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diff --git a/42109-0.txt b/42109-0.txt index 406b5e7..f119989 100644 --- a/42109-0.txt +++ b/42109-0.txt @@ -1,30 +1,4 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: The Dull Miss Archinard - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 16, 2013 [eBook #42109] -[Most recently updated: May 31, 2021] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - - - +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42109 *** The @@ -8311,354 +8285,4 @@ to forego the enjoyment=> to forgo the enjoyment {pg 158} unforgetable=> unforgettable {pg 181} - - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law 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. 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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/license - - -Title: The Dull Miss Archinard - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 16, 2013 [EBook #42109] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - -The - -Dull Miss Archinard - -By - -Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -New York -Charles Scribner's Sons -1898 - -Copyright, 1898, by -Charles Scribner's Sons - -_All rights reserved_ - -_TO_ - -MY GRANDMOTHER - -H. M. D. - - - - -Prologue - -PETER ODD - - - - -The Dull Miss Archinard - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - -Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream, -whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating -fly, his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisherman reverie, no -definite thought forming from the appreciative impressions of sunlit -meadows, cool stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming curves of -river. For a tired man, fishing is an occupation particularly soothing, -and Peter Odd was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, perhaps, -more that of the lover of nature than of the true sportsman, the -pastoral feast of the landscape with its blue distance of wooded hill, -more to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet-spotted beauty; -yet the attitude of receptive intentness was pleasant in all its phases, -no one weary thought could become dominant while the eyes rested on the -water, or were raised to such loveliness of quiet English country. So -much of what he saw his own too; the sense of proprietorship is, under -such circumstances, an intimately pleasant thing, and although, where -Odd stood at a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall -beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the confines of his -property just here, the woods and meadows before him were all his--to -the blue hills on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched widely -about Allersley Manor, and to the left the river ran for a very -respectable number of miles through woods and meadows as beautiful. The -sense of proprietorship was still new enough to give a little thrill, -for the old squire had died only two years before, and the sorrow of -loss had only recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed -responsibilities, to the realization that energies so called forth may -perhaps make of life a thing well worth living. A life of quiet utility; -to feel oneself of some earthly use; what more could one ask? The duties -of a landowner in our strenuous days may well fill a man's horizon, and -Odd was well content that they should do so; for the present at least; -and he did not look beyond the present. - -In his tweeds and waterproof knee-breeches and boots, a sun-burnt straw -hat shading his thin brown face, his hand steady and dexterous, as brown -and thin, he was a pleasing example of the English country-gentleman -type. He was tall, with the flavor of easy strength and elegance that an -athletic youth gives to the most awkwardly made man. His face was at -once humorous and sad; it is strange how a humorous character shows -itself through the saddest set of feature. Odd's long, rather acquiline -nose and Vandyke beard made a decidedly melancholy silhouette on the -sunlit water, yet all the lines of the face told of a kindly -contemplation of the world's pathetic follies; the mouth was sternly -cut yet very good-tempered, and its firm line held evident suggestions -of quiet smiling. - -Poor Peter Odd had himself committed a pathetic folly, and, as a result, -smiles might be tinged with bitterness. - -A captured trout presently demanded concentrated attention. The vigorous -fish required long playing until worn out, when he was deftly secured in -the landing-net and despatched with merciful promptitude; indeed, a -little look of nervous distaste might have roused in an unsympathetic -looker-on conjectures as to a rather weak strain--a foolish width of -pity in Peter Odd's character. - -"A beauty," he mentally ejaculated. He sat down in the shade. It was -hot; the long, thick grass invited a lolling rest. - -On the other side of the hedge was a rustic bathing-cabin, and from it -Odd heard the laughing chatter of young voices. The adjoining property -was a small one belonging to a Captain Archinard. Odd had seen little of -him; his wife was understood to be something of an invalid, and he had -two girls--these their voices, no doubt. Odd took off his hat and mopped -his forehead, looking at the little landing-wharf which he could just -see beyond the hedge, and where one could moor boats or dive off into -the deepness of the water. The latter form of aquatic exercise was -probably about to take place, for Odd heard-- - -"I can swim beautifully already, papa," in a confident young voice--a -gay voice, quiet, and yet excited too by the prospect of a display of -prowess. - -A tall, thin girl of about fourteen stepped out on to the landing. A -bathing-dress is not as a rule a very graceful thing, yet this child, -her skirt to her knee, a black silk sash knotted around her waist, with -her slim white legs and charming feet, was as graceful as a young Amazon -on a Grecian frieze. A heavy mass of braids, coiled up to avoid a -wetting, crowned her small head. She was not pretty; Odd saw that -immediately, even while admiring the well-poised figure, its gallantly -held little torso and light energy. Her profile showed a short nose and -prominent chin, inharmoniously accentuated. She seemed really ugly when -her sister joined her; the sister was beautiful. Odd roused himself a -little from his half recumbency to look at the sister appreciatively. -Her slimness was exaggerated to an extreme--an almost fluttering -lightness; her long arms and legs seemed to flash their whiteness on the -green; she had an exquisite profile, and her soft black hair swept up -into the same coronet of coils. Captain Archinard joined them as they -stood side by side. - -"You had better race," he said, looking down into the water, and then -away to the next band of shadow. "Dive in, and race to that clump of -aspens. This is a jolly bit for diving." - -"But, papa, we shall wet our hair fearfully," said the elder girl--the -ugly one--for so Odd already ungallantly designated her. "We usually get -in on this shallower side and swim off. We have never tried diving, for -it takes so long to dry our hair. Taylor would not like it at all." - -"It is so deep, too," said the beauty in rather a faltering -voice--unfortunately faltering, for her father turned sharply on her. - -"Afraid, hey? You mustn't be a coward, Hilda." - -"I am not afraid," said the elder girl; "but I never tried it. What must -I do? Put my arms so, and jump head first?" - -"There is nothing to do at all," said the Captain, with some acidity of -tone. "Keep your mouth shut and strike out as you come up. You'll do it, -Katherine, first try. Hilda is in a funk, I see." - -"Poor Hilda," Odd ejaculated mentally. She was evidently in a funk. -Standing on the edge of the landing, one slim foot advanced in a -tentative effort, she looked down shrinking into the water--very deeply -black at this spot--and then, half entreatingly, half helplessly, at her -father. - -"Oh, papa, it is so deep," she repeated. - -The Captain's neatly made face showed signs of peevish irritation. - -"Well, deep or not, in you go. I must break you of that craven spirit. -What are you afraid of? What could happen to you?" - -"I--don't like water over my head--I might strike--on something." - -Tears were near the surface. - -What asses people made of themselves, thought Odd, with their silly -shows of authority. The more the father insisted, the more frightened -the child became; couldn't the idiot see that? The tear-filled eyes and -looks that showed a struggle between fear of her father's anger and fear -of the deep, black pool, moved Odd to a sudden though half-amused -resentment, for the little girl was certainly somewhat of a coward. - -"Let me go in first, papa, and show her. Hilda, dear, it's nothing; -being frightened will make it something, though, so don't be frightened, -and watch me." - -"Yes, go in first, Katherine; show her that I have a girl who isn't a -coward--and how one of my daughters came to be a coward I don't -understand. I am ashamed of you, Hilda." - -Hilda evidently only controlled her sobs by a violent effort; her -caught-in under-lip, wide eyes, and heaving little chest affected Odd -painfully. He frowned, sat up, put his hat on, and watched Miss -Katherine with a lack of sympathy that was certainly unfair, for the -plucky little person went through the performance most creditably, -stretched out and up her thin pretty arms, curved forward her pretty -body, and made the plunge with a lithe elegance that left her father -gazing with complacent approval after the white flash of her feet. - -"Bravo! First-rate! There, Hilda, you see what can be done. Come on, -little white feather." He spoke more kindly; the elder sister's prowess -put him more in humor with his less creditable offspring. - -"Oh, papa!" The child shrank on the edge of the platform--she would go -bundling in, and hurt herself. "But, papa," and her voice held a sharp -accent of distress, "where is Katherine?" - -Indeed Katherine had not reappeared. Only a moment had passed, but a -moment under water is long. Captain Archinard's eyes searched the -surface of the river. - -"But she can swim?" - -"Papa! papa! She is drowned, _drowned_!" Hilda's voice rose to a scream. -With a wild look of resolve she sprang into the river just as Odd dashed -in, knee-deep, and as Katherine's head appeared at some distance down -the current--an angry little head, half choked, and gasping. Katherine -swam and waded to the shore, falling on her knees upon the bank, while -Odd dived into the hole--very bad hole, deep and weedy--after Hilda. - -He groped for the child among a tangle of roots, touched her hair, -grasped her round the waist, and came to the surface with some -difficulty, his strokes impeded by sinuous cord-like weeds. Captain -Archinard was too much astonished by the whole matter to do more than -exclaim, "Upon my word!" as his younger daughter was deposited at his -feet. - -"A nasty hole that. The weeds have probably grown since any one has -dived." - -Odd spoke shortly, having lost his breath, and severely; the child -looked half drowned, and Katherine was still gasping. - -"Why, Mr. Odd! Upon my word!"--the Captain recognized his neighbor--"I -don't know how to thank you." - -The Captain had not recovered from his astonishment, and repeated with -some vehemence: "Upon my word!" - -"Well, papa, you nearly drowned me!" Katherine was struggling between -pride and anger. She would not let the tears come, but they were near -the surface. "Those horrible snaky things got hold of me and I almost -screamed, only I remembered that I mustn't open my mouth, and I thought -I would _never_ come to the top." The self-pitying retrospect brought -the tears to her eyes, but she held up her head and looked and spoke her -resentment, "I think you might have gone in first yourself. And Hilda! -Why didn't you wait until I came to the surface before you made her do -it?" - -Captain Archinard looked more vague under these reproaches than one -would have expected after his exhibition of rather fretful autocracy. - -"Made her!" he repeated, seizing with a rather mean haste at the error; -"made her? She went in herself! Like a rocket, after you. By Jove! she -showed her blood after all." - -"Hilda! you tried to save my life!" - -Odd still held the younger girl on his arm, supporting her while she -choked and panted, for she had evidently had not shown her sister's -_aplomb_ and had opened her mouth. Katherine took her into her arms and -kissed her with a warmth quite dramatic. - -"Darling Hilda! And you were so frightened, too. I would have gone in -after _her_," she added, looking up at Odd with a bright, quick glance, -"but there would have been nothing to my credit in that." - -"And _I_ would have gone in after her, it goes without saying, Mr. Odd," -said the Captain, when Katherine had led away to the bathing-cabin her -still dazed sister, "but you seemed to drop from the clouds. Really, you -have put me under a great obligation." - -"Not at all. I have spent most of the day in the river. I merely went -in a bit deeper to fish out that plucky little girl." - -"I've dived off that spot a hundred times. I'd no idea there were weeds. -I've never known weeds to be there. I'll send down one of the men -directly after lunch and have it seen to. Really I feel a sense of -responsibility." The Captain went on with an air of added -self-justification, "Though, of course, I'm not responsible. I couldn't -have known about the weeds." - -Weeds or no weeds, Odd could not forgive him for the child's fright, -though he replied good-humoredly to the invitation to the house. - -"Mrs. Archinard would have called on Mrs. Odd before this, but my wife -is an invalid--never leaves the house or grounds. She sees a good deal -of Miss Odd. I knew your father myself as well as one may know such a -recluse; spent some pleasant hours in his library--magnificent library -you've got. Peculiarly satisfactory it must be, as you go in for that -sort of thing. Won't you come in to tea this afternoon? And Mrs. Odd? -Miss Odd? I was sorry to find them out when I called the other day. I -haven't seen Mrs. Odd. I don't see her at church." - -"No; we have hardly settled down to our duties yet, and my wife only got -back from the Riviera a few weeks ago." - -"Well, I hope we shall keep you at Allersley now that your _wanderjahre_ -are over, and that you are married. I was wandering myself during your -boyhood. My brother bought the place, you know; liked the country here -immensely. Poor old Jack! Only lived ten years to enjoy it--and died a -bachelor--luckily for me. But we've missed one another, haven't we? -Neighbors too. I have seen Mrs. Odd--at a dance in London, Lady -Bartlebury's, I remember; and I remember that she was the prettiest girl -in the room. Miss Castleton--the beautiful Alicia Castleton." - -Miss Castleton's fame had indeed been so wide that the title was quite -public property, and the Captain's reminiscent tone of admiration most -natural and allowable. Odd accepted the invitation to tea, waded back -round the hedge, gathered up his basket and rod, and made his way up -through the park to Allersley Manor. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Mrs. Odd and Miss Odd, Peter's eldest and unmarried sister, were having -an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes, -came into the morning-room just before lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open -French window cutting the leaves of a review. There were several more -reviews on the table beside her, and with her eyeglasses and fine, -severe profile, she gave one the impression of a woman who would pass -her mornings over reviews and disagree with most of them for reasons not -frivolous. - -Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was very remarkable looking. The -adjective is usually employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty -pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd's dominant characteristic was beauty, pure -and simple; beauty triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable in the -sense that no one could fail to notice her, as when one had noticed her -it was impossible not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness -that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion against an almost -tame conformity, a rash person might assert that to him her type did not -appeal; but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplendent; in this -extreme lay the only hope of escape from conformity. The long figure in -the uniform-like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was almost -too uncommonplace in elegance of outline; the white hand too slender, -too pink as to finger-tips and polished as to nails; the delicate -scarlet splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, too dazzling. - -Mrs. Odd's red-brown hair was a glory, a burnished, well-coiffed, -well-brushed glory; it rippled, coiled, and curved about her head. Her -profile was bewildering--lazily, sweetly petulant. "Is this the face?" a -man might murmur on first seeing Alicia. - -Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon his vision over a year -ago. He was still young and literary, and, as he was swept out of -himself, had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expression. - -Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room. - -"I don't really see, Mary, what duty has got to do with it." Without -turning her head, she turned her eyes on Odd: "How wet your hair is, -Peter!" - -Mary Odd looked up from the review she was cutting rather grimly, and -her cold face was irradiated with a sudden smile. - -"Well, Peter," she said quietly. - -"I fished a little girl out of the river," said Odd, taking a seat near -Alicia, and smiling responsively at his sister. "Captain Archinard's -little girl." He told the story. - -"An interesting contrast of physical and moral courage." - -"I have seen the children. They are noticeable children. They always -ride to hounds." Hunting had been Miss Odd's favorite diversion during -her father's lifetime. "But the pretty one, as I remember, has not the -pluck of her sister--physical, as you say, Peter, no doubt." - -"What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard?" - -"Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an American, and was rich, -I believe. Captain Archinard left the army when he married her, and -immediately spent her money. Luckily for him poor Mr. Archinard -died--Jack Archinard; you remember him, Peter? A nice man. I go to see -Mrs. Archinard now and then. I don't care for her." - -"You don't care much for any one, Mary," said Mrs. Odd, smiling. "Your -remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no -doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection." - -"Yet I have many friends, Alicia." - -"Not near Allersley?" - -"Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, -and Miss Hibbard among my friends." - -"Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn't she? What big caps -she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off -her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an -inveterate matchmaker." - -"She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to -mean." - -"But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when -events are marriageable young men, doesn't she?" - -"Does she?" - -"Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in -saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring." - -"And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect." - -During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look -men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests. - -"I am awfully hungry. Isn't it almost lunch-time?" he said, as they -paused. - -Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. "It only wants five minutes." - -Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its -lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory. - -"How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary," he said, looking down at -the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined -her husband, putting her arm through his. - -"Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter," she smiled at him; and -although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life -with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight -to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty--a rather sickly, pallid -pleasure--and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he -and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of -hurting her. - -After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the -sympathy that allows itself no words. - -There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia's lonely complacency--a -pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness. - -"Mary is so disagreeable to-day," said Alicia, as they walked slowly -across the lawn. "She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of -other people's worthlessness." - -Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen -to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman -he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the -revealment of Alicia's shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She -had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not -found it out--had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these -characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was -born so. - -"It will be dull enough here, at all events," Alicia went on, pressing -her slim patent-leather shoe into the turf with lazy emphasis as she -walked, for Alicia was not bad-tempered, and took things easily; "but if -Mary is going to be disagreeable--" - -"You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived here. It is in a truer -sense her home than mine, but she would go directly if either you or she -found it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially she would never -have stayed." - -"Don't imply extravagant things, Peter. Who thinks of her going?" - -"She would--if _you_ made it disagreeable." - -"I? I do nothing. Surely Mary won't want to go because she scolds me." - -"Come, Ally, surely you don't get scolded--more than is good for you." -Odd smiled down at her. Her burnished head was on a level with his -eyes. "Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, as Mary is -somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought to take her lectures in a humble -spirit, and be thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection than I -am." - -"I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter." Alicia left the subject of -Mary for a still more intimate grievance. - -"The art of not being bored requires patience, not to say genius. It can -be learned though. And there are worse things than being bored." - -"I think I could bear anything better." - -"What would you like, Ally?" Odd's voice held a certain hopefulness. -"I'll do anything I can, you know. I believe in a woman's individuality -and all that. Does your life down here crush your individuality, -Alicia?" - -Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an inward bitterness. - -"Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care for all that woman -business--rights and movements and individualities and all that; a silly -claiming of more duties that do no good when they're done. I am an -absolutely banal person, Peter; my mind to me isn't a kingdom. I like -outside things. I like gayety, change, diversion. I don't like days one -after the other--like sheep--and I don't like sheep!" - -They had passed through the shrubbery, and before them were meadows -dotted with the harmless animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd's simile. - -"Well, we won't look at the sheep. I own that they savor strongly of -bucolic immutability. You've had plenty of London for the past year, -Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are really the change." - -"You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, Peter." - -"Longings for a political salon, Ally? I have hardly time for my -scribbling and landlording as it is." - -"A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as being clever and keeping it -up. No, I like seeing people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I -am absolutely banal, as I tell you." - -"Well, you shall have London next year. We'll go up for the season." - -"You took me for what I was, Peter," Mrs. Odd remarked as they retraced -their steps towards the house. "I have never pretended, have I? You knew -that I was a society beauty and that only. I am a very shallow person, I -suppose, Peter; I certainly can't pretend to have depths--even to give -Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. Why did you fall in -love with me, Peter? It wasn't _en caractère_ a bit, you know." - -"Oh yes, it was, Ally. I fell in love with you because you were -beautiful. Why did you fall in love with me?" - -The mockery with which Alicia's smile was tinged deepened into a -good-humored laugh at her own expense. - -"Well, Peter, I don't think any one before made me feel that they -thought me so beautiful. I am vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was -awfully flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. I am sure -you idealized me. Shall we go in? Lunch must be ready, and you must be -hungrier than ever." - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -At four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary started for the -Archinards' house. Mary had offered to join her brother; the prospect of -the walk together was very pleasant. She could not object when Alicia, -at the last moment, announced her intention of going too. - -"I have never been to see her. I should like the walk, and Mary will -approve of the fulfilment of my duty towards my neighbor." - -Mary's prospects were decidedly nipped in the bud, as Alicia perhaps -intended that they should be; but Alicia's avowed motive was so -praiseworthy that Mary allowed herself only an inner discontent, and, -what with her good-humored demeanor, Odd's placid chat of crops and -tenantry, and Alicia's acquiescent beauty, the trio seemed to enjoy the -mile of beechwood and country road and the short sweep of prettily -wooded drive that led to Allersley Priory, a square stone house covered -with vines of magnolia and wisteria, and incorporating in its walls, -according to tradition, portions of the old Priory which once occupied -the site. From the back of the house sloped a wide expanse of lawn and -shrubberies, and past it ran the river that half a mile further on -flowed out of Captain Archinard's little property into Odd's. The -drawing-room was on the ground-floor, and its windows opened on this -view. - -Mrs. Archinard and the Captain were talking to young Lord Allan Hope, -eldest son of Lord Mainwaring. Mrs. Archinard's invalidism was evidently -not altogether fictitious. She had a look of at once extreme fragility -and fading beauty. One knew at the first glance that she was a woman to -have cushions behind her and her back to the light. There was no -character in the delicate head, unless one can call a passive -determination to do or feel nothing that required energy, character. - -The two little girls came in while Odd talked to their father. They were -dressed alike in white muslins. Katherine's gown reached her ankles; -Hilda's was still at the _mi-jambe_ stage. Their long hair fell about -their faces in childlike fashion. Katherine's was brown and strongly -rippled; Hilda's softly, duskily, almost bluely black; it grew in -charming curves and eddies about her forehead, and framed her little -face and long slim neck in straightly falling lines. - -Katherine gave Odd her hand with a little air that reminded him of a -Velasquez Infanta holding out a flower. - -"You were splendid this morning, Mr. Odd. That hole was no joke, and -Hilda swallowed lots of water as it was. She might easily have been -drowned." - -Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply set black eyes had a -dominant directness. She held her head up, and her smile was charming--a -little girl's smile, yet touched with the conscious power of a clever -woman. Odd felt that the child was clever, and that the woman would be -cleverer. He felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice -of fun as they looked into his as though she knew that he knew, and they -both knew together, that Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his -ducking had been only conventionally "splendid." - -"Hilda wants to thank you herself, don't you, Hilda? She had such a -horrid time altogether; you were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the -sea monster!" Then Katherine, having, as it were, introduced and paved -the way for her sister, went back across the room again, and stood by -young Allan Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd. - -Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. She was not shy, -though she evidently had not her sister's ready mastery of what to say, -and how to say it. Odd was rather glad of this; he had found Katherine's -_aplomb_ almost disconcerting. - -"I do thank you very much." She put her hand into Odd's as he spoke, and -left it there; the confiding little action emphasized her childlikeness. - -"What did you think of as you went down?" he asked her. - -"In the river?" A shade of retrospective terror crossed her face. - -"No, no! we won't talk about the river, will we?" Odd said quickly. -However funny Katherine's greater common sense had found the incident, -it had not been funny to Hilda. "Have you lived here long?" he asked. -Captain Archinard had joined Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either -side, Alicia was enjoying herself. "I have never seen you before, you -know." - -"We have lived here since my uncle died; about eight years ago, I -think." - -"Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley." - -"Didn't you like Allersley?" Hilda asked, with some wonder. - -"Oh, very much; and my father was here, so I often came back; but I -lived in London and Paris, where I could work at things that interested -me." - -"I have been twice in London; I went to the National Gallery." - -"You liked that?" - -"Oh, very much." She was a quiet little girl, and spoke quietly, her -wide gentle gaze on Odd. - -"And what else did you like in London?" - -Hilda smiled a little, as if conscious that she was being put through -the proper routine of questions, but a trustful smile, quite willing to -give all information asked for. - -"The Three Fates." - -"You mean the Elgin Marbles?" - -"Yes, with no heads; but one is rather glad they haven't." - -"Why?" asked Odd, as she paused. Hilda did not seem sure of her own -reason. - -"Perhaps they would be _too_ beautiful with heads," she suggested. "Do -you like dogs?" she added, suddenly turning the tables on him. - -"Yes, I love dogs," Odd replied, with sincere enthusiasm. - -"Three of our dogs are out there on the verandah, if you would care to -know them?" - -"I should very much. Perhaps you'll show me the garden too; it looks -very jolly." - -It was a pleasure to look at his extraordinarily pretty little -Andromeda, and he was quite willing to spend the rest of his visit with -her. They went out on the verandah, where, in the awning's shade, lay -two very nice fox terriers. A dachshund sat gazing out upon the sunlit -lawn in a dog's dignified reverie. - -"Jack and Vic," Hilda said, pointing out the two fox terriers. "They -just belong to the whole family, you know. And this dear old fellow is -Palamon; Arcite is somewhere about; they are mine." - -"Who named yours?" - -"I did--after I read it; they had other names when they were given to -me, but as I had never called them by them, I thought I had a right to -change them. I wanted names with associations, like Katherine's setters; -they are called Darwin and Spencer, because Katherine is very fond of -science." - -"Oh, is she?" said Odd, rather stupefied. "You seem to have a great many -dogs in couples." - -"The others are not; they are more general dogs, like Jack and Vic." - -Hilda still held Odd's hand: she stooped to stroke Arcite's pensive -head, giving the fox terriers a pat as they passed them. - -"So you are fond of Chaucer?" Odd said. They crossed the gravel path and -stepped on the lawn. - -"Yes, indeed, he is my favorite poet. I have not read all, you know, but -especially the Knight's Tale." - -"That's your favorite?" - -"Yes." - -"And what is your favorite part of the Knight's Tale?" - -"The part where Arcite dies." - -"You like that?" - -"Oh! so much; don't you?" - -"Very much; as much, perhaps, as anything ever written. There never was -a more perfect piece of pathos. Perhaps you remember it." He was rather -curious to know how deep was this love for Chaucer. - -"I learnt it by heart; I haven't a good memory, but I liked it so much." - -"Perhaps you would say it to me." - -Hilda looked up a little shyly. - -"Oh, I can't!" she exclaimed timidly. - -"_Can't_ you?" and Odd looked down at her a humorously pleading -interrogation. - -"I can't say things well; and it is too sad to say--one can just bear to -read it." - -"Just bear to say it--this once," Odd entreated. - -They had reached the edge of the lawn, and stood on the grassy brink of -the river. Hilda looked down into the clear running of the water. - -"Isn't it pretty? I don't like deep water, where one can't see the -bottom; here the grasses and the pebbles are as distinct as possible, -and the minnows--don't you like to see them?" - -"Yes, but Arcite. Don't make me tease you." - -Hilda evidently determined not to play the coward a second time. The -quiet pressure of Odd's hand was encouraging, and in a gentle, -monotonous little voice that, with the soft breeze, the quickly running -sunlit river, went into Odd's consciousness as a quaint, ineffaceable -impression of sweetness and sadness, she recited:-- - - "Allas the wo! allas the peynes stronge, - That I for you have suffered, and so longe! - Allas the deth! allas myn Emelye! - Allas departing of our companye! - Allas myn hertes quene! allas, my wyf! - Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf! - What is this world? What asketh man to have? - Now with his love, now in his colde grave - Allone, withouten any companye." - -Odd's artistic sensibilities were very keen. He felt that painfully -delicious constriction of the throat that the beautiful in art can give, -especially the beautiful in tragic art. The far-away tale; the far-away -tongue; the nearness of the pathos, poignant in its "white simplicity." -And how well the monotonous little voice suited its melancholy. - - "Allone, withouten any companye," - -he repeated. He looked down at Hilda; he had tactfully avoided looking -at her while she spoke, fearing to embarrass her; her eyes were full of -tears. - -"Thanks, Hilda," he said. It struck him that this highly strung little -girl had best not be allowed to dwell too long on Arcite and, after a -sympathetic pause (Odd was a very sympathetic person), he added: - -"Now are you going to take me into the garden?" - -"Yes." Hilda turned from the river. "You know he had just gained her, -that made it all the worse. If he had not loved her he would not have -minded dying so much, and being alone. One can hardly bear it," Hilda -repeated. - -"It is intensely sad. I don't think you ought to have learned it by -heart, Hilda. That's ungrateful of me, isn't it? But I am old enough to -take an impersonal pleasure in sad things; I am afraid they make you -sad." - -Hilda's half-wondering smile was reassuringly childlike. - -"Oh, but it's _nice_ being sad like that." - -Odd reflected, as they went into the garden, that she had put herself -into his category. - -After the shadow of the shrubberies through which they passed, the -fragrant sunlight was dazzling. Rows of sweet peas, their mauves and -pinks and whites like exquisite musical motives, ran across the -delicious old garden. A border of deep purple pansies struck a -beautifully meditative chord. Flowers always affected Odd musically; he -half closed his eyes to look at the sweeps of sun-flooded color. A -medley of Schumann and Beethoven sang through his head as he glanced -down, smiling at Hilda Archinard; her gently responsive little smile was -funnily comprehensive; one might imagine that tunes were going through -her head too. - -"Isn't it jolly, Hilda?" - -"Very jolly," she laughed, and, as they walked between the pansy borders -she kept her gentle smile and her gentle stare up at his appreciative -face. - -She thought his smile so nice; his teeth, which crowded forward a -little, lent it perhaps its peculiar sweetness; his eyelids, drooping at -the outer corners, gave the curious look of humorous sadness to the -expression of his brown eyes. His moustache was cut shortly on his upper -lip, and showed the rather quizzical line of his mouth. Hilda, -unconsciously, enumerated this catalogue of impressions. - -"What fine strawberries," said Odd. "I like the fragrance almost more -than the flavor." - -"But won't you taste them?" Hilda dropped his hand to skip lightly into -the strawberry bed. "They are ripe, lots of them," she announced, and -she came running back, her outstretched hands full of the summer fruit, -red, but for the tips, still untinted. The sunlit white frock, the long -curves of black hair, the white face, slim black legs, and the spots of -crimson color made a picture--a sunshiny Whistler. - -Odd accepted the strawberries gratefully; they were very fine. - -"I don't think you can have them better at Allersley Manor," said Hilda, -smiling. - -"I don't think mine are as good. Won't you come some day to Allersley -Manor and compare?" - -"I should like to very much." - -"Then you and Miss Katherine shall be formally invited to tea, with the -understanding that afterwards the strawberry beds are to be invaded." - -"I should like to very much," Hilda repeated. - -"Hullo! Don't make me feel a pig! Eat some yourself," said Odd, who had -finished one handful. - -"No, no, I picked them for you." - -Odd took her disengaged hand in his as they walked on again, Hilda -resisting at first. - -"It is so sticky." - -"I don't mind that: it is very generous." She laughed at the -extravagance. - -"And what do you do all day besides swimming?" Odd asked. - -"We have lessons with our governess. She is strict, but a splendid -teacher. Katherine is quite a first-rate Latin scholar." - -"Is Katherine fond of Chaucer?" - -"Katherine cares more for science and--and philosophy." Hilda spoke with -a respectful gravity. "That's why she called her dogs Darwin and -Spencer. She hasn't read any of Spencer yet, but of course he is a great -philosopher. She knows that, and she has read a good deal of a big book -by Darwin, 'The Origin of Species,' you know." - -"Yes, I know." Odd found Katherine even more startling than her sister. - -"I tried to read it, but it was so confusing--about selection and -cabbages--I don't see how cabbages _can_ select, do you?" Hilda's voice -held a reminiscent vagueness. "Katherine says that she did not care for -it _much_, but she thought she ought to look through it if she wanted a -foundation; she is very keen on foundations, and she says Darwin is the -foundation-key--or corner-stone--no, keystone to the arch of modern -science--at least she did not say so, but she read me that from her -journal." - -"Oh! Katherine wrote that, did she?" - -"Yes; but you mustn't think that Katherine is a blue-stocking." -Something in Odd's tone made Hilda fear misunderstanding. "She loves -sports of all kinds, and fun. She goes across country as well as any -woman--that is what Lord Mainwaring said of her last winter during -fox-hunting. She isn't afraid of anything." - -"And what else do you do besides lessons?" - -"Well, I read and walk; there are such famous walks all about here, -walks in woods and on hills. I don't care for roads, do you? And I stay -with mamma and read to her when she is tired." - -"And Katherine?" - -"She is more with papa." In her heart Hilda said: "He loves her best," -but of that she could not speak, even to this new friend who seemed -already so near; to no one could she hint of that ache in her heart of -which jealousy formed no part, for it was natural that papa should love -Katherine best, that every one should; she was so gay and courageous; -but though it was natural that Katherine should be loved best, it was -hard to be loved least. - -"You are by yourself a good deal, then?" said Odd. "Do you walk by -yourself, too?" - -"Yes, with the dogs. I used to have grandmamma, you know; she died a -year ago." - -"Oh, yes! Mrs. Archinard's mother." - -Hilda nodded; her grasp on Odd's hand tightened and they walked in -silence. Odd remembered the fine portrait of a lady in the drawing-room; -he had noticed its likeness and unlikeness to Mrs. Archinard; a delicate -face, but with an Emersonian expression of self-reliance, a puritan look -of stanchness and responsibility. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -On the way home, cool evening shadows slanting across the road, Alicia -declared that she had really enjoyed herself. - -"Captain Archinard is quite jolly. He has seen everybody and everything -under the sun. He is most entertaining, and Lord Allan is remarkably -uncallow." - -"He thinks of standing for Parliament next year. A nice, steady, honest -young fellow. How do you like the Archinards, Peter?" - -"The child--Hilda--is a dear child." - -"She is awfully pretty," said Alicia, who could afford to be generous; -"I like that colorless type." - -"She is delicate, I am afraid," said Mary. - -"She has the mouth of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a -Gainsborough; you know the portrait of Sheridan's wife at Dulwich?" - -Alicia had never been to Dulwich. Mary assented. - -"The other one--the ugly one--is very clever," Alicia went on; she was -in a good temper evidently. Not that Alicia was ever exactly -bad-tempered. "She said some very clever things and looked more." - -"She is too clever perhaps," Mary remarked. "As for Mrs. Archinard, I -should like to slap her. I think that my conventionality is of a -tolerant order, but Mrs. Archinard's efforts at æsthetic originality -make me feel grimly conventional." - -"Mary! Mary! how delightful to hear such uncharitable remarks from you. -_I_ should rather like to slap her too, though she struck me as awfully -conventional." - -"Oh, she is, practically. It is the artistic _argot_ that bores one so -much." - -"She is awfully self-satisfied too. Dear me, Peter, I wish we had driven -after all. I hate the next half-mile. It is just uphill enough to be -irritating--fatigue without realizing exactly the cause of it. Why -didn't we drive, Peter?" - -"I thought we all preferred walking. You are a very energetic young -person as a rule." - -"Not for tiresome country roads. They should be got over as quickly as -possible." - -"Well, we will cut through the beech-woods as we came." - -"Oh dear," Alicia yawned, "how tired I am already of those tiresome -beech-woods. I wish it were autumn and that the hunting had begun. -Captain Archinard gives me glowing accounts, and promises me a lead for -the first good run. We must fill the house with people then, Peter." - -"The house shall be filled to overflowing. Perhaps you would like some -one now. Mrs. Laughton and her girls; you like them, don't you?" - -Alicia wrinkled up her charming nose. - -"Can't say I do. I've stopped with them too much perhaps. They bore me. -I am afraid no one would come just now, everything is so gay in London. -I wish I were there." - -Alicia was not there because the doctor had strongly advised country air -and the simple inaction of country life. Alicia had lost her baby only -three weeks after its birth--two months ago--and had herself been very -ill. - -"But I think I shall write to some people and ask them to take pity on -me," she added, as they walked slowly through the woods. "Sir John, and -Mr. and Mrs. Damian, Gladys le Breton, and Lord Calverly." - -"Well!" Peter spoke in his usual tone of easy acquiescence. - -Mary walked on a little ahead. What good did it do to trouble her -brother uselessly by her impatient look? But how could Peter yield so -placidly? Mary respected him too much to allow herself an evil thought -of his wife; but Alicia was a person to be talked about. Mary did not -doubt that she had been talked about already, and would be more so if -she were not careful. - -Lord Calverly and Sir John dangling attendance would infallibly cause -comment on any woman--let alone the beautiful Mrs. Odd. Yet Peter said, -"Well!" - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -The evening did not pass pleasantly at the Priory. Captain Archinard's -jolliness did not extend to family relationships; he often found family -relationships a bore, and the contrasted stodginess of his own -surroundings seemed greater after Mrs. Odd's departure. - -He muttered and fumed about the drawing-room after dinner. - -He was confoundedly pinched for money, and upon his word he would not be -surprised if he should have to sell the horses. "And what my life will -be stuck down here without the hunting, I can't imagine. Damnable!" - -The Captain growled out the last word under his breath in consideration -of Katherine and Hilda, who had joined their father and mother after -their own tea and a game of lawn-tennis. But Mrs. Archinard was not the -woman to allow to pass unnoticed such a well-founded cause of grievance. - -With a look of delicate disgust she laid down the volume of Turgenieff -that she was reading. - -"Shall I send the children away, Charles? Either they or you had best -go, if you are going to talk like that." - -"Beg pardon," said the Captain shortly. "No, of course they don't go." - -"I am sure I have few enough enjoyments without being made to suffer -because you are to lose one of yours." - -"Who asks you to suffer, Kate? But you don't wait for the asking. You're -only too willing to offer yourself as a _souffre-douleur_ on all -occasions." - -Then Mrs. Archinard retired behind her book in scornful resignation and, -after twenty minutes of silence, the little girls were very glad to get -away to bed. - -Hilda was just undressed when Mrs. Archinard sent for her to come to her -room. Her head ached, and Hilda must brush her hair; it was early yet. -This was a customary task, and one that Hilda prided herself upon -accomplishing with sovereign beneficence. Taylor's touch irritated Mrs. -Archinard; Hilda only was soothing. - -In dressing-gown and slippers she ran to her mother's room. - -Mrs. Archinard's long hair--as black and as fine as Hilda's--fell over -the back of the large arm-chair in which she reclined. - -"Such a headache!" she sighed, as Hilda took up the brush and began to -pass it slowly and gently down the length of hair. "It is really brutal -of your father to forget my head as he does." - -Hilda's heart sank. The unideal attitude of her father and mother toward -one another was one of her great sorrows. Papa was certainly fond of his -pretty wife, but he was so fretful and impatient, and mamma so -continually grieved. It was all wrong. Hilda had already begun to pass -judgment, unconsciously, on her father; but her almost maternal -tenderness for her mother as yet knew no doubt. - -"It would be very dreadful if the horses had to go, wouldn't it?" she -said. Her father's bad temper might be touching if its cause were -suggested. - -"Of course it would; and so are most things dreadful. I am sure that -life is nothing but dreadfulness in every form." Yet Mrs. Archinard was -not at all an unhappy woman. Her life was delicately epicurean. She had -few wants, but those few were never thwarted. From the early cup of -exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all the day of dilettante -lounging over a clever book--a day relieved from monotony by pleasant -episodes--dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from acquaintances, -with whom she had a reputation for languid cynicism and quite awesome -literary and artistic cleverness--to this hour of hair-brushing, few of -her moments were not consciously appreciative of the most finely -flavored mental and physical enjoyment. But the causes for enjoyment -certainly seemed so slight that Mrs. Archinard's graceful pessimism -usually met with universal sympathy. Hilda was very sorry for her -mother. To lie all day reading dreary books; condemned to an inaction -that cut her off from all the delights of outdoor life, seemed to her -tragic. Mrs. Archinard did not undeceive her; indeed, perhaps, the most -fascinating of Mrs. Archinard's artistic occupations was to fancy -herself very tragic. Hilda went back to her room much depressed. - -The girls slept together, and Katherine was sitting up in her night-gown -writing her journal by candlelight and enjoying a sense of talent -flowing at all costs--for writing by candlelight was strictly -forbidden--as she dotted down what she felt to be a very original and -pungent account of the day and the people it had introduced. - -When, however, she heard the patter of Hilda's heedless slippers in the -corridor, she blew out the candle in a hurry, pinched the glowing wick, -and skipped into bed. She might take an artistic pleasure in braving -rules, but Katherine knew that Hilda would have shown an almost dull -amazement at her occupation; and although Katherine characterized it as -dull, she did not care to arouse it. She wished to stand well in Hilda's -eyes in all things. Hilda must find nothing to criticise in her either -mentally or morally. - -"What shall we do if the horses are sold?" she exclaimed, as Hilda got -into the little bed beside hers. "Only imagine! no hunting next winter! -at least, none for us!" - -"Poor papa," Hilda sighed. - -"Oh, you may be sure that he will keep one hunter at least, but of -course he will be dreadfully cut off from it with only one, and of -course our horses will have to go if the worst comes to the worst. You -won't miss it as much as I will, Hilda; the riding, yes, no doubt, but -not the hunting. Still Lord Mainwaring will give us a mount, and now -that Mr. Odd is here, he will be sure to have a lot of horses. The old -squire let everything of that sort run down so, Miss Odd had only two -hunters. Well, Hilda, and what do you think of Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh, I love him, Katherine!" Hilda lay looking with wide eyes into the -soft darkness of the room. The windows were open, and the drawn chintz -curtains flapped gently against the sills. - -"I wouldn't say that if I were you, Hilda," Katherine remarked, with -some disapproval. - -"Why not?" Hilda's voice held an alarmed note. Katherine was, to a great -extent, her mentor. - -"It doesn't sound very--dignified. Of course you are only a little girl, -but still--one doesn't say such things." - -"But I do love him; how can one help loving a person who treats one so -kindly. And then--anyway--even if he had not been kind to me I should -love him, I think." - -Hilda would have liked to be able properly to analyze her sensations and -win her sister's approval; but how explain clearly? - -"That would be rather foolish," Katherine said, in a tone of kind but -restraining wisdom; "one shouldn't let one's feelings run away with one -like that. Shall I tell you what _I_ think about Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh yes, please." - -"I think he is like the river where we jumped in to-day--ripples on the -top, kindness and smiles, you know--but somewhere in his heart a big -hole--a hole with stones and weeds in it." Katherine was quoting from -her journal, but Hilda might as well think the simile improvised: -Katherine felt some pride in it; it certainly justified, she thought, -the conventionally illicit act of the candle. - -Hilda lay in silent admiration. - -"Oh, Katherine, I never know how I feel things till you tell me like -that," she said at last. "How beautiful! Yes, I am sure he has a hole in -his heart." And tears came into Hilda's eyes and into her mind the -line:-- - - "Allone, withouten any companye." - -"As for Mrs. Odd," Katherine continued, pleased with the success of her -psychology, "she has no heart to make a hole in." - -"Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful!" - -"She is a thorough egotist. She doesn't know much either, Hilda, for -when Darwin came in she laughed a lot at the name and said she wouldn't -be paid to read him--the real Darwin." - -"Perhaps she likes other things best." - -"Herself," said Katherine decisively. "Miss Odd of course we have had -time to make up our minds about." - -"I like her; don't you? She has such a clear, trustful face." - -"She is rather rigid; about as hard on other people as she would be on -herself. She could never do anything wrong." - -"I don't quite like _that_; being hard on other people, I mean. One -could be quite sure about one's own wrongness, but how can one about -other people's? It is rather uncharitable, isn't it, Katherine?" - -"She isn't very charitable, but she is very just. As for Lord Allan, he -is a sort of type, and, therefore, not very entertaining." - -"A type of what?" - -"Oh, just the eldest son type; very handsome, very honest, very good, -with a strong sense of responsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him, -which is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the younger -son--more interest." - -Katharine went to sleep with a warmly comfortable sense of competence. -She doubted whether many people saw things as clearly as she did. - -She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming scream from Hilda. - -"What is the matter, Hilda?" She spoke crossly. "How you startled me." - -"Oh, such a horrid dream!" Hilda half sobbed. "How glad I am that it -isn't so!" - -"What was it?" Katherine asked, still crossly; severity she thought the -best attitude towards Hilda's fright. - -"About the river, down in the hole; I was choking, and my legs and arms -were all tangled in roots." - -"Well, go to sleep now," Katherine advised. - -Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, supplicating voice -was heard. - -"Katherine--I'm so sorry--don't be angry--might I come to you? I'm so -frightened." - -"Come along," said Katherine, still severely, but she put her arms very -fondly around her shivering sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed -her. - -"Silly little Hilda," she said. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Three days before the arrival of Gladys le Breton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord -Calverly, and Sir John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia's -invitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother. - -She came into the library early one morning before breakfast. Odd was -there, writing. - -"Peter," she said, "last night, before going to bed, I wrote to Mr. -Apswith and accepted him." - -Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled round his chair in -amazement. - -"Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary?" - -"Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I felt that the time had -come." - -Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with -Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, -and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love when she first came -out twelve years ago. Mr. Apswith's patience, perseverance, and fidelity -were certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had thought that -as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty in maintaining her severe -independence, it would, in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith's -ardor. - -Mary, however, was a person to keep her own counsel. During her father's -lifetime, when much responsibility and many duties had claimed her, she -had certainly doubted more than once the possibility of Mr. Apswith's -ultimate success; there was a touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great -deal of the Minerva. But, since her father's death, since Peter's bridal -home-coming, Mary often found herself thinking of Mr. Apswith, her -fundamental sympathy with him on all things, her real loneliness and his -devotion. They had corresponded for years, and often saw one another. -Familiarity had not bred contempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust -and dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary's letters had called -forth from Mr. Apswith a most domineering and determined love-letter. -Mary had yielded to it--gladly, as she now realized. Yet her heart -yearned over Peter. He got up now, and kissed her. - -"Mary, my dear girl"--he could hardly find words--"may you be very, very -happy. You deserve it; so does he." - -Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful decision, on the fact -that by it Peter would be left to the solitary companionship of his -wife; it was not a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her arms -around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her happiness made his missing -it so apparent, but she shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge. - -"We must ask Apswith down at once," said Odd. "It's a busy session, but -he can manage a few days." - -"Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within -the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. -She stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get -my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks' time. -Delay would be rather silly--he has waited so long." - -"You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don't like to -lose you." - -"It isn't losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I -shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the -Mainwarings." - -When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for -a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one -does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to -himself that Mary's prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even -character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a -sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia's influence was a very air-pump. Poor -Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather -unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green -stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and -his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two -months ago, just after the baby's death and just before Alicia's -departure for the Riviera. - -Alicia was lying on the sofa--Peter staring at the distant trees, did -not see them but that scene--her magnificent health had made lying on -sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort -of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin -white cheek. His heart was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not -said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in -any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how -keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal -pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the -baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of -longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers -about it, was that of his child--dead. - -On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover's -tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all -tenderness out of it. - -"My dear girl, my poor, dear girl," he said, kissing her; and he sat -down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up -at him with those wonderful eyes--looked up with a smile. - -"Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter." - -Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her--her beauty -entranced him as it had done from the beginning. - -"Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?" His earnestness pleased her; she felt -in it her own power. - -"What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever imagine I didn't?" - -"Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of our child? Will you -feel for my sorrow as I feel for yours, my poor darling?" - -"Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It is especially hard on you, -too, losing your heir." - -Her look, her words crushed all the sudden impulse of resolve, hope, -love even. - -"My heir?" Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone. "That has nothing to do -with it. I wasn't thinking of that." - -"Weren't you?" said Alicia, rather wearily. She felt her weakness, it -irked her, and her next words were more fretfully uttered-- - -"Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot to go through, too, and -for nothing." She saw the pain setting her husband's lips sternly. "I -suppose now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing about baby," -she remarked. - -"I hope I am not a brute," said Peter gloomily. - -"You hope _I'm_ not, too, no doubt." - -"Don't, don't, Alicia." - -"I felt awfully about it; simply awfully," Alicia declared. - -Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library -windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an -epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia -could disappoint him no longer. - -In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness -had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a -nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points -with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a -thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia's -perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all -consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He -was carefully just to Alicia. - -Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia's guests had arrived. Mrs. -Marchant, an ugly, "smart," vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and -good singer; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to -head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and -supposed to be clever. - -"Clever, I suppose," Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, "because she has the -reputation of doing foolish things badly--dancing on dinner-tables and -thoroughly _bête_ things like that. She has not danced on Peter's table -as yet." - -Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily, -and Peter's placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le -Breton's coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a -charitable point of view. - -"Poor little girl," said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with -some severity; "it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is -to make a fool of herself," and with this rather unexpected piece of -opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially -hated the big man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. His -cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of -protecting partisanship in Mary's breast, and his looks at Alicia made -her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly -more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a -reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent -good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter's -good-humor might fail. - -The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peter -_dans cette galère_. - -Peter, however, did not much mind the _galère_. His duties as host lay -lightly on him. He did not mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at -the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and -pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs -and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary -tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John -and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite -falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced -definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter. - -Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show -that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less -gayety than when Mary was there. - -She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard--who -had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his -horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at -odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir -John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight -effects in the drawing-room. - -Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day -Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked -to bring his girls to tea. - -Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the -drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory -introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while -he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain -followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two -children. Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the -hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at -Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a -white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right -about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed -gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their -dogs-- - -"I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day." - -"We didn't know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to -bring them," said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like -effect: "We _should_ have liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully." - -That Palamon's despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen. - -"Hey! What's that?" Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard -the faint ejaculation; "what is your dog called?" - -"Palamon." Hilda's voice was reserved; she had already thought that she -did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, -she was sure of it. - -"What funny names you give your dogs," said Alicia. "The other is called -Darwin," she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; "but Palamon -is pretty--prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him -that?" - -"It is out of 'The Knight's Tale,'" said Katherine; "Hilda is very fond -of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite." - -Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of -his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby's, -hugely amused him. - -"So you like Chaucer?" Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very -uncomfortable. "Strong meat that for babes," Lord Calverly added, -looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant -vagueness. - -"Never read it," she replied briskly; "not to remember. If I had had -literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books -without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently." - -Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did -not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as -"improper" showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm -and wonder. Alicia's expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her -even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly's appreciative monocle--the -monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with -abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man -who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a -child's quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if -Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up -with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a -half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two -little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them -hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda's glad face. - -"I'm sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?" - -He shook hands, smiling at them. - -"Don't, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring," -called the Captain; "they can find their way to the garden without an -escort." - -"But it won't put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if -I couldn't," and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious -and hesitating. - -Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for -strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of -unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, -and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out -with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention -between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not -interest her, but she found Alicia's low, musical laughter, and the -enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly's half-muffled -utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well -in her journal. - -"He is probably flattering her," thought Katherine; "that is what she -likes best." - -Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly's stare and Alicia's -frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He -took her first to the picture gallery--having noticed as they went -through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with -evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the -Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from -picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle -smile, so that, after the half-hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure -that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was -singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in -answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw. - -"All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!" she said; "almost -everything would be beautiful, wouldn't it, if one were great enough?" - -The strawberry beds were visited, and-- - -"Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first -acquaintance?" asked Peter; "we have plenty of time before tea." But, -seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda's eyes, "Well, not there, -then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our -boating-house is a mile from yours, and I'll give you a paddle in my -Canadian canoe,--such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, -or you'll spill us both into the river." - -"I shouldn't mind, as you would be there," laughed Hilda; and so they -went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made -the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that -she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the -best and oldest of friends. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with -an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation -deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind. - -The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the -acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and -kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the -shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable -mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and -self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence. - -Mary's wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone -for two months' cruising in a friend's yacht about the North Sea, Peter -set to work with vigor. "The Sonnet" was in a year's time to make him -famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went -to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found -a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were -thoroughly irreproachable--a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty -but very sensible wife. - -Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her own fashion, felt no -weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, -and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd -when the news reached him at his sister's, was as unjust as it was -poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd's death had -broken her husband's heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false -premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia's -death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was -a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures -haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which -she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away -from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of -the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came -the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death -more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks, -seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive -suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married -there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must -have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of -the wisdom of the decision. - -At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way--the -dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of -helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she -heard that her friend was going away. - -The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her -capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to -her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense -of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity -for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly -bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the -hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she -never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had -seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession. - -"Odd goes to-morrow," the Captain announced one evening in the -drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather -cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she -was not reading, and her father's words seemed to stop her heart in its -heavy beating. - -"I met Thompson"--Mr. Thompson was Peter's land-agent--"and everything -is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he's badly broken up." - -"How futile to mourn over death," Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa. -"Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and -circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great -illusion?" Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely -yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking "rot" before -the children. - -"Move this lamp away, Hilda," said Mrs. Archinard. "I think I can take a -nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal." - -It was a warm autumn night, and the windows were open. Hilda slipped -out when she had moved the lamp away. - -She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge, -but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the -lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness -her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came -to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda's heart -stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at -night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage, -and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only -mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree -trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were -all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an -indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all -the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without -stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance -she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the -lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her -breath. Yes, _he_ was there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet -of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of -the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and -Hilda pushed it open and went in. - -At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half -incredulous stupefaction. Hilda's white face, tossed hair, the -lamentable condition of her muslin frock, made of her indeed a -startling apparition. - -"My dear Hilda!" he exclaimed. - -Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared silently at him. Mr. Odd's -face looked so much older; its gravity made her heart stand still with -an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood helplessly before him, -tears brimming to her eyes. - -"My dear child, what is the matter? You positively frightened me." - -"I came to say 'Good-bye,'" said Hilda brokenly. - -Peter's gravity was mere astonishment and sympathetic dismay. The -tear-brimmed eyes, after his weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with -a most exquisite rush of pity and tenderness. - -"Come here, you dear child," he said, holding out his arms to her; "you -came to say 'Good-bye?' I am very grateful to you." - -Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and wept. After the frozen -nightmare moment, the old kindness was a delicious contrast; she almost -forgot the purport of her journey, though she knew that she was crying. -Odd stroked her long hair; her tears slightly amused and slightly -alarmed him, even while the pathos of the affection they revealed -touched him deeply. - -"Did you come alone?" he asked. - -Hilda nodded. - -"That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank you for it. There, can't -you smile at me? Don't cry." - -"Oh, I love you _so_ much, I can hardly bear it." Peter felt -uncomfortable. The capacity for suffering revealed in these words gave -him a sense of responsibility. Poor child! Would her lot in life be to -cry over people who were not worth it? - -"I shall come back some day, Hilda." Hilda stopped crying, and Peter was -relieved by the sobs' cessation. "I have a wandering fit on me just now; -you understand that, don't you?" - -She held his hand tightly. She could not speak; her heart swelled so at -his tone of mutual understanding. - -"I am going to see my sister. I haven't seen her for five years; but -long before another five years are passed I shall be here again, and the -thing I shall most want to see when I get back will be your little -face." - -"But you will be different then, I will be different, we will both be -changed." Hilda put her hands before her face and sobbed again. Peter -was silent for a moment, rather aghast at the child's apprehension of -the world's deepest tragedy. He could not tell her that they would be -unchanged--he the man of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor -little Hilda! Her grief was but too well founded, and his thoughts -wandered for a moment with Hilda's words far away from Hilda herself. -Hilda wiped her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He had a keen -sense of the unconventional in beauty, and her tears had not disfigured -her small face--had only made it strange. He patted her cheek and smiled -at her. - -"Cheer up, little one!" She evidently tried to smile back. - -"I am afraid you have idealized me, my child--it's a dangerous faculty. -I am a very ordinary sort of person, Hilda; you must not imagine fine -things about me nor care so much. I'm not worth one of those tears, poor -little girl!" - -It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn gaze; a sage prophecy -of inevitable recovery would be brutal; to show too much sympathy -equally cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her grief, and -he found himself looking gravely into her large eyes. - -"You're not worth it?" she repeated. - -"No, really." - -"I don't imagine things about you." - -"Well, I am glad of that," said Peter, feeling rather at a loss. - -"I love you dearly," said Hilda, with a certain air of dreary dignity; -"you are you. I don't have to imagine anything." - -Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. - -"Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and certainly I don't have to -imagine anything." - -Hilda's eyes, with their effect of wide, almost unseeing expansion, -rested on his for a moment longer. She drew herself up, and a look of -resolution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young face. Odd -still felt somewhat disconcerted, somewhat at a loss. - -"I must go now; they don't know that I am here." - -"They didn't know that you were coming, I suppose?" - -"No; they wouldn't have let me come if I had told them before, but I -will tell them now." - -"Well, we will tell them together." - -"Are you going to take me home?" - -"Did you imagine that I would let you go alone?" - -"You are very kind." - -"And what are you, then? Your shoes are wringing wet, my child. Your -dress is thin, too, for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine around -you. There! and put on this hat." - -Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat that came down over -her ears; she looked charming and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda -responded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering together the -wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd lit a cigar, put on his own hat, -took her hand, and they sallied forth. - -"You came across, I suppose?" - -"Yes, by the woods." - -"And you weren't frightened?" - -He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as she replied-- - -"You know already that I am a coward." - -"I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly courageous. The flesh -may be weak, but the spirit is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda?" - -"Yes," said Hilda vaguely. - -They walked in silence through the woods. Clouds hid the moon, and the -wind had risen. - -Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost in the ghost-like -unreality of existence. The walk through the melancholy dimness seemed -symbolical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of Hilda Archinard's -little hand in his was comforting. When they had passed through the -Priory shrubbery and were nearing the house, Hilda's step beside him -paused. - -"Will you kiss me 'Good-bye' here, not before them all?" - -"What beastly things 'Good-byes' are," Odd said, looking down at the -glimmering oval of her uplifted face; "what thoroughly beastly things." -He took the little face between his hands and kissed her: "Good-bye, -dear little Hilda." - -"Thank you so much--for everything," she said. - -"Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you." - -"Don't be different. _Try_ not to change." - -"Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -That she, not he, would change was the inevitable thing. He stooped and -kissed again the child beside him. - - - - -Part I - -KATHERINE - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Odd knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysées in a -rattling, closed _fiacre_. He and Besseint had talked so late into the -evening that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in the -Marboeuf quarter and dress. - -Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers of the day; he and -Peter had battled royally and delightfully over the art of writing, and -as Besseint was certainly more interesting than would be the dinner at -the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable. - -Lady---- welcomed him unresentfully-- - -"Just, only just in time. I am going to send you down with Miss -Archinard--over there talking to my husband--she is such a clever girl." - -Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise; a shock so strong that -Lady---- saw a really striking change come over his face. Peter himself -was startled by his own pleasure and eagerness. - -"Evidently you know her; and evidently you _were_ going to be bored and -are _not_ going to be now! Your change of expression is really -unflattering!" Lady---- laughed good humoredly. - -"I haven't seen her for ten years; we were the greatest chums. Oh! it -isn't Hilda, then!" Odd caught sight of the young lady. - -"I am _very_ sorry it isn't 'Hilda.' Hilda is the beauty; she is, -unfortunately, almost an unknown quantity; but Katherine will be a -stepping-stone, and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on her -own account." - -Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone; that atoned somewhat for the -disappointment that Odd felt as he followed his hostess across the room. - -"Miss Archinard--an old friend. Mr. Odd tells me he has not seen you for -ten years." - -"Mr. Odd!" cried Miss Archinard. She was evidently very glad to see him. - -"It is astonishing, isn't it?" said Peter. "Ten years does mean -something, doesn't it?" - -"So much and yet so little. It hasn't changed you a bit," said -Katherine. "And here is papa. Papa, isn't this nice? Mr. Odd, do you -remember the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor Hilda! And her -romantic farewell escapade?" - -Captain Archinard was changed; his hair had become very white, and his -good looks well worn, but his greeting had the cordiality of old -friendship. - -"And Hilda?" Peter questioned, as he and Katherine went into the -dining-room together. "Hilda is well? And as lovely as ever?" - -"Well, and as lovely as ever," Katherine assured him. "She is not here -because she rarely goes out. Papa and I are the frivolous members of the -family. Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art." Peter had a good -look at her as they sat side by side. - -Katherine was no more beautiful than in childhood, but she was -distinctly interesting and--yes--distinctly charming. Her black eyes, -deeply set under broad eyebrows, held the same dominant significance; -humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her white teeth gave a brilliant gayety -to her smile. There was distinction in her coiffure--the thick deeply -rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled smoothly from crown to neck; -and Peter recognized in her dress a personal taste as distinctive--the -long unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were untinged by any -hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, and yet the dress wrinkled about -her waist as she moved with a daring elegance far removed from the -moulded conventionality of the other women's bodices. This glowing gown -was cut off the shoulders; Katherine's shoulders were beautiful, and -they were triumphantly displayed. - -"And now, please tell me," said Peter, "how it comes that I haven't seen -you for ten years?" - -"How comes it that we have not seen _you_? You have been everywhere, and -so have we; really it is odd that we should never have met. Of course -you know that we left the Priory only a year after you went to India?" - -Peter nodded. - -"I was dismayed to find you gone when I got back. I heard vague rumors -of Florence, and when I went there one winter you had disappeared." - -"We must have been in Dresden. How I hated it! All the shabby -second-rate culture of the world seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had -to let the Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor." - -Katherine's smiling assertion was not carried out in her appearance, yet -the statement put a bond of familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as -to an old friend who had a right to know. - -"Then we had a year or two at Dinard--loathsome place I think it! Then -Florence again, and at last Paris, and here we have been for over three -years, and here we shall probably stick for who knows how long! Hilda's -painting gives us a reasonable background; at least as reasonable as -such exiles can hope for." - -"But you don't mean to say that your exile is indefinite?" - -Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a suggestion of shrug in the -creamy expanse of shoulder. - -"And Hilda paints? Well?" - -"Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, and her work is -really individual, unaffectedly individual, and that's the rare thing, -you know. Over four years of atelier work didn't scotch Hilda's -originality, and she has a studio of her own now, and is never happy out -of it." - -"What kind of work does she go in for?" Peter was conscious of a vague -uneasiness about Hilda. "Portraits?" - -"No; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her things are very -decorative--not Japanese either--except in their air of choice and -selection; well, you must see them, they really are original, and, in -their own little way, quite delightful; they are, perhaps, a wee bit -like baby Whistlers--not that I intimate any real resemblance--but the -sense of color, the harmony; but you must see them," Katherine repeated. - -"And Mrs. Archinard?" Peter felt some remorse at having forgotten that -rather effaced personality. - -"Mamma is just the same, only stronger than she used to be in England. -I think the Continent suits her better. And now _you_, Mr. Odd. The idea -of talking about such nobodies as we are when you have become such a -personage! You have become rather cynical too, haven't you? As a child -you did not make a cynical impression on me, and your 'Dialogues' did. I -think you are even more cynical than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to -me of a _rapport_ between your 'Dialogues' and his 'Dialogues -Philosophiques.' I don't imply that, except that you are both sceptical -and both smiling, only your smile is more bitter, your scepticism less -frivolous." - -"I'm sceptical as to people, not as to principles," said Peter, smiling -not bitterly. - -"Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate people." - -"I don't admire them." - -"You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The -Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And -then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn't -it? Why didn't you keep on?" - -"Because I didn't keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were -dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure." - -"I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren't -'practical,' and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we -should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring." - -"Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got back three weeks ago." - -"How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since -getting back?" - -"Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London." - -"We were with Lady Mainwaring." - -"Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my -having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has -been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?" - -"Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us." - -"And Hilda enjoyed herself?" - -Katherine smiled: "How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed -herself after a fashion, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn't -care much for that sort of thing really." - -Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful -complaint of Mrs. Archinard's weekly letter had cut short Hilda's -season, and brought her back to the little room in the little -_appartement, 3ième au dessus de l'entresol_, where Mrs. Archinard spent -her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at -Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard's -lace-frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long-suffering that -went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people's -deficiencies. - -"But Hilda's month meant more than other girls' years," Katherine went -on; "you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor -Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those -big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old -friend," and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, "Allan Hope." - -Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt -its concealment. - -"Allan Hope?" he repeated. "It is impossible for me to imagine little -Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!" - -"Allan Hope is very nice," Katherine said lightly. - -"Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a -child." - -Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine. - -"And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is." - -"That depends." Katherine laughed. "But regrets of that kind are -unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don't think little Hilda is -much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn't -imply that one is ready for them, and I don't think that Hilda is -ready." - -Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine's black eyes rested on -him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully -in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of -white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might -not constitute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear -glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all. - -There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years -ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet -mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look -of middle age. - -"His Parliamentary experience probably knocked the remaining illusions -out of him," Katherine reflected. "He was certainly very unsuccessful, -he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit -now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill -hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home -and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a -woman who would be nice to him." And it was characteristic of Katherine -that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether -it would be feasible, or rather desirable--for Katherine intended to -please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she -could make up her mind--to contemplate that rôle for herself. Miss -Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of -matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent -indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly -attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would -choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a -husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful; -and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of -every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss -Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd -would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was -excellent--not glittering--Katherine would have liked glitter, and the -more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, -that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of -modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit only to impress ignorance or -vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one -wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that -she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to -him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could -at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy -memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friendship; but -Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked -anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation. - -Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to -the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, -rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking. -Indeed his next words showed as much. - -"How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you -know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find -myself an uncle with a vengeance." - -"I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages -ago, that wedding." - -"Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently. - -"She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, -at Allersley?" - -"Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is -rather lonely." - -"Why don't you fill it with people?" - -"You forget that I don't like people," said Odd. - -"You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be -something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty -as landowner and country gentleman." - -"Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come -back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness." - -"The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I -think I prefer Paris to the Priory." - -"What do you do with yourself in Paris?" - -"Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very -well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one -must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good -fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed -round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with -which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. -He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him. - -"Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you -fight?" - -"The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the -pity." - -"And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral -crusade?" - -"I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of -conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine, -chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would -be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the -people I liked." - -"And all the others would be in cages!" - -"They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very -tolerant." - -"And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all -marching and caging." - -"I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but -not meanly so, I assure you." - -"No; not meanly so, I am sure." Odd's eyes were quietly scrutinizing, -as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and -looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic. - -"And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but, -meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?" - -"Meanwhile I study my _milieu_. I go out a good deal, if one can call it -going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-American _mélange_; I read a -bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like -sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in -papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!" - -"You rode so well, too, Mary told me." - -"Yes, I rode well, otherwise I shouldn't regret it." Katherine smiled -with even more assurance under the added intensity of the _pince-nez_. - -"You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the feeling." - -"That sounds vain; I certainly shouldn't feel pleasure if I were -conscious of playing second fiddle to anybody." - -"A very vain young lady," Odd's smile was quite alertly interested, "and -a self-conscious young lady, too." - -"Yes, rather, I think," Katherine owned; frankness became her, "but I am -very conscious of everything, myself included. I am merely one among the -many phenomena that come under my notice, and, as I am the nearest of -them all, naturally the most intimately interesting. Every one is -self-conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at all." - -"And you are clever," Peter pursued, in a tone of enumeration, his smile -becoming definitely humorous as he added: "And I am very impudent." - -Katherine was not sure that she had made just the effect she had aimed -for, but certainly Mr. Odd would give her credit for frankness. - -It was agreed that he should come for tea the next afternoon. - -"After five," Katherine said; "Hilda doesn't get in till so late; and I -know that Hilda is the _clou_ of the occasion." - -"Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all that?" - -"She doesn't care about anything, _anything_ else," Katherine said -gravely, adding, still gravely, "Hilda is very, very lovely." - -"I hope you weren't too much disappointed," Lady---- said to Odd, just -before he was going; "is she not a charming girl?" - -"She really is; the disappointment was only comparative. It was Hilda -whom I knew so well. The dearest little girl." - -"I have not seen much of her," Lady---- said, with some vagueness of -tone. "I have called on Mrs. Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever, -too; but the other girl was never there. I don't fancy she is much help -to her mother, you know, as Katherine is. Katherine goes about, brings -people to see her mother, makes a _milieu_ for her; such a sad invalid -she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in her work, I believe. Rather -a pity, don't you think, for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like -that? She paints very nicely, to be sure; I fancy it all goes into that, -you know." - -"What goes into that?" Odd asked, conscious of a little temper; all -seemed combined to push Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory -and very mysterious background. - -"Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Katherine can entertain a -roomful of people. Grace, tact, sympathy, the impalpable something that -makes success of the best kind, Katherine has it." - -Katherine's friendly, breezy frankness had certainly amused and -interested Odd at the dinner-table, but Lady ----'s remarks now produced -in him one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions of feeling -by which the judgments of a half-hour before are suddenly reversed. -Katherine's cleverness was that of the majority of the girls he took -down to dinner, rather _voulu_, banal, tiresome. Odd felt that he was -unjust, also that he was a little cross. - -"There are some clevernesses above entertaining a roomful of people. -After all, success isn't the test, is it?" - -Lady---- smiled, an unconvinced smile-- - -"You should be the last person to say that." - -"I?" Odd made no attempt to contradict the evident flattery of his -hostess' tones, but his ejaculation meant to himself a volume of -negatives. If success were the test, he was a sorry failure. - -He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped -him. - -"I have hardly had one word with you, Odd," said the Captain, whose -high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its -fundamental look of peevish pettiness. "Mrs. Brooke is going to take -Katherine home. It's a fine night, won't you walk?" - -Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never -found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke -and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men -turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré together. - -"We are not far from you, you know," the Captain said--"Rue Pierre -Charron; you said you were in the Marboeuf quarter, didn't you? We are -rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I'll leave you at the door of your -hotel." - -They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night -was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysées, as they turned into it, -almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights. - -"Ten years is a jolly long time," remarked Captain Archinard, "and a -jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we'd -left the Priory, of course?" - -"I was very sorry to hear it." - -"Devilish hard luck. It wasn't a choice of evils, though, if that is -any consolation; it was that or starvation." - -"As bad as that?" - -"Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations--safe -enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one -thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I -simply can't go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of -creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is -mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the -interest; and hard luck it is altogether," the Captain repeated. -"Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep -all worry from her; she doesn't know anything about my troubles; she -lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself -rather than deprive her of one luxury." The tone in which the Captain -alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. "And -the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have -of it. But what is my life, I ask you?" The Captain's voice was very -resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good -gentleman's unhappy situation. "What is my life, I ask you? I go -dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and -five o'clock tea in grass widows' drawing-rooms for all distraction. -Paris is full of grass widows," he added, with an even deepened -resentment of tone; "and I never cared much about the play, and French -actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared -about that sort of thing, which I never did--much," and the Captain -drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the -tip as they passed beneath a lamp. - -"I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer," he declared, "smokable -tobacco. Thought I'd economize on these, and they're beastly, like all -economical things!" And the Captain cast away the cigar with a look of -disgust. - -Peter offered him a substitute. - -"You are a lucky dog, Odd, to come to contrasts," the Captain paused to -shield his lighted match as he applied it to the fresh cigar; "I don't -see why things should be so deuced uneven in this world. One fellow born -with a silver spoon in his mouth--and you've got a turn for writing, -too; once one's popular, that's the best paying thing going, I -suppose--and the other hunted all over Europe, through no fault of his -own either. Rather hard, I think, that the man who doesn't need money -should be born with a talent for making it." - -"It certainly isn't just." - -"Damned unjust." - -Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and smiled as he smoked and -walked beside the rebellious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd -had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble futility pathetic, -especially as there was a certain amount of truth in the Captain's -diatribes, the old eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in -this badly managed world. It would be kinder to immediately offer the -loan for which the Captain was evidently paving the way to a request. -But he reflected that the display of such quickness of comprehension -might make the request too easy; and in the future the Captain might -profit by a discovered weakness a little too freely. He would let him -ask. And the Captain was not long in coming to the point. He was in a -devilish tight place, positively couldn't afford a pair of boots -(Peter's eyes involuntarily sought the Captain's feet, neatly shod in -social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one hundred pounds? (The -Captain was frank enough to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc. - -Peter cut short the explanation with a rather unwise manifestation of -sympathetic comprehension; the Captain went upstairs with him to his -room when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check for 3000 -francs in his pocket; the extra 500 francs were the price of Peter's -readiness. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -It rained next day, and Peter took a _fiacre_ from the Bibliothèque -Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove -through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just five -when he got there, and already almost dark. There were four flights to -be ascended before one reached the Archinards' apartment; four steep and -rather narrow flights, for the house was not one of the larger newer -ones, and there was no lift. Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley, -opened the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently not denuded -himself of a valet when he had parted with his horses; that sacrifice -had probably seemed too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether -Wilson's wages were ever paid, and thought it more probable that a -mistaken fidelity attached him to his master. In view of year-long -arrears, he might have found it safer to stay with a future possibility -of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever to even the hope of -compensation. - -The little entrance was very pretty, and the drawing-room, into which -Peter was immediately ushered, even prettier. Evidently the Archinards -had brought their own furniture, and the Archinards had very good taste. -The pale gray-greens of the room were charming. Peter noticed -appreciatively the Copenhagen vases filled with white flowers; he could -find time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archinard's sofa, for no -one else was in the room, a fact of which he was immediately and -disappointedly aware. Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband's -monetary embarrassments had made even less impression on her than upon -the surroundings, for though the little salon was very pretty, it was -not the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, if anything, -plumper and prettier than when Peter had last seen her. - -"This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!" -Mrs. Archinard's slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate -warmth. "Katherine told us this morning about the _rencontre_. I was -expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really -impossible!" Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad -and pretty smile. "I could hardly realize it, were it not that your -books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years." - -Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar -bindings. - -"I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them -again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links -before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!" Mrs. Archinard laid -her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the "Dialogues," which was -uppermost. "Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on -your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art -productions of our age. Pater is more _étincellant_--a style too -jewelled perhaps--one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty; -but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life--a chain of -flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very -sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic." - -Peter was conscious of being sorry for it. - -"I think we are both of us tired." Mrs. Archinard's smile grew even more -sadly sweet; "both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. -How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched, -do they not? Everything crumbles." Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter -found nothing to say ("How dull a man who writes quite clever books can -be!" thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone-- - -"And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She -told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely. -Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very -proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I -always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much." -The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard's voice irritated Odd to -such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own -pleasant as he replied-- - -"Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl." - -"Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is! -Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term -is flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical -woman of the world." - -Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass--very -unjustly--Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the -atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made -upon _ce type là_. She welcomed Katherine's entrance as a diversion from -looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in -dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high -collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points -were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly -set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a -well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the -pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and -shadows. - -"I _am_ glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little -diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there--a big bit!" - -"And you are a perfectly delightful condensation of everything -delightfully Parisian." - -"The heart is British. True oak!" laughed Katherine; "don't judge me by -the foliage." - -"Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to choose such foliage." - -"No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, to mamma. But thanks, -very much. I am glad you are appreciative." Katherine smiled so gayly, -and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, that Peter forgot for a -moment to wonder where Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget. - -"I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them to wait tea until she -comes, poor dear! 'Them' is Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose; Taylor, our -old maid; and the cook! The cook is French, otherwise our staff is -shrunken, but of the same elements. One doesn't mind having no servants -in a little box like this. Yes, mamma, I have paid _all_ the calls, and -only two people were out; so I deserve petting and tea. I hope Hilda -will hurry." Mrs. Archinard's face took on a look of ill-used -resignation. - -"We all pay dearly for Hilda's egotism," she remarked, and for a moment -there was a rather uncomfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation -and a queerer melancholy rising within him. - -The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than the Hilda of ten years -ago. They talked in a rather desultory fashion for some time. Mrs. -Archinard's presence was damping, and even Katherine's smile was like a -flower seen through rain. The little clock on the mantelpiece struck the -quarter. - -"Almost six!" exclaimed Katherine; "we must have tea." - -"Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not sacrifice Mr. Odd," -said Mrs. Archinard with distinct fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell, -and Peter, with a quickness of combination that surprised himself, -surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she become emancipated? Bohemian? -His melancholy grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of -daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint and delicate -design. - -"Hilda designed it in Florence," said Katherine, seeing him looking at -it; "an Italian friend had it made for her after her own model and -drawings. Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. People who -know about it have admired that teapot, as you do, I see." - -"It's a lovely thing," said Peter, as Katherine turned it before him; -"the simplicity of the outline and the delicate bas-relief"--he bent his -head to look more closely--"exquisite." And he thought it rather rough -on Hilda; to pour the tea from her own teapot without waiting for her. - -Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at fully half-past six, -that he might have been asking for too much patience. - -"There she is," said Katherine; "I must go and tell her that you are -here." Katherine went out, and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the -entrance. He was conscious of feeling excited, and unconsciously rose to -his feet and looked eagerly toward the door. But only Katherine came in. - -"I don't believe I shall ever see Hilda!" he exclaimed, with an -assumption of exasperation that hid some real nervousness. Katherine -laughed. - -"Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to wash her face and hands. -Artists are untidy people, you know," and Odd, with that same strange -acuteness of perception with which he seemed dowered this afternoon, -felt that Hilda had been coming in in all her artistic untidiness, and -that Katherine had seen to a more respectable _entrée_. - -It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that tactful young lady -probably guessed at his disappointment, for she went to the piano and -began to play a sad aria from one of Schumann's Sonatas that sighed and -pled and sobbed. She played very well, with the same perfect taste that -she showed in her gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond of -Schumann especially, not to listen to her. - -In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was over in a moment, the -meeting, as the most exciting things in life are. Peter had not realized -till the moment came how much it would excite him. - -Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put her hand in his with all the -pretty gravity he remembered in the child. Odd took the other hand too -and stared at her. He was conscious then of being very much excited, and -conscious that she was not. - -Her eyes were "big and vague," but they were the most beautiful eyes he -had ever seen, and the vagueness was only in a certain lack of -expression, for they looked straight into his. Carried along by that -first impulse of excitement, despite the little shock of half-felt -disappointment, Peter bent his head and kissed her on each cheek. - -"Bravo!" said Katherine, still striking soft chords at the piano, -"Bravo, Mr. Odd! considering your first meeting and your last parting, -you have a right to that!" And Katherine laughed pleasantly, though she -was a trifle displeased. - -"Yes, I have, haven't I?" said Peter, smiling. He still held Hilda's -hands. The little flush that had come to her cheeks when he had kissed -her was gone, and she looked very white. - -"Are you glad to see me, Hilda?" he asked; "I beg your pardon, but it -comes naturally to call you that." - -"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Odd," Hilda smiled. Her voice was very -like the child's voice saying, "I thank you very much," ten years ago. -The same voice, grave and gentle. Odd had expected some little warmth, -some little embarrassment even, in the girl, considering the parting -from the child. But Hilda did not show any warmth, neither did she seem -at all embarrassed, and Odd felt rather as one does when an unnecessary -downward stride reveals level ground where one expected another step. He -had stumbled a little, and now, half ruefully, half humorously, he -considered the child Hilda grown up. She sat down near her mother. - -"I am so sorry. I am afraid you waited for me," she said, bending -towards her; "I really couldn't help it, mamma." - -"No, I think it kindest to consider you irresponsible; there is -certainly an element of insanity in your exaggerated devotion to your -work." Mrs. Archinard smiled acidly, and Hilda, Odd thought, did look a -little embarrassed now. He had adjusted himself to the reality of the -present, and was able to study her. The same Botticelli Madonna mouth, -the same Gainsborough eyes; the skin of dazzling whiteness--an almost -unnatural white--but she was evidently tired. - -Certainly her black gown looked strangely beside Katherine's velvet, -Mrs. Archinard's silk and laces. Odd saw that there was mud on the -skirt, a very short skirt, and Hilda's legs were very long. She had -walked, then. His own paternal solicitude struck him as amusing, and -rather touching, as he glanced at her slim feet, to see with -satisfaction that wet boots had been replaced by patent-leather -shoes--heelless little shoes. - -"I am afraid you work too much, you tire yourself," he said, for after -her mother's rebuff she had sunk back in her chair with a weary -lassitude of pose. Hilda immediately sat up straightly, giving him an -almost frightened glance. How unchanged the little face, though the -cloud of her hair no longer framed it. Hilda's hair was as smooth as her -sister's, only it was brushed straight back, and the soft blue-black -coils were massed from ear to ear, and showed, in a coronet-like effect -above her head, almost too much hair; it emphasized the pale fragility -of her look. - -"Oh no, I am not tired," she said, "not particularly. I walked home, you -see. I am very fond of walking." - -"Hilda is fond of such funny things," said Katherine, coming from the -piano, "of walking in the mud and rain for instance. She is the most -persistently, consistently energetic person I ever knew." Katherine -paused pleasantly as though for Hilda to speak, but Hilda said nothing -and looked even more vague than before, almost dull in fact. - -"Well, she has had no tea," said Odd, "and after mud and rain that is -rather cruel, even as a punishment." - -Again Hilda gave him the alarmed quick glance; his eyes were humorously -kind, and she smiled a slight little smile. - -"Some tea!" Katherine cried; "my poor Hilda, I'm afraid it is -hard-boiled by this time"--she laid her hand on the teapot--"and -_almost_ cold. Shall I heat some more water, dear?" - -"Oh! don't think of it, Katherine, it is almost dinner-time." - -"Must I be off?" asked Odd, laughing. - -"How absurd; we don't dine till eight," Katherine said. - -"It wasn't a hint to me, then, Hilda?" Hilda looked helplessly -distressed. - -"A hint? Oh no, no. How could you think that?" - -"I was only joking. I didn't really believe you so anxious to get rid of -an old friend." Odd, with some determination, crossed the room and sat -down beside her. - -"I want to see a great deal of you if you will let me." - -"No one sees much of Hilda, not even her own mother," said Mrs. -Archinard from her sofa. "It is terrible indeed to feel oneself a -cumberer of the earth, unable to suffice to oneself, far less to others. -With my failing eyesight I simply cannot read by lamplight, and there -are three or four hours at this season when I am absolutely without -resources. Yet even those hours Hilda cannot give me." - -Hilda now looked so painfully embarrassed that Odd was perforce obliged, -for very pity's sake, to avert his eyes from her face. - -"Ah, Mr. Odd," Mrs. Archinard went on, "you do not know what that is. To -lie in the gray dusk and watch one's own gray, gray thoughts." - -"It must be very unpleasant," Odd owned unwillingly, feeling that his -character of old friend was being rather imposed upon; this degree of -intimacy was certainly unwarranted. - -"Now, mamma, you usually have friends every afternoon," said Katherine, -in her pleasant, even voice. She was preparing some fresh tea. "You make -me as well as Hilda feel a culprit." - -"No, my dear." Mrs. Archinard's deep sense of accumulated injury -evidently got quite the better of her manners. "No, my dear, you never -_could_ read aloud and never _did_. I never asked it of you. You are -really occupied as a girl should be. At all events you fulfil your -social duties. You see that people come to see me. As I cannot go out, -as Hilda will not, I really don't know what I should do were it not for -you. And, as it is, no one came this afternoon until Mr. Odd made his -welcome appearance." - -"But Mr. Odd came at five, and you always read till then." Katherine's -voice was gently playful. Hilda had not said one word, and her -expression seemed now absolutely dogged. - -"At this season, Katherine! You forget that it is night by four! And how -a girl with any regard for her mother's wishes can walk about the -streets of Paris alone after that hour it passes my comprehension to -understand." - -"Do you care about bicycling, Mr. Odd?" The change was abrupt but -welcome. "Because I am going to the Bois to-morrow morning, and alone -for once." Katherine smiled at him over the kettle which she was -lifting. "Papa has deserted me." - -"I should enjoy it immensely. And you," he looked at Hilda, "won't you -come?" - -"Oh, I can't," said Hilda, with a troubled look. "Thanks so much." - -"Oh no, Hilda can't," laughed Mrs. Archinard. - -"And where is the Captain off to?" queried Peter hastily. He felt that -he would like to shake Mrs. Archinard. Hilda's stubborn silence might -certainly be irritating, and Odd had sympathy for parental claims and -wishes, especially concerning the advisability of a beautiful girl -walking in the streets at night unescorted, sacrificed to youthful -conceit; but Mrs. Archinard's personality certainly weakened all claims, -and her taste was as certainly atrocious. - -"Papa," said Katherine, pouring out the tea, "is going to-morrow morning -to the Riviera. Lucky papa!" Odd thought with some amusement of the £120 -that constituted papa's "luck." "I have only been once to Monte Carlo, -and I won such a lot. Only imagine how forty pounds turned my head. I -revelled in hats and gloves for a whole year. Then we go to-morrow, Mr. -Odd? I have my own bicycle. I have kept it near the Porte Dauphine, and -you can hire a very nice one at the same place." - -"May I call for you here at ten, then? Will that suit you?" - -"Very well." Odd watched Katherine as she carried the tea and cake to -her sister. Hilda gave a little start. - -"O Katherine, how good of you! I didn't realize what you were doing." - -"It is you who are good, my pet," said Katherine in a low, gentle voice. -Peter thought it a pretty little scene. - -"A great deal of latitude must be granted to the young person who -invented that teapot," he said to Hilda. "One must work hard to do -anything in art, mustn't one? A most lovely teapot, Hilda." - -"I am glad you like it." Hilda smiled her thanks, but her eyes still -expressed that distance and reserve that showed no consciousness of the -past, no intention of admitting it as a link to the present. She did not -seem exactly shy, but her whole manner was passive--negative. Katherine -probably thought that Mr. Odd had by this time realized the futility of -an attempt to draw out the unresponsive artist, for she seated herself -between Odd and the sofa, thus protecting Hilda from Mrs. Archinard's -severities and Odd from the ineffectual necessity for talking to Hilda. -Odd thought that were Katherine and Mrs. Archinard not there he might -have "come at" Hilda, but the sense of ease Katherine brought with her -was undeniable. She was charmingly mistress of herself, made him talk, -appealed prettily to her mother, who even gave more than one melancholy -laugh, and, with a tactful give and take, yet kept the reins of -conversation well within her own hands. - -Odd found her a nice girl, but the undercurrent of his thought dwelt on -Hilda, and at every gayety of Katherine's, his eyes sought her sister's -face; Hilda's eyes were always fixed on Katherine, and she smiled a -certain dumbly admiring smile. As he sat near her, he could see that the -little black dress was very shabby. He could not have associated Hilda -with real untidiness, and indeed the dress with its white linen cuffs -and collar, its inevitable grace of severely simple outline, was neat to -an almost painful degree. Hilda's artistic proclivities perhaps showed -themselves in shiny seams and careful darns and patches. - -When he rose to go he took her hands again; he hoped that his -persistency did not make him appear rather foolish. - -"I am sorry you won't come to-morrow. May I hope for another day?" - -"I can't come to-morrow"--there was a touch of self-defence in Hilda's -smile--"but perhaps some other day. I should love to," she finished -rather abruptly. - -"But you will be different--I will be different. We will both be -changed," repeated itself in Odd's mind as he walked down the Rue Pierre -Charron. Poor little child-voice! how sadly it sounded. How true had -been the prophecy. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter Odd, at this epoch of his life, felt that he was resting on his -oars and drifting. He had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had -seen much, thought much, done much; yet he had made for no goal, and had -won no race; how should he, when he had not yet made up his mind that -racing for anything was worth while? - -Perhaps the two years in Parliament had most closely savored of -consciously applied contest, and in that contest Odd considered himself -beaten, and its efforts as though they had never been. Every one had -told him that to bring the student's ideals into the political arena was -to insure defeat; one's friends would consider a carefully -discriminating honesty and broad-mindedness mere disloyal luke-warmness, -foolish hair-splitting feebleness; one's enemies would rejoice and -triumph in the impartiality of an opponent. Certainly he had been -defeated, and he could not see that his example had in any way been -effectual. At all events, he had held to the ideals. - -His fine critical taste found even his own books but crude and partial -expressions of still groping thoughts. His unexpressed intention, good -indeed, if one might so call its indefiniteness, had been to make the -world better for having lived in it; better, or at least wiser. But he -doubted the saving power of his own sceptical utterances; the world -could not be saved by the balancings of a mind that saw the tolerant -point of view of every question, a mind itself so unassured of results. -A strong dash of fanaticism is necessary for success, and Odd had not -the slightest flavor of fanaticism. Perhaps he had given a little -pleasure in his more purely literary studies, and Peter thought that he -would stick to them in the future, but he had put the future away from -him just now. He had only returned from the great passivity of the -Orient a few weeks ago, and its example seemed to denote drifting as the -supreme wisdom. No effort, no desire; a peaceful receptivity, a peaceful -acceptance of the smiles or buffets of fate; that was Odd's ideal--for -the present. He was a little sick of everything. The Occidental's energy -for combat was lulled within him, and the Occidental's individualistic -tendencies seemed to stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an -amused and tolerant observation free from striving; and, for an -Occidental, this mood is dangerous. Odd also did a good deal of -listening to very modern and very clever French talk. He knew many -clever Frenchmen. He did not agree with all of them, but, as he was not -sure of his own grounds for disagreement, he held his peace and listened -smilingly. Certainly the exclusively artistic standpoint was a most -comforting and absorbing plaything to fall back on. - -Peter's friends talked of the amusing and touching spectacle of the -universe. The representation of each man's illusion on the subject, and -the manner of that representation, were never-ceasing sources of -interest. Peter also read a little at the Bibliothèque Nationale, paid a -few calls, dined out pretty constantly, and bicycled a great deal in the -mornings with Katherine Archinard. She understood things well, and her -taste was as sure and as delicate as even Odd could ask. Katherine had -absorbed a great deal of culture during her wanderings, and it would -have taken a long time for any one to find out that it was of a rather -second-hand quality, and sought more for attainment than for enjoyment. -Katherine talked with clever people and read clever reviews, and being -clever herself, with a very acute critical taste, she knew with the -utmost refinement of perception just what to like and just what to -dislike; and as she tolerated only the very best, her liking gave value. -Yet _au fond_ Katherine did not really care even for the very very best. -Her appreciation was negative. She excelled in a finely smiling, -superior scorn, and could pick flaws in almost any one's enjoyment, if -she chose to do so. Katherine, however, was kind-hearted and tactful, -and did not arouse dislike by displaying her cleverness except to people -who would like it. Enthusiasm was banal, and Katherine was not often -required to feign where she did not feel it; her very rigor and -exclusiveness of taste implied an appreciation too high for expression; -but Katherine had no enthusiasm. - -Her rebellious and iconoclastic young energy amused Odd. He thought her -rather pathetic in a way. There was a look of daring and revolt in her -eye that pleased his lazy spirit. Meanwhile Hilda troubled him. - -Would she never bicycle? Katherine, wheeling lightly erect beside him, -gave the little shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders -characteristic of her. She evidently found no fault with Hilda. Others -might do so--the shrug implied that, implied as well that Katherine -herself perhaps owned that her sister's impracticable unreason gave -grounds for fault-finding--but Hilda was near her heart. - -When could he see her? That, too, seemed wrapped in the general cloud of -vagueness, unaccountableness that surrounded Hilda. Odd called twice in -the evening; once to be received by Katherine alone, Hilda was already -in _dèshabille_ it seemed, and once to find not even Katherine; she was -dining out, and Miss Hilda in bed. In bed at nine! "Was she ill?" he -asked of Taylor. Wilson had evidently accompanied the Captain. - -"No wonder if she were, sir," Taylor had replied, with a touch of the -grievance in her tone that Hilda always seemed to arouse in those about -her; "but no, she's only that tired!" and Odd departed with a deepened -sense of Hilda's wilful immolation. Katherine brought him home to lunch -on several occasions after the bicycling, but Hilda was never there. She -lunched at her studio. - -On a third call Hilda appeared, but only as he was on the point of -going. She wore the same black dress, and the same look of unnatural -pallor. - -"Hilda," said Odd, for amid these unfamiliar conditions he still used -the familiar appellation, "I must see the cause of all this." - -"Of what?" Her smile was certainly the sweet smile he remembered. - -"Of this unearthly devotion; these white cheeks." - -"Hilda is naturally pale," put in Mrs Archinard; "she has my skin. But, -of course, now she is a ghost." - -"Well, I want to see the haunted studio. I want to see the -masterpieces." Odd spoke with a touch of gentle irony that did not seem -to offend Hilda. - -"You will see nothing either uncanny or unusual." - -"Well, at all events, when can I come to see you in your studio?" The -vague look crossed Hilda's smile. - -"You see--I work very hard;" she hesitated, seemed even to cast a -beseeching glance at Katherine, standing near. Katherine was watching -her. - -"She is getting ready her pictures for the Champs de Mars. But, Hilda, -Mr. Odd may come some morning." - -"Oh yes. Some morning. I thought you always bicycled in the morning. I -wish you _would_ come, it would be so nice to see you there!" she spoke -with a gay and sudden warmth; "only you must tell me when to expect you. -My studio must be looking nicely and my model presentable." - -"I will take Mr. Odd to-morrow," said Katherine, "he would never find -his way." - -"Thanks, that will be very jolly," said Odd, conscious that an -unescorted visit would have been more so, yet wondering whether Hilda -alone might not be more disconcerting than Hilda aided and abetted by -her sister. - -So the next morning he called for Katherine, and they walked to a -veritable nest of _ateliers_ near the Place des Ternes, where they -climbed interminable stairs to the very highest studio of all, and here, -in very bare and business-like surroundings, they found Hilda. She left -her easel to open the door to them. A red-haired woman was lying on a -sofa in a far, dim corner, a vase of white flowers at her head. There -was a big linen apron of butcher's blue over the black dress, and Hilda -looked very neat, less pallid, too, than Odd had seen her look as yet. -Her skin had blue shadows under the chin and nose, and a blue shadow -made a mystery beneath the long sweep of her eyebrows and about her -beautiful eyes. But when she turned her head to the light, Odd saw that -the lips were red and the cheeks freshly and faintly tinted. - -He was surprised by the picture on the big easel; the teapot had not -prepared him for it. A rather small picture, the figure flung to its -graceful, lazy length, only a fourth life-size. It was a picture of -elusive shadows, touched with warmer lights in its grays and greens. The -woman's half-hidden face was exquisite in color. The sweep of her pale -gown, half lost in demi-tint, lay over her like the folded wings of a -tired moth. The white flowers stood like dreams in the dreamy -atmosphere. - -"Hilda, I can almost forgive you." Odd stood staring before the canvas; -he had put on his eye-glass. "Really this atones." - -"Isn't it wonderfully simple, wonderfully decorative?" said Katherine, -"all those long, sleepy lines. My clever little Hilda!" - -"My clever, clever little Hilda!" Odd repeated, turning to look at the -young artist. Her eyes met his with their wide, sweet gaze that said -nothing. Hilda was evidently only capable of saying things on canvas. - -"It is lovely." - -"You like it really?" - -"I really think it is about as charming a picture as I have seen a woman -do. So womanly too." Odd turned to Katherine, it was difficult not to -merge Hilda in her art, not to talk about her talent as a thing apart -from her personality: "She expresses herself, she doesn't imitate." - -"Perhaps that is rather unwomanly," laughed Katherine: "a crawling -imitativeness seems unfortunately characteristic. Certainly Hilda has -none of it. She has inspired me with hopes for my sex." - -"Really cleverer than Madame Morisot," said Odd, looking back to the -canvas, "delightful as she is! She could touch a few notes surely, -gracefully; Hilda has got hold of a chord. Yes, Hilda, you are an -artist. Have you any others?" - -Hilda brought forward two. One was a small study of a branch of pink -blossoms in a white porcelain vase; the other a woman in white standing -at a window and looking out at the twilight. This last was, perhaps, the -cleverest of the three; the lines of the woman's back, shoulder, _profil -perdu_, astonishingly beautiful. - -"You are fond of dreams and shadows, aren't you?" - -"I haven't a very wide range, but one can only try to do the things one -is fitted for. I like all sorts of pictures, but I like to paint -demi-tints and twilights and soft lamplight effects." - - "'Car nous voulons la nuance encor-- - pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,'" - -chanted Katharine. "Hilda lives in dreams and shadows, I think, Mr. Odd, -so naturally she paints them. '_L'art c'est la nature, vue à travers un -temperament_.' Excuse my spouting." - -"So your temperament is a stuff that dreams are made of. Well, Hilda, -make as many as you can. Hello! is that another old friend I see?" On -turning to Hilda he had caught sight of a dachshund--rather white about -the muzzle, but very luminous and gentle of eye--stretching himself from -a nap behind the little stove in the corner. He came toward them with a -kindly wag of the tail. - -"Is this Palamon or Arcite?" - -A change came over Hilda's face. - -"That is Palamon; poor old Palamon. Arcite fulfilled his character by -dying first." - -"And Darwin and Spencer?" - -"Dead, too; Spencer was run over." - -"Poor old Palamon! Poor old dog!" Odd had lifted the dog in his arms, -and was scratching the silky smooth ears as only a dog-lover knows how. -Palamon's head slowly turned to one side in an ecstasy of appreciation. -Odd looked down at Hilda. Katherine was behind him. "Poor Palamon, -'allone, withouten any companye.'" Hilda's eyes met his in a sad, -startled look, then she dropped them to Palamon, who was now putting out -his tongue towards Odd's face with grateful emotion. - -"Yes," she said gently, putting her hand caressingly on the dog's head; -her slim, cold fingers just brushed Odd's; "yes, poor Palamon." She was -silent, and there was silence behind them, for Katherine, with her usual -good-humored tact, was examining the picture. The model on the sofa -stretched her arms and yawned a long, scraping yawn. Palamon gave a -short, brisk bark, and looked quickly and suspiciously round the studio. -Both Odd and Hilda laughed. - -"But not 'allone,' after all," said Odd. "Is he a great deal with you? -That is a different kind of company, but Palamon is the gainer." - -"We mustn't judge Palamon by our own standards," smiled Hilda, "though -highly civilized dogs like him don't show many social instincts towards -their own kind. He did miss Arcite though, at first, I am sure; but he -certainly is not lonely. I bring him here with me, and when I am at home -he is always in my room. I think all the walking he gets is good for -him. You see in what good condition he is." - -Palamon still showing signs of restlessness over the yawn, Odd put him -down. He was evidently on cordial terms with the model, for he trotted -affably toward her, standing with a lazy, smiling wave of the tail -before her, while she addressed him with discreetly low-toned, -whispering warmth as "_Mon chou! Mon bijou! Mon petit lapin à la sauce -blanche!_" - -"Don't you get very tired working here all day?" Odd asked. - -"Sometimes. But anything worth doing makes one tired, doesn't it?" - -"You take your art very seriously, Hilda?" - -"Sometimes--yes--I take it seriously." Hilda smiled her slight, reserved -smile. - -"Well, I can't blame you; you really have something to say." - -"Hilda, I am afraid we are becoming _de trop_. I must carry you off, Mr. -Odd. Hilda's moments are golden." - -"That is a sisterly exaggeration," said Hilda. Had all her personality -gone into her pictures? was she a self-centred little egotist? Odd -wondered, as he and Katherine walked away together. Katherine's warmly -human qualities seemed particularly consoling after the chill of the -abstract one felt in Hilda's studio. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -"Peter, she is a nice, a clever, a delightful girl," said Mary Apswith. - -Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlooking the Rue de la -Paix. For her holiday week of shopping Peter's hotel was not central -enough, but Peter himself was at her command from morning till night. He -stood before her now, his back to the flaming logs in the fireplace, -looking alternately down at his boots and up at his sister. Peter's face -wore an amused but pleasant smile. Katherine must certainly be nice, -clever, and delightful, to have won Mary, usually so slow in friendship. - -"Whether she is deep--deeply good, I mean--I don't know; one can't tell. -But, at all events, she is sincere to the core." Mary had called on the -Archinards some days ago, and had seen Katherine every day since then. - -Mary's stateliness had not become buxom. The fine lines of her face had -lost their former touch of heaviness. Her gray hair--grayer than -Peter's--and fresh skin gave her a look of merely perfected maturity. -Life had gone well with her; everybody said that; yet Mary knew the -sadness of life. She had lost two of her babies, and sorrow had -softened, ripened her. The Mary of ten years ago had not had that tender -look in her eyes, those lines of sympathetic sensibility about the -lips. Her decisively friendly sentence was followed by a little sigh of -disapprobation. - -"As for Hilda!" - -"As for Hilda?" - -"I am disappointed, Peter. Yes; we went to her studio this morning; -Katherine took me there; Katherine's pride in her is pretty. Yes; I -suppose the pictures are very clever, if one likes those rather misty -things. They look as though they were painted in the back drawing-room -behind the sofa!" Peter laughed. "I don't pretend to know. I suppose _au -fond_ I am a Philistine, with a craving for a story on the canvas. I -don't really appreciate Whistler, so of course I haven't a right to an -opinion at all. But however clever they may be, I don't think those -pictures should fill her life to the exclusion of _everything_. The girl -owes a duty to herself; I don't speak of her duty to others. I have no -patience with Mrs. Archinard, she is simply insufferable! Katherine's -patience with her is admirable; but Hilda is completely one-sided, and -she is not great enough for that. But she will fancy herself great -before long. Lady---- told me that she was never seen with her -sister--there is that cut off, you see--how natural that they should go -out together! Of course she will grow morbidly egotistic, people who -never meet other people always do; they fancy themselves grandly -misunderstood. So unhealthy, too! She looked like a ghost." - -"Poor little Hilda! She probably fancies an artist's mission the -highest. Perhaps it is, Mary." - -"Not in a woman's case"--Mrs. Apswith spoke with a vigorous decision -that would have stamped her with ignominy in the eyes of the perhaps -mythical New Woman; "woman's art is never serious enough for heroics." - -"Perhaps it would be, if they would show a consistent heroism for it." -Peter opposed Mary for the sake of the argument, and for the sake of an -old loyalty. _Au fond_ he agreed with her. - -"A female Palissy would revolutionize our ideas of woman's art." - -"A pleasant creature she would be! Tearing up the flooring and breaking -the chairs for firewood! An abominable desecration of the housewifely -instincts! I don't know what Allan Hope will do about it," Mary pursued. - -"Ah! That is an accepted fact, then?" - -"Dear me, yes. Lady Mainwaring is very anxious for it. It shows what -Allan's steady persistency has accomplished. The child hasn't a penny, -you know." - -"You think she'd have him?" - -"Of course she will have him. And a lucky girl she is for the chance! -But, before the definite acceptance, she will, of course, lead him the -usual dance; it's quite the thing now among girls of that type. -Individuality; their own life to be lived, their Art--in capitals--to be -lived for; home, husband, children, degrading impediments. Such tiresome -rubbish! I am very sorry for poor Allan." Peter studied his boots. - -"Allan probably accounts for that general absent-mindedness I observed -in her; perhaps Allan accounts for more than we give her credit for; -this desperate devotion to her painting, her last struggle to hold to -her ideal. Really the theory that she is badly in love explains -everything. Poor child!" - -"Why poor, Peter? Allan Hope is certainly the very nicest man I know, -barring yourself and Jack. He has done more than creditably in the -House, and now that he is already on the Treasury Bench, has only to -wait for indefinite promotion. He is clever, kind, honest as the day. He -will be an earl when the dear old earl dies, and that that is a pretty -frame to the picture no one can deny. What more can a girl ask?" - -"This girl probably asks some impossible dream. I'm sorry for people who -haven't done dreaming." - -"Between you and me, Peter, I don't think Hilda is really clever enough -to do much dreaming--of the pathetic sort. Her eyes are clever; she sees -things prettily, and puts them down prettily; but there is nothing more. -She struck me as a trifle stupid--really dull, you know." - -Odd shifted his position uncomfortably. - -"That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self-expression." He leaned -his arm on the mantelpiece and studied the fire with a puzzled frown. -"That exquisite face must _mean_ something." - -"I don't know. By the law of compensation Katherine has the brains, the -heart, and Hilda the beauty. _I_ didn't find her shy. She seemed -perfectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of absorption in her -love affair, as you say. I am not sure that he has asked her yet. He is -a most modest lover." - -Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her stay, and her first -impression was strengthened. - -Katherine shopped with her; they considered gowns together. Katherine's -taste was exquisite, and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming -Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not above liking pretty -things--that was already nice in her--for the girl was clever enough to -pose indifference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. Katherine was -very independent, but very attentive. Her sincerity was charmingly gay, -and not priggish. She said just what she thought; but she thought things -that were worth saying. She made little display of learning, but one -felt it--like the silk lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk -too much; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. Mary took her twice -to the play with Peter and herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd -sat in the back of the box and watched for the effect on her face of the -clever play interpreted by the best talent of the Théâtre Français. The -quiet absorption of her look might imply much intelligent appreciation; -but Katherine's little ripples of glad enjoyment, clever little thrusts -of criticism, made Hilda's silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while -between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke a scintillating sense -of intellectual enjoyment about her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda -sat listening with that same smile of admiration that almost irritated -Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability--inferiority. - -The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, was rather -touching; and Mary owned that Hilda was "sweet," but the adjective did -not mitigate the former severity of judgment--that was definite. - -When Mary went, she begged Katherine to accept the prettiest gown Doucet -could make her, and Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness. -The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine Braun photograph, -which Hilda received with surprised delight, for she had done nothing to -make Mrs. Apswith's stay in Paris pleasant. She thought such kindness -touching, and Katherine's gown the loveliest she had ever seen. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Mary gone, the bicycling tête-à-têtes were resumed, and Odd, too, began -to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were -bon camarades in the best sense of the term, and Peter found it a very -pleasant sense. He realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in -his present désoeuvrée condition would have been intolerable. The -melancholy of laziness could not creep to him while this girl laughed -beside him. The frank, sympathetic relation--almost that of man to -man--was untouched by the faintest infusion of sentiment; delicious -breeziness and freedom of intercourse was the result. Peter listened to -Katherine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to laugh at him. He -told her a good many of his thoughts; she criticised them, approved of -them, encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present -contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any affirmation. He had -never felt so little sure of anything nor so conscious of everything in -general. Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he continued to drift. -He still read in an objectless way at the Bibliothèque, hunting out old -references, pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of view of -all times. Katherine offered to help him, and in the morning he would -bring her his notes to look over; her quick comprehension formed -another link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She had no taste for -drifting. In her eye he read a dissatisfaction, a thirst for wider -vision, wider action, a restless impatience with the narrowness, the -ineffectiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her probable future -with a sense of pathos. Hilda's wide gaze showed no such rebellion with -the actual; her art had filled it with a distant content that shut -strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was it merely the placid -consciousness of Allan Hope--a future assured and fully satisfactory? -Under Katherine's gayety there was a fierce beating of caged wings, and -Odd fancied at times that, freed, the imprisoned birds might be strong -and beautiful. He fancied this especially when she played to him; she -played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, as the winter came -and it grew too cold for bicycling, Peter often spent the morning in -listening to her. Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon in -the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually met her dining out or -at some reception; their intimacy once noticed, they were invited -together. Lady---- was especially anxious that Odd should have every -opportunity for meeting her favorite. - -But with all this intimacy, to Peter's consciousness thoroughly, -paternally platonic, under all its daily interests and quiet pleasure -lay a half-felt hurt, a sense of injury and loss. The little voice, -seldom thought of during the last ten years, now repeated often: "But -you will be different; I will be different; we will both be changed." - -Captain Archinard returned from the Riviera in a temper that could mean -but one thing; he had gambled at Monte Carlo, and he had lost. He did -not mention the fact in the family circle; indeed, by a tacit agreement, -money matters were never alluded to before Mrs. Archinard. Her years of -successful invalidism had compelled even her husband's acquiescence in -the decision early arrived at by Hilda and Katherine: mamma must be -spared the torments to which they had grown accustomed. But to Katherine -the Captain freed his querulous soul, never to Hilda. There was a look -in Hilda's eyes that made the Captain very uncomfortable, very angry; -conscious of those cases of wonderful champagne, the races, the clubs, -the boxes at the play, and all the infinite array of his wardrobe--a -sad, wondering look. Katherine's scoldings were far preferable, for -Katherine was not so devilish superior to human weaknesses; she had -plenty of unpaid bills on her own conscience, and understood the -necessities of an aristocratic taste. He and Katherine had their little -secrets, and were mutually on the defensive. Hilda never criticised, to -be sure, but her very difference was a daily criticism. The Captain -thought his younger daughter rather dull; Katherine, of finer calibre -than her father, admired such dulness, and found some difficulty in -stilling self-reproachful comparisons; temperament, circumstance, made a -comforting philosophy. And then Hilda's art made things easy for Hilda; -with such a refuge, would she, Katherine, ask for more? Katherine rather -wondered now, after her father's exasperated recountal of ill-luck, -where papa had got the money to lose; but papa on this point was -prudently reticent, and borrowed two one-hundred-franc notes from Peter -while the latter waited in the drawing-room for Katherine one morning. - -Katherine and her father were making a round of calls one day, and the -Captain stopped at his bank to cash a check. Katherine stood beside him, -and, although he manoeuvred concealment with hand and shoulder, her -keen eyes read the name. - -Her mouth was stern as they walked away--the Captain had folded the -notes and put them in his pocket. - -"A good deal of money that, papa." - -"I suppose I owe twice as much to my tailor," Captain Archinard replied, -with irritation. - -"Has Mr. Odd lent you money before this?" - -"I really don't know that Mr. Odd's affairs--or mine--are any business -of yours, Katherine." - -"Yours certainly are, papa. When a father puts his daughter in a false -position, his affairs decidedly become her business." - -"What rubbish, Katherine. Better men than Odd have been glad to give me -a lift. I can't see that Odd has been ill-used. He is rolling in money." - -"I don't quite believe that, papa. Allersley is not such a rich -property. But it is not of Mr. Odd's ill-usage I complain, it is of -mine; for if this borrowing goes on, I hardly think I can continue my -relations with Mr. Odd. It would rather look like--decoying." - -The Captain stopped and fixed a look of futile dignity on his daughter. - -"That's a strange word for you to use, Katherine. I would horsewhip the -man who would suggest it. Odd is a gentleman." - -"Decidedly. I did not speak of his point of view but of mine. All -frankness of intercourse between us is impossible if you are going to -sponge on him." - -"Katherine! I can't allow such impertinence! Outrageous! It really is! -Sponge! Can't a man borrow a few paltry hundreds from another without -exposing himself to such insulting language?--especially as Odd is to -become my son-in-law, I suppose. He is always hanging about you." - -"That is what I meant, papa." Katherine's tone was icy. "Your -suppositions were apparent to me, you drain Mr. Odd on the strength of -them. Borrow from any one else you like as much as you can get, but, if -you have any self-respect, you won't borrow from Mr. Odd in the hope -that I will marry him." - -"Devilish impertinent! Upon my word, devilish impertinent!" the Captain -muttered. He drew out his cigar-case with a hand that trembled. -Katherine's bitter look was very unpleasant. - -Katherine expected Odd the next morning; he was reading a manuscript to -her, and would come early. - -She was waiting for him at ten. She had put on her oldest dress. The -severe black lines, a silk sash, knotted at the side, suggested a -soutane--the slim buckled shoes with their square tips carried out the -monastic effect, and Katherine's strong young face was cold and stern. - -"Shall we put off our work for a little while? I want to speak to you," -she said, after Odd had come, and greetings had passed between them. - -"Shall we? You have been too patient all along, Miss Archinard." Odd -smiled down at her as he held her hand. "You make me feel that I have -been driving you--arrantly egotistic." - -"No; I like our work immensely, as you know." Katherine remained -standing by the fireplace. She leaned her arm on the mantelpiece, and -turned her head to look directly at him. "I am not at all happy this -morning, Mr. Odd." Odd's kind eyes showed an almost boyish dismay. - -"What is it? Can I help you?" His tone was all sympathetic anxiety and -friendly warmth. - -"No; just the contrary. Mr. Odd, I am ashamed that you should have seen -the depths of our poverty. It is not a poverty one can be proud of. -Poverty to be honorable must work, and must not borrow." - -Odd flushed. - -"You exaggerate," he said, but he liked her for the exaggeration. - -"I did not know till yesterday that papa owed to you his Riviera trip." - -"Really, Katherine"--he had not used her name before, it came now most -naturally with this new sense of intimacy--"you mustn't misunderstand, -misjudge your father. He couldn't work; his life has unfitted him for -it; it would be a false pride that would make him hesitate to ask an old -friend for a loan; an old friend so well able to lend as I am. You women -judge these things far too loftily." And Peter liked her for the -loftiness. - -"Would you mind telling me how much you lent him last time? I was with -him when he cashed the check. I saw the name, not the amount." - -"It was nothing of any importance," said Odd shortly. He exaggerated -now. The Captain had told him that the furniture would be seized unless -some creditors were satisfied, and, with a very decided hint as to the -inadvisability of another trip for retrievement to the Riviera, Peter -had given him the money, ten thousand francs; a sum certainly of -importance, for Odd was no millionaire. - -Katherine looked hard at him. - -"You won't tell me because you want to spare me." - -"My dear Katherine, I certainly want to spare you anything that would -add a straw's weight to your distress; you have no need, no right to -shoulder this. It is your father's affair--and mine. You must not give -it another thought." - -"That is so easy!" Katherine clenched her hand on the mantelpiece. She -was not given to vehemence of demonstration; the little gesture showed a -concentration of bitter rebellion. Odd, standing beside her, put his own -hand over hers; patted it soothingly. - -"It's rather hard on me, you know, a slur on my friendship, that you -should take a merely conventional obligation so to heart." - -Katherine now looked down into the fire. - -"Take it to heart? What else have I had on my heart for years and years? -It is a mere variation on the same theme, a little more poignantly -painful than usual, that is all! What a life to lead. What a future to -look forward to. I wonder what else I shall have to endure." Odd had -never seen her before in this mood of fierce hopelessness. - -"Our poverty has poisoned everything, everything. I have had no youth, -no happiness. Every moment of forgetfulness means redoubled keenness of -gnawing anxiety. Debts! Duns! harassing, sordid cares that drag one -down. Mr. Odd, I have had to coax butchers and bakers; I have had to -plead with horrible men with documents of all varieties! I have had to -pawn my trinkets, and all with surface gayety; everything must be kept -from mamma, and papa's extravagance is incorrigible." - -Odd was all grave amazement, grave pity, and admiration. - -"You are a brave woman, Katherine." - -"No, no; I am not brave. I am frightened--frightened to death sometimes. -I see before me either a hideous struggle with want or--a _mariage de -convenance_. I have none of the classified, pigeon-holed knowledge one -needs nowadays to become a teaching drudge, and I can't make up my mind -to sell myself, though, in spite of my lack of beauty and lack of money, -that means of escape has often presented itself. I have had many offers -of marriage. Only I _can't_." - -Odd was silent under the stress of a new thought, an entirely new -thought. - -"For Hilda I have no fear," Katherine continued, still speaking with the -same steady quiet voice, still looking into the fire. "In the past her -art has absorbed and protected her, and her future is assured. She will -marry a good husband." A flash as of Hilda's beauty crossed the growing -definiteness of Peter's new thought. That old undoing, that mirage of -beauty; he put it aside with some self-disgust, feeling, as he did so, -a queer sense of impersonality as though putting away himself as he put -away his weakness. He seemed to contemplate himself from an outside -aloofness of observation. The trance-like feeling of the illusion of all -things which he had felt more than once of late made him hold more -firmly to the tonic thought of a fine common-sense. - -"Of course, mamma will be safe when Hilda is Lady Hope," Katherine said; -"perhaps I shall be forced to accept the same charity." Her voice broke -a little, and she turned the sombre revolt of her look on Peter; her -eyes were full of tears. - -"Katherine," he said, "will you marry me?" - -Odd, five minutes before, had not had the remotest idea that he would -ask Katherine Archinard to be his wife. Yet one could hardly call the -sudden decision that had brought the words to his lips, impulsive. While -Katherine spoke, the bitter struggle of the fine young life, surely -meant for highest things; the courage of the cheerfulness she never -before had failed in; the pride of that repulsion for the often offered -solution to her difficulties--a solution many women would have accepted -with a sense of the inevitable--became admirably apparent to Odd. Their -mutual sympathy and good-fellowship and, almost unconsciously, Hilda's -assured future--Allan Hope--had defined the thought. He felt none of -that passion which, now that he looked back on it, made of the miserable -year of married life that followed but the logical retribution of its -reckless and wilful blindness. The very lack of passion now seemed an -added surety of better things. His life with Katherine could count on -all that his life with Alicia had failed in. He did not reason on that -unexcited sense of impersonality and detachment. He would like her to -accept him. He would like to help this fine, proud young creature; he -would like sympathetic companionship. He was sure of that. He had not -surprised Katherine; she had seen, as clearly as he now saw, what Peter -Odd would do. She had not exactly intended to bring him to a realization -of this by the morning's confession, for on the whole Katherine had been -perfectly sincere in all that she had said, but she felt that she could -rely on no better opportunity. Now she only turned her head towards him, -without moving from her position before the fireplace. Katherine never -took the trouble to act. She merely aimed at the most advantageous line -of conduct and let taste and instinct lead her. Her taste now told her -that quiet sincerity was very suitable; she felt, too, a most sincere -little dash of proud hesitation. - -"Are you generously offering me another form of charity, Mr. Odd? My -distress was not conscious of an appeal." - -"You know your own value too well, Katherine, to ask me that. _I_ -appeal." - -"Yet the apropos of your offer makes me smart. Another joy of poverty. -One can't trust." - -"It was apropos because a man who loves you would not see you suffer -needlessly." Peter, too, was sincere; he did not say "loved." - -"Shall I let you suffer needlessly?" asked Katherine, smiling a little. -"I sha'n't, if that implies that you love me." - -"Suppose I do. And suppose I stand on my dignity. Pretend to distrust -your motives. Refuse to be married out of pity?" - -"That sort of false dignity wouldn't suit you; you have too much of the -real." - -"Would you be good to me, Mr. Odd?" - -"Very, very good, Katherine." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it, and Katherine's smile shone out in all -its frank gayety. "I think I can make you happy, dear." - -"I think you can, Mr. Odd." - -"You must manage 'Peter' now." - -"I think you can, Peter," Katherine said obediently. - -"And Katherine--I would not have dared say this before, you would have -flung it back at me as bribery--but I can give you weapons." - -"Yes, I shall be able to fight now." She looked up at him with her -charming smile. "And you will help me, you must fight too. You must be -great, Peter, great, _great!_" - -"With such a fiery little engine throbbing beside my laggard bulk, I -shall probably be towed into all sorts of combats and come off -victorious." - -They sat down side by side on the sofa. Katherine was a delightfully -comfortable person; no change, but a pleasant development of relation -seemed to have occurred. - -"You won't expect any flaming protestations, will you, Katherine," said -Peter; "I was never good at that sort of thing." - -"Did you never flame, then?" - -"I fancy I flamed out in about two months--a long time ago; that is -about the natural life of the feeling." - -"And you bring me ashes," said Katherine, rallying him with her smile. - -"You mustn't tease me, Katherine," said Peter. He found her very dear, -and kissed her hand again. - - - - -Part II - -HILDA. - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -"Well, Hilda, we have some news for you!" With these words, spoken in -the triumphant tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his -daughter as she came into the drawing-room at half-past six. Odd had -been paying his respects to his future parents-in-law, and was sitting -near Mrs. Archinard's sofa. He rose to his feet as Hilda entered and -looked at her, smiling a trifle nervously. - -"Guess what has happened, my dear," said the Captain, whose good humor -was apparent, while Mrs. Archinard murmured, "_She_ would never guess. -Hilda, only look at your hat in the mirror." It was windy, and Hilda's -shabby little hat was on the back of her head. - -"What must I guess? Is it about you?" she asked, turning her sweet -bewildered eyes from Odd to her father, to her mother, and back to Odd -again. - -"Yes, about me and another person." - -"You are going to marry Katherine!" Her eyes dilated and their sweetness -deepened to a smile; "you are going to marry Katherine, that _must_ be -it." - -"That is it, Hilda. Congratulate me." He took her hands in his and -kissed her. "Welcome me, and tell me you are glad." - -"Oh! I am very glad. I welcome you. I congratulate you!" - -"You will like your brother?" - -"A brother is dearer than a friend, and you have always been a friend, -haven't you, Mr. Odd?" - -"Always, always, Hilda; I didn't know that you realized it." - -"Did _you_ realize it?" - -"_Did_ I, my dear Hilda! I did, I do, I always will." Hilda's face -seemed subtly irradiated. Her listless look of pallor had brightened -wonderfully. No one could have said that the lovely face was dull with -this sudden change upon it. Peter felt that he himself was grave in -comparison. - -"And I am going to claim all a brother's rights immediately, Hilda." - -"What are a brother's rights?" - -"I am going to look after you, to scold you, to see you don't overwork -yourself." - -"I give you leave, but you mustn't presume _too_ much on the new -rights." - -"Ah! but I have old ones as well." - -"You mustn't be tyrannical!" she still laughed gently as she withdrew -her hands; "I must go and see Katherine." - -"Yes, go and dress now, Hilda." Mrs. Archinard spoke from the sofa, -having watched the scene with a slight air of injury; Hilda's unwonted -gayety constituted a certain grievance. "Mr. Odd dines with us, and I -really can't bear to see you in that costume. The skirt especially is -really ludicrous, my dear. I am glad that I don't see you walking -through the streets in it." - -"Hilda knows that her feet bear showing," remarked the Captain, crossing -his own with complacency; "she has her mother's foot in size and mine -in make--the Archinard foot; narrow, arched instep, and small heel. - -"Really, Charles, I think the Maxwells will bear the comparison!" Mrs. -Archinard, though she smiled, looked distinctly distressed. - -Hilda found her sister before the long mirror in her room, Taylor -fastening the nasturtium velvet. Katherine always had a commanding air, -and it was quite regally apparent to-night; all things seemed made to -serve her, and Taylor's crouching attitude symbolic. - -Hilda put her arms around her neck. - -"My dear, dear Kathy, I am so glad! To think that good things _do_ come -true!" - -"You like my choice, pet?" - -"_No_ one else would have done," cried Hilda; "he is the only man I ever -saw whom I could have thought of for you. Why, Katherine, from that -first day when you told me you had met him at the dinner, I _knew_ it -would happen." - -"Yes, I certainly felt a prophetic sense of proprietorship from the -first," Katherine owned musingly. She looked over her sister's shoulder -at the fine outline of her own head and neck in the glass. - -"Aren't you rather splashed and muddy, pet? Poor people can't afford an -affection that puts their velvet gowns in danger. There, I mustn't -rumple my lace." - -"I haven't hurt, have I?" Hilda stood back hastily. "I forgot, I _am_ -rather muddy. And, Katherine, you will help one another so much; that -makes it so ideal." - -"Idealistic little Hilda!" - -"But that is evident, isn't it? You with all your energy and cleverness -and general _sanity_, and he so widely sympathetic that he is a bit -impersonal. I mean that he doubts himself because he doubts everything -rather; he sees how relative everything is; he probably thinks too much; -I am sure that is dangerous. You will make him act." - -"I am to be the concrete to his abstract. He certainly does lack energy. -I wonder if even I shall be able to prod him into initiative." - -Katherine patted down the fine old lace that edged her bodice, and -looked a smiling question from her own reflection in the mirror to her -sister. "Suppose I fail to arouse him." - -"You will understand him. He will have something to live for; that is -what he needs. He won't be able to say, 'Is it worth while?' about -_your_ happiness. As for initiative, you will probably have to have that -for both. After all, he has made his name and place. He has the nicest -kind of fame; the more apparent sort made up by the admiration of -mediocrities isn't half as nice." - -"Ah, pet, you are an intellectual aristocrat. My _pâte_ is coarser. I -like the real thing; the donkey's brayings make a noise, and one must -take the whole world with all its donkeys conscious of one, to be -famous. I like noise." Katherine smiled as she spoke, and Hilda smiled, -too, a little smile of humorous comprehension, for she did not take -Katherine in this mood at all seriously. She was as stanch in her belief -of Katherine's ideals as she was in sticking to her own. - -"We will be married in March," said Katherine, pausing before her -dressing-table to put on her rings--a fine antique engraved gem and a -splendid opal. "You may go, Taylor; and Taylor, you may put out my -opera-cloak after dinner. I think, Hilda, I will go to the opera; papa -has a box. He and I and Peter might care about dropping in for the last -two acts. You don't care to come, do you?" - -"Well, mamma expects me to read to her; it's a charming book, too," -added Hilda, with tactful delicacy. - -"Well, I shall envy you your quiet evening. I can't ask Peter to spend -his here in the bosom of my family. Yes, March, I think, unless I decide -on making that round of visits in England; that would put it off for a -month. I hope the ravens will fetch me a trousseau--for I don't know who -else will." - -"I shall have quite a lot by that time, Katherine. I haven't heard from -the dealer in London yet, but those two pictures will sell, I hope. And, -at all events, with the other things, you know, I shall have about a -hundred pounds." - -Katherine flushed a little when Hilda spoke of "other things," and -looked round at her sister. - -"I _hate_ to think of taking the money, Hilda." - -"My dear, why should you? Except, of course--the debts," Hilda sighed -deeply: "but I think on _this_ occasion you have a right to forget -them." Katherine's flush perhaps showed a consciousness of having -forgotten the debts on many occasions less pressing. - -"I meant, in particular, taking the money from you." - -Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest. - -"Kathy! as if it were not my pleasure! my joy! I am lucky to be able to -get it for you. _Can_ you get a trousseau for that much, Kathy?" - -"Well, linen, yes. I don't care how little I get, but it must be -good--good lace. I shall manage; I don't care about gowns, I can get -them afterwards. Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband." A -pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine's lips. "He _is_ a -dear! I only hope, pet, that you will be able to hold on to the money. -Don't let the duns worry it out of you!" The weary, pallid look came to -Hilda's face. - -"I'll try, Kathy dear. I'll do my very best." - -"My precious Hilda! You need not tell me _that!_ Run quickly and dress, -dear, it must be almost dinner-time. What _have_ you to wear? Shall I -lend you anything?" - -"Why, you forgot my gray silk! My fichu! Insulting Kathy!" - -"So I did! And you look deliciously pretty in that dress, though she -_did_ make a fiasco of the back; let the fichu come well down over it. -You really shouldn't indulge your passion for _petites couturières_, -child. It doesn't pay." - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Odd climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Hilda's studio. The -concièrge below at the entrance to the court had looked at him with the -sourness common to her class, as she stood spaciously in her door. The -gentleman had, evidently, definite intentions, for he had asked her no -questions, and Madame Prinet felt his independence as a slur upon her -Cerberus qualifications. - -Odd was putting into practice his brotherly principles. He had spent the -morning with Katherine--the fifth morning since their engagement--and -time hanging unemployed and heavy on his hands this afternoon, a visit -to Hilda seemed altogether desirable. It really behoved him to solve -Hilda's dubious position and, if possible, help her to a more normal -outlook; he felt the task far more feasible since that glimpse of gayety -and confidence. Indeed he was quite unconscious of Madame Prinet's -suspicious observation as he crossed the court, and the absorption in -his pleasant duty held his mind while he wound up the interminable -staircase. - -His knock at Hilda's door--there was no mistaking it, for a card bearing -her name was neatly nailed thereon--was promptly answered, and Odd found -himself face to face with a middle-aged maiden of the artistic type -with which Paris swarms; thin, gray-haired, energetic eyes behind -eyeglasses, and a huge palette on her arm, so huge that it gave Odd the -impression of a misshapen table and blocked the distance out with its -brave array of color. Over the lady's shoulder, Odd caught sight of a -canvas of heroic proportions. - -"Oh! I thought it was the concièrge," said the artist, evidently -disappointed; "have you come to the right door? I don't think I know -you." - -"No; I don't know you," Odd replied, smiling and casting a futile glance -around the studio, now fully revealed by the shifting of the palette to -a horizontal position. - -"I expected to find Miss Archinard. Are you working with her? Will she -be back presently?" - -The gray-haired lady smiled an answering and explanatory smile. - -"Miss Archinard rents me her studio in the afternoon. She only uses it -in the morning; she is never here in the afternoon." - -Odd felt a huge astonishment. - -"Never here?" - -"No; can I give her any message? I shall probably see her tomorrow if I -come early enough." - -"Oh no, thanks. Thanks very much." He realized that to reveal his dismay -would stamp Hilda with an unpleasantly mysterious character. - -"I shall see her this evening--at her mother's. I am sorry to have -interrupted you." - -"Oh! Don't mention it!" The gray-haired lady still smiled kindly; Peter -touched his hat and descended the stairs. Perhaps she worked in a large -atelier in the afternoon; strange that she had never mentioned it. - -Madame Prinet, who had followed the visitor to the foot of the staircase -and had located his errand, now stood in her door and surveyed his -retreat with a fine air of impartiality; people who consulted her need -not mount staircases for nothing. - -"Monsieur did not find Mademoiselle." - -Odd paused; he certainly would ask no questions of the concièrge, but -she might, of her own accord, throw some light on Hilda's devious ways. - -"No; I had hoped to find her. Mademoiselle was in when I last called -with her sister. I did not know that she went out every afternoon." - -Odd thought this tactful, implying, as it did, that Miss Archinard's -friends were not in ignorance of her habits. - -"Every afternoon, monsieur; _elle et son chien_." - -"Ah, indeed!" Odd wished her good day and walked off. He had stumbled -upon a mystery only Hilda herself might divulge: it might be very -simple, and yet a sense of anxiety weighed upon him. - -At five he went to call on a pleasant and pretty woman, an American, who -lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He was to dine with the Archinards, -and Katherine had said she might meet him at Mrs. Pope's; if she were -not there by five he need not wait for her. She was not there, and Mr. -Pope took possession of him on his entrance and led him into the library -to show him some new acquisitions in bindings. Mrs. Pope was not a grass -widow, and her husband, a desultory dilettante, was always in evidence -in her graceful, crowded salon. He was a very tall, thin man, with -white hair and a mild, almost timid manner, dashed with the collector's -eagerness. - -"Now, Mr. Odd, I have a treasure here; really a perfect treasure. A -genuine Grolier; I captured it at the La Hire sale. Just look here, -please; come to the light. Isn't that a beauty?" - -Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter; she did not approve of -the hiding of her lion in the library. She took him into the -drawing-room, where a great many people were drinking tea and talking, -and he was passed dexterously from group to group; Mrs. Pope, gay and -stout, shuffling the pack and generously giving every one a glimpse of -her trump. It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find himself -at last in Mrs. Pope's undivided possession. He was sitting on a sofa -beside her, talking and drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a -picture on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He put down the -cup of tea and put up his eyeglasses to look at it. A woman in a dress -of Japanese blue, holding a paper fan; pink azaleas in the foreground. -The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality made it unmistakable. -He got up to look more closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing -signature: "Hilda Archinard." - -He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise. - -"I didn't know that Hilda had reached this degree of popularity. You are -very lucky. Did she give it to you?" - -Katherine's engagement was generally known, and Mrs. Pope reproached -herself for having failed to draw Mr. Odd's attention before this to the -work of his future sister. - -"Oh no; she is altogether too distinguished a little person to give away -her pictures. That was in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The -two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of her things; for -high prices, too. Always the way, you know; a starving genius is allowed -to starve, but material success comes to a pretty girl who doesn't need -it. Katherine is so well known in Paris that Hilda's public was already -made for her; there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her due. -Her work is certainly charming." - -Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could not share Mrs. Pope's -feeling of easy pleasantness. Hilda _did_ need it. Certainly there was -nothing pathetic in doing what she liked best and making money at it. -Yet he wondered just how far Hilda's earnings helped the family; kept -the butcher and baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture he -thought of the black serge dress; somewhere about Hilda's artistic -indifference there might well lurk a tragic element. Did she not really -care to wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings perhaps went to -provide? The vague distress that had never left him since his first -disappointment at the Embassy dinner, that the afternoon's discovery at -the atelier had sharpened, now became acute. - -"I always think it such a pretty compensation of Providence," said Mrs. -Pope, gracefully anxious to please, "that all the talent that Hilda -Archinard expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in Katherine; -is part of herself as it were, like a perfume about her." - -"Yes," said Odd rather dully, not particularly pleased with the -comparison. - -"She is such a brilliant girl," Mrs. Pope added, "such a splendid -character. I can't tell you how it delighted me to hear that Katherine -had at last found the rare some one who could really appreciate her. It -strengthened my pet theory of the fundamental fitness of things." - -"Yes," Odd repeated, so vaguely that Mrs. Pope hurriedly wondered if she -had been guilty of bad taste, and changed the subject. - -When Peter reached the Archinards' at half-past six that evening, he -found the Captain and Mrs. Archinard alone in the drawing-room. - -"Hilda not in yet?" he asked. His anxiety was so oppressive that he -really could not forbear opening the old subject of grievance. Indeed, -Odd fancied that in Mrs. Archinard's jeremiads there was an element of -maternal solicitude. That Hilda should voluntarily immolate herself, -have no pretty dresses, show herself nowhere--these facts perhaps moved -Mrs. Archinard as much as her own neglected condition. At least, so -Peter charitably hoped, feeling almost cruel as he deliberately broached -the painful subject. - -Mrs. Archinard now gave a dismal sigh, and the Captain shook his head -impatiently as he put down _Le Temps_. - -Odd went on quite doggedly-- - -"I didn't know that Hilda sold her pictures. I saw one of them at Mrs. -Pope's this afternoon." - -There could certainly be no indiscretion in the statement, for Mrs. -Pope herself had mentioned the fact of Hilda's success as well known. -Indeed, although the Captain's face showed an uneasy little change, Mrs. -Archinard's retained its undisturbed pathos. - -"Yes," she said, "oh yes, Hilda has sold several things, I believe. She -certainly needs the money. We are not _rich_ people, Peter." Mrs. -Archinard had immediately adopted the affectionate intimacy of the -Christian name. "And we could hardly indulge Hilda in her artistic -career if, to some extent, she did not help herself. I fancy that Hilda -makes few demands on her papa's purse, and she must have many expenses. -Models are expensive things, I hear. I cannot say that I rejoice in her -success. It seems to justify her obstinacy--makes her independent of our -desires--our requests." - -Odd felt that there was a depth of selfish ignorance in these remarks. -The Captain's purse he knew by experience to be very nearly mythical, -and the Captain's expression at this moment showed to Peter's sharpened -apprehension an uncomfortable consciousness. Peter was convinced that, -far from making demands on papa's purse, Hilda had replenished it, and -further conjectures as to Hilda's egotistic one-sidedness began to shape -themselves. - -"And a very lucky girl she is to be able to make money so easily," the -Captain remarked, after a pause. "By Jove! I wish that doing what -pleased me most would give me a large income!" and the Captain, who -certainly had made most conscientious efforts to fulfil his nature, and -had, at least, tried to do what most pleased him all his life long, and -with the utmost energy, looked resentfully at his narrow well-kept -finger-nails. - -"Does she work all day long at her studio?" Peter asked, conscious of a -certain hesitation in his voice. The mystery of Hilda's afternoon -absences would now be either solved or determined. It was -determined--definitely. There was no shade of suspicion in Mrs. -Archinard's sighing, "Dear me, yes!" or in the Captain's, "From morning -till night. Wears herself out." - -Hilda, all too evidently, had a secret. - -"She ought to go to two studios, it would tire her less. Her own half -the day, and a large atelier the other." Assurance might as well be made -doubly sure. - -"Hilda left Julian's a long time ago. She has lived in her own place -since then, really lived there. I haven't seen it; of course I could not -attempt the stairs. Katherine tells me there are terrible stairs. Most -shockingly unhealthy life she leads, I think, and most, _most_ -inconsiderate." - -At the dinner-table Odd knew that Hilda had only him to thank for the -thorough "heckling" she received at the hands of both her parents. Her -silence, with its element of vacant dulness, now admitted many -interpretations. It hedged round a secret unknown to either father or -mother. Unknown to Katherine? Her grave air of aloofness might imply as -much, or might mean only a natural disapproval of the scolding process -carried on before her lover, a loyalty to Hilda that would ask no -question and make no reproach. - -"Any one would tell you, Hilda, that it is positively not _decent_ in -Paris for a young girl to be out alone after dusk," said the Captain. -"Odd will tell you so; he was speaking about it only this evening. You -must come home earlier; I insist upon it." - -Odd sat opposite to her, and Hilda raised her eyes and met his. - -He smiled gravely at her, and shook his head. - -"Naughty little Hilda!" but his voice expressed all the tender sympathy -the very sight of her roused in him, and Hilda smiled back faintly. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter brought Katherine the engagement ring a few days afterward. The -drifting had ceased abruptly, and he felt the new sense of reality as -most salutary. His personality and hers now filled the horizon; their -relations demanded a healthy condensation of thoughts before expanded in -wandering infinity, and he was thankful for the consciousness of -definite duty and responsibility that made past years seem the -refinement of egotism. - -Katherine looked almost roguishly gay that afternoon, and, even after -the ring was exclaimed over, put on, and Peter duly kissed for it, he -felt that there was still an expression of happy knowingness not yet -accounted for. - -"The ring wasn't a surprise, but you have one for me, Katherine." - -Katherine laughed out at his acuteness. - -"The ring is lovely; clever, sensitive Peter!" - -"You have quite convinced me of your pleasure and my own good taste. -What is the news?" - -"Well, Peter, a delightful thing has happened, or is _going_ to happen, -rather. Allan Hope is coming to Paris next week! Peter, we may have a -double wedding!" - -"Hilda has accepted him?" - -"Oh, we have not openly discussed it, you know. Mamma got his letter -this morning; very short. He hoped to see us all by Wednesday. Of -course, mamma is charmed. Hilda said nothing, and went off to the studio -as usual; but Hilda never _does_ say anything if she is really feeling." - -"Doesn't she?" There was a musing quality in Odd's voice. - -"_I_ think the child is in love with him; I thought so from the first. -Wednesday! A week from to-morrow! Oh, of course she will have him!" -Katherine said jubilantly. - -"Allan isn't the man to fail in anything. He has a great deal of -determination." - -"Yes, he seems the very embodiment of success, doesn't he? That is -because he doesn't try to see everything at once, like some people I -know." And Katherine nodded her head laughingly at her _fiancé_. -"Intellectual epicureanism is fatal. Allan Hope has no unmanageable -opinions. His party can always count on him. He is always there, -unchanged--unless they change! He pins his faith to his party, and -verily he shall have his reward! By mere force of honest mediocrity he -will mount to the highest places!" - -"Venomous little Katherine! What are you trying to insinuate?" - -"Why, that Lord Allan isn't particularly clever, nor particularly -anything, except particularly useful to men who can be clever for him. -He is the bricks they build with." - -"Allan is as honest as the day," said Peter, a little shortly. - -"Honest? Who's a denygin' of it, pray? His honesty is part of his -supreme utility. My simile holds good; he is a brick; a dishonest man is -a mere tool, fit only to be cast away, once used." - -"How rhetorical we are!" said Odd, smiling at her with a touch of -friendly mockery. - -"Lord Allan most devoutly believes that in his party lies the salvation -of his country," Katherine pursued. "Oh, I have talked to him!" - -"You have, have you? Poor chap!" ejaculated Peter. "Will you ever serve -me up in this neatly dissected way, as a result of our confidential -conversations?" - -"Willingly! but only to yourself. Don't be afraid, Peter. I could -dissect myself far more neatly, far more unpleasantly. I have a genius -for the scalpel! And I have said nothing in the least derogatory to -Allan Hope. He couldn't disagree with his party, any more than a pious -Catholic could disagree with his church. It is a matter of faith, and of -shutting the eyes." - -If Hilda was so soon to pass to the supreme authority of an accepted -lover, Peter felt that for his own satisfaction he must make the most of -the time left him, and solve the riddle of her occupations. That -delicate sense of loyal reticence had held him from a hinted question to -even Katherine. If Katherine were as ignorant as he, a question would -arouse and imply suspicion. Odd could suspect Hilda of nothing worse -than a silly disobedience founded on a foolish idea of her own artistic -worth; a dull self-absorption, unsaved by a touch of humor. Yet this -very suspicion irritated Odd profoundly; it seemed logical and yet -impossible. He felt, in his very revulsion from it, a justification for -a storming of her barriers. - -That very evening, while Katherine played Schumann, the Captain having -gone out and Mrs. Archinard dozing on the sofa, he determined to have -the truth if possible. - -Hilda stood behind her sister, listening. Her tall slenderness looked -well in anything that fell in long lines, even if made by the most -_petite_ of _petite couturières_, as the gray silk had been. The white -fichu covered deficiencies of fit, and left free the exquisite line of -her throat. Her head, in its attitude of quiet listening, struck Odd -with the old sense of a beauty significant, not the lovely mask of -emptiness. - -"Come and sit by me, Hilda," he said from his place on the sofa, "you -can hear better at this distance." - -The quick turn of her head, her pretty look of willingness were -charming, he thought. - -"I like to see you in that dress," he said, as she sat down beside him -on the sofa, "there isn't a whiff of paint or palette about it, except -that, in it, you look like a picture, and a prettier one than even you -could paint." - -"That is a very subtle insult!" Hilda's smile showed a most encouraging -continuation of the pretty willingness. - -"You see," said Odd, "you are not fair to your friends. You should paint -fewer pictures, and be more constantly a picture in yourself." She -showed a little uneasy doubtfulness of look. - -"I am afraid I don't understand you. I am afraid I am stupid." - -"You should _be_ a little more, and _act_ a little less." - -"But to act is to be," said Hilda, with a sudden laugh. "We are not -listening to Schumann," she added, a trifle maliciously. Her face turned -toward him in a soft shadow, a line of light just defining the cheek's -young oval, the lovely slimness of the throat affected Odd with a really -rapturously artistic appreciation. The shape of her small head, too, -with its high curves of hair, was elegant with an intimate elegance -peculiarly characteristic. An inner gentle dignity, a voluntary -submission to exterior facts of existence resulting in a higher freedom, -a more perfect self-possession, seemed to emanate from her; the very -poise of her head suggested it, and so strong and so sudden was the -suggestion that Odd felt his curiosity intolerable, and those groping -suspicions outrageously at sea. - -"Hilda," he said abruptly, "I went to your studio the other afternoon. -You were not there." - -Her finger flashed warningly to her lip, and her glance towards her -mother turned again to him, pained and beseeching. - -"She--they can't hear," said Odd, in a still lower voice. - -"No, I was not there," Hilda repeated. - -"And your father, your mother, Katherine, think you are there when you -are not. Is that wise? Don't be angry with me, my dear Hilda. You may -have confidence in me. Tell me, do you work somewhere else?" - -"_No._ I am not angry. You startled me." Her look was indeed shaken, -but sweet, touched even. "Yes, I work somewhere else." - -"And you keep it a secret?" - -She nodded. - -"Is it safe to keep secrets from your father and mother? Or is it a -secret kept for their sakes, Hilda?" Peter had made mental combinations, -yet he suspected that in this one he was shooting rather far from the -mark. No matter. Hilda looked away, and seemed revolving some inner -doubt. Her hesitation surprised him; he was more surprised when, half -unwillingly, she whispered, "Yes," still not looking at him. - -"For their sakes," repeated Odd, his curiosity redoubled. "Come, Hilda, -please tell me all about it. For _their_ sakes?" - -"In one way." Hilda spoke with the same air of half-unwilling -confidence. But that she should confide, that she should not lock -herself in stubborn silence, was much. - -"And as you need not keep it for my sake, you may tell me," he urged; "I -may be able to help you." - -"Oh! I don't need help." She turned a slightly challenging look upon -him. "It is no hardship to me, no trouble to keep my little secret." - -"You are really unkind now, Hilda." - -"No,"--her smile dwelt on him meditatively; "but I see no reason, no -necessity for telling you. I have nothing naughty to confess!" and there -was a touch of pride in her laugh. - -"Yes, you are unkind, for you turn my real anxiety to a jest." - -"You must not be anxious." Her eyes still rested on his, sweetly and -gently. - -"Not when I see you surrounded by an atmosphere of carping criticism? -When I see you coming home, night after night, worn out, too fatigued to -speak? When I see that you are thin and white and sad?" - -Hilda drew herself up a little. - -"Oh, you are mistaken. But--how _kind_ of you!" and again the irradiated -look lit up her face. - -"Does _that_ surprise you? Hilda, Katherine is in the dark about this -too?" - -"Katherine knows; but please don't ask her about it." - -"She doesn't approve, then?" - -"Not exactly. Besides, it might hurt her. Please don't ask me either. It -really isn't worth any mystery, and yet I must keep it a secret." - -Odd was silent for a moment, a baffling sense of pitfalls and -hiding-places upon him. - -"But Katherine ought to tell me," he said at last, smiling. - -"Now you are pushing an unfair advantage. She thinks, probably, that it -might hurt _me_. Really, _really_," she added urgently, "it isn't so -serious as all this seems to make it. The one serious thing is that it -_would_ hurt mamma, and that is why I make such a mountain out of my -mole-hill. How mystery does magnify the tiniest things!" - -"Tell me, at least, where you go in the afternoon. I mean to what part -of Paris, to what street." - -"I go to several streets," said Hilda, smiling resignedly, "since you -_will_ be so curious." - -"Where are you going to-morrow? Give me just an idea of your prowess." - -"I go to-morrow to the Rue d'Assas." - -"Near the Luxembourg Gardens?" - -"Yes." - -"I fancied you were walking yourself to death. And next day?" - -"Next day--the Rue Poulletier." - -"And where may that be? I fancied I knew my Paris well." - -"It is a little street in the Île St. Louis. That is my favorite walk; -home along the quays. I get the view of Notre Dame from the back, with -all the flying buttresses, and the sunset beyond." - -"No wonder you are tired every night. You always walk?" - -"Usually. I have Palamon with me, and they would not take him in a 'bus. -But from the Île St. Louis I often take the boat, and that is one of the -treats of Paris, I think, especially when the lights are lit. And on -some days I go to the Boulevard St. Germain. There; now you shall ask me -no more questions." - -Odd made no further comment on the information he had received, but he -resolved to be in the Rue d'Assas to-morrow. He did not intend to spy, -but he did intend to walk home with Hilda, and to make her understand -that one of the brotherly offices he claimed was the right to protecting -companionship. He revolved the _rôle_ and its possibilities, as he lay -back in the sofa watching Hilda's profile, and listening to Schumann--a -_rôle_ that could, at all events, not last long, since Allan Hope -arrived on Wednesday. Allan's arrival would put an end to mysteries, to -a need for brotherly protection. Odd felt a certain curiosity on this -point; indeed his attitude towards Hilda was one of continual curiosity. - -"So Allan Hope turns up Wednesday week," he said. "I shall be glad to -see Allan again." - -Hilda's silence might imply displeasure, but Odd, in an attitude of -manly laziness, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding an -ankle, thought a little gentle teasing quite allowable. - -"Will you go bicycling with him, unkind Hilda?" He was not prepared for -the startled look she turned on him. - -"When I would not go with _you_?" Her own vehemence seemed to embarrass -her. "I hardly know how to bicycle at all," she added lamely; "I would -have gone with you if I had had time." She looked away again, and then, -taking a book from the table beside her-- - -"Have you seen the last volume of _décadent_ poetry? Isn't the binding -nice?" Odd felt himself justly, but rather severely, reproved; yet the -gentle candor of her eyes was kind and soothing. Katherine was playing -the "Chopin" from Schumann's "Carnaval," and Peter, still holding his -ankle and feeling rather like a naughty little boy forgiven, did not -look at the fantastic volume she held, but at Hilda herself. How blue -the shadows were on the milky whiteness of her skin. Odd's eyes followed -the thick, soft eddies of hair about her forehead. - -"Aren't the margins generous?" said Hilda, turning the pages; "a mere -trickle of print through the whiteness. Some of the verses are really -very pretty," and she talked gayly, in her gentle way, as they went -through the pages together. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -It was just past four when Peter walked up the Rue Bonaparte and -stationed himself at the corner of the Rue Vavin and the Rue d'Assas, -opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. - -From this point of vantage he could look up and down the street, and -there would be no chance of missing her. She rarely reached home till -past six, and, even allowing for very slow walking, he was if anything -too early. - -He felt, as he opened his umbrella--it had begun to rain--that his -present position might look foolish, but was certainly justifiable. He -would ask Hilda no questions, force in no way her confidence, but really -on the gray dreariness of such a day she ought not to reject but rather -to be glad for his proffered and unexpected companionship. The combined -dreariness of the afternoon with its cold rain, the gray street, the -desolate-looking branches of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, -inspired him with a painful sympathy for Hilda's pursuits. She was, -probably, working in one of these tall, severe houses; perhaps with some -atelier chum fallen beneath the ban of Mrs. Archinard's disapproval, and -clung to with a girl's enthusiasm. Disobedient of Hilda, very. The chum -might be masculine. This was a new and disagreeable supposition; a Marie -Bashkirtseff, Bastien Lepage affair; Bohemia gloried in such -audacities; it was difficult to associate Hilda with such feats of -independence. There was a mystery somewhere, however, and if not -mountainous, it must be more than mere mole-hill. It was very windy, and -the rain blew slantingly. Katherine would find the situation amusing. A -vision of the sympathetic amusement was followed by the realization that -to betray his Quixotism might be to betray Hilda's confidence. Yet Hilda -had made no confidence. Peter rebelled at the mere suggestion of -concealment. Knowing all, Katherine could surely know that he had been -admitted into the outer courts of the mystery. He had ample time for -every variety of reflection, for he had been standing in the rain for -over an hour, when Hilda appeared not far from him, stepping from the -door of one of the largest and most dignified of the gray houses. She -paused on the wet pavement to open her umbrella, and Peter had a glimpse -of the wide red lips and small black beard of an unpleasant-looking -French youth, who seemed to loiter behind her with a certain air of -expectancy. It was impossible to connect his commonplace vulgarity of -aspect with Bohemian friendships or with Hilda, and, indeed, she gave -him a mere nod, not looking at him at all, and came walking up the -street, her skirt raised in one hand, showing slim feet and ankles. Odd, -as he contemplated her advance, was reminded of the light poise of a -Jean Goujon nymph. Her umbrella, lowered against the wind, hid him from -her. - -"Well, Hilda," he said amicably, when she was almost beside him--the -umbrella tilted back over her shoulder, and the rain fell on her -startled face--"Here I am." - -Her stare of utmost amazement was very amusing, but she looked white and -tired. - -"I must get a _fiacre_, I haven't your taste for plodding through rain -and mud, and you'll be kind enough to forgo the enjoyment for one day, -won't you?" Her stupefaction at last resolved itself into one word: -"Well!" she exclaimed with emphasis, and then she laughed outright. - -"By Jove, child, you look done up. I'm glad you're not angry, though. -You wouldn't laugh if you were angry, would you? Here is a _fiacre_." He -hailed the approaching vehicle; the _cocher's_ hat and cape, the roof of -the cab, the horse's waterproof covering glistened with rain in the -dying light. - -"You are very, very kind," Hilda said, rather gravely now, as they stood -side by side on the curb while the _fiacre_ rattled up to them. - -"I always intend to be kind, Hilda, if you will let me. Jump in." He -followed her, slamming the door with relief, and depositing the two -dripping umbrellas in a corner. - -"You must be drenched," said Hilda solemnly. - -"Imitation is the sincerest flattery, I believe; your fondness for -drenchings inspired me. You are not one bit angry, then? You see I ask -you no questions." - -"Angry? It was too good of you!" Her voice was still meditative. - -"I am much relieved that you should say so. I was only conscious of -guilt." - -"How long did you wait?" - -"About an hour." - -"And it was _pouring_!" - -"Oh no, not pouring. I have suffered far worse drenchings for far less -pleasure. One has no umbrella in Scotland on the moors." - -"One has, at least, the scenery." Hilda smiled. - -"Yes; the Rue d'Assas isn't particularly inspiring. I don't disclaim -honor; that corner was most wearing. Only the irritation of waiting for -my mysterious little truant kept me from finding it dreary." - -"Don't call me mysterious, please." - -"But you are mysterious, Hilda; very. However, I promised myself, and I -promise you, to say no more about it, to ask no questions." - -"You are so kind, so good." There was deep feeling in her voice; she -looked at him with a certain wistful eagerness. "You really do care, -don't you? Shall I tell you? I should like to. It seems silly not to -tell you, and I think you have a right to know--after to-day." - -"I really care a great deal, Hilda; but--I don't want to take an unfair -advantage, you know; I really have no right whatsoever. Wait till this -impulse of unmerited gratitude has passed." - -"But it is nothing to tell, really nothing. You see--I make money. I -have to--I teach. There; that is all." - -Peter looked at her, at the white oval of her face, at the unfashionable -little hat, at the shabby coat and skirt. A lily of the field who toiled -and spun. And a hot resentment rose within him as he thought of the -father, the mother, the sister. - -"Why _have_ you to?" he asked, in a hard voice. - -"We are so dreadfully poor, and we are so dreadfully in debt." - -"But why you alone? What can _you_ do?" - -"I can do a good deal. I have been very lucky. I love my work too, and I -make money by it, so it is natural. Mamma, of course, would think it -terrible, degrading even; but I can't agree with mamma's point of view; -I think it is quite wrong. I see nothing terrible or degrading." - -"No; nothing terrible or degrading, I grant you." - -"You think I am right, don't you?" - -"Yes; quite right, dear, quite right." - -Odd paused before adding: "It is the incongruity that is shocking." - -"The incongruity?" Hilda's voice was vague. - -"Between your life and theirs; yes." - -"Oh, you don't understand. I love my work; it is my pleasure. Besides, -they don't know; they don't realize the necessity either." - -"Why the teaching? I thought your pictures sold well." - -"And so they do, often; but I took up the teaching some years ago, -before I had any hope of selling my pictures; it is very _sure_, very -well paid, and I really find it a rest after five hours of studio work; -after five hours I don't feel a picture any longer." - -"Yet they must know that the money comes from somewhere?" - -Hilda's voice in replying held a pained quality; this attack on her -family very evidently perplexed her. - -"Mamma thinks it comes from papa, and papa, I suppose, doesn't think -about it at all; he knows, too, that I sell my pictures. You mustn't -imagine," she added, with a touch of pride and resentment, "that they -would let me teach if they knew; you mustn't imagine that for one -moment. And I don't mean to let them know, for then I couldn't help -them; as it is, my help is limited. The money goes, for the most part, -towards _guarding_ mamma. She could not bear shocks and anxiety." - -Odd said nothing for some moments. - -"How did it begin? how did you come to think of it?" he asked. - -"It began some years ago, at the studio where I worked when I first came -to Paris. There was a kind, dull French girl there; she had no talent, -and she was very rich. She heard my work praised a good deal, and one -day, after I had got a picture into the Salon for the first time, she -came and asked me if I would give her lessons. Fifteen francs an hour." -Hilda paused in a way which showed Odd that the recollection was painful -to her. - -"It seemed a _very_ strange thing to me at first, that she should ask -me. I had, I'm afraid, rather silly ideas about Katherine and myself; as -though we were very elevated young persons, above all the unpleasant -realities of life. But my common sense soon got the better of my pride; -or rather, I should say, the false pride made way for the honest. We -were _awfully_ poor just then. Papa, of course, never could, never even -tried to make money; but that winter he went in for exasperated -speculation, and really Katherine and I did not know what was to become -of us. To keep it from mamma was the great thing. Katherine was just -beginning to go out, and no money for gowns and cabs; no money, even, -for mamma's books. Keeping up with current literature is expensive, you -know, and mamma has a horror of circulating libraries. The thought of -poor mamma's empty life soon decided me. I remember she had asked one -day for John Addington Symonds's last book, and Katherine and I looked -at one another, knowing that it could not be bought. I realized then, -that at all events I could make enough to keep mamma in books and -Katherine in gloves. You can't think how nasty, how egotistic my vulgar -hesitation seemed to me. My life so full, so happy, and theirs on the -verge of ruin. There is something very selfish about art, you know; it -shuts one off so much from real life, makes one so indifferent to -scrapings and pinchings. I realized that, with my shabby clothes and -apparent talent, it was most natural for the French girl to think I -should be glad of her offer; and indeed I was. It was soothing, too, to -have her so eager. She wanted me very much, so I yielded gracefully." -Hilda gave a little smile of self-mockery. "I have taught her ever -since. She lives in that house in the Rue d'Assas; rich, bourgeois -people, common, but kind. She has no talent"--Hilda's matter-of-fact -manner of knowledge was really impressive--"but I don't feel unfair in -going on with her, for she really does see things now, and that is the -greatest pleasure next to seeing and accomplishing; and, indeed, how -rarely one accomplishes. Through her I have a great many pupils, for -other girls at the studio heard of her progress with me, and wanted -private lessons too. All my afternoons are taken up, and, with fifteen -francs an hour, you can see what a lot I make. It rather annoys me to -think of people far cleverer than I am who can make nothing, and I, just -because I have had luck, making so much. But among my pupils, I really -have quite a _vogue_; and I _am_ a good teacher, I really think I am." - -"I am sure your pupils are very lucky. You have a great many, you say?" - -"Yes, quite a lot. Sometimes I give three lessons in an afternoon. With -Mademoiselle Lebon, my first pupil, I spend all the afternoon twice a -week. She has a gorgeous studio." Hilda smiled again. "It is very nice -working there. To-morrow I go for two hours to an old lady; she lives in -the Boulevard St. Germain; she is a dear, and a great deal of talent -too; she does flowers exquisitely; not the dreadful feminine vulgarities -one usually associates with women's flower-painting; why all the -incompetents should fall back on those loveliest and most difficult -things, I never could understand. But my pupil really sees and selects. -Only think how funny! Katherine met her son at a dance one night--the -Comte de Chalons--insignificant but nice, she said; how little he could -have connected Katherine with his mother's teacher! Indeed, he never saw -me," and Hilda's smile became decidedly clever. "I suppose the -comtesse--she really is a dear, too--thinks that for a penniless young -teacher I am too pretty. Well, I make on an average thirty francs an -afternoon. I give Mademoiselle Lebon and Madame de Chalons double time -for their money, as old pupils. It would be easier to have a class in -my studio, of course, but I would lose many of my most interesting -pupils, who don't care about going out; then, too, it would be almost -impossible to keep my misdoings undiscovered. And there is all the -mystery!" She leaned forward in the dusk of the cab to smile at him -playfully. "I am glad to get it off my mind; glad, too, that you should -know why I am so often cross and dull; by the time I reach home I am -tired. I always bring Palamon, unless it is as rainy as to-day, and of -course he puts omnibuses out of the question; omnibuses mount up, too, -when one takes them every day. Excuse these sordid details." - -"I should think that a young lady who earns thirty francs an afternoon -might afford a cab." Odd found it rather difficult to speak. She was -mercifully unaware of the aspect in which her drudging, crushed young -life appeared to him. - -"And then, what would Palamon and I do for exercise!" said Hilda -lightly; "it is the walking that keeps me well, I am sure." - -His silence seemed to depress her gayety, for after a moment she added: -"And really you don't know how poor we are. I have no right to cabs, -really. As it is, it often seems wrong to me spending the money as I do -when we owe so much, so terribly much. Thirty francs is a lot, but we -need every penny of it, for mere everyday life. I have paid off some of -the smaller debts by instalments, but the weekly bills seem to swallow -up everything." - -His realization of this silent struggle--the whole weight of her -selfish family on her frail shoulders--made Odd afraid of his own -indignation. The remembrance of Mrs. Archinard's whines, the Captain's -taunts, yes, and worst of all, Katherine's gowns and gayety, almost -overcame him. He took her hand in his and held it as they rolled along -through the wetly shining streets. His continued silence rather alarmed -Hilda. The relief of full confidence was so great that she could not -bear it impaired by any misinterpretation. - -"You do understand," she said; "you do think I am right? My success -seems unmerited to you, perhaps? But I try to give my best. I seem very -selfish and unkind to mamma, I know, but I really am kind--don't you -think so?--in keeping the truth from her and letting her misjudge me. I -know you have thought of me that I was one of those selfish idiots who -neglect their real duties for their art; but I can do more for mamma -outside our home. And I read to her in the evening. Oh, how conceited, -egotistic, all that sounds! But I do want you to believe that I try to -do what seems best and wisest." - -"Hilda! Hilda!" he put her hand to his lips and kissed the worn glove. - -"You simply astound me," he said, after a moment; "your little life -facing this great Paris." - -"Oh, I am very careful, very wise," Hilda said quickly. - -"Careful? You mean that if you were not you might encounter -unpleasantnesses?" - -She looked at him with a look of knowledge that went strangely with her -delicate face. - -"Of course one must be careful. I am young--and pretty. I have learned -that." - -"My child, what other things have you learned?" And Odd's hold tightened -on her hand. - -"That terrifying things might happen if one were not brave. Don't -exaggerate, please. I really have found so few lions in my path, and a -girl of dignity cannot be really annoyed beyond a certain point. Lions -are very much magnified in popular and conventional estimation. A girl -can, practically, do anything she likes here in Paris if she is quiet -and self-reliant." - -Odd stared at her. - -"Of course I have always been a coward, after a fashion; I was -frightened at first," said Hilda. He understood now the look of moral -courage that had haunted him; natural timidity steeled to endurance. -"The greatest trouble with me is that I am too noticeable, too pretty." -She spoke of her beauty in a tone of matter-of-fact experience; "it is a -pity for a working woman." - -"My child," Odd repeated. He felt dazed. - -"Please don't exaggerate," Hilda reiterated. - -"Exaggerate? Tell me about these lions. How have you vanquished them?" - -"I have merely walked past them." - -His evident dismay gave her a merry little moment of superior wisdom. - -"They frightened me and that was all. One was the husband of a person I -taught. He used to lie in wait for me in the dining-room." Hilda gave -Odd a rather meditative glance. "You won't be angry? Angry with _me_ -for keeping on in my path of independence?" - -"No; I won't be angry with you." Odd felt that his very lips were white. - -"Well, he gave me a letter one day." Hilda paused. "What a despicable -man!" she said reflectively; "I taught his wife! I tore the letter in -two, gave it back to him, and walked out. Naturally, I never went back -again." Her voice suddenly broke. "Oh! it was horrible! I felt--" - -"What did you feel?" - -"I felt as though I were for evermore set apart from _my_ kind of girl, -from girls like Katherine. I felt smirched, as though some one had -thrown mud at me. That was morbid. I got over it." - -"Heavens!" Odd ejaculated. "Katherine knows this too?" he asked -bitingly. - -"Oh no, no! Mr. Odd, you are the only person. Never speak of it, will -you? Never, never! Poor Kathy! It would drive her mad!" - -"And she knows of your work?" - -"Yes; I had to tell her of that. She felt dreadfully about it. She -wanted me to go out with her, and have pretty dresses, and meet the -clever people she meets. You should have seen how happy she was in -London last spring! To have me with her! Wrenched away from my paint! Of -course I could not give up my work, even if there had been money enough. -I made her see that, and I can't say I made her agree, but I made her -yield. She takes a false view of it still, and worries over it. She -wants me to give up the teaching and paint pictures only; but that would -be too risky, they don't sell so surely. I have several on my hands. -But Katherine knows nothing of lions and unpleasantness. I must keep -such things secret, or I should not be allowed to go on." - -"You think I am safe. I must allow you, I suppose?" - -"Yes, you must." She smiled a very decided little smile, adding gravely, -"I have confided in you." - -"Trust me." There was silence in the cab for some moments. The tall -trees of the Cours la Reine dripped in a misty mass on one side; on the -other was the Seine with its lights. - -"And the young man I saw at the door as you came out to-day?" said Odd. - -"Oh, that is nothing, I hope. He is Mademoiselle Lebon's brother. A -harmlessly disagreeable creature, I fancy." Odd resumed his brooding -silence. "What are you thinking of so solemnly?" she asked. - -"Of you." - -"Why so solemnly? I am afraid you are laboring under all sorts of false -impressions. I have told my story stupidly." - -"The true impression has stupefied me. Good heavens! Theoretically I -believe in the development of character at all costs, and you have -certainly developed a _rara avis_ in the line; but practically, -practically, my dear little girl, I would have you taken care of in -cotton-wool, guarded, protected; you would always be lovely, and you -would have been happy. You have been very unhappy." - -Hilda was looking at him with that rather vague look of impersonal -contemplation characteristic of her. - -"How you exaggerate things," she said, smiling; "I have not been -unhappy." - -"The pity of it! The pathos!" Odd pursued, not heeding her comment. -Hilda looked at him rather sadly. - -"You mean that I should have lost my ignorance? Yes, that made me feel -badly," she assented. "That is the worst of it. One becomes so -suspicious. But, Mr. Odd, that is merely a sentimental regret. I have -not lost my self-respect. I am not ignorant of things I should like to -ignore; but one may know a great many things, and be unharmed." - -"My dear child, you are probably innocent of things familiar to many -modern girls. No knowledge could harm you. You have a right to more than -self-respect. You are a little heroine. Your unrewarded, unrecognized -fight fills me with amazement and reverence. I did not know that such -self-forgetful devotion existed." - -"Oh, please don't talk like that! It is quite ridiculous! We must have -money, and I can make it easily. I would be quite a monster if I sat -idly at home, and saw mamma in squalid misery. I merely do my duty." -Hilda spoke quite sharply and decisively. - -"Merely!" Odd ejaculated. - -A thought of the near future, of Allan Hope, kept him silent, otherwise -he might have indulged in reckless invective. He still held her hand, -and again he raised it to his lips. - -"That is a very stubborn and unconvinced salute, I am afraid," Hilda -said good-humoredly. - -"May I come and get you now and then?" he asked. - -"You think it would be wise?" - -"How do you mean wise, Hilda?" - -"I might be found out. I have given you my secret. You must help me to -keep it." - -"I may speak of it to Katharine--since she knows?" - -"Oh, of course, to Katherine. But don't _egg_ her on to worry me!" -laughed Hilda; "and speak to her with _reservations_--there are things -she must not know." - -Peter wondered if the child-friendship, the brotherly relations, -entitled him to seal the compact with a kiss upon her lips. He looked at -her with a sudden quickening of breath. Her dimly seen face was very -beautiful. This realization of her beauty's attraction at that moment -struck him with a sense of abasement before her. Surely no such poor tie -held him to this lovely soul. And, at the turn of his own thoughts, Odd -felt a vague stir of fear. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Odd was to take a walk in the Bois with Katherine the next morning, and -he found her waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delightfully -smart and wintry little figure. Katherine never failed in elegance, in -well-groomed finish--her low-heeled little boots, her irreproachable -snowy gloves, bore the same unmistakable stamp of the _cachet_ that -costs, that is not to be procured ready made. Odd, as a rich man, had -given very little thought to the power of money, and little thought to -Katherine's garments except as charmingly characteristic symbols of good -taste; but to-day his eye noted the black fur that fell about her -shoulders and trailed lustrous ends to her very feet, more for its -richness than its becomingness. - -Her bright though slightly grave smile failed to restore him to his -usual attitude of _bon camaraderie_. He smiled and kissed her, but he -was conscious of underlying soreness, conscious, too, that he might lose -his temper with Katherine; he had never lost it with Alicia. Katherine's -very superiority made it imperative to have things out with her. Kindly -resignation was an impossibility. He realized that not to admire -Katherine would make life with her intolerable. She would immediately -perceive reservations and she would revolt against them. He wondered -whether he should be the one to broach the subject of Hilda's -ill-treatment, and was amazed at a certain embarrassed shrinking, as -from a feeling too deep for words, that kept him silent as they walked -along, taking a short cut to the Place de l'Etoile, where the Arc stood -in almost cardboard clearness on the pale cold sky. It was Katherine who -spoke-- - -"Hilda told me of your kindness yesterday. It touched her very much." - -In some subtle way it irritated Odd to hear Katherine vouch for Hilda's -feeling. - -"And Hilda told you that I had been admitted into the mystery of the -Archinard family?" His voice was even enough, but it held a certain -keenness that Katherine was quick to recognize. - -"You don't think their mystery creditable, do you? Nor do I, Peter. But -mamma knows nothing of it, nor papa; and I have tried to dissuade Hilda -from the first." - -"My dear Katherine, the child has worked like a galley-slave for you -all! Your necessities were more potent facts than your dissuasions, I -fancy!" - -Katherine gave a look at the fine severity of the profile beside her. -She felt herself arraigned, and her impulse was towards rebellion. -However, her voice was gentle, submissive even, as she answered him-- - -"I know it must look badly to you--cruel even. But, Peter, don't you -know--you do know--how things _grow_ around one? One can hardly tell -where the definite wrongdoing comes in, or rather the definite -submission to a wrong situation." This was so true, that Katherine felt -immediately the mollified quality of his voice as he answered-- - -"I know. I know submission was forced upon you, no doubt. But I had -rather you had not submitted when once the situation grew definite. And -I wish, Katherine, that you had helped her in making the situation -easier. Granting that you could give her no material aid--granting that -her faculty is good luck--still the actual burden might have been -lightened." - -Odd paused; he could not say his thoughts outright--tell her that the -comparative luxury of her life and her mother's was outrageous, shocking -to him now that he understood its source. - -"It is part of Hilda's good luck that her pleasures are not costly, or -rather that she can herself defray their cost," said Katherine quietly. -"She has always lived in her art--seemed to care for nothing else. My -life would indeed have been dreadful had I not accepted the interests -that came into it. I have always felt, too, that in following the -natural bent of my own character, I was laying foundations that might -some day repay Hilda for everything. If she has friends--a public--it is -owing to me. It was I who persuaded her to come to London last spring. -I, therefore, who assured her future, in a sense, for there Allan Hope -fell in love with her. I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my -own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it nevertheless. I make -a circle for mamma; I brighten her life and my own and Hilda's, as far -as she will let me. Certain _tools_ are necessary--Hilda needs brushes -and canvases and studios; I, a few gowns, a few cabs, and a supply of -neat boots and gloves. Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I -own; but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I entreated her to give -up the idea--I said we would all starve together rather. She insisted, -and how can I interfere?" - -"I can understand, Katherine, that everything you say is most convincing -to yourself; I see the perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, -my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda denies herself -the commonest comforts of life, not only to give you the luxuries, but -because her high sense of honor rebels against spending on herself money -that is owed to others. Don't misunderstand me; I don't ask any such -perhaps overstrained sense of responsibility from you. You have, no -doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; but could it not -have been lived with a little less elegance? I am sure that you would be -welcomed everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and fewer gloves." - -Katherine flushed lightly; her flushes were never deep, and always -becoming. It certainly cut her now to hear his almost unconscious -implication--that from her he expected a less perfect sense of honor -than from her sister. She swallowed a certain wrathful mortification -that welled up, and answered with some apparent cheerfulness-- - -"You don't know your world, Peter, if you fancy that even Katherine -Archinard would be welcome in darned and dirty gloves!" - -Odd walked on silently. - -"And might she not be forced into taking some girlish distraction?" he -said presently. "It came out yesterday, with that astounding air of -_excusing_ herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the evening! -Could not you do that, Katherine, and let Hilda profit now and then by -the _entourage_ you have created for her?" - -Katherine's flush deepened. - -"Mamma doesn't care for my reading, and Hilda won't go out; she goes to -bed too early." - -"And then," Odd continued, ignoring her comment in a way most irritating -to Katherine's smarting susceptibility, "you might have gone with her -now and again to these houses where she teaches. You would have stood -for protection. You would have seen for yourself if, in this drudgery, -there lurked any unpleasantness, any danger. A girl of her extreme -beauty is--exposed to insult." - -Katherine gave him a stare of frank astonishment. - -"Oh, you must not give way to unpleasant romancing of that sort! Things -like that only happen in novels of the silliest sort--even to beauties! -And Hilda would have told _me_. She tells me _everything_. Really, -Peter, she must have given you a wrong impression; she enjoys her life!" - -"So she tried to convince me," said Odd, with a good deal of sharpness; -"there was no hint of complaint, regret, reproach, in Hilda's recountal; -don't imagine it, Katherine." - -Katherine was telling herself that never in all her life had she -experienced so many rebuffs. She contemplated her own good temper with -some amazement; she also wondered how long it would last. By this time -they were half-way down the Avenue du Bois; the day was fine and clear, -and the wintry trees were sharply definite against the sky. - -"I have never even seen her in a well-made gown," said Odd. - -"Hilda scorns the fashion-plate garment, as I do. We are both original -in that respect." - -"Your originality takes different forms." - -"Because it must adapt itself to different conditions, Peter. I won't be -scolded about my dresses. Men like you imagine that, because a woman -looks well, she must spend a lot. It isn't so with me. My dresses last -forever, and, to go into details, Hilda by no means clothes me. Papa has -money--now and then. Even Hilda could not support the family, and her -money mainly goes for mamma's books and oysters and hot-house grapes. If -she will not spend it on herself, and if, now and then, I accept some of -it, I cannot consent to feel unduly humiliated." - -There was a decisiveness in Katherine's tone that warned Peter to -self-control. Indeed the situation had been created for her. She had -owned up frankly to her distaste for it, her realization of its wrong. - -"I am not going to ask undue humiliation of you, my dear Katherine. -Don't think me such a priggish brute; but I am going to ask you to help -me to put an end to this." Katherine's smiles had returned. - -"Allan Hope will." - -Peter walked on, looking gloomy. - -"You won't realize that Hilda's life is the one that gives her the -greatest enjoyment. I have always envied Hilda till _you_ came; and even -now"--Katherine's smile was playful--"Allan Hope is very nice! Take -patience, Peter, till Wednesday." - -"Yes; we must wait." - -"I have waited for so long! Hilda could not have minded what you call -the 'drudgery.' She had only to lift her finger to end it." - -"Hilda would not be the girl to lift her finger." - -"You appreciate my Hilda, Peter; I am glad." Katherine gave his -abstracted countenance another of her bright contemplative glances. -There was nothing sly in Katherine's glances, and yet underlying this -one was a world of kindly, though very keen analysis; disappointment, -rebellion, and level-headed tolerance. This was decidedly not the man to -be fitted to her frame. He could not be moulded to a clever woman's -liking, for all his indefiniteness. On certain points of the conduct of -life, Katherine felt that she would meet an opposition sharply definite. -Katherine understood and was perfectly tolerant of criticism, but she -did not like it; nor did she like being put in the wrong. That Peter now -considered her very much in the wrong was evident. She was also aware -that the sophistry of her explanation had deceived herself even less -than it had deceived him. That Hilda spent her life in drudgery, and -that she spent hers in pleasure-seeking, were facts most palpable to -Katherine's very impartial vision. She knew she was wrong, and she knew -that only frank avowal would meet Peter's severity and touch his -tenderness and humor. If she heaped shame on her own head, he would be -the first to cry out against the injustice. - -Yet Katherine hesitated to own herself wrong. She was not sure that she -cared to place her lover in the sheltering and leading attitude of the -Love in the "Love and Life." The meek, trembling look of Life had -always irritated her in the picture. Katherine felt herself quite strong -enough to stand alone, and felt that she would like to lead in all -things. It was with a deep inner sense of humiliation that she said-- - -"Please don't be cross with me, Peter. Please don't scold me. I have -been naughty--far naughtier than I dreamed of--you have made me realize -it, though you are not quite just. But you must comfort me for my own -misdoings." - -As Katherine went on she felt an artistic impulsiveness, almost real, -and which sounded so real that Peter met the sweet pleading of her eyes -with a start of self-disgust. - -Peter was very tender-hearted, very sympathetic, very prone to -self-doubt. Katherine's look made him feel a very prig of pompous -righteousness. - -"Why, Katherine!" he said, pausing in his walk. "My dear Katherine! as -if I could not appreciate the slow growth of necessity! I only hope you -may never have to comfort me for far worse sins!" - -This was satisfactory. But Katherine's pride still squirmed. - -Odd went to meet Hilda on Thursday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The -distances were always great, and he insisted on cabs for the return -trip. Palamon must be tired, even if Hilda were not. He was too old for -such journeyings; and Hilda had smilingly to submit. Wednesday would end -it all definitely; Peter thought that he saw the end with unmixed -satisfaction, and yet when Allan Hope walked into his rooms early on -Wednesday morning, this Perseus of Hilda's womanhood gave the Perseus -of her childhood a really unpleasant turn of the blood. There was -something irritating in Allan Hope's absolute fitness for the _rôle_, -emphasizing, as it did, Peter's own unfitness, his forty years, and his -desultory life. - -Active energy, the go-ahead perseverance that knows no doubts, the -honest and loyal convictions which were all arranged for him from his -cradle, and which he would bequeath to his children unaltered, all -things that make for order and well-being, looked at one from Lord -Allan's clear, light eyes. Odd suddenly felt himself to be an uncertain -cumberer of the earth; failure personified beside the other's air of -inevitable success. He was fond of Hope and Hope fond of him, and they -talked as old friends talk, with the intimacy that time brings; an -intimacy far removed from the strong knittings of sympathy that an hour -may accomplish; for, though Odd understood Allan very well, Allan did -not muddle his direct views of things by a comprehension that implied -condonation. He thought it rather a pity that Odd had not made more of -his life. Odd's books weren't much good that he could see; better do -something than write about the things other men have done. Odd felt that -Allan was probably quite right. They hardly spoke of Hilda, but in -Hope's congratulations on Peter's engagement there was a ring of -heartfelt brotherly warmth that implied much, and left Peter in a gloomy -rage with himself for feeling miserable. Peter had not analyzed the -darks and glooms of the last few days. - -Growth does not admit of much self-contemplation. One wakes suddenly to -the accomplished change. If Peter was conscious of developments, he -defined them as morbid enlargements of that self-doubt which would -naturally thrill under the stress of new responsibilities. - -Only from the force of newly formed habit did he go to the Rue -Poulletier that afternoon, hardly expecting to meet Hilda. But Hilda -had, as yet, not interrupted her usual avocations. She emerged from the -gloomy portals of one of the old dismantled-looking _hôtels_ that line -the Rue Poulletier with a certain dignity, and she looked toward the -corner where he stood with a confident glance. It was the second time he -had met her there, twice in the Rue d'Assas too. - -"It is so kind of you," she said, as she joined him and they turned into -the _quai_; "only you mustn't think that you _must_, you know." - -"_May_ I think that I _must_? Give me the assurance of necessity. I am -always a little afraid of seeming officious." - -Hilda smiled round at him. - -"Who is fishing? You know I love to have you come. You can't think how I -look forward to it." She was walking beside him along the _quai_. The -unobtrusive squareness of the "Doric little Morgue" was on their left, -as they faced the keen wind and the dying sunset. Notre Dame stood gray -upon a chilly evening sky of palest yellow. "I know now that I _was_ -lonely." - -"That implies the kindest compliment." - -"More than _implies_, I hope." - -"You really like to have me come?" - -"You know I do. I am only afraid that you will rob yourself--of other -things for me." - -The candor of her eyes was childlike. - -"My little friend." Odd felt that he could not quite trust himself, and -took refuge in the convenient assertion. - -The cold, clear wind blew against their faces; it ruffled the water, and -the gray waves showed sharp steely lights. The leafless trees made an -arabesque of tracery on the river and the sky. Hilda looked up at the -kind, melancholy face beside her, a faint touch of cynicism in her sad -smile; but the cynicism was all for herself, and it was not excessive. -She accepted this renaissance gratefully, though the disillusions of the -past were unforgettable. - -"Tell me, Hilda, that you will be my friend whatever happens--to you or -to me." - -"I have always been your friend, have I not?" - -"Have you, Hilda, always?" - -"I am dully faithful." Hilda's smile was a little baffling; it gave no -warrant for the sudden quickening of the breath that he had experienced -more than once of late. - -"I feel as if I had _found_ you, Hilda." - -"Did you _look_ for me, then?" - -The smile was now decidedly baffling and yet very sweet. - -"You know," she added, "I liked you from that first moment when you -fished me out of the river. It seems that you are fated to act always -the chivalrous part toward me." - -"I would ask no better fate. Hilda, you have seen Allan Hope? Not yet?" - -"No; not yet." Hilda's face grew serious. "He is coming to tea this -afternoon." - -"But you must be there." - -"Yes, I suppose I must." This affectation of girlish indifference seemed -to Odd more significant than noticeable shyness. - -"We must take a cab," he said, trying to keep his voice level. - -"Oh, it makes no difference. Cabs, you see, are never reckoned with in -my arrivals. I am warranted to be late." - -"But you must not be late." - -"But if I want to?" There was certainly a touch of roguery in her eyes. - -"If you want to and if I want you to, it shows that you are cruel and I -conscienceless. Here is a cab. Away with you, Hilda. _Au revoir_." - -"Aren't you coming too?" asked Hilda, pausing in the act of lifting -Palamon. - -"Not to-day; I can't." Odd knew that he was cowardly. "I shall see you -to-morrow? I suppose not." - -"Why, yes, if you come to the Boulevard St. Germain." Hilda had -deposited Palamon on the floor of the cab and still stood by the open -door looking rather dismayed. - -"Really!" - -"I shall go there." - -"I too, then. Remember our vow of friendship, Hilda. I wish you -everything that is good and happy." - -There was seemingly a slightly hurt look on Hilda's face as she drove -away. In spite of the vow, Peter feared that this was the last of Hilda, -of even this rather shadowy second edition of friendship. - -He had done his duty; to hurt oneself badly seems a surety of having -done one's duty thoroughly. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Hilda drove home, with Palamon leaning his warm body against her feet as -he sat on the floor of the cab. She put out her hand now and then and -laid it on his head, but absently. She leaned back presently and closed -her eyes, only rousing herself with a little start when the cab drew up -with a jerk in the Rue Pierre Charron. Palamon stood dully on the -pavement while she spoke to the cabman--but the _monsieur_ had paid him, -as Hilda had forgotten for the moment. Palamon was evidently tired too, -and with a little turn of dread she wondered if the time would come when -she must leave Palamon to a lonely day in the apartment. Mrs. Archinard -did not like dogs near her. Katherine was always out, and although -Rosalie the cook was devoted to the _tou-tou_, Hilda would miss him -terribly and he would miss her. - -She said to herself that if it came to that she would allow herself a -daily cab-fare rather than leave Palamon, and she toiled up the steep -stairs carrying him. Taylor opened the door to her. - -"Give me the dog, Miss Hilda; you do look that tired. You are to go at -once into the drawing-room, Miss. Lord Allan Hope has been waiting for -some time." - -Hilda was surprised to find that she had been thinking of Palamon -rather than of the ordeal before her. She felt calm now, perfectly, as -she walked into the drawing-room, a little taken aback, however, to find -Lord Allan there waiting for her and alone. - -Katherine was in the next room, her own pretty room, a rather perplexed -smile of expectancy on her face. Taylor brought in Palamon, and -Katherine gave him a drink and patted him kindly. Palamon would go with -Hilda to her new home--dear old Palamon! The thought of Hilda's new home -and homes--of the castle in Somersetshire and the shooting-lodge in -Scotland, and the big house in Grosvenor Square, deepened the look of -perplexity on Katherine's brow. - -While Palamon lapped the water, she watched him with an expression of -absent-minded concentration. She could hear nothing in the drawing-room, -except now and then the slightly raised quiet of Allan Hope's fine -voice. Presently there was a long silence, and Katherine paused near the -door. - -The quizzical lift of her eyebrows spoke her amused inquiry. She could -hardly imagine Hilda allowing herself to be kissed, and as the silence -continued, Katherine felt a touch of impatience color her sisterly -sympathy. Lord Allan's voice, pitched on a deep note of pain, startled -her. There followed quite a burst of ardent eloquence. With a little -_moue_ of self-disapproval Katherine bent her ear to the door. She heard -Lord Allan quite distinctly. He was pleading in more desperate accents -than she could have imagined possible from him, and Katherine caught, -too, the half frightened reiteration of Hilda's voice: "I can't, I -can't; really I can't. I am so--_so_ sorry, so sorry--" The -childishness of this helpless repetition brought a quick frown to -Katherine's brow. - -"Little idiot! Baby!" - -She straightened herself and stood staring at the gray houses across the -way. Then, at renewed silence in the drawing-room, she walked to the -mirror and looked at her amethyst-robed reflection. - -Her eyes lingered on the contour of her waist, the supple elegance of -the line that fell gleaming from her hip. She met the half-shamed, -half-daring glance of her deeply set eyes. The silence continued, and -Katherine walked out through the entrance and into the drawing-room. - -Hilda was sitting upright on a tall chair, looking at the floor with an -expression of painful endurance, and Lord Allan stood looking at her. - -He turned his eyes almost unseeingly on Katherine and remained silent, -while Hilda rose and put out her hand to him. Hilda had no variety of -metaphor; "I am so sorry," she repeated. - -She left her hand in his for one moment and then passed swiftly out of -the room. Katherine was left facing the unfortunate lover. Katherine -showed great tact. - -"Lord Allan, don't mind me. Sit down for a moment. Perhaps then you may -be able to tell me. Perhaps I can help you." - -"No good, Miss Archinard; it's all up with me." - -Her gentle voice evidently turned aside the current of his frank -despair. Instead of rushing out, he dropped on the sofa and looked at -the carpet over his locked hands. - -"I am not going to talk to you for a little while." - -The lamps were lighted and the tea-things all in readiness on the little -table. Katherine lit the kettle and turned a log on the fire. Lord -Allan's silence implied a dull acquiescence. He did not move until -Katherine came and sat down on the chair beside him. - -"_I_ am so sorry, too," she said, with a sad little smile. "Lord Allan, -I thought she cared for you." - -"I hoped so." - -"And have you no more hope?" - -"None--absolutely none. I tell you it's rough on a fellow, Miss -Archinard. I--I _adore_ that child." - -"Poor Lord Allan," Katherine gently breathed. She stretched out her slim -hand and laid it almost tenderly on his. Katherine was rather surprised -at herself, and to herself her motives were rather confused. "I should -have liked you as a brother, Lord Allan." - -"You are awfully kind." He lifted his dreary eyes and surveyed her -absently, but with some gratitude. "I suppose I had best be going," he -added suddenly, as if struck by the anti-climax of his position. - -"No, no; not unless you feel you must." Katherine put out her hand again -and detained his rising. "I can't bear to think of you going out alone -like that into the cold. Just wait. You are bruised. Get back your -breath. I am not going to be tiresome." - -Lord Allan leaned back in the sofa with a long sigh, relapsing into the -same half stunned silence, while Katherine moved about the tea-table, -measuring out the tea from the caddy to the teapot, pouring on the -boiling water, and pausing to wait for the tea to steep. Presently Lord -Allan was startled by a proffered steaming cup. - -"Will you?" she said. "I made it for you. It is such a chilly evening." - -"Oh, how awfully kind of you," he started from his crushed recumbency of -attitude, "but you know I really _can't!_" But at the grieved gentleness -of Katherine's eyes he took the cup. "It is too awfully kind of you. I -do feel abominably chilly." He gulped down the tea, and gave a half -shame-faced smile as she took the cup for replenishment. - -"No, don't get up," she urged, as he made an effort to collect his -courtesy; "let me wait on you," and she returned with a discreetly -tempting plate of the thinnest bread and butter. She sat down beside him -again, looking into the fire with kind, sad eyes as she stirred her tea. -She asked him presently, in the same quietly gentle voice, some little -question about the most recent debate in the House. Lord Allan had -rather distinguished himself in that debate; it was on the crest of that -wave of triumph that he had come to Hilda. From monosyllabic replies he -was led on to a rather doleful recitation of his own prowess; it seemed -that Katherine had followed it all in the newspapers, so tactfully -intelligent were her comments. He found himself sipping his third cup of -tea, enjoying in a dreary way the expounding of his favorite political -theories to the quiet, purple-robed figure beside him. He remembered -that Miss Archinard had always been interested in his career; she, of -course, was the intellectual one, though Hilda's beauty sent a sharp -stab of pain through him as he made the comparison; he appreciated now -Miss Archinard's kindness and sympathy with a brotherly warmth of -gratitude. When he at last rose to go, he was dejected; but no longer -the crushed individual of an hour before. - -"You have been too good to a beaten man," he said, taking her hand. - -"Oh, Lord Allan, by the laws of compensation you must lose _sometimes_. -Hilda, poor child, doesn't know what she has done; she cannot know. Her -little achievements bound the world for her. She doesn't see outside her -studio walls. _Your_ great world of action, true beneficent action, -would stun her. Do you leave Paris directly, Lord Allan? Yes! Then won't -you write to me now and then? I am interested in you. I won't relinquish -the claim of 'it might have been.' May I keep in touch with you--as a -sister would?" - -"You are too good, Miss Archinard." - -"To an old friend? A man I have followed and admired as I have you? Lord -Allan, I respect you from the bottom of my heart for the way in which -you have borne this knock-down from fate. You are strong, it won't hurt -you in the end. Let me know how you get on." - -Katherine's eyes were compelling in their candid kindness. Lord Allan -said that he would, with emphasis. As he went down the long staircase, -the purple-robed figure filled his thoughts with a reviving -beneficence. He felt that the blow was perhaps not so bad as he had -imagined--might even be for the best; better for him, for his career. -Katherine's words enveloped him in an atmosphere that was soothing. - -Left alone, Katherine finished her second cup of tea, and made, as she -looked thoughtfully into the fire, a second little _moue_ of -self-disapprobation. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next -morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of -illusions of late; for the regularity of his daily routine--the morning -spent with Katherine, and the afternoon with Hilda--excluded the hours -of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the discovered immunity. - -Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim sole tilted towards the -blaze, and she looked round at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd's -face wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, seemed -thinner, older than usual. He looked even haggard, Katherine thought. -She liked his thin face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as -Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pretences of any kind for -mockery to fasten on. The clever feminine eye is quick to remark the -subtlest signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine's eye was very -clever, and this morning, in looking at Odd, she was conscious of a -little inner sigh. Katherine had asked herself more than once of late -whether a husband, not only too superior for success, but morally her -superior, might not make life a little wearing. Some such thought -crossed her mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized that through -Allan Hope's discomfiture she herself was as wrongly placed as ever, and -Hilda's drudgery as binding. - -Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that general sense of _malaise_. - -One was that Allan Hope's smooth, handsome face was rather fatuous; the -face that knows no doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a -Katherine. - -Another thought held a keen conjecture on Peter's haggard looks. - -She put out her hand to him, and, stooping over her, he kissed her with -more tenderness than he always showed. Their engagement had left almost -untouched the easy unsentimental attitude of earlier days. - -"Well," he said, and Katherine understood and resented somewhat the -quick attack of the absorbing subject. She shook her head. - -"Bad news, Peter. Bad and very unexpected." - -Odd stood upright and looked at her. - -"Bad!" he repeated. - -"She refused him," Katherine said tersely, and her glance turned once -more from the fire to Peter's face. He looked at her silently. - -"She is a foolish baby," added Katherine. - -"She refused him--definitely?" - -"Quite. She had to face the music last night, of course. Mamma and papa -were rather--shabby--let us say, in their disinterested disappointment." -Odd flushed a little at the cool cynicism of Katherine's tone. "She told -me, when I removed her from the battlefield, that she doesn't love him -and never will. So, of course, from every high and mighty point of view -she is right, quite right." - -Katherine's eyes returned contemplatively to the fire. Odd was still -silent. - -"She ought to love him, of course; that is where she is so foolish. I am -afraid she has ruined her life. I love you, Peter, and he is every bit -as good-looking as you are." Katherine glanced at him with a sad and -whimsical smile. Peter, certainly, was looking rather dazed. He stooped -once more and kissed her. - -"Thank you for loving me, Katherine." - -"You are welcome. It _is_ a pity, isn't it?" - -"Yes, it is"--Peter seated himself on the sofa, where Allan had sat the -night before--"an awful pity," he added. "I am astonished. I thought she -cared for him." - -"So did I." - -"She cares for some one else, perhaps." Odd locked his hands behind his -head, and he too stared at the fire. - -"There is no one else she could care for. I know Hilda's outlook too -well." - -"And she refused him," he repeated musingly. - -"Really, Peter, that sounds a little dull--not like you." Katherine -smiled at him. - -"I feel dulled. I am awfully sorry. It would have been so satisfactory. -And what's to be done now?" - -"That is for you to suggest, Peter. My power over Hilda is very limited. -You may have more influence." - -"She might come and live with us." - -"That would be very nice," Katherine assented, "and it is very dear of -you to suggest it." - -Peter was conscious of sudden terrors that prompted him to add with -self-scorn-- - -"What would your mother do?" - -"Without her? I don't know." - -"Of course," Peter hastened to add, "as far as money goes, you know; you -understand, dear, that your mother shall want nothing. But to rob her of -the companionship of both daughters?" Peter rose and walked to the -window. It needed some heroism, he thought, to put aside the idea of -Hilda living with them; he tried to pride himself on the renunciation, -while under the poor crust of self-approbation lurked jibing depths of -consciousness. Heroism would not lie in renunciation, but in living with -her. The cowardice of his own retreat left him horribly shaken. - -Katherine watched him from her chair, calmly. - -"But Hilda's work must cease at once," he said presently, finding a -certain relief in decisive measures. "She won't show any false pride, I -hope, about allowing me to put an end to it." - -"It would be like her," said Katherine, sliding a sympathetic gloom of -voice over the hard reality of her conclusions; conclusions half angry, -half sarcastic. Peter was dull after all. Katherine felt alarmed, -humiliated, and amused, but she steeled herself inwardly to a calm -contemplation of facts. She joined him at the window. "What a burden you -have taken on your poor shoulders, Peter." Peter immediately put his arm -around her waist, and, though Katherine felt a deeper humiliation, she -saw that alarm was needless; a proof of Peter's superiority, a proof, -too, of his stupidity; as her own most original and clever superiority -was proved by the fact of her calm under humiliation. Could she accept -that humiliation as the bitter drop in the cup of good things Peter had -to offer her? Katherine asked herself the question; it was answered by -another. Just how far did the humiliation go? Peter's infidelity might -be mere shallow passion, _passagère;_ the fine part might be to feign -blindness and help him out of it. _Attendons_ summed up Katherine's -mental attitude at the moment. - -"Don't talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine," said Peter. "Don't try to -spoil my humble little pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, -what more can I ask?" He looked at her with kind, tired eyes. - -"I won't thwart you, but Hilda will." - -"Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. That must be soon, -Katherine." - -Katherine looked pensively out of the window. - -"We will see," she replied, with a pretty evasiveness. - -It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the Boulevard St. Germain that -afternoon. He walked at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to -cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did not think much, and -was convinced that his mind was a comparatively happy blank as he paused -before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her avocations. If he -made any definite reflections while he walked up and down between the -doorway and the next corner, they were on his last few conversations -with Hilda; and then on rather abstract points merely. He had drawn the -child out. He had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired for -enjoyment, not for display. He had found out that Hilda knew Italian -literature, from Dante to Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, -and loved it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandinavia was -deeply appreciated by her, and the essayists of France. Her tastes were -as delicately discriminative as Katherine's, but lacked that metallic -assurance of which lately Peter had become rather uncomfortably aware. -As for the English tongue, from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they -could range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson's sweet radiance. - -Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey and evaded any -trespassing beyond its limits. His reticence was not put to a prolonged -test. Hilda met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were -accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious guilt, though Peter was -not sure that she was not a "foolish baby." - -"Let us walk," she said, "it is such a lovely day." - -"We will walk at least till the sun goes. We will just have time to -catch the sunset on the Seine." - -"Yes; what a _lovely_ day! I wish I were ten, with short skirts, and a -hoop, that I could run and roll." - -"You would like a bicycle ride. Come to-morrow with Katherine and me." - -"I can't. Don't think me a prig, but my model is due and I am finishing -my picture. Thanks so much; and this walk is almost as good." - -"If Palamon is tired I will carry him, Hilda." - -"Oh, he isn't tired. See how he pulls at his cord. The sunlight is -getting into his veins. What delicious air." - -"The sunlight is getting into your veins too, Hilda. You are looking a -little as you should look." - -Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It was an original -characteristic of Hilda's that she did not seem at all anxious to talk -about herself, and Odd continued, looking down at her profile-- - -"That's what you ought to have--sunlight. You are a little white flower -that has grown in a shadow." Hilda did not glance up at him; she smiled -rather distantly. - -"What a sad simile!" - -"Is it a true one, Hilda?" - -"I don't think so. I never thought of myself in that sentimental light. -I suppose to friendly eyes every life has a certain pathos." - -"No; some lives are too evidently and merely flaunting in the sunlight -for even friendly eyes to poetize--to sentimentalize, as you rather -unkindly said." - -"Sunlight is poetic, too." - -"Success and selfishness, and all the commonplaces that make up a happy -life, are not poetic." - -"That is rather morbid, you know--_décadent_." - -"I don't imply a fondness for illness and wrongness. Rather the -contrary. It is a very beautiful rightness that keeps in the shade to -give others the sunshine." - -Hilda's eyes were downcast, and in her look a certain pale reserve that -implied no liking for these personalities--personalities that glanced -from her to others, as Odd realized. - -He paused, and it was only after quite a little silence that Hilda said, -with all her gentle quiet-- - -"You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or that my life has been an -unhappy life. It is very good of you to trouble about it, but I can't -claim the rather self-righteously heroic _rôle_ you give me. I think it -is others who live in the shadow. I think that any work, however feebly -done, is a happy thing. I find so much pleasure in things other people -don't care about." - -"A very nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You couldn't have told me -to mind my own business more kindly." Odd's humorous look met her glance -of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, "Will you try to find -pleasure in a thing most girls _do_ care for? Will you go to the -Meltons' dance on Monday? Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and -I said I would try to persuade you." - -"I _didn't_ mean to snub you." - -"Very well; convince me of it by saying you will come to the dance." - -The girlish pleasure of her face was evident. - -"Do you really want me to?" - -"It would make me very happy." - -"It is against my rules, you know. I can't get up at six and go out in -the evening besides. But I will make an exception for this once, to show -you I wasn't snubbing you! And, besides, I should love to." The gayety -of her look suddenly fell to hesitation. "Only I am afraid I can't. I -remember I haven't any dress." - -"_Any_ dress will do, Hilda." - -"But I haven't any dress. The gray silk is impossible." - -Peter's mind made a most unmasculine excursion into the position. - -"But you were in London last year. You went to court. You must have had -dresses." - -"Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came back. I had no need for -them. Her own wore out, and mine fit her very well--a little too long -and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps the white satin would -do, if it wasn't cut at the bottom; it could be let down again, if it -was only turned up. It is trimmed with _mousseline de soie_, and the -flounce would hide the line." - -Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; he found it horribly -touching. "It might do." - -"It must do. If it doesn't, another of Katherine's can be -metamorphosized." - -"And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don't know many -people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I -should like to _depend_ on you; and if I am left sitting alone in a -corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?" Her -smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look. - -"Hilda, you are quite frivolous." Terms of reckless endearment were on -his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. "How shall I manoeuvre -that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle -occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no." - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - - -Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for -several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he -would see her at the Meltons' on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had -been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a -witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that -might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine -had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety. - -The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton's -apartment--one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the -Avenue du Bois de Boulogne--and after greeting his hostess, he waited -for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully -apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine's -smooth dark head, the Captain's correctly impassive good looks, and -Hilda's loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter -thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility -as acute as a fond mother's, he saw--felt, even--the stir, the ripple of -inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of -a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious -of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a -bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the -very air with sudden perfume. "Her dear little head," "Her lovely little -head," he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally -spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, -which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. -Then, turning to Hilda-- - -"The white satin _does_," he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did -not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her -sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen -people already. - -"See that Hilda, in her _embarras de choix_, doesn't become too much -embarrassed," she said to Peter. "Exercise for her a brotherly -discretion." - -The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton--a pretty little woman with -languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself -there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her -exclusiveness, which she took _au grand serieux_, highly amused -Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton's. -She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself -at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as -tolerant of a millionaire _parvenu_ as might be a duchess with a -political _entourage_ to manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton's anxious -social self-satisfaction humorous--a fact of which Mrs. Melton was -unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly -impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull too, and a few grievances -whispered behind her fan in Katherine's ear _en passant_--for subject, -the unfortunate and eternal _nouveau riche_--made pleasant gravity -difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her -dull and funny. - -Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the -opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes. - -"I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, -led by your father and Mrs. Melton." - -He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced -it--charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, -surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, -with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else's hair -was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was -a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and -floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz -came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his -felicity carry him too far into conjecture. - -"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked, as they joined the eddy circling -around Mrs. Melton's ballroom. - -"So much; thanks to you." Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at -the joy of dancing. "I had almost forgotten how delicious it was." - -"More delicious than the studio, isn't it?" - -"You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche -could do it--all light and movement and color. I should like to come -out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows -everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls' throats. There is -the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly -heads! Isn't that worth while?" - -Odd's eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda's throat. - -"Everything you do is worth while--from painting to dancing. You dance -very well." - -The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display -of which he recognized the gown's quondam possessor, gave him a little -pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of -cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the -happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue--the long fatigue of a -weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge -of the aloofness--the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night -Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago. - -"You dance well, too, Mr. Odd," she said. - -"I very seldom waltz." - -"In _my_ honor then?" - -"Solely in your honor. I haven't waltzed five times in one evening with -one young woman--for ages!" - -"You haven't waltzed five times with me yet. I may wear you out!" - -"What an implied reflection on my forty years! Do I seem so old to you, -Hilda?" - -"No; I don't think of you as old." - -"But I think of you as young, very young, deliciously young." - -"Deliciously?" she repeated. "That is a fallacy, I think. Youth is sad; -doesn't see things in _value_; everything is blacker or whiter than -reality, so that one is disappointed or desperate all the time." - -"And you, Hilda?" - -Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful defiance. - -"Don't be personal." - -"But you were. And, after the other day--your declaration of -contentment." - -"Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. I hate people who talk -about themselves," Hilda added; "it's the worst kind of immodesty. -Material and mental braggarts are far more endurable than the people who -go round telling about their souls." - -"Severe, rigid child!" Odd laughed, and, after a little pause, laughed -again. "You are horribly reserved, Hilda." - -"Very sage when one has nothing to show. Silence covers such a multitude -of sins. If one is consistently silent, people may even imagine that one -isn't dull," said Hilda maliciously. - -"You are dull and silent, then?" - -"I have few opinions; that is, perhaps, dulness." - -"It may be a very wide cleverness." - -"Yes; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz is yours too, you know. -You have quite a cluster here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an -ice." - -Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on a small sofa in a corner -of the ballroom. Katherine passed, dancing; her dark eyes flashed upon -them a glance that might have been one of amusement. Odd was conscious -of a painful effort in his answering smile. - -Hilda's eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her sister with a fond -contemplation. - -"Isn't that dress becoming to her? The shade of deepening, changing -rose." - -"Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely." - -"Do you notice dresses, care about them?" - -"I think I do, sometimes; not in detail as a woman would, but in the -blended effect of dress and wearer." - -"I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you -noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? -I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has -visions of crushed ribs, don't you think?" - -Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile -that he still felt to be painful. "And is not this lace gathered around -the shoulders pretty too?" Hilda turned to him for inspection. - -"You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, -Hilda." Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her -gown. - -"The lace is mamma's. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem -hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has -Meredith's last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing -all the talking. _You_ talk now." - -"About Meredith, your dress, or you?" - -"About yourself, if you please." - -"It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me -than you were in yourself." - -Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers -with a force which almost compelled her-- - -"No; I am very much interested in you." Odd was silent, studying her -face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown--the -expression of painfully controlled emotion. - -"There is nothing comparably interesting in me," he said; "I have had my -story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story." - -"What do you mean?" - -"Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn't." - -"And your books?" - -"They are as negative as I am." - -"Yet they have helped me to live." Hilda looked hard at him while she -spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the -emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white. - -"Helped you to live, Hilda!" he almost stammered; "my gropings!" - -"You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like -Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and -lit my path!" She smiled, adding: "I suppose you think you have failed -because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you -yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success." - -"I didn't even know you read my books." - -"I know your books very well; much better than I know you." - -"Don't say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them." - -"One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. -Perhaps you _do_ even better than you write." - -"Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison." His voice -stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile-- - -"Shall we dance?" - -In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the -dance's circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of -desire; he must hear from Hilda's lips why she had refused Allan Hope. - -An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed his mind once and again -with a dull ache of self-reproach, all the more insistent from his -realization that its cause was not so much the infidelity to Katherine -as that Hilda would think him a sorry villain. - -Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying herself. She knew that his -energy this evening was on Hilda's account; he had claimed the -responsibility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider herself -neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, with perhaps a display of -the dulness she had discovered in him, upon her confidence and common -sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray that confidence; there -was some rather dislocated consolation in that. - -Hilda was a little breathless when he came to claim her for the second -cluster of waltzes. It was near the end of the evening. - -"I have been dancing _steadily_," she announced, "and twice down to -supper! Did you try any of the narrow little sandwiches? So good!" - -"And you still don't grudge me my waltzes?" - -"I like yours _best_!" she said, smiling at him as she laid her hand on -his shoulder. They took a few turns around the room and then Hilda owned -that she was a little tired. They sat down again on the sofa. - -"Hilda!" said Odd suddenly, "will you think me very rude if I ask you -why you refused Allan Hope?" - -Hilda turned a startled glance upon him. - -"No; perhaps not," she answered, though the voice was rather frigid. - -"You don't think I have a right to ask, do you?" - -"Well, the answer is so evident." - -"Is it?" Hilda had looked away at the dancers; she turned her head now -half unwillingly and glanced at him, smiling. - -"I would not have refused him if I had loved him, would I? You know -that. It doesn't seem quite fair, quite kind, to talk of, does it?" - -"Not to me even? I have been interested in it for a long time. Katherine -told me, and Mary." - -"I don't know why they should have been so sure," said Hilda, with some -hardness of tone. "I never encouraged him. I avoided him." She looked at -Odd again. "But I am not angry with you; if any one has a right, you -have." - -"Thanks; thanks, dear. You understand, you know my interest, my -anxiety. It seemed so--happy for both. And you care for no one else?" - -"No one else." Hilda's eyes rested on his with clear sincerity. - -"Don't you ever intend to marry, Hilda?" Odd was leaning forward, his -elbows on his knees, and looking at the floor. There was certainly a -tension in his voice, and he felt that Hilda was scanning him with some -wonder. - -"Does a refusal to take one person imply that? I have made no vows." - -"I don't see--" Odd paused; "I don't see why you shouldn't care for -Hope." - -"Are you going to plead his cause?" she asked lightly. - -"Would it not be for your happiness?" Odd sat upright now, putting on -his eyeglasses and looking at her with a certain air of resolution. - -"I don't love him." Hilda returned the look sweetly and frankly. - -"What do you know of love, you child? Why not have given him a chance, -put him on trial? Nothing wins a woman like wooing." - -"How didactic we are becoming. I am afraid I should really get to loathe -poor Lord Allan if I had given him leave to woo me." - -"I suppose you think him too unindividual, too much of a pattern with -other healthy and hearty young men. Don't you know, foolish child, that -a good man, a man who would love you as he would, make you the husband -he would, is a rarity and very individual?" - -Odd found a perverse pleasure in his own paternally admonishing -attitude. Hilda's lightly amused but touched look implied a confidence -so charming that he found the attitude sublimely courageous. - -"I suppose so," she said, and she added, "I haven't one word to say -against Lord Allan, except--" She paused meditatively. - -"Except what?" Odd asked rather breathlessly. - -"He doesn't really _need_ me." - -"Doesn't _need_ you! Why, the man is desperately in love with you!" - -"He needs a wife, but he doesn't need _me_." - -"You are subtle, Hilda." - -"I don't think I am _that_." - -"You are waiting, then, for some one who can satisfy you as to his -_need_ of you?" - -"I shall only marry that person." - -Hilda jumped up. "But I'm not waiting at all, you know. _Dansons -maintenant!_ Your task is nearly over!" - -It was very late when Odd gave Hilda up to her last partner, and joined -Katherine in a small antechamber, where she was sitting among flowers, -talking to an appreciative Frenchman. This gentleman, with the -ceremonious bow of his race, made away when Miss Archinard's _fiancé_ -appeared, and Odd dropped into the vacated seat with a horrible sinking -of the heart. The dull self-reproach was now acute, he felt meanly -guilty. Katherine looked at him funnily--very good-humoredly. - -"I didn't know you had it in you to dance so well and so persistently, -Peter. You have done honor to Hilda's ball." - -"I hope I wasn't too selfishly monopolizing." - -"Oh, you had a right to a certain monopoly since, owing to you only, she -came," and Katherine added, smiling still more good-humoredly, "I am -_not_ jealous, Peter." - -He turned to look at her. The words, the playful tone in which they were -uttered, struck him like a blow. His guilty consciousness of his own -feeling gave them a supreme nobility. She was _not_ jealous. What a cur -he would be if ever he gave her apparent cause for jealousy. The cause -was there; his task must be to keep it hidden. - -"But suppose _I_ am?" he said; "you haven't given me a single dance." - -Katherine's smile was placid; she did not say that he had not asked for -one. Indeed they had rarely danced together. - -"I think of going to England in a day or two, Peter," she observed. "The -Devreuxs have asked me to spend a month with them." - -Peter sat very still. - -"A sudden decision, Kathy?" - -"No, not so sudden. Our _tête-à-tête_ can't be prolonged forever." - -"Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the wedding day must be fixed -before you go." - -"I yield. The first part of May." - -"Three months! Let it be April at least, Kathy." - -"No, I am for May." - -"It's an unlucky month." - -"Oh, _we_ can defy bad luck, can't we?" Katherine smiled. - -"If you go away, I shall," said Odd, after a moment's silence. - -"Why, I thought you would stay here and look after mamma--and Hilda," -said Katherine slowly, and with a wondering thought for this revealment -of poor Peter's folly. Peter then intended to heroically sacrifice his -infidelity. That he should think she did not see it! - -"I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip through Provence would set -me right. I should come back through Touraine just at the season of -lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in Paris. I see so little -of your mother--and Hilda. Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after -her lessons." - -"I am afraid that mamma can't spare Taylor." - -Peter moved impatiently. - -"Katherine, may I give you some money? She would take it from you. -Persuade her to give up that work. You could do it delicately." - -"As I have told you, you exaggerate my influence. She would suspect the -donor. She would not take the money." - -"I could speak to your father; lend him a sum." - -Katherine flushed. - -"It would make him very angry with her if he knew. And the lessons are a -fixed sum; only a steady income would be the equivalent." - -"Oh dear!" sighed Peter. He suddenly realized that of late he had talked -of little else but Hilda in his conversations with Katherine. - -"When do you go to London, dear?" he asked. - -"The day after to-morrow." Katherine, above the waving of her fan, -smiled slightly at his change of tone. "Will you miss me, Peter?" - -"All the more for being cross with you. It is very wrong of you to play -truant like this." - -"It will be good for both of us." Katherine's voice was playful, and -showed no trace of the bitterness she was feeling. "I might get tired of -you, Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence is the best fuel -to appreciation. I shall come back realizing more fully than ever your -perfection." - -"What a sage little person it is! Sarcastic as well! May I write to you -very often?" - -"As often as you feel like it; but don't force feeling." - -"May I describe châteaux and churches? And will you read my descriptions -if I do?" - -"With pleasure--and profit. Let me know, too, how the book gets on. Can -I do anything for you at the British Museum?" - -It struck Katherine that the change in their relation which she now -contemplated as very probably definite might well allow of a return to -the first phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan Hope which -she had received that morning, though satisfactory in many respects, was -not quite so from an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friendship -with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for any woman, and Katherine -perhaps, with an excusable malice, rather anticipated the time when -Peter might have regrets, and find in that friendship the solace of -certain disappointments from which Katherine had almost decided not to -withhold him. - -"I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, even in London, shall -I?" said Odd, in reply to an offer more generous than he could have -divined. "Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. Don't -be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the Elgin Marbles if you like. I -shall set you no heavier task." - -"They are so profoundly melancholy in their cellared respectable abode, -poor dears! I know they would have preferred dropping to pieces under a -Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in an insulting -immortality. The frieze especially, stretched round the ugly wall like a -butterfly under a glass case!" Odd laughed with more light-heartedness -than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced him to feel that he still -found Katherine charming. There must certainly be safety in that -affectionate admiration. - -"I won't even ask you to harrow your susceptibility by a look at the -insulted frieze, then; you must know it well, to enter with such -sympathy into its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I shall be -lonely down there. A daily letter would be none too many." - -"I can't quite see why you are exiling yourself. Of course, the weather -here is nasty just now. I have noticed your cough all the evening. Come -and say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so fix your hour." - -"Our usual hour? In the morning?" - -"You will not see Hilda then." - -"Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. You will kiss her _au -revoir_ for me." - -Odd felt a certain triumph. - -Katherine's departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for -makeshift flight. After a month or two of solitary wrestling and -wandering, he might find that the dubiously directed forces of -Providence were willing to help one who helped himself. - -His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly -entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him. -The disclosure of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how -face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight -the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest -emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too -late? A love as far removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as it -was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; -and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and -kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more -fearful shipwreck. - -Hilda's selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave -her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be -dreaded than any hurt to himself. - -And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - - -An April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd's return. A rather -prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs. - -He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had -announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied -some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard's. -Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the -Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she -knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter -had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the -Captain's projected jaunt. He surmised that her father's absence would -lighten Hilda's load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain's -hands--on the understanding that most of it was to be given to -Hilda--but _from_ her father, would relieve her from the necessity for -teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, -but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking -individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told -him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed -"_toujours souffrante_," and "Mademoiselle 'Ilda"--Odd had hesitated -uncomfortably before asking for her--was out. "_Pas bien non plus, -celle-là_," she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still -more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; "_Elle -s'éreinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle_." With a sick -sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she -might be found. All the morning, it seemed "_Il faut bien qu'elle soigne -madame, et puis elle m'aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop -lourde_," and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that "_Madame est -très, mais très exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une -damê comme celle-là_." - -Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her -days he should probably find her in the Rue d'Assas, and, with the -angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda -excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in -fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he -caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. -The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half -dazed her evidently. - -"You? I can hardly believe it!" she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that -plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was -wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips -a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had -reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the -slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable -little hat symbolized a biting poverty. - -"Hilda! Hilda!" was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He -was aghast. - -"I _am_ glad to see you," she said, and her voice had a forced gayety -over its real weakness; "I haven't seen any of my people for so long, -except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn't it? -Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I -could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and -Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and -mamma is much, _much_ better. As for papa, the last time I heard from -him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that -he hasn't been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last -letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you -are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking." - -Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be -over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control. - -"If I had known I would have come sooner," he said; "you would have let -me help you, wouldn't you?" - -"I am afraid you couldn't have _helped_ me. That is the worst of -illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up." - -"My poor child!" Odd inwardly cursed himself. "If I had known! What have -you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look--" - -"Fagged, don't I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since -you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We'll all go -to the _vernissage_ together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer -have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for -mamma." - -"Taylor helped you, I suppose?" - -"Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and -indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that -she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, -of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed -her." There was an explanatory note in Hilda's voice; indeed Odd's -silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. "It made double -duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not -minded." - -"And Wilson?" - -"He went with papa. I don't think papa could live without Wilson." - -"Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of your ghastly little face. -You have been housemaid, _garde-malade_, and bread-winner. Had you no -money at all?" Hilda flushed--the quick flush of physical weakness. - -"Yes, at first," she replied; "papa gave me quite a lot before going, -and that has paid part of the doctor's bills, and my lessons brought in -the usual amount." - -"Could you not have given up the lessons for the time being?" - -"I know you think it dreadful in me to have left mamma for all those -afternoons." Her acceptation of a blame infinitely removed from his -thoughts stupefied Odd. "And mamma has thought it heartless, most -naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy and kind. The doctor came three -times a day and I can explain to _you_"--Hilda hesitated--"the money -papa gave me went almost immediately--some unpaid bills." - -"What bills?" Odd spoke sternly. - -"Why, we owe bills right and left!" said Hilda. - -"But what bills were these?" - -"There was the rent of the apartment for one thing; we should have had -to go had that not been paid; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker; they -threatened to seize the furniture." - -"Katherine's dressmaker?" - -"Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that she would be so impatient; -but I suppose, on hearing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman -became frightened." Peter controlled himself to silence. The very -fulness of Hilda's confidence showed the strain that had been put upon -her. "And then," she went on, as he did not speak, "some of the money -had to go to Katherine in England. Poor Kathy! To be pinched like that! -She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling to tip the -servants and get her railway ticket to Surrey." - -"Why did she not write to me? Considering all things--" - -"Oh!" said Hilda--her tone needed no comment--"we have not quite come to -that." She added presently and gently, "I had money for her." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it; the glove was loose upon it. - -"And now," said Hilda, leaning forward and smiling at him, "you have -heard me _filer mon chapelet_. Tell me what you have been doing." - -"My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too grossly egotistic after -your story." - -"Has my story sounded so dismal? _I_ have been egotistic, then. I had -hoped that perhaps you would write to me," she added, and a delicately -malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard at her, with a -half-dreamy stare. - -"I thought of you," he said; "I should have liked to write." - -"Well, in the future do, please, when you feel like it." - -Mrs. Archinard was extended on the sofa in the drawing-room when they -reached the Rue Pierre Charron. The crisp daintiness of -pseudo-invalidism had withered to a look of sickly convalescence. She -was much faded, and her little air of melancholy affectation pitifully -fretful. - -"You come before my own daughter, Peter," she said; "I don't _blame_ -Katherine, since Hilda tells me that she did not let her know of my -dangerous condition." - -"Not _dangerous_, mamma," Hilda said, with a patient firmness not -untouched by resentment, a touch to Odd most new and pleasing. "The -doctor had perfect confidence in me, and would have told me. I should -have sent for papa and Katherine the moment he thought it advisable. -Under the circumstances they could have done nothing for you that I did -not do." Hilda had, indeed, rather distorted facts to shield Katherine. -What would Mrs. Archinard have said had she known that Katherine, in -answer to a letter begging her to return, had replied that she _could_ -not? Even in Hilda's charitable heart that "_could_ not" had rankled. -Odd's despairing gloom discerned something of this truth, as he realized -that the uncharacteristic self-justification was prompted by a rebellion -against misinterpretation before _him_. Mrs. Archinard showed some -nervous surprise. - -"Very well, very well, Hilda," she said, "I am sure I ask no sacrifices -on _my_ account. One may die alone as one has lived--alone. My life has -trained me in stoicism. You had better wash your face, Hilda. There is a -great smudge of charcoal on your cheek," and, as Hilda turned and walked -out, "I have looked on the face of the King of Terrors, Peter. Peter! -dear old homely name! the faithful ring in it! It is easy for Hilda to -talk! I make no complaint. She has nursed me excellently well--as far as -her nursing went. But she has a _hard_ soul! no tenderness! no sympathy! -To leave her dying mother every afternoon! To sacrifice me to her -_painting_! At such a time! Ah me!" Large tears rolled down Mrs. -Archinard's cheeks, and her voice trembled with weakness and self-pity. -Odd, in his raging resentment, could have exploded the truth upon her; -the tears arrested his impulse, and he sat moodily gazing at the floor. -Mrs. Archinard raised her lace-edged handkerchief and delicately touched -away the tears. - -"I have given my whole life, my whole life, Peter, for my girls! I have -borne this long exile from my home for their sakes!" At Allersley Mrs. -Archinard had never ceased complaining of her restricted lot, and had -characterized her neighbors as "yokels and Philistines." Speaking with -her handkerchief pressed by her finger-tips upon her eyelids, she -continued, "I have asked nothing of them but sympathy; _that_ I have -craved! And in my hour of need--" Mrs. Archinard's _point de Venise_ -bosom heaved once more. Odd took her hand with the unwilling yet pitying -kindness one would show towards a silly and unpleasant child. - -"I don't think you are quite fair," he said; "Hilda looks as badly as -you do. She has had a heavy load to carry." - -"I told her again and again to get a _garde-malade_, two if necessary." -Mrs. Archinard's voice rose to a higher key. "She has chosen to ruin her -appearance by sitting up to all hours of the night, and by working all -day in that futile studio." - -"_Garde-malades_ are expensive." Odd could not restrain his voice's -edge. - -"Expensive! For a dying mother! And with all that is lavished on her -studio--canvases, paints, models!" - -The depths of misconception were too hopelessly great, and, as Mrs. -Archinard's voice had now become shrilly emphatic, he kept silence, his -heart shaken with misery and with pity, despairing pity for Hilda. She -re-entered presently, wearing on her face too evident signs of -contrition. She spoke to her mother in tones of gentle entreaty, humored -her sweetly, gayly even, while she made tea. - -"You know I cannot touch cake, Hilda." - -"There are buttered _brioches_, mamma, piping hot." - -"Properly buttered, I hope. Rosalie usually places a great clot in the -centre, leaving the edges uneatable." