upon the individuality of another, none objected.
+
+"Something new, isn't it?" asked Jim, rather dubiously.
+
+"It's unbelievable," said Muriel, her face flushed.
+
+"Shall we go?"
+
+"No--we might as well wait a little while--until we've finished our
+champagne."
+
+The quadrille ended. There were ten minutes during which the visitors to
+the place waltzed rapidly, with feet lifting high, about the floor. Down
+the centre two young girls were swaying together in a form of waltzing
+that neither of the Americans had ever seen before. A man and a woman,
+dancing, would embrace violently at every recurrence of a certain
+refrain.
+
+Muriel slipped her hand along the rail of the box. Stainton, whose eyes
+were fixed on the dancers, started at her touch.
+
+"Hold my hand," said Muriel.
+
+He took her hand in his, lowering it from the view of the spectators.
+
+"No," commanded Muriel: "on the rail, please."
+
+"Certainly, but isn't that rather----"
+
+"It seems to be the custom, Jim."
+
+So he held her hand before them all, and soon found himself liking this.
+
+A troupe of girls ran upon the floor and, to the music, began a
+performance in tumbling. The hair of one was loosened, the ribbon that
+held it fell at her slippered feet, and two men, from near-by tables,
+leaped upon it and struggled laughingly for possession of the trophy.
+
+The Staintons were intent upon this when they heard a low laugh behind
+them. They looked about: three women with bright cheeks were peeping
+through the swinging doors of the box. Involuntarily, Jim smiled, and,
+since a smile in Montmartre passes current for an invitation, the
+foremost of the girls entered, shutting out her companions.
+
+"_Vous etes Americains?_" she enquired.
+
+Stainton's French went as far as that. He nodded.
+
+"_Du nord ou du sud?_"
+
+Jim was accustomed to thinking that there was but one real America.
+
+"The United States," said he.
+
+"Ver' well," laughed the girl in an English prettily accented. "Your
+good 'ealth, sar--and the good 'ealth of mademoiselle."
+
+She raised from the table Jim's goblet of champagne and drank a little.
+It was evident that her English was now exhausted.
+
+Jim, frankly puzzled, looked at Muriel.
+
+"What shall we do?" he wondered.
+
+He thought that Muriel would resent the intrusion, but Muriel did not
+seem to resent it.
+
+"It appears to be the custom," said Muriel again. "I suppose that we had
+better ask her to sit down and have some champagne."
+
+"Very well," said Stainton, none too willingly. "You ask her, then: the
+French verb 'to sit' always was too much for me."
+
+Muriel offered the invitation; the visitor laughingly accepted; another
+bottle was ordered and, while Jim, unable to understand what was being
+said, leaned over the rail and looked at the dancers, his wife and the
+vermilion-lipped intruder engaged in an encounter of small-talk that
+Muriel began by enjoying as an improvement at once of her French and her
+knowledge of the world.
+
+The visitor, however, so managed the conversation that, though she did
+give Muriel her address in a little street off the Boulevard Clichy, it
+was she who was gathering information. She was extremely polite, but
+extremely inquisitive.
+
+"You have been long in Paris, is it not?" she asked.
+
+"No, not long; only two weeks," said Muriel.
+
+"But in France--no?"
+
+"We came direct to Paris."
+
+"But you speak French well, mademoiselle."
+
+The compliment pleased Muriel to the extent that she missed the title
+applied to her.
+
+"My knowledge of French is very small," she replied. "I studied the
+language in America."
+
+"In America? Truly? One would never suppose."
+
+"We had a French nun for teacher."
+
+"Yes, yes. And monsieur your sweetheart, he does not speak French--no?"
+
+Muriel started.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, a little stiffly, "is my husband."
+
+But the visitor, far from feeling reprimanded, was openly delighted.
+
+"Your husband?" she echoed. "Very good. He is handsome, your husband."
+
+"I think so," said Muriel.
+
+"And it is always good," pursued the guest, "that the husband be much
+older than the wife, is it not?"
+
+Instantly Muriel relapsed. She could not know that the girl spoke
+sincerely. She was among strangers, and, like most of us, instinctively
+suspected all whose native tongue was not her own.
+
+"He is not much older!" she retorted.
+
+"Oh--but yes. And it is well. It is so that it is most often arranged in
+France."
+
+"No doubt--but our marriages are not 'arranged' for us in America. We
+choose for ourselves."
+
+The visitor seemed surprised. She raised her long, high brows and looked
+from Stainton to Muriel.
+
+"How then," she enquired, "you choose for yourself a man so much older?"
+
+"I say he is _not_ much older, not any older," said Muriel, despising
+herself for having fallen into such a discussion, yet unable, in an
+alien language, to disentangle herself.
+
+"But madame is a mere girl," said the visitor, seeking only to be
+polite.
+
+"And my husband is young also," declared Muriel.
+
+Something in the tone of this repetition convinced the French girl that
+the subject was not further to be pursued. She essayed another tack.
+
+"And the babies?" she asked. "Is it that you brought with you the
+babies?"
+
+Muriel's cheeks warmed again, and she looked away.
+
+"We have no children," she responded, shortly.
+
+"No children?" The visitor plainly considered this unbelievable. "You
+have no little babies? Then, why to marry?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Not one?"
+
+"We have none."
+
+"But how unhappy, how unfortunate for monsieur! Perhaps soon----"
+
+"We have been married only a short time."
+
+"Ah!" The French girl seemed to rest upon that as the sole reasonable
+explanation. "Then," she said with a note of encouragement in her tone,
+"it is not without hope. After a while you will have the babies."
+
+Muriel was angry. She looked to Jim for rescue; but Jim was still
+leaning over the rail, engrossed in the spectacle presented by the
+dancers.
+
+"I do not want any children," said Muriel, suddenly.
+
+"No children? You wish no children?" gasped her inquisitor. "You choose
+to marry, and yet you want no children? But why then did madame marry?"
+
+Muriel rose.
+
+"For reasons that you cannot understand," she said. "We must go now,"
+she added; and she touched Jim's arm. "Come," she said to him; "let's
+go, Jim."
+
+Stainton turned slowly.
+
+"What's the hurry?" he asked.
+
+"It must be after one o'clock," said Muriel.
+
+"But we are in Montmartre."
+
+"Yes--and we have still a great deal of it to see before daylight, I
+believe."
+
+Jim rose.
+
+"All right," he said.
+
+The girl put out her hand.
+
+"_S'il vous plait, monsieur_," she said: "_la petite monnaie_."
+
+Stainton had tried to take the extended hand to bid its owner
+good-night, but he noticed, before she began to speak, that it was
+turned palm upward.
+
+"What's this?" he enquired of Muriel.
+
+"My cab-fare," said the visitor in French, and Muriel, vaguely
+appreciating the fact that here was another custom of the country,
+translated.
+
+"Give her a five-franc piece," she said. "Something of the sort is
+evidently expected."
+
+"So I have to pay her for the privilege of buying her champagne?"
+laughed Jim. "Ask her what I _am_ paying for. I am curious about this."
+
+"No," said Muriel.
+
+"Do," urged Stainton.
+
+But the girl appeared now to comprehend. She was not embarrassed.
+
+"In brief," she explained, "for my time."
+
+"You pay her," Muriel grudgingly translated, "for her time. But," she
+concluded, "I wouldn't pay her much, Jim."
+
+"So that's it!" chuckled Stainton. "Oh, well, I don't want to seem
+stingy after all this discussion of it."
+
+He handed her a ten-franc louis.
+
+The girl's eyes caught the unexpected glint of gold.
+
+"Oh, la-la-la!" she gurgled, and, with what seemed one movement, she
+pocketed the money; drank to Jim's health; flung her arms about him with
+a sounding kiss on his mouth, and ran giggling through the
+folding-doors.
+
+Stainton, tingling with a strange excitement and looking decidedly
+foolish, gazed at his wife.
+
+"What do you think of that?" he choked.
+
+Muriel stood before him trembling, her black eyes ablaze.
+
+"How _dared_ you?" she demanded.
+
+"_I?_" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth did _I_ do?"
+
+"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.
+
+"But, my dear, _I_ didn't do anything. It was the girl----"
+
+"You permitted it."
+
+"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid.
+And she meant it as a compliment."
+
+"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."
+
+"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter
+that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."
+
+"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you
+couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."
+
+He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of
+which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most
+gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they
+went.
+
+They climbed the crowded stairs and paused for a moment in the doorway,
+while Jim began to divest himself of his overcoat. Muriel, ahead, was
+looking into the elaborate room.
+
+Pale green and white it was and loud with laughter and music, with the
+popping of many corks and the chatter of persons that seemed to have no
+mission there save the common mission of enjoyment. In the centre was a
+cleared space, and there, among handsomely appointed tables, the white
+waistcoated men and radiantly-gowned women loudly applauding, two
+Spanish girls in bright costumes were dancing the sensuous mattchiche.
+
+Muriel saw that, at one of the tables nearest the dancers, was a young
+man who applauded more enthusiastically than any of his neighbours. She
+saw that the girls observed this and liked it. She saw one girl, with an
+especially violent embrace, seize her partner, hold her tight for an
+instant, release her, and then, dashing to the young man, extend her
+arms, to which the young man sprang amid the tolerant laughter of his
+companions. Muriel saw the Spanish girl and the young man continue the
+dance.
+
+Quickly she wheeled to her husband.
+
+"I don't want to go in here," she said.
+
+"What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded.
+
+She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the
+room, in the position that he had thus far maintained.
+
+"I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the
+stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well."
+
+She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced
+to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat.
+
+In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between
+sobs, to kissing him.
+
+"I love you!--I love you!" she cried.
+
+The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+WORMWOOD
+
+
+When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through
+which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed,
+often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried
+lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing
+gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to
+return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply,
+bidding her sleep and not bother.
+
+Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that
+opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps
+this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but
+Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of
+his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his
+hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he
+cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the
+turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected
+of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.
+
+Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes
+and gladly let him go.
+
+On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he
+was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal
+of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked
+down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that
+he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to
+smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He
+knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their
+surmise and the truth.
+
+He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to
+Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every
+fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours
+more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round
+tables on the sidewalk outside a corner cafe. Only one of them was in
+use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a
+closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner
+was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and
+his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other
+customer.
+
+A dirty waiter appeared from the cafe and shuffled forward, adjusting
+his apron.
+
+"_B'jour, monsieur_," the waiter mumbled.
+
+Stainton did not return this salutation.
+
+"_Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau_," he ordered.
+
+He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago.
+He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter
+would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the
+boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.
+
+The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the
+little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink,
+put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the
+glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself
+after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an
+afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.
+
+The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress
+toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind
+inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with
+the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their
+work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their
+play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys
+shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim
+by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the
+papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles;
+the girls annoyed him most because they would call one another's
+attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these
+people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been
+doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their
+own hearts; but Jim hated them all.
+
+He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage,
+went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but,
+when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he
+found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.
+
+Was _M. le medecin_ in? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he
+doubted if _M. le medecin_ could as yet receive monsieur. It was early,
+and _M. le medecin_ rarely saw any patients before--
+
+Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before
+the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily
+bade him enter.
+
+"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and
+as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's
+hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, _hein_? Did
+the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not
+my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what
+is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend?
+Sit."
+
+The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and
+pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner
+Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiene Sociale,"
+Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier,
+Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits,
+there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling
+ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and
+there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a
+memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his
+back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.
+
+Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample
+mouth were contracted.
+
+"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something
+else. I dare say it's not--not much. I know that these things may be the
+merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical
+weariness, or--or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does
+like to have a physician's assurance."
+
+Boussingault peered through his bar-bound _pince-nez_. He began to
+understand.
+
+"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe
+before the _dejeuner_."
+
+Stainton tried to smile.
+
+"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life,"
+he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I
+took it on an empty stomach."
+
+The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.
+
+"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"
+
+"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but----"
+
+"But you do not come here to pass the time, _hein_?"
+
+"No, doctor."
+
+"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his
+shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take
+absinthe for the second time in your life."
+
+He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's
+nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had
+come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared
+to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be
+founded.
+
+"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you--you
+met my wife last evening."
+
+Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.
+
+"What then?" he inquired.
+
+"What do you think of her?"
+
+"I think that she is very charming--and, M. Stainton, very young."
+
+It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with
+significance.
+
+"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk
+even to my physician of--of certain intimate matters; but"--he glanced
+at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf--"from the titles
+of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within
+the limits of your specialty."
+
+He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he
+could find a suitable one, his vis-a-vis, looking him straight in the
+eyes, had settled the matter:
+
+"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should
+drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of
+excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He
+paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded,
+"she is how old?"
+
+Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his
+anxiety to protect himself.
+
+"She is nearly nineteen."
+
+"Eighteen, _bien_. And you?"
+
+Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the
+arms of his chair.
+
+"Before I married," he said, "only a very short time before I married, I
+had myself looked over carefully by one of the most eminent physicians
+in New York. He assured me that I was in perfect physical condition,
+that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact----"
+
+Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.
+
+"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, your _biceps
+flexor_. How many years are you alive?"
+
+"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand----"
+
+"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"
+
+"On the contrary."
+
+"And your age?"
+
+Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.
+
+"Fifty," he belligerently declared.
+
+Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.
+
+"_Vous voila!_"
+
+"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand----"
+
+"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is
+it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl
+of eighteen----"
+
+"But I have lived a careful life!"
+
+"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are
+moderate drinkers."
+
+"I drink no more than you."
+
+"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."
+
+"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.
+
+"La-la-la!"
+
+"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely
+abstemious."
+
+It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant
+effort to speak as if he did not.
+
+"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."
+
+Stainton rose.
+
+"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.
+
+Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled
+the more knowingly.
+
+"Yet you are here," said he.
+
+Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to
+leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he
+showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.
+
+"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as
+restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl----"
+
+"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come
+to consult me."
+
+"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression--all my life
+of--of----"
+
+Boussingault rose at last. He came round the desk and, with a touch of
+genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.
+
+"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he
+comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!'
+The old roue, he comes to me and says--the same thing. We all some day
+curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of
+merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on
+one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it
+with regard to no man."
+
+"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."
+
+"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"
+
+"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.
+
+The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.
+
+"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but
+even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make
+him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt,
+I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her
+young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself
+with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts--you try to live
+downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not
+possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is
+not cruel. It is not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the
+beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps
+time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember
+your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now--Poof!
+It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to
+quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her
+respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us.
+Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this
+prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more.
+You must yourself rest."
+
+He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and
+handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same
+strain, as before.
+
+"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been
+easier."
+
+"In a little while?"
+
+"There will be a child."
+
+Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.
+
+"What?" he said. "And you--you----Thousand thunders, these Americans
+here!"
+
+At this Stainton himself grew angry.
+
+"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."
+
+"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to the ceiling. "Hear him! 'It is
+far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the
+great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the '_Avis Important_'
+he there has posted on the door."
+
+It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain
+and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had
+been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried
+by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame
+Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had
+been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more
+exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of
+maturity.
+
+"A week," he said, patting Stainton's broad, straight back. "One little
+week. We must ourself sever from the so charming lady for so long, for
+we know that, ultimately, an absence will work for even her good. Is it
+not, _hein_? But the not-knowing profound of mankind! Incredible! Truly.
+Nine-tens of my women patients, they are married, who of themselves know
+not half so much as the savage little girl of ten years. And the men,
+they I think no more wise."
+
+Stainton passed through the now crowded waiting-room and into the sunlit
+street in a mood that wavered between rebellion and submission. He
+walked to the Chatham and, once arrived, walked past the hotel. He did
+this twice, when, with the realisation that he hesitated from fear of
+Muriel, he mastered his timidity and entered.
+
+His wife was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, but Stainton knew that
+she was not asleep. He went to her and kissed her.
+
+"Muriel," he said, "I am going to Lyons."
+
+She did not open her eyes.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"I think that I ought to go," said Stainton, "and clean up this matter
+of the sale. I shall get the American consul there to recommend a good
+lawyer, and I'll complete the whole transaction as soon as I can."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It will probably take an entire week," pursued Stainton. He waited. "I
+don't like to leave you alone in Paris, but you'd be frightfully lonely
+in Lyons, and I shall be busy--very busy. Now, I know you don't like
+Boussingault. I don't like his opinions myself, but he is a leading man
+in his specialty, and his wife is a good woman. She has said that she
+will call on you this afternoon and take you to stay with her."
+
+Muriel was silent.
+
+"That's all," said Stainton, "except that there is a train from the Gare
+de Lyon at noon, and I ought to take it."
+
+"Then you have been to Dr. Boussingault?" asked Muriel.
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"And he----"
+
+"He said the--the change was what I needed."
+
+He busied himself packing a bag. At last he came again to the bed and
+bent over her.
+
+"Good-bye," he said.
+
+She raised her lips, and he strained her to him. He did not trust
+himself to say more, and he was grateful to her for her refusal to ask
+any further question. She kissed him, her eyes unopened. All that he
+knew was that she kissed him.
+
+Muriel lay quiet for some time. Then she got up and dressed and
+shuddered when she looked at herself in the mirror, and tightened her
+stays. Yet she dressed carefully before going out for a long walk.
+
+In the Tuileries Gardens she watched the gaily costumed maids and wet
+nurses with their little charges. She saw a woman of the working class,
+who was soon to be a mother. She looked away.
+
+She hailed a passing cab.
+
+"Drive me to the Boulevard Clichy," she said in French.
+
+The driver nodded.
+
+Muriel entered the cab. She had an important errand.
+
+Late in the afternoon she returned to the Chatham and left it with a
+suitcase in her hand. She told the unsurprised clerk at the _bureau_
+that her rooms were to be held for her, but that she would be absent for
+five days.
+
+"If anyone calls," she said, "you will say that I have gone to Lyon with
+monsieur."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+RUNAWAYS
+
+
+Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better
+spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly
+his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that
+Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to
+be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from
+congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he
+announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before
+received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her
+normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below
+the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.
+
+Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the
+day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to
+meet him, and he embraced her warmly.
+
+"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to
+have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's
+good to be with you again!"
+
+"What wire?" asked Muriel.
+
+"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come
+here."
+
+"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."
+
+"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to
+have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back
+here."
+
+"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me
+before those strangers."
+
+"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our
+two selves--just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now,"
+he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his
+knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my
+reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is
+gone--going, going, gone--and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri
+Duperre Boussingault et Cie., for----I told you the figure, didn't
+I--_our_ figure? Isn't it splendid?"
+
+"I am glad," said Muriel.
+
+"You don't really object?" he asked.
+
+"Why should I? Of course I am glad."
+
+"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell
+it."
+
+"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember--but you showed me how foolish that was."
+
+He laughed happily.
+
+"I am a great converter," he said. "If you could only have heard me
+converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel--and mostly
+through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and
+you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."
+
+"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."
+
+"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little
+brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"
+
+"Yes, Jim."
+
+"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On
+Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and
+there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on
+a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked
+that?"
+
+"I should----" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.
+
+"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were
+the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind?
+Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you
+wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you
+didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the
+Boussingaults."
+
+Muriel sat upon his knee.
+
+"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.
+
+"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.
+
+"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.
+
+"But, dearest, how--What?--Where were you? You mean to say that you
+stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and
+sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.
+
+"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did
+you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"
+
+Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I--Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"
+
+"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then
+you never got my letters?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Muriel! And you pretended--Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She
+said she would call the afternoon that I left."
+
+"I suppose she did."
+
+"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see
+her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"
+
+"I didn't see her. I left word at the _bureau_ that I was out. I left
+word that I had gone to Lyons with you."
+
+"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking
+right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would
+know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that
+you weren't with me."
+
+She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.
+
+Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.
+
+"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and
+were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a
+fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand,
+dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel----"
+
+"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.
+
+"I was. Yes, I was."
+
+"You are the best man in the world, only--only----"
+
+"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt,
+dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"
+
+"I had to."
+
+"Out of consideration for me."
+
+"No."
+
+"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and
+so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought for
+anything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave,
+lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in
+your condition!"
+
+She drew from him.
+
+"Jim----" she said.
+
+"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.
+
+"But, Jim----"
+
+"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults.
+Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell
+him."
+
+"Don't tell him, Jim."
+
+"We'll see; we'll see."
+
+"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him
+again."
+
+"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."
+
+"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am--I dare say I am
+as bad----"
+
+"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not.
+Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in
+the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or
+interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and
+soon"--he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child--"in
+a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."
+
+"Don't!" said Muriel.
+
+But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.
+
+"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am
+going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear
+of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly
+always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make
+a tour of the shops."
+
+She lifted her face with a troubled smile.
+
+"I have everything I want," she said.
+
+"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared
+to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."
+
+"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."
+
+"All?" smiled her husband.
+
+"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already
+that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them.
+You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."
+
+"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad
+you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get
+some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those--some little
+things--some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival
+of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know
+I am."
+
+Muriel's voice faltered.
+
+"So soon----" she said.
+
+"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city
+where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come
+along."
+
+She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after
+shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes.
+She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she
+endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed
+her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which
+he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as
+he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop
+clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as
+this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the
+approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last
+broke down and fainted in their _taxi-metre_.
+
+The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.
+
+"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept
+long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"
+
+"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."
+
+"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."
+
+They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains
+and stood looking out upon a grey day.
+
+"I don't want to think it over," she said.
+
+"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."
+
+"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I
+want to go to-day."
+
+"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed
+it.
+
+"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been
+like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."
+
+He softened.
+
+"Aren't you well?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.
+
+"Don't call me that," she said.
+
+"Why not, Muriel?"
+
+"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim----" She put her
+hand in his--"I'm horrid, I know----"
+
+"You're never that!"
+
+"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired
+of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can
+pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."
+
+Again Muriel took refuge at the window.
+
+"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."
+
+"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"It'll be cold, dear."
+
+"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm
+weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."
+
+She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make
+arrangements. In an hour he was back.
+
+"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of
+mail sent on as far as Neuchatel. We can get a train in forty-five
+minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a
+ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English--and here are the tickets.
+Can you be ready?"
+
+She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly
+distracting journey.
+
+The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their
+train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard,
+then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over
+fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white
+strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without
+deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel
+and emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old
+red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel
+would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church
+would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the
+tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier
+and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward
+and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds
+about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchatel with the white Sentis to
+the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.
+
+But a day at Neuchatel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted
+to move on. She made enquiries.
+
+"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor
+was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.
+
+"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly
+protested.
+
+"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done
+almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no
+business and nothing else to do."
+
+So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne,
+through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg,
+past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of
+Koenigsfelden, where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary
+had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by
+John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden
+and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to
+Zurich.
+
+They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of
+their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on
+their way to the Gross-Muenster, Muriel said:
+
+"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here.
+Let's go on to-morrow."
+
+It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.
+
+"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back
+to the hotel this minute and lie down."
+
+She would not hear of that.
+
+"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe
+Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you
+know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"
+
+Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon
+the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her
+unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than
+he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.
+
+"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself down to sleep, eight hours
+later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few
+real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."
+
+Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to
+loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.
+
+"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."
+
+"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"
+
+"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"
+
+"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."
+
+"We've seen it, haven't we?"
+
+"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to
+Innsbruck."
+
+Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the
+door.
+
+"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to
+know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed
+and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.
+
+"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am
+about done up."
+
+Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan
+to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that
+Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded
+Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruins of Graephang and, on the
+great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.
+
+Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of
+their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring
+moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer,
+saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had
+the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last
+there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a
+sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.
+
+"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte
+and Twain and Do-_nel_li."
+
+"Our what?" asked Jim.
+
+"Please?"
+
+"I didn't catch that last name."
+
+"Donelli--Ignatius Donelli."
+
+"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly--yes."
+
+"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know
+of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"
+
+The Austrian left the train just before they reached the
+six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight
+after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:
+
+"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"
+
+Muriel moved uneasily. Von Klausen's name had not been mentioned more
+than twice between them since they had left the _Friedrich Barbarossa_.
+
+"Why, no," she answered.
+
+"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."
+
+"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."
+
+Stainton reflected.
+
+"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed
+rather to neglect us in Paris."
+
+"_My_ Austrian? Why mine?"
+
+"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"
+
+"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."
+
+He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to
+quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all
+Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.
+
+Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the
+Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then
+across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by
+way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale
+spring sunshine and where, in roles of gallants to the fashionable
+ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of
+light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel
+said that the women were dowdy and their escorts effeminate; she
+scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the
+copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediaeval
+roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene
+Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the
+Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb
+of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."
+
+Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton
+was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf.
+So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure
+these things--and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.
+
+Muriel was again in tears.
+
+"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."
+
+"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear.
+Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."
+
+"But I'm tired of looking and waiting--we've been doing that ever since
+we went away. Let's go back to Paris."
+
+Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she
+had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them
+both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions--and now
+she wanted to go back to Paris!
+
+"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.
+
+"I know; but now it will be spring there--real spring--and everyone says
+that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."
+
+"Yet the climate----"
+
+"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."
+
+"Do you think"--Stainton put his hand upon hers--"do you think that you
+can rest there: really rest?"
+
+"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak
+a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful.
+I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German,
+either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been
+hurrying--hurrying--hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"
+
+"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked
+sixty years old.
+
+"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that
+pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know _what's_ the matter with me;
+but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back
+home."
+
+This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more
+quartered at the Chatham.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+"NOT AT HOME"
+
+
+"A gentleman to see madame."
+
+The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the
+barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four
+hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up"
+at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris,
+there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's
+nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of
+Captain von Klausen.
+
+"I am not at home," said Muriel.
+
+"Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added:
+"This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that
+madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and
+it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed
+disappointed."
+
+"I am not at home," repeated Muriel.
+
+This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself
+out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat
+wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the
+sitting-room again opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen
+downstairs and had brought him along.
+
+In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and
+his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it.
+Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an
+air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed
+utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had
+Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have
+protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young
+fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a
+schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented
+Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.
+
+Nevertheless, Muriel was annoyed. She was annoyed lest they had fallen
+in with the servant, which they had not done, and been told that she was
+out. She was annoyed with Jim because he had brought to call upon her a
+man that, only a few days before, she had told him she disliked. And she
+was distinctly annoyed with von Klausen.
+
+Yet the interview passed off pleasantly enough. Jim was never the man to
+observe under a woman's conventional politeness, even when that
+politeness was ominously intensified, the fires of her disapproval, and
+von Klausen, if indeed he saw more than the husband, at least appeared
+to see no more. He remained to tea.
+
+"Why on earth did you bring _him_ here?" asked Muriel as soon as the
+door had closed on the Austrian.
+
+"Why, did you mind?"
+
+"I told you that I didn't like him."
+
+"I know, but you didn't seem to mind."
+
+"I managed not to be rude to your guest, that's all. Jim, you must have
+remembered that I said I didn't like him."
+
+"Yes, I do remember," Stainton confessed; "but the fact is that I
+brought him because I couldn't very well get out of bringing him. He was
+so extremely glad to see me that I couldn't merely drop him in the
+lobby."
+
+"How did he know that we were here?"
+
+"I told him on the boat that we were to stop here."
+
+"But we have been and gone and returned since then."
+
+"Then I suppose he found us out in the same way that Boussingault did:
+in the hotel news of the _Daily Mail_."
+
+"Well, you might have told him that I wasn't at home. That's what I told
+the servant when his card was sent up."
+
+"Yes, Muriel, I might have tried that, and, as a matter of fact, I did
+think of it; but then he would have hung on to me downstairs, and I knew
+you would be lonely up here without me."
+
+Muriel turned away to observe herself in a long mirror.
+
+"You know I don't like him," she repeated.
+
+"Yes, yes, dear, but what was I to do. Besides, he is really a very good
+fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you
+have for your prejudice?"
+
+"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she
+hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's
+generally good ground for it."
+
+"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a
+mere boy."
+
+"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than
+I am."
+
+"Are you so very aged, my dear?"
+
+"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."
+
+Stainton kissed her.
+
+"Well said," he declared; "your young husband has been so weather-beaten
+that he has been a pretty poor sort of spouse lately. We won't worry any
+more about von Klausen."
+
+Yet to worry about von Klausen they were forced. They seemed, during the
+next ten days, to meet him everywhere, and he was always so polite that
+his invitations could not be contumeliously refused. He took them to
+the opera and to supper afterwards, and they, at last, had to ask him to
+dine.
+
+It was in the midst of this dinner at Les Fleurs that Stainton, begging
+his guest's pardon, glanced at a letter that had been handed him as he
+and Muriel that evening left the hotel.
+
+"Hello," he said, "these French business-men are not so slow, after all.
+They have drawn the final papers, and I am to sign them to-morrow."
+
+He turned to Muriel.
+
+"So," he said, "I shall have to break our agreement this once, Muriel,
+and leave you alone for the morning. Will you forgive me?"
+
+Muriel smiled.
+
+"I'll try," she said.
+
+"You won't be bored?"
+
+"Oh, I'll be bored, of course, but I shall make the best of it."
+
+"Permit me," interposed von Klausen, "to offer my services to Mrs.
+Stainton."
+
+"Your services?" asked Muriel.
+
+"To occupy you during your husband's absence. It is unendurable to think
+of you as wholly deserted--is it not, sir?"
+
+The Austrian was addressing Jim. Stainton and his wife exchanged a quick
+glance. Jim was thinking of her expression of dislike for the Captain;
+Muriel was annoyed because her husband had neglected to read his letter
+before they joined von Klausen: she was in the mood for revenge.
+
+"Oh, she'll make out," said Stainton. "Won't you, Muriel?"
+
+"I don't know," replied Muriel. "It will be very dull."
+
+"Then I renew my offer," said von Klausen.
+
+"But, Captain," protested Jim, apparently blind to everything but his
+wife's prejudice, "we couldn't think of imposing on you."
+
+"An imposition--Mr. Stainton! How an imposition? A privilege, I assure
+you, sir."
+
+"But your duties at the Embassy?"
+
+"One can sacrifice much for one's friends, Mr. Stainton; as it
+fortunately happens, I shall be all at liberty to-morrow morning. The
+spring is come upon us early. It will, I am sure, be delightful weather.
+If Mrs. Stainton will permit me the pleasure of driving her through the
+Bois----"
+
+"Thank you," said Muriel. "You are very kind. I'll go."
+
+Stainton looked perplexedly at his wife.
+
+He did not, however, again broach the matter until they were safely in
+their own rooms at the hotel and were ready for bed.
+
+"I hope you'll forgive me," he at last said.
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For getting you into that confounded engagement with young von
+Klausen. It was stupid of me. I don't know how I ever blundered into
+it."
+
+"It's of no consequence. I dare say I can stand him for once."
+
+"Of course you can, dear. Still, I know how you dislike the Captain, and
+so I hope you'll pardon----"
+
+"Nonsense," yawned Muriel. "Don't think about it any more. And do turn
+out the light. I'm awfully sleepy."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+IN THE BOIS
+
+
+That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely
+begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and
+so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the Foret de Rouvray and the
+Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets
+and the Champs Elysees, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic
+commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman
+seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and
+turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence
+fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the
+horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.
+
+"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.
+
+Muriel hesitated.
+
+"Why?" she enquired.
+
+"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the
+most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality
+of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you
+have been good enough to visit."
+
+His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to
+contradict him. She looked out at the Lac Inferieur, with its shaded
+banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in
+imitation of a Swiss _chalet_. She was resolved to prefer this to his
+Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the
+Austrian Tyrol as his own.
+
+"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.
+
+"Better? But--why?"
+
+"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and
+inviting."
+
+"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen,
+smiling.
+
+He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself
+fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain
+turned to the driver.
+
+"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.
+
+There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the
+undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.
+
+"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."
+
+Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."
+
+"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after
+your return from your visit to my country."
+
+"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said
+this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her
+companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have
+not been thinking much about you one way or the other."
+
+"I am sorry," said von Klausen.
+
+"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."
+
+"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."
+
+"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.
+
+"Yes."
+
+She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at
+his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.
+
+"How dared you?" she gasped.
+
+"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a
+reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."
+
+"Well, you shan't know."
+
+"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to
+plead in his own defence?"
+
+"You are not accused--and you aren't judged."
+
+"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how
+is that possible?"
+
+"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"
+
+"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none.
+Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To
+accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in
+another of them."
+
+Muriel bit her red under-lip.
+
+"Let us go back," she said.
+
+"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."
+
+They walked a few steps forward.
+
+"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.
+
+"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are
+presumptuous."
+
+"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."
+
+"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."
+
+"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."
+
+"What nonsense!"
+
+"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret,
+madame."
+
+Muriel's eyes flashed.
+
+"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident
+that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."
+
+Von Klausen bowed.
+
+"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to
+the reference."
+
+"I did not."
+
+"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close
+acquaintanceship."
+
+"I required nothing--and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was
+the merest trifle."
+
+Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.
+
+"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to
+your husband."
+
+She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky
+cheeks were aflame.
+
+"How low of you!" she cried.
+
+But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.
+
+"To mention the truth?" he murmured.
+
+"To bring up such a trifle--to trade on such a confidence--to make of an
+impulsive action and of the consequences of that action--you know--I
+told you at the time, and you must know--that I didn't mention the
+circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been
+to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you
+would not want your terror known."
+
+"Ah--so you did think of me, then?"
+
+"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."
+
+They were now half-way along the Lac Inferieur. Under the arching trees
+in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring
+morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the
+Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling
+companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his
+blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.
+
+"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched
+my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always--think of me deeply. I
+cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must
+listen. I tell you now, once and forever--I tell you----"
+
+Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise
+understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there
+was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly
+unloosed--the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite
+of all the hampering harness of convention--and she was undeniably
+curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain
+sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory
+knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this
+soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage
+and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been
+goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion
+against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent
+opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something
+else--something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the
+young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of
+ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of
+elaborately conceived convention.
+
+Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the
+last, it will have its word.
+
+"Stop!" said Muriel.
+
+Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.
+
+"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do
+not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only
+a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and
+slowly; now----"
+
+Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically
+Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the
+Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence
+for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.
+
+Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was
+evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her
+soul--and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful
+consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the
+moment before.
+
+She raised a trembling hand.
+
+"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as
+ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would--I believe
+he would kill you."
+
+Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but
+the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands
+fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.
+
+"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some
+phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no
+man that lives."
+
+"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered:
+"afraid and ashamed."
+
+"Not afraid."
+
+"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the
+splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way.
+Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."
+
+It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result.
+Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so
+deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley
+in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he
+did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and
+the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was
+somehow inexplicably true.
+
+Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him.
+His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he
+was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.
+
+Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could
+not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was
+doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the
+result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty
+had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak
+began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth
+which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard
+his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.
+
+"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself
+murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry--very sorry. We will never
+speak of it again--not to ourselves--and not to anybody else."
+
+"But we shall be friends?" he asked.
+
+"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was
+before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his
+manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had
+previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will
+never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a
+herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.
+
+When one is young such promises are lightly made.
+
+"Never," he vowed.
+
+"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this
+affair to me?"
+
+"Never again, dear lady."
+
+"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in--in that
+way."
+
+He pressed her hand ever so slightly.
+
+"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."
+
+"But the thoughts are wrong."
+
+"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I
+cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only
+master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The
+good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he
+has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions.
+I shall remember always his words."
+
+She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and
+their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them
+to fall, upon trivial things.
+
+"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the
+subject of her fevered trip with Jim.
+
+"We didn't get anywhere near it. I--we were in a hurry to get back to
+Paris. We--we thought it would be warmer in Paris."
+
+"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"
+
+"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we
+crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had
+driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came
+right back here."
+
+"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it.
+It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world
+goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit
+at a table before one of the cafes, of an evening in summer or of a
+Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebiere or the rue
+Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime--you and
+your husband."
+
+"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and
+I."
+
+"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and
+more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons
+seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."
+
+She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.
+
+"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has
+sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau--the particular point
+that I mean--a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are
+set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises
+almost to the clouds. Nearly at its top, a precipice below and a
+precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That
+cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelene spent, in penance,
+the last thirty years of her life."
+
+He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.
+
+Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.
+
+"You have been there, then?" she asked.
+
+"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers
+and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot--the silent chapel; the long,
+fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to
+the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below,
+and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE CALL OF YOUTH
+
+
+That evening there came the beginning of the end.
+
+The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with
+preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate
+any sort of fete of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had
+not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von
+Klausen had promised his two American friends, the _grand boulevard_
+would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the
+Madelaine.
+
+"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with
+Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to
+luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The
+streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be
+masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."
+
+He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of
+the dull routine of the Embassy.
+
+Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own
+part, though she told herself religiously that she had done no wrong,
+she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and
+kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been
+preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm
+over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she
+glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.
+
+"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.
+
+"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention
+had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description
+of the evening before the fete. If he felt somewhat worn from the now
+unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome
+this chance for novel amusement.
+
+"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our
+pilot, Captain?"
+
+Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.
+
+"If," he said, "you will do me the honour--you and Mrs. Stainton--to
+dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot
+and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the
+boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no
+alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of
+her drive this morning?"
+
+Jim, too, looked at Muriel.
+
+"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the
+Austrian's.
+
+Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.
+
+"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This
+juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."
+
+"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the
+signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the
+movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all."
+He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."
+
+"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during
+the remainder of the afternoon----"
+
+"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not
+stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with
+her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to
+face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own
+thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely
+knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to
+waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious
+if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every
+minute. You _are_ sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"
+
+Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by
+motoring to Versailles and back."
+
+So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in
+time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odeon and dined on
+_croute consomme_, _filet_ of cod, and _canard sauvage a la presse_.
+After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than
+he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.
+
+When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from
+the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had
+predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from
+house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and
+threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as
+riotously happy as only a fete-day crowd in Paris can be.
+
+Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue
+Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of
+merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of
+confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue
+Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton
+was lost.
+
+They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood
+on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on
+this side, and again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered
+their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and
+though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away,
+Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts,
+he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.
+
+Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the
+fete-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel
+began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.
+
+"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said--and, as he had to bend to
+her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a
+loose strand of her dark hair--"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall
+find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."
+
+"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in
+order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her
+fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man
+grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll
+go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves--at once--at once!
+Call a cab."
+
+Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her,
+bending to her ear.
+
+"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far--if you are not too tired?"
+
+"No, no, I'm not too tired--or I won't be if we can only hurry."
+
+They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.
+
+"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are
+afraid--of me?"
+
+His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine
+sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't----"
+
+"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this
+morning."
+
+"_Not afraid_--even then. And now--well, I remember the talk we had
+afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."
+
+Again his lips were near her neck.
+
+"I shall never forget it," he vowed.
+
+Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her
+words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she
+dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed.
+She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they
+had reached the hotel.
+
+"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they
+met.
+
+The servant thought not.
+
+"Ask at the _bureau_."
+
+Stainton had not yet come back.
+
+"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be
+better that we await him in your sitting-room."
+
+Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the
+hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now
+a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor
+errors--perhaps the greatest--that they inspire us with the fear that
+the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had
+never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her.
+She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than
+withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world
+would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with
+the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she
+became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted
+eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not
+precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method
+of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been
+roused.
+
+"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the
+servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will
+say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my--in the
+sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."
+
+For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on
+their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen
+shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this
+silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her
+wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It
+was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and
+she sought refuge in platitude.
+
+"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she
+added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."
+
+"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."
+
+There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish
+than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes
+narrowed.
+
+"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.
+
+"Only what has happened to us. He--I think he will be here soon."
+
+Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that.
+She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence.
+She wished devoutly that Jim would return.
+
+"It--it is rather close here," she said.
+
+"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes
+from her. He did not move.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "Will you--will you be so good as to open the
+window?"
+
+He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice,
+and he turned to the window.
+
+The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to
+draw them from the glass. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between
+them. Then something went wrong with the knob that controls the bolt. He
+shook the knob. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a
+tinkle of falling glass.
+
+Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was
+trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.
+
+"You are hurt?" she cried.
+
+Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.
+
+"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."
+
+The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.
+
+"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.
+
+She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the
+knuckles--a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white
+fingers and marked them with a bright stain.
+
+That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had
+begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature;
+the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black
+hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm
+and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things
+they had never seen before.
+
+Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with
+electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.
+
+The circuit was complete.
+
+"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.
+
+From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a
+voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:
+
+"I love you!"
+
+She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond
+reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when
+they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips,
+in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast
+there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to
+the force in her own true being.
+
+"But--but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.
+
+Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.
+
+"But Jim----You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is
+far, far too good for either of us."
+
+Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost
+merry kiss.
+
+"He need never know," said the Austrian.
+
+She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.
+
+"You--you----" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could
+never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"
+
+It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.
+
+"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"
+
+"Go!"
+
+Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She
+pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with
+hate and shame.
+
+"Go!"
+
+"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."
+
+"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the
+word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across
+her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"
+
+"But, Muriel----"
+
+"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring
+for the servants."
+
+"Muriel----"
+
+"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again,
+I'll ring."
+
+He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave
+him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He
+shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.
+
+Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination,
+Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried
+to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which
+only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into
+the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the
+window.
+
+Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his
+day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the
+boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.
+
+"Muriel!" he cried.
+
+She opened her heavy eyes.
+
+"Jim!"
+
+He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father
+strokes the hair of his weary child.
+
+"My poor little girl!" he said.
+
+Had she thought at all coherently about his coming, she had not meant
+to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had
+occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth,
+or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him
+while he did that.
+
+"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you
+anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought--I hardly
+know what I thought."
+
+"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached
+for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"
+
+Muriel started.
+
+"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's----" She
+laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It
+stuck--the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his
+wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the
+pieces from the floor."
+
+She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to
+her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of
+marital ethics.
+
+After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to
+draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of
+deception. Truth became impossible.
+
+She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible it became, the more
+bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that
+she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her
+relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration
+of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen
+had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far
+below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy
+against her lover and heightened her affection--call it love as she
+would, it would now be no more than affection--for Jim. She wanted to
+tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that
+barred her way.
+
+She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.
+
+"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."
+
+At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood
+had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for
+motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.
+
+"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is
+really no reason for you to worry."
+
+She did not look up, but she shook her head.
+
+"I am not," she repeated.
+
+He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her
+cheek, which her hands left bare.
+
+"There, there," he said.
+
+At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.
+
+"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."
+
+He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.
+
+"What--what----" he stammered.
+
+"O, Jim!" she cried.
+
+"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What--how? When? You don't
+mean----"
+
+"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.
+
+Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control
+himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his
+reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy
+of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he
+began again:
+
+"You don't mean----"
+
+"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"
+
+He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the
+edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its
+fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite
+Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.
+
+"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey
+brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"
+
+Her head sank lower in her hands.
+
+"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."
+
+"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You
+must know! How did this happen?"
+
+Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her
+only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her
+breast.
+
+"Answer me!" he demanded.
+
+She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her
+face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into
+a sheet.
+
+"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a
+drive. Coming back--here at the hotel--I fell from the cab--getting out.
+I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor--_not_
+Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said
+it was easy--They said I would be all right in a week.--I thought I
+was--But I have suffered--O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't,
+please, think----"
+
+She crashed to the floor at his feet.
+
+Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers
+while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their
+mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony
+that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He
+stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head
+against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to
+murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.
+
+Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.
+
+"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew
+it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have
+had rest, and instead----Why didn't you tell me? Why?"
+
+"I was afraid," she said, simply.
+
+"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"
+
+Her words were a fresh stab.
+
+"Yes. I knew how much you wanted----And I was afraid."
+
+"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me
+what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."
+
+"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the
+place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time,
+perhaps----Only now--oh, take me away!"
+
+"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to
+our own country. Back home."
+
+But at that she shuddered.
+
+"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than
+Paris. Don't you see? We left there happy, expecting----Not there. No,
+I couldn't bear that."
+
+Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking
+her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand,
+brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.
+
+She drew the hand from him.
+
+"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."
+
+"It is--there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk
+about getting away."
+
+"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we
+were in Italy."
+
+"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell
+you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."
+
+"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not
+anything I have said about it?"
+
+"Not that. I don't know. Something before that----"
+
+"Because you lost me in the crowd?"
+
+"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the
+boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I--I don't
+like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."
+
+He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both
+that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in
+unfamiliar surroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are
+familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be
+remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those
+which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.
+
+New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would
+do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris
+and different from New York.
+
+"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.
+
+She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to
+be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It
+was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her
+effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.
+
+The next morning they left for Marseilles.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+OUR LADY OF PROTECTION
+
+
+For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel,
+because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to
+the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however,
+was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned
+and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the
+Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by
+taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road
+beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had
+ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing
+that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.
+
+"Let's take it," said Muriel.
+
+She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of
+hotels.
+
+"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may
+want to be getting back home when--when all's well again."
+
+"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are
+willing to pay them a little more than they would ask on a long lease,"
+Muriel serenely assured him.
+
+Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a
+small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it
+to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at
+once.
+
+They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their
+rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of
+fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of
+business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for
+the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for
+Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because
+she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to
+banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to
+which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own
+reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It
+annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her
+shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put
+roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders
+and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for
+excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she
+was heartily sorry for Jim.
+
+It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to
+press once more the question of their return to New York. They were
+sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their
+villa, and were looking over the blue bay.
+
+"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"
+
+His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have
+thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to
+see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.
+
+"Perhaps," she granted.
+
+On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out
+the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill
+on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern
+monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open
+elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed
+the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which
+stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.
+
+The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a
+quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of
+storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of
+the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other
+ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at
+the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers
+answered or to the making of other prayers.
+
+"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping
+before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused,
+"that these people wanted."
+
+Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.
+
+"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."
+
+His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.
+
+"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."
+
+"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in
+here."
+
+"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze
+out there."
+
+"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."
+
+Muriel's lips tightened.
+
+"Very well," she said.
+
+She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled
+to the side overlooking the bay.
+
+Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a
+panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping
+in the _vieux port_, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed
+houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from
+the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the Cite Chabas
+and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point,
+where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in
+terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From
+dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas
+on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue;
+the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the
+waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of
+land where towers the Chateau d'If.
+
+She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The
+breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen
+below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape--of a
+landscape of which she had only heard:
+
+"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away;
+the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the
+distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and
+was saved."
+
+"Muriel!"
+
+It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and
+had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner
+serious.
+
+"How did you come here?"
+
+The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her
+weapons of defence.
+
+"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning
+after you departed--because I had to see you, whether you wished me or
+not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and
+they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your
+hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on
+the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come
+here."
+
+His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her
+poise.
+
+"How dared you come?" she asked.
+
+"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.
+
+"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."
+
+"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."
+
+"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"
+
+"You must." He came nearer to her.
+
+"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she
+demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."
+
+"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that
+you have told him nothing."
+
+She eyed him menacingly.
+
+"Are you so sure of that?"
+
+"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told
+him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."
+
+"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider
+me?--But of course you don't!"
+
+"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have
+come to say--perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear
+that I should cause you annoyance----"
+
+"You annoy me now."
+
+"But if you have not told him----Well, what I have to say is my excuse.
+If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste
+in saying it."
+
+He moved still nearer.
+
+"I have told him," she said.
+
+"No."
+
+"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes,
+her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.
+
+"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said
+von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to
+tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied.
+I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I
+have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was
+in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I
+know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence
+from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do
+not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that
+word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now--now, _ach_, I know I
+love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred
+as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in
+your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my
+punishment--for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and
+I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still
+be hopeless."
+
+She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it
+rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the
+cold.
+
+"Hopeless?" she repeated.
+
+"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes
+of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."
+
+She remembered her teaching in the convent school.
+
+"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.
+
+"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact,
+you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."
+
+She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning
+the corner of the promenade.
+
+"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything.
+Wait. There will be another chance for us: I must have one word alone
+with you before--before----"
+
+"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our
+lives."
+
+The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.
+
+"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see
+you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive
+glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.
+
+Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to
+the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience
+with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so
+the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The
+Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself
+altogether at the best.
+
+"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been
+homesick for a long time without knowing."
+
+"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little
+dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"
+
+"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have
+one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we
+are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that
+both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."
+
+"Then you are returning soon?"
+
+"Three weeks from to-day."
+
+Muriel looked at Jim.
+
+"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.
+
+"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed,
+didn't we, dear?"
+
+She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She
+could only nod.
+
+"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not
+mention it to me when we met to-day."
+
+"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled
+pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."
+
+She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a
+departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in
+three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious
+manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there
+were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her
+were not the sense of her deception of him.
+
+"I forgot," she said.
+
+"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing,
+my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the
+Captain for a few minutes with his _dubonais_. We have an outside
+stateroom on the upper deck of the _Prinzess Wilhelmina_, and we sail
+from Genoa."
+
+He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the
+southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced
+another surprise.
+
+"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains
+to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here
+until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."
+
+This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.
+
+"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."
+
+"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's
+not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you
+had to to run right off to dress, you know."
+
+"Why must you go?"
+
+"Those French purchasers again."
+
+"I thought you were through with them."
+
+"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they
+have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I
+wrote to them and fixed a price on that."
+
+"You don't mean that you tricked them?"
+
+"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of
+doing business."
+
+"You didn't say you had written them."
+
+"My dear, when do I bore you with business affairs?" Stainton turned to
+von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But
+perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening
+and see that she is not too much depressed."
+
+Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately
+shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he
+was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone
+there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and
+she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house.
+Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and
+the Austrian left without naming his hotel.
+
+When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing,
+although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company.
+She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:
+
+"Why are you going away to-morrow?"
+
+Jim was surprised.
+
+"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"
+
+"Then I think you might have told me when _he_ wasn't here."
+
+"My dear, you gave me no chance."
+
+"And you booked passage back, Jim?"
+
+"Passage home, yes."
+
+Muriel's mouth drooped.
+
+"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.
+
+He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked
+searchingly into hers.
+
+"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"
+
+"I know, Jim, but I never promised----"
+
+"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."
+
+He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how
+to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that,
+within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in
+France or America.
+
+"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want
+to leave early. We had better go to bed."
+
+She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to
+Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet
+she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule
+never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded
+that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent,
+and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and
+watched him climb aboard his train.
+
+She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried
+to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none.
+As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more afraid. When
+nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew
+afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed
+him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown
+into her drawing-room.
+
+"You shouldn't," she said--"you shouldn't have come!"
+
+Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young
+and handsome.
+
+"Why not?" he asked.
+
+"Because of Jim."
+
+"He invited me."
+
+"Yes, I know, but----" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted
+her fingers.
+
+"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."
+
+"He was queer. His manner--I don't know. Only I had not promised to go
+home in three weeks."
+
+"No?"
+
+"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"
+
+Von Klausen smiled.
+
+"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"
+
+"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons
+and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."
+
+"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of
+business. I know that; surely you should know it better."
+
+"That business wasn't like him."
+
+"It was very--shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself.
+Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married
+man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife
+in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once
+more!'"
+
+She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this
+was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa,
+the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare
+shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.
+
+The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the
+walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half
+hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say
+good-bye forever.
+
+Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la
+Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love
+for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had
+asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the
+characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love
+for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether.
+This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not
+have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at
+all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and
+of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he
+had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more
+than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one
+might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon
+a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.
+
+They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet
+Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.
+
+"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now
+think of as so right might end by being very wrong."
+
+"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be
+right."
+
+"Not the ruin of our lives?"
+
+"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your
+husband's----"
+
+"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't
+honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is
+good and kind and brave; but somehow--I don't know why: I don't know
+why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did
+love him."
+
+"Nevertheless, you are married to him."
+
+"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when----"
+
+"A divorce is always wrong."
+
+"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the
+marriage a real one?"
+
+"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of
+any faith is binding."
+
+"But marriage is a contract."
+
+"Marriage is a sacrament."
+
+They would get so far--always darting down this byway and that of
+casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against
+the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom--and then she would come back
+to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her
+great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from
+taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile,
+and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one
+in a passion of abnegation.
+
+But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it
+must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued
+proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung,
+with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding
+interview.
+
+In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.
+
+Muriel started.
+
+"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling
+bell.
+
+"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.
+
+They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in
+that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of
+man.
+
+Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind
+rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the
+Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.
+
+"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"
+
+With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He
+told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they
+occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as
+passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to
+chastity.
+
+To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past
+seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded
+it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force
+balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim
+had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had
+once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving
+how much stronger was her hold on him.
+
+"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her
+hand.
+
+They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment
+more and they would go on, forever, apart.
+
+He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with
+pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan
+Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer,
+fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her
+wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high,
+curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were
+damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars.
+He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled
+her in his arms.
+
+It was then that Stainton entered the room.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+HUSBAND AND WIFE
+
+
+They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each
+was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the
+door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one
+glance. Each turned toward the husband.
+
+Stainton smiled heartily.
+
+"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed
+her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see
+you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you.
+But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your
+country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."
+
+"When----" began Muriel.
+
+"I got as far as Montelimart when they caught me with one of their blue
+telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have
+to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what
+train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles
+and landed at Lyons before I heard that--I wasn't wanted."
+
+Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Muriel had been on the verge
+of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian,
+nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to
+court it quite another.
+
+"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored
+your good wife."
+
+"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my
+good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"
+
+Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last
+distinctly to say:
+
+"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."
+
+"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.
+
+"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.
+
+"You have said, sir, that it is late."
+
+"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."
+
+The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.
+
+Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the
+drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left
+her.
+
+"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an
+explanation."
+
+She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his
+approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.
+
+"Don't touch me!" she cried.
+
+She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely,
+what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual role of fond
+protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even
+pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she
+could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened
+by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there
+cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.
+
+Jim stopped short.
+
+"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well,
+you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to
+me!"
+
+Tradition always shows us the wronged husband in a towering rage, in the
+throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for
+either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife
+the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of
+their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is
+contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his
+senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to
+pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to
+her.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" he asked.
+
+Muriel sat down.
+
+"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"
+
+"About my trip to Lyons?"
+
+"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."
+
+"I have some right, I think, to come home."
+
+"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an
+'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"
+
+"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has
+been in my mind for some time."
+
+"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your
+suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at
+the first?"
+
+"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"
+
+"Love affair? There has been no love affair."
+
+Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he
+stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.
+
+"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't
+for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"
+
+Muriel was silent.
+
+"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I
+tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that
+night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the
+Spanish dancer----"
+
+Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames
+of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved,
+with an upward motion, slowly around her.
+
+"You saw that!"
+
+"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and,
+naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe
+what it was."
+
+The wife fought for her self-control and won it.
+
+"Deceit! Deceit even then!"
+
+"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did
+not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris--and I
+understood later why you wanted to go back."
+
+He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.
+
+"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your
+illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did
+not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy,
+too, there came the night of the fete. I could tell when von Klausen and
+you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the
+air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the
+boulevards: I separated myself from you."
+
+He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once
+beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.
+
+"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to give me a fair chance?
+You threw me into his arms--or tried to--and you call that a fair
+chance?"
+
+Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which
+clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he
+smiled quietly.
+
+"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger;
+your love for me--or failing your love, your moral strength--need not
+assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself
+to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."
+
+"You coward!"
+
+"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be
+a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full
+opportunity. Otherwise the fear--a very small one then--would have
+continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives,
+his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."
+
+"You dare to say that!"
+
+He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the
+room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing
+its point.
+
+"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is
+that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all
+upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went
+on, "a woman compromises herself with X, at least after she has become
+a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself
+with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only
+exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner
+or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y
+and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their
+personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though
+this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she
+should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has
+managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a
+few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."
+
+Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks
+were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the
+low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a
+lightning-flash on a darkened sea.
+
+"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she
+declared.
+
+He raised a steady hand.
+
+"Only a moment more, please," he said.
+
+Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:
+
+"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I
+took you away from Paris again--the next day, wasn't it?--because you
+wanted to go, but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen
+was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am
+by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian
+turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I
+decided to make an end of it. Now"--he spoke as if he were concluding an
+affair of business--"I have made that end."
+
+"How have you made that end?"
+
+Stainton smiled wanly.
+
+"My dear----" he said.
+
+"Don't call me that."
+
+"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you
+are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."
+
+"How have you made an end?"
+
+"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."
+
+"You mean that you think--that you dare to think that I--that the
+Captain and--that we----"
+
+"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know.
+Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the
+preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this
+house----"
+
+"At your invitation!"
+
+"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained
+alone with you in this room until after midnight--I say, given all
+these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I
+wanted--the evidence of seeing you in his arms--no man in his senses
+would for one moment doubt----"
+
+"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her
+disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.
+
+"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say----"
+
+"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will
+never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You
+unclean-minded old man!"
+
+He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.
+
+At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own
+high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been
+so long festering in her mind--at first unguessed, then vehemently
+denied, but always there and always becoming more and more
+poisonous--the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned
+to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in
+a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had
+achieved maturity.
+
+"Now you listen to me," she commanded.
+
+Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.
+
+Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its
+back and leaned across the back toward her.
+
+So they stood, facing each other.
+
+"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible
+alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and
+hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and
+trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to
+hope--actually to hope!--for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young,
+and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one
+minute your wife."
+
+Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.
+
+"You were a good imitation," he said.
+
+"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife,
+anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and
+couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real,
+so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what
+was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what
+you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an
+admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was
+it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And
+me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house,
+and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"
+
+"For a time you were a good imitation."
+
+"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I
+tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I
+soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things
+would change, that they were so bad they must change--and they
+wouldn't."
+
+"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper
+lip.
+
+"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't
+you remember, at the very start, how I _said_ I wanted to be honest? But
+somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened,
+seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why
+does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie,
+and so all we did was lies and lies."
+
+"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."
+
+"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to
+give--not what I gave you--not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What
+was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you
+always _knew_ that _you_ had all _you_ wanted. Well, you had. But did
+you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as
+a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I
+sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let
+myself be married to a man three times my age--and this is Nature's
+punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and
+then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger,
+and because I _was_ hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that
+was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"--she
+flashed it out at him--"what happened to me while you were selling the
+mine was not an accident!"
+
+This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger
+and horror struggled for him.
+
+"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean----"
+
+"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that
+girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and
+I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that
+I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to
+have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't
+want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think
+I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the
+time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go
+crazy--_crazy_! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother
+against my will!"
+
+He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her
+deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely
+done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:
+
+"You loved him--then?"
+
+"I didn't love you."
+
+"Did you love him?"
+
+"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied
+to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But
+then, when I did _that_ thing, I only knew what I've told you."
+
+Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself,
+but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the
+door.
+
+Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.
+
+"But I love him now," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.
+
+"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing--nothing. I was no
+more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so
+little, were fit to be my husband."
+
+Stainton half turned.
+
+"And he?" Jim asked.
+
+"He loves me: you only liked having me."
+
+He turned slowly away again.
+
+She thought that she heard him whisper:
+
+"No child!"
+
+"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost
+everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a
+baby, a little dead baby. It will never leave me: it's the little
+ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."
+
+He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of
+going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an
+hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a
+candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face.
+One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with
+him. She was right; he was growing old.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+HUSBAND AND LOVER
+
+
+At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and
+flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling
+clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.
+
+"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or
+less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me,
+I----"
+
+"But, monsieur----"
+
+"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."
+
+"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."
+
+"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried
+to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion
+flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
+
+"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."
+
+"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"
+
+"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to
+monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."
+
+Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed to him and, as the maid
+left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth
+time when the domestic reappeared.
+
+"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.
+
+"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his
+question.
+
+The maid presented a card.
+
+"Show Captain von Klausen up here," said Jim.
+
+A moment later, husband and lover stood alone together.
+
+"Good-morning," said Stainton.
+
+He held out his hand, and von Klausen, after a swift hesitation, took
+it.
+
+The Austrian's expression was disturbed. He was unshaven. It was obvious
+that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. The sight seemed, somehow,
+to restore his host's self-confidence.
+
+"You will please to pardon for this early intrusion----" von Klausen
+began.
+
+Stainton smiled.
+
+"You are always so pleasant, Captain," he said, "that you never intrude.
+Besides, the earlier the better. As it happens, I was just this moment
+thinking of you."
+
+Von Klausen bowed. There was a brief pause, the Austrian's blue eyes
+wandering about the room in an endeavour to escape Stainton's glance,
+and Stainton's eyes fastened thoughtfully upon the Austrian.
+
+"Well?" asked the husband.
+
+Von Klausen coughed.
+
+"Madame is--is----" he started, but stopped short.
+
+"You asked for me. Did you expect to find her up at this time of day?"
+
+"Oh, no--no: certainly not. Pardon me. I forgot the hour."
+
+"Ah, you often forget the hour, don't you, Captain?"
+
+The Austrian braced himself. He raised his chin defiantly. He met the
+issue directly.
+
+"You refer," he asked, "to my late call of last evening--yes?"
+
+"More or less. I am rather curious about that call."
+
+"Sir, there is nothing about it to excite your curiosity. You asked me
+to call. There is nothing of my call that you may not learn from your
+wife."
+
+"No doubt. Of course not; but it may be that I prefer to ask you."
+
+Von Klausen was in a corner. Anger he could have met with anger, but
+here was something that he did not comprehend.
+
+"I can answer no question," he said, stiffly, "that you have not asked
+of Mrs. Stainton."
+
+"How do you know that I haven't asked her?"
+
+"I do not know that you have."
+
+"You are sure of that?"
+
+"What do you wish to say, Mr. Stainton?"
+
+"I mean: are you sure that you haven't seen her since you left here last
+night?"
+
+The Austrian's face expressed a bewilderment that Stainton could not
+mistrust.
+
+"How is that possible?" inquired von Klausen.
+
+"Oh, of course!" Stainton, convinced, shrugged his shoulders. "However,
+I do want to make a few inquiries of you."
+
+"Then I prefer to wait until your wife descends, so that you may make
+them in her presence."
+
+Stainton still held in his left hand the letter that Muriel had
+addressed to him. He tapped it upon the knuckles of his right hand.
+
+"I am afraid," he said, "that I can't conveniently wait so long. Captain
+von Klausen, are you in love with my wife?"
+
+The Austrian rose precipitately. His blond moustache bristled.
+
+"Sir!" said he.
+
+"I merely wanted to know."
+
+"At your question I am amazed, sir."
+
+"Oh, I really had a good reason for asking."
+
+"In my country no reason suffices for such a question."
+
+"Hum. Well, you see, neither my wife nor I belong to your country, and
+you are not in your country now. However, there is no need for you to
+get excited, Captain. I am sorry if I seem to have intruded on your
+confidence with a lady; but, to tell you the truth, as my wife has
+admitted that she is in love with you, I was not unnaturally somewhat
+curious to discover whether you reciprocated her affection."
+
+Von Klausen's eyes protruded. This husband was, obviously, mad. He might
+have been driven mad by his discovery. The discovery seemed a thing
+accomplished. With a great in-taking of breath, the Austrian made
+answer:
+
+"You have loved your wife. Why should _I_ be ashamed to say that I love
+her?"
+
+If von Klausen expected an explosion, he was disappointed.
+
+"Well," said Stainton, calmly, "that is one way of looking at it."
+
+"Please?"
+
+"Never mind. You say you love her?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Stainton looked at him narrowly, from under heavy brows. He regularly
+tapped his knuckles with the envelope.
+
+"For a day?" he asked.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"I mean: is this a world-without-end business so far as you are
+concerned, or is it one of your little amusements by the way?"
+
+The Austrian clenched his teeth.
+
+"Do you mean to insult me, sir?"
+
+"I assure you that I mean nothing of the sort."
+
+"Then you insult your wife!"
+
+"Not at all. I am sorry that you should suppose I could think ill of
+her."
+
+"If you do not think ill of her, you have no right to ask such a
+question as this which you have asked."
+
+"It's not impossible that I should be a trifle interested, you know."
+
+"I cannot understand, sir, how you can have the calmness----"
+
+"Why not? She is my wife, you see. What I want to know is whether you
+are genuinely, sincerely in love with her. You know what I mean. As
+between man and man now: is this a for-ever-and-ever affair with you?"
+
+The Austrian's bewilderment found vent in a long sigh.
+
+"It is," said he.
+
+"Good," said Stainton. He thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets
+and bent forward. "If I let her get a divorce from me, will you marry
+her?" he asked.
+
+"Do you make a joke?"
+
+"I don't consider this a joking matter, Captain. I ask you a frank
+question and I want a frank answer."
+
+Von Klausen doubted his ears, but he replied:
+
+"I would desire nothing better, but my faith forbids."
+
+"You're sincere in that?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"I mean about your faith, you know."
+
+"Whatever else may be charged against me, sir, heresy or infidelity may
+not be charged."
+
+"Have a cigar," said Stainton.
+
+He produced his cigar-case, gave the Austrian a cigar, held a steady
+match while his guest secured a light, and then, with a cigar between
+his teeth, began to walk rapidly up and down the room, puffing quietly,
+his hands clasped behind his back.
+
+"Look here," he said. "I am the kind of man that lives to look ahead and
+prepare for all contingencies. I do not always succeed, but I see no
+harm in trying. Well. When I first began to think about this thing, I
+said I would be prepared for the worst, if the worst came. I remembered
+your prejudices, and I had a fellow do some research work for me at the
+Bibliotheque Nationale, and yesterday I spent some time in the seminary
+library at Avignon. My dear fellow, you haven't got a leg to stand on."
+
+"No leg?"
+
+"Not in your objections to divorce and remarriage."
+
+"The Church----"
+
+"Was founded by, or at any rate pretends allegiance to, Jesus of
+Nazareth. Now, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said--it's not
+certain--something that may seem to bear out your theories; but that
+something which may be twisted to your way was said just about two
+thousand years ago to a small, outlying, semi-barbarous province. Are
+you going to try to apply it to civilisation to-day?"
+
+The Austrian had philosophically seated himself in the chair against
+which Jim had leaned the night before.
+
+"I apply the Sermon on the Mount," said von Klausen.
+
+"Do you? I didn't think you did. But we'll pass that. Your faith bases
+its argument on the interpretation of that text made by the Early
+Church, and the Christian Fathers interpreted it in just about two dozen
+different ways."
+
+"So?" said von Klausen: he would humour this lunatic.
+
+"In the first place, at the beginning of the Christian Era marriage in
+Rome was a private partnership that the parties could dissolve by mutual
+consent, or by one notifying the other, as in any other partnership;
+that was part of Roman law, and for centuries neither the Church nor its
+Fathers disputed that law. In all the history of the first phase of
+Christianity in Rome you can't find one time when the whole Church
+accepted the idea that marriage was indissoluble. Once or twice the
+Church tried to get the law to require the Church's sanction before
+decree of divorce would be legally valid, but that was not a denial of
+divorce; it was a recognition and an endeavour to capture the control
+and exploitation of divorces."
+
+"That matters nothing," said von Klausen. "These things were determined
+otherwise. With all my heart I wish not, but they were."
+
+"How? The Church began by having nothing to do with marriages. Weddings
+were not held in the churches and so of course marriage was not
+considered a sacrament. I can give you chapter and verse for everything
+I say. About the only early council that tried to interfere with the law
+was the Council of 416, or some time near that. It tried to make Rome
+abolish divorce, but no emperor listened to it till early in the ninth
+century--Charlemagne, and he practised divorce himself. Only a little
+earlier--I think it was in 870--the Church officially allowed
+dissolution of marriage. In the Middle Ages the episcopal courts allowed
+divorce and were supported by the popes."
+
+"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage
+indissoluble?"
+
+"I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the
+Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble, _anathema sit_. The
+Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the
+Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He
+shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do,"
+he said.
+
+"You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said.
+
+"I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed
+divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom
+tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so
+afraid of women that he--he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce
+for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was
+careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming."
+
+"St. Augustine is the authority in this matter."
+
+"And no one other person ever said so many contradictory things about
+it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs
+without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't
+condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery;
+in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in
+the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to
+bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take
+their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake."
+
+Stainton paused to relight his cigar.
+
+"But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage."
+
+"Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the
+other."
+
+Von Klausen shrugged.
+
+"Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after
+the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow
+him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in
+everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly
+blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her
+husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced
+person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was
+weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate
+the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation.
+Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more
+than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine
+himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it."
+
+The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual
+interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only
+intellectual.
+
+"It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted;
+"it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a
+sacrament."
+
+"Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an
+act of the flesh?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then how can what is done by the flesh be a sacrament?"
+
+"I do not know. I know that it is. The Church, whether early or late,
+has spoken and it has said that marriage is a sacrament indissoluble
+save by the death of the husband or the wife."
+
+Stainton put down his cigar.
+
+"Captain," he said, "you are in earnest, aren't you?"
+
+The Austrian flushed, but did not flinch.
+
+"I am," said he.
+
+"You love her?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Truly?"
+
+"With heart and soul, both."
+
+"And there is no changing your faith?"
+
+"No way."
+
+"There isn't any short-cut, any quick trail over the mountain, any
+bridle-path? A fellow cannot get an Indulgence--nothing of that sort?"
+
+"I wish--I wish deeply that one might; but--no."
+
+"No," said Jim with a little sigh, "I suppose not nowadays. I looked
+that up, too. Public opinion is pretty strong, and as wrong as usual."
+He seemed to shake the subject from him. "And," he ended, "now that I
+have bored you with my cheap pedantry, I remember that I have been a bad
+host: I have not asked you your errand."
+
+What change was coming over the madman now?
+
+"My errand?" asked von Klausen.
+
+"Exactly. You come here at about 9 A.M., and I take up your valuable
+time with a discussion of ecclesiastical polity. What was it that you
+wanted to see me about?"
+
+What the Austrian had wanted he had long since learned. He had no sooner
+left the villa on the night previous than he began to doubt whether his
+supposition that Stainton was unsuspicious was quite so well founded as
+he had at first imagined. He recalled a certain constraint in the
+husband's deportment, and then he imagined other tokens that had not
+been displayed. In the end, he decided to return to Muriel's home at the
+earliest possible moment, discover whether there were any real danger
+and, if there was, face its consequences. Now, however he learned that
+Muriel had made some sort of confession to Stainton and that Stainton
+had received that confession in a manner inexplicable to von Klausen.
+Confronted with Jim's abrupt question, he did not know what to say, and
+so he found himself saying:
+
+"I should like to see Mrs. Stainton."
+
+Stainton whistled.
+
+"I wish you could," he answered. "Indeed, indeed, I wish you could, my
+boy; but I am sorry to say that it is out of the question."
+
+"You forbid it?" Von Klausen wished that these confounded Americans
+could be brought to see the simplicity of settling complex difficulties
+by the code of honour.
+
+"I didn't say that I forbade it; I said it was out of the question. I
+meant that it was out of the question."
+
+The Austrian bent forward, hot anger in his eyes.
+
+"Do you dare to deprive her of her liberty?" he asked.
+
+"On the contrary, my dear sir, she has taken her liberty. She has gone
+away."
+
+The thing seemed incredible to von Klausen:
+
+"Away from Marseilles?"
+
+Stainton nodded.
+
+"That's it," he agreed.
+
+There shot through von Klausen's mind the thought that this lunatic had
+killed her. If so, he would surely kill the lunatic or be killed in the
+attempt.
+
+"I don't believe it," he said. "I believe that you are----"
+
+"Captain von Klausen, I have learned all that I want to know about your
+religious faith, and I am not in the slightest degree interested in the
+question of your other beliefs. I say to you that my wife has gone away,
+and I am afraid that, whether you like it or not, you are obliged, for
+the present, to accept my word."
+
+"I will not accept your word!"
+
+"Pardon me, but I don't see what else you can very well do. Of course,
+you might watch the house, but the Corniche gets very hot by midday."
+
+"You joke. You can joke about such a thing!"
+
+"I have never been so serious as I am now."
+
+Stainton emphasised his words with a gesture of his left hand, in which
+he held the now crumpled letter.
+
+"That letter!" said von Klausen with sudden inspiration. "It is from
+her!"
+
+"It is."
+
+"Ah, you have intercepted a letter from her to me!"
+
+"I am not in the habit of reading my wife's personal letters to other
+people--when she writes any. This note is addressed to me, and it is
+this note that tells me of her departure."
+
+"It tells you where she is going?"
+
+"It tells me that and more. It tells me that she is sorry for a wound
+she thinks she has inflicted on my feelings, and she proposed to look
+for rest in a certain secluded place."
+
+The Austrian's blue eyes brightened.
+
+"A secluded place?" he repeated, excitedly.
+
+"Exactly; but I shall not tell you its name. I shall keep that to myself
+until I have had another interview with my wife."
+
+The Captain looked closely at Stainton.
+
+"You mean to follow and chastise her?" he asked.
+
+"There," said Stainton, quietly, "I think we reach a point where the
+matter becomes entirely my own affair."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+THE MAN AND HIS GOD
+
+
+If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very
+small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:
+
+"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus
+(5 fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) Gemenos to the (4 hrs.)
+Hotellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the
+(51/2 M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad
+road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the Hotellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on
+the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, 3/4 hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of
+the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees--The Ste.
+Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen
+retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is
+still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the
+mountains among which it lies."
+
+So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or
+else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists
+spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which
+hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen's last
+residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant
+had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the
+earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it
+might quite as well be across the celestial border.
+
+Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had
+written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking
+reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.
+
+The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died
+away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to
+have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the
+difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning
+herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her
+because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy
+which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.
+
+She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but
+she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with
+his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before
+recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least
+won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before,
+assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised
+herself to him in that long ago and far away New York--how tall and
+strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master,
+of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed
+her to his breast--how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure
+that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed
+her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of
+such short life?
+
+In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand
+little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point
+its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to
+him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in
+character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her
+anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement,
+as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of
+any physical contact with him made her shiver.
+
+Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She
+was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a
+sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it
+could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as
+his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral
+rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?
+
+Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her primal impulses
+she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage
+trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding,
+wanted to hide and suffer alone.
+
+She had some money in her purse--a thousand francs. She wrote the note
+to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that
+she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes
+and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram
+to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.
+
+It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind
+a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas,
+they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged
+mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became
+sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only
+thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes,
+looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath
+her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the
+gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view,
+only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to
+gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer
+precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed
+to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that showed
+even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they
+rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide
+plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came,
+among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hotellerie that had for many
+years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of
+its builders.
+
+They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid
+sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell
+of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church
+inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.
+
+A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon
+her knees and prayed.
+
+She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after
+her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.
+
+She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a
+gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill
+became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn
+path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant
+boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since
+they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags
+above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached
+at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of
+smooth rock that leaned far forward from the clouds as if it were about
+to fall.
+
+Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting
+steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of
+the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted
+natural balcony, was the grotto.
+
+Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were
+open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of
+the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the
+cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an
+irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the
+low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primaeval forest,
+to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered
+von Klausen's words:
+
+"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the
+snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant
+sheep-bells, and the memory----"
+
+She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.
+
+He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see
+that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she
+noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.
+
+"You followed?"
+
+He nodded briefly.
+
+"Why did you follow me?" she asked.
+
+It was fully a minute before he regained his breath; but when he spoke
+he spoke calmly and gently.
+
+"I came," he said, "to say some things that I should have said last
+night."
+
+Muriel braced herself against the parapet.
+
+"Very well," said she.
+
+He understood her.
+
+"I don't mean to scold you, dear," began Stainton.
+
+His eyes regarded her wistfully, and she turned away, glancing first
+over the precipice where, below them, the treetops tossed and then up,
+far up, straight up, to the awful height of sheer cliff overhead where,
+somewhere just beyond her sight, there nestled, she knew, the little
+chapel of St. Pilon.
+
+"Why not?" she asked.
+
+"Wait and you will understand."
+
+She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear.
+She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as
+punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.
+
+"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry
+with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for,
+but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you--I promised to
+love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be
+loved, you deserve it. And yet I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come
+back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with
+you. If you want me to, we can start right away."
+
+But Stainton would not yet hear of that.
+
+"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps
+something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and
+heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor
+little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"
+
+"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"
+
+"I could never do that, Muriel."
+
+"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you--you, my husband--and I
+do--I do----"
+
+The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not
+utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:
+
+"You do love him?"
+
+She bowed her dark head in assent.
+
+"You are very sure?" he asked.
+
+"Very, very sure."
+
+"So that it was not"--he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to
+put the question--"it was not merely passion?"
+
+Muriel looked straight into his eyes.
+
+"It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only
+twice even so much as kissed him."
+
+Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to
+him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been
+baser.
+
+There was a long pause.
+
+"I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see."
+
+He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them.
+
+"And--von Klausen," he presently pursued--"you will let me ask it, won't
+you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure
+that his love for you is--is of the same sort that yours is for him?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"On the same evidence."
+
+"I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me."
+
+She gave a short cry.
+
+"Is he hurt?" she asked.
+
+"Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I
+didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by
+motor-bus, to learn--what I have learned; and to say--what I am about to
+say."
+
+"You told him where I was?"
+
+"I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving
+a note in which you told me that you were bound for a certain secluded
+spot to be alone."
+
+Muriel clasped her white hands in distress.
+
+"He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me
+of this place--told me only the other day in much those words."
+
+Stainton smiled a little.
+
+"I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should."
+
+"But he will follow!"
+
+"No doubt."
+
+"You--you--why do you speak so?"
+
+"He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably
+come the whole way by motor."
+
+"He will--he will! He will know that you have come----"
+
+"I told him that I meant to."
+
+"And he will think you mean to punish me----"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And--oh, don't you see?--he will come to protect me!"
+
+The husband again put his hand timidly upon her arm.
+
+"My dear," he said, "that is just what I wanted him to do--and what I
+feared he might not do if I told him that I wanted it. The worst thing
+about this whole tragedy is that it is unnecessary, a quite useless
+tragedy. I've thought a great deal since you spoke out plainly to me,
+and I am beginning to see--even I, who wish not to see it--that you were
+not so far from right; for if man's stupidity hadn't devised for itself
+a wholly crooked and muddled system for the conduct of his life, this
+sort of now common catastrophe simply couldn't happen. Listen."
+
+He plucked at her sleeve, and she turned her pale face toward him.
+
+"All my life," he went on, "I've been afraid of two things: old age
+and--something else. Perhaps I've learned better in the last few hours.
+I've tried to learn that only the laws of man are horrible and bad and
+that no natural law can be, if we face it for what it is, either
+repellent or wrong. Before, I tried to be young. I trained myself to be
+young. I denied my youth, believing that I could strengthen and prolong
+it. I decided that youth was a state of mind--that it could be retained
+by an effort of the will. I postponed love with that in mind, and I
+postponed too long. Then, when I never doubted myself, I married you."
+
+He released her arm.
+
+"I married you," he continued; "and so, from sinning against myself, I
+began to sin against another. Much that you said last night was right. I
+have been selfish. I have robbed you of your youth, and I've given you
+nothing in return but what a man might give to spoil a child or to
+flatter a mistress. It wasn't a marriage. I see that now. The white heat
+of passion fused together two pieces of greatly differing metals, but
+when the passion cooled, the welding wouldn't hold: the joint snapped. I
+thought I could hold you. Hold you--as if that could be love which must
+be held! I took a low advantage of your ignorance of life. I came to
+you, who knew nothing, and said: 'I will teach you'--but--I was giving
+you the half-sunshine of the sunset when your just portion was the blaze
+of noon. I was keeping youth from youth."
+
+Her large eyes were tender with tears.
+
+"Do you mean it?" she asked. "Do you really mean--all this?"
+
+"As I never meant anything else in my life. I violated nature and must
+pay the price."
+
+Throughout all time and lands, he now felt, youth calls to youth,
+generation to generation, and not all the laws upon the statute-books of
+all the world can silence it.
+
+"I've thought that you were ignorant," he was saying; "perhaps you were
+wiser than I. You are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling it. I was
+the one that was ignorant. I was the one that was wrong."
+
+Out of sheer generosity, though her brain and heart cried assent to his
+every word, she tried to protest. But the youth in her heart clamoured
+that he was speaking truth.
+
+"And so," he concluded, "now that I am sure that you truly love each
+other, I mean to step aside."
+
+She looked at him blankly.
+
+"Step aside?" she repeated.
+
+"I mean to make what reparation is possible: I must."
+
+Muriel's face quivered.
+
+"So that I--that we----" she started.
+
+"So that you and von Klausen may marry."
+
+"But we can't anyhow! Oh--that's the horror of it! That's why the thing
+can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a
+sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."
+
+Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of
+pain.
+
+"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and
+now----"
+
+"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage----"
+
+"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am
+only wondering----"
+
+His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases
+of the colloquial.
+
+"Look there!" he broke off.
+
+Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the
+tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was
+bounding: fevered, lithe, young.
+
+Muriel clutched the parapet.
+
+"It's Franz!" she said.
+
+"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought
+I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the Hotellerie. He must
+have left the car there and come right on."
+
+"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what
+shall I do?"
+
+"See him, of course."
+
+"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll
+just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it
+all over again? I'm tired--I'm so tired!"
+
+Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not
+take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward
+translate into a good-bye.
+
+"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around
+to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."
+
+"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life--you've said so
+yourself."
+
+Stainton smiled.
+
+"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more
+appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of
+the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke
+enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this
+cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to
+Marseilles--Try it, Muriel--for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't
+pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never
+say die!"
+
+He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer.
+He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down
+the steps.
+
+She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young
+head and shoulders came above the steps.
+
+"Franz!" she cried.
+
+The Austrian hurried to her.
+
+Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led
+around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from
+his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep
+behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease
+with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the
+mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of
+bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously,
+his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the
+Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most
+men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from
+towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven
+by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of
+finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations: the
+sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was
+the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He
+was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St.
+Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that
+end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the
+death that he had all his life feared.
+
+He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the
+panorama of the Chaine de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles,
+from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full
+sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue,
+cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The
+summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices
+were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and
+there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or
+the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining
+half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke
+that was blue.
+
+He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single
+room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the
+edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the
+chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it
+and the drop; looked over and then instinctively fell on his knees and
+so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.
+
+He saw below him--far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue
+rock--the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of
+the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the
+parapet, the precipice continue to the primaeval forest, the trees of
+which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him.
+Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.
+
+He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open.
+He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father
+after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body
+below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed
+in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman
+thing....
+
+Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped
+down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around
+the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.
+
+He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed
+unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one
+argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried
+to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful
+was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that
+thought his thoughts lost all order. He recalled how happy he had been
+with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised
+that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the
+child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at
+the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to
+lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fortitude. His
+father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to
+live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean
+old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the
+affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was
+right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?
+
+He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that
+he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and
+like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly
+all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell--a foot, over a
+stone.
+
+He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.
+
+Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again
+to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he
+gained the edge, looked over----
+
+One little push would do it; one leap.
+
+His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocks before him until his
+fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in
+his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the
+chapel and to safety.
+
+He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure
+was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined.
+He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not
+die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back
+to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love,
+to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a
+woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine
+that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she,
+unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what
+Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he
+would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If
+passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an
+animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him
+detest each other.
+
+The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They
+must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an
+unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical
+immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a
+secret, a secret of which they might never rid themselves. He,
+unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and
+thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and
+loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that
+he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.
+
+He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain
+might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had
+so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in
+it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pass. He came down
+in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way
+on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.
+
+They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward
+them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von
+Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.
+
+"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly
+ridiculous."
+
+Stainton was thinking:
+
+"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I
+must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."
+
+What he said was:
+
+"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I
+had a little tumble."
+
+They both started forward.
+
+"Are you hurt?" they asked, and they asked it together.
+
+"No--no; I'm all right. Quite all right." He looked at Muriel. "You
+can't fix it up?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+He looked at von Klausen.
+
+"You"--he wet his lips with his thick tongue--"you won't change your
+prejudices?"
+
+The Austrian flushed.
+
+"I cannot change my religion," said he.
+
+Stainton clumsily drew his watch from his pocket.
+
+"Then," said Stainton, "you and I must be hurrying, Muriel. I'm sorry,
+Captain; but the bus leaves the Hotellerie in half an hour, and we've
+got to hurry to catch it. Good-bye. Muriel, come on."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+The CROWN NOVELS
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+HER SOUL AND HER BODY, by Louise Closser Hale
+
+The struggle between the spirit and the flesh of a young girl early in
+life compelled to make her own way. Exposed to the temptations of life
+in a big city, the contest between her better and lower natures is
+described with psychological analysis and tender sympathy. Absorbingly
+interesting.
+
+
+HELL'S PLAYGROUND, by Ida Vera Simonton
+
+This book deals with primal conditions in a land where "there ain't no
+ten commandments"; where savagery, naked and unashamed, is not confined
+to the blacks. It is a record of the life in the African tropics and it
+is a powerful and fascinating story of a scene that has rarely been
+depicted in fiction.
+
+
+THE MYSTERY OF No. 47, by J. Storer Clouston
+
+This is a most ingenious detective story--a thriller in every sense of
+the word. The reader is led cleverly on until he is at a loss to know
+what to expect, and, completely baffled, is unable to lay the book down
+until he has finished the story and satisfied his perplexity.
+
+
+THE SENTENCE OF SILENCE, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE," ETC.
+
+By "The Sentence of Silence" is meant that sentence of reticence
+pronounced upon the subject of sex. That which means the continuance of
+the human race is the one thing of which no one is permitted to speak.
+In this book the subject is dealt with frankly.
+
+
+THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE."
+
+The inexpressible conditions of human bondage of many young girls and
+women in our cities demand fearless and uncompromising warfare. The
+terrible peril that lingers just around the corner from every American
+home must be stamped out with relentless purpose.
+
+
+TO-MORROW, by Victoria Cross
+
+Author of "Life's Shop Window," etc.
+
+Critics agree that this is Victoria Cross' greatest novel. Those who
+have read "Life's Shop Window," "Five Nights," "Anna Lombard," and
+similar books by this author will ask no further recommendation.
+"To-morrow" is a real novel--not a collection of short stories.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+TO-DAY, by George H. Broadhurst and Abraham S. Schomer
+
+If you want real human interest, real heart throbs, be sure to read
+"To-Day."
+
+If you loved your wife and she committed the greatest wrong, would you
+forgive her?
+
+Get your answer in the sensational novel hit of the year.
+
+
+AT BAY, by Page Philips
+
+Who was the culprit?
+
+The police accused a prominent society girl, and Aline Graham herself
+thought she was guilty. This remarkable detective story unravels the
+mystery in a series of thrilling scenes.
+
+
+THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, by Owen Davis
+
+Sometimes a respectable father revolts from the bondage imposed upon him
+by an extravagant wife and family.
+
+Charles Nelson needed affection. Lacking it at home, he sought it
+elsewhere, thereby stumbling into a most amazing entanglement.
+
+
+THE SECRET OF THE NIGHT, by Gaston Leroux
+
+Rouletabille has returned! The hero of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room!"
+He appears again in the most successful mystery story of the year.
+
+
+THE APPLE OF DISCORD, by Henry C. Rowland
+
+Calvert Lanier, and his floating studio, obtrudes himself upon an
+exclusive summer colony and succeeds in kissing the three most exclusive
+and fairest members of the colony, and later, gets all at sea, in more
+senses than one, with two of them.
+
+
+RUNNING SANDS, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+In the skillful hands of the author this novel runs admirably and
+convincingly true to life; it reveals a depth of insight into human
+nature, a grasp of the real forces of life.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+SIMPLY WOMEN, by Marcel Prevost
+
+"Marcel Prevost, of whom a critic remarked that his forte was the
+analysis of the souls and bodies of a type half virgin and half
+courtesan, is now available in a volume of selections admirably
+translated by R. I. Brandon-Vauvillez."--_San Francisco Chronicle._
+
+
+GUARDIAN ANGELS, by Marcel Prevost
+
+"'Guardian Angels' is elegance and irony--and only for those youths who
+are dedicated to sex hygiene and eugenic lore."--_New York Times._
+
+A true picture of Parisian life with all its glitter and fascination.
+
+
+WHOSO FINDETH A WIFE, by J. Wesley Putnam
+
+Being an answer to Hall Caine's "The Woman Thou Gavest Me"
+
+Elizabeth Ferris marries without love. How she comes to a broader
+conception of life and to love her husband in time to prevent a tragedy
+is told in this story.
+
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF A NICE YOUNG MAN, by Aix. Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
+Up-to-Date
+
+A handsome young man, employed as a lady's private secretary, is bound
+to meet with interesting adventures.
+
+
+HER REASON, Anonymous
+
+A frank exposure of Modern Marriage. "Her Reason" shows the deplorable
+results of the process at work to-day among the rich, whose daughters
+are annually offered for sale in the markets of the world.
+
+
+LIFE OF MY HEART, by Victoria Cross
+
+How Love revenges herself on those who disregard her plainest promptings
+is the theme of this novel, full of humor, pathos, and fidelity to the
+facts of life.
+
+
+THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION, by Victoria Cross
+
+The self-sacrifice of woman in love. The heroine gives herself to a man
+for his own sake. He is her hero, her god, and she declines to marry him
+until satisfied that he cannot live without her.
+
+
+THE LAW OF LIFE, by Carl Werner
+
+Helen Willoughby is beautiful and attractive. Among her lovers there are
+two, both strong, both determined to win her, who presently enter into a
+bitter rivalry for her hand.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE LIFE SENTENCE, by Victoria Cross
+
+A beautifully written story, full of life, nature, passion, and pathos.
+A splendid vitality glows throughout this novel, whose characters are
+depicted with graphic intensity. "The Life Sentence" proclaims anew the
+author's power of insight into human nature.
+
+
+THE LURE OF THE FLAME, by Mark Danger
+
+"The book carries a lesson for women that all should learn.
+
+"It is the experience of one who abandoned the path of virtue.
+The downward path, at first attractive, was swift and fatal. The
+author has handled a difficult subject with great force and boldness
+and has eliminated much that is defiling without losing its
+effectiveness."--_Boston Globe._
+
+
+THE FRUIT OF FOLLY, by Violet Craig
+
+Throbbing with human emotion, this book is the record of one woman's
+mistake. The principal scenes are laid in present day New York, and no
+more powerful commentary on life in our big centers has been written in
+a long time.
+
+
+A WORLD OF WOMEN, by J. D. Beresford
+
+Romantic and dramatic are the situations in this novel. The book is like
+a dream-garden peopled with women of moving humanity who find themselves
+in a situation never before conceived. As a result, their impulses and
+emotions find vent in entirely original ways.
+
+
+THE WHIP, by Richard Parker
+
+Novelised from Cecil Raleigh's great Drury Lane melodrama of the same
+name.
+
+BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTURES PROM THE PLAY
+
+This big love story of English sporting society is crammed full of
+dramatic incidents. "The Whip" strikes an answering chord of sympathy
+and interest in every reader. England and America have voted it the big
+hit of the decade.
+
+
+ROMANCE, by Acton Davies
+
+The World's Greatest Love Story
+
+Based on Edward Sheldon's Play Fully Illustrated
+
+Filled to overflowing with the emotional glamor of love, "Romance" is
+the romance of a famous grand opera singer and a young clergyman.
+Despite their different callings they are drawn together by a profound
+and sincere love. In the hour of trial the woman rises to sublime
+heights of self-denial.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE DANGEROUS AGE, by Karin Michaelis
+
+Here is a woman's soul laid bare with absolute frankness. Europe went
+mad about the book, which has been translated into twelve languages. It
+betrays the freemasonry of womanhood.
+
+
+MY ACTOR HUSBAND, Anonymous
+
+The reader will be startled by the amazing truths set forth and the
+completeness of their revelations. Life behind the scenes is stripped
+bare of all its glamor. Young women whom the stage attracts should read
+this story. There is a ringing damnation in it.
+
+
+MRS. DRUMMOND'S VOCATION, by Mark Ryce
+
+Lily Drummond is an unmoral (not immoral) heroine. She was not a bad
+girl at heart; but when chance opened up for her the view of a life she
+had never known or dreamed of, her absence of moral responsibility did
+the rest.
+
+
+DOWNWARD: "A Slice of Life," by Maud Churton Braby
+
+AUTHOR OF "MODERN MARRIAGE AND HOW TO BEAR IT."
+
+"'Downward' belongs to that great modern school of fiction built upon
+woman's downfall. * * * I cordially commend this bit of fiction to the
+thousands of young women who are yearning to see what they call
+life."--_James L. Ford in the N. Y. Herald._
+
+
+TWO APACHES OF PARIS, by Alice and Claude Askew
+
+AUTHORS OF "THE SHULAMITE," "THE ROD OF JUSTICE," ETC.
+
+All primal struggles originate with the daughters of Eve.
+
+This story of Paris and London tells of the wild, fierce life of the
+flesh, of a woman with the beauty of consummate vice to whom a man gave
+himself, body and soul.
+
+
+THE VISITS OF ELIZABETH, by Elinor Glyn
+
+One of Mrs. Glyn's biggest successes. Elizabeth is a charming young
+woman who is always saying and doing droll and daring things, both
+shocking and amusing.
+
+
+BEYOND THE ROCKS, by Elinor Glyn
+
+"One of Mrs. Glyn's highly sensational and somewhat erotic
+novels."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+The scenes are laid in Paris and London; and a country-house party also
+figures, affording the author some daring situations, which she has
+handled deftly.
+
+
+THE REFLECTIONS OF AMBROSINE, by Elinor Glyn
+
+The story of the awakening of a young girl, whose maidenly emotions are
+set forth as Elinor Glyn alone knows how.
+
+"Gratitude and power and self-control! * * * in nature I find there is a
+stronger force than all these things, and that is the touch of the one
+we love."--Ambrosine.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE VICISSITUDES OF EVANGELINE, by Elinor Glyn
+
+"One of Mrs. Glyn's most pungent tales of feminine idiosyncracy and
+caprice."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+Evangeline is a delightful heroine with glorious red hair and amazing
+eyes that looked a thousand unsaid challenges.
+
+
+DAYBREAK: a Prologue to "Three Weeks"
+
+"Daybreak" is a prologue to "Three Weeks" and forms the first of the
+series, although published last. It is a highly interesting account of a
+love episode that took place during the youth of the famous Queen of
+"Three Weeks."
+
+A story of the Balkans, this is one of the timely novels of the year.
+
+
+ONE DAY: a Sequel to "Three Weeks"
+
+"There is a note of sincerity in this book that is lacking in the
+first."--_Boston Globe._
+
+"One Day" is the sequel you have been waiting for since reading "Three
+Weeks," and is a story which points a moral, a clear, well-written
+exposition of the doctrine, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
+
+
+HIGH NOON: a New Sequel to "Three Weeks"
+
+A Modern Romeo and Juliet
+
+A powerful, stirring love-story of twenty years after. Abounding in
+beautiful descriptions and delicate pathos, this charming love idyl will
+instantly appeal to the million and a quarter people who have read and
+enjoyed "Three Weeks."
+
+
+THE DIARY OF MY HONEYMOON
+
+A woman who sets out to unburden her soul upon intimate things is bound
+to touch upon happenings which are seldom the subject of writing at all;
+but whatever may be said of the views of the anonymous author, the
+"Diary" is a work of throbbing and intense humanity, the moral of which
+is sound throughout and plain to see.
+
+
+THE INDISCRETION OF LADY USHER: a Sequel to "The Diary of My Honeymoon"
+
+"Another purpose novel dealing with the question of marriage and dealing
+very plainly,--one of the most interesting among the many books on these
+lines which are at present attracting so much attention."--_Cleveland
+Town Topics._
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th St., New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+THE SPIDER'S WEB, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+A splendid story, in every way equal to the "House of Bondage," written
+in the author's best manner.
+
+
+LITTLE LOST SISTER, by Virginia Brooks
+
+Gripping, vital, true, intense, it is a page from the life of a
+beautiful girl.
+
+
+SPARROWS, by Horace W. C. Newte
+
+The story of an unprotected girl, of which the reader will not skip a
+single page.
+
+
+THE OTHER MAN'S WIFE, by Frank Richardson
+
+The duel of sex is here, and it is described without bias, as fearlessly
+stated as it is exquisitely conceived.
+
+
+SALLY BISHOP, by E. Temple Thurston
+
+There have been few stories so sweet, so moving, so tender, so
+convincing as this life-record of a London girl.
+
+
+THE PRICE, by Gertie de S. Wentworth-James
+
+Dealing with woman's life under modern conditions, the author writes of
+the heights and the depths of existence.
+
+
+DAUGHTERS OF THE RICH, by Edgar Saltus
+
+A story of great strength and almost photographic intensity, wise,
+witty, yet touchingly pathetic.
+
+
+HAGAR REVELLY, by Daniel Carson Goodman
+
+A truthful presentation of the real reasons why some girls go wrong and
+others do not.
+
+
+UNCLOTHED, by Daniel Carson Goodman
+
+A novel for the woman of thirty, this book is an honest attempt to be
+honest.
+
+
+LOVE'S PILGRIMAGE, by Upton Sinclair
+
+A novel which deals with a husband and a wife, which for efficiency and
+truth is unexcelled.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+FAMOUS BOOKS AT POPULAR PRICES
+
+
+SIX WOMEN, by Victoria Cross
+
+A half-dozen of the most vivid love stories that ever lit up the dusk of
+a tired civilization.
+
+
+LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW, by Victoria Cross
+
+It tears the garments of conventionality from woman, presenting her as
+she must appear to the divine eye.
+
+
+PAULA, by Victoria Cross
+
+Here the author's fervid energy combines with a sense of humor to make a
+book both vital and attractive.
+
+
+THE RELIGION OF EVELYN HASTINGS, by Victoria Cross
+
+A study of passion, but it is passion that ennobles and brings
+happiness.
+
+
+SIX CHAPTERS OF A MAN'S LIFE, by Victoria Cross
+
+There is no mistaking the earnestness of the morality which it enforces.
+
+
+A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE, by Victoria Cross
+
+Here the author presents a stirring story of love, intrigue and
+adventure, woven about a proud, independent, reckless heroine.
+
+
+THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T, by Victoria Cross
+
+A striking, well-told story, fascinating in its hold on the reader.
+
+
+ANNA LOMBARD, by Victoria Cross
+
+A bold, brilliant, defiant presentation of the relations of men and
+women.
+
+
+THE ETERNAL FIRES, by Victoria Cross
+
+Given the soul of a maiden waiting for love, the plot as it unfolds
+shows how the heroine finds one worthy of her.
+
+
+Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown
+Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
+
+
+THE MACAULAY COMPANY 15 West 38th Street, New York
+
+Send for Illustrated Catalogue
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+Italic typeface in the original book is indicated with _underscores_.
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+The following spelling variants have been retained as printed:
+
+  "Lyon" and "Lyons"
+
+  "nearby" and "near-by"
+
+  "treetops" and "tree-tops"
+
+  "sha'n't" and "shan't"
+
+On page 333, an asterisk * appears; however, there is no corresponding
+note in this book.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Running Sands, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNNING SANDS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38753.txt or 38753.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/7/5/38753/
+
+Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Kerry Tani and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/38753.zip b/38753.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..65283ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38753.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ef7dab1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #38753 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38753)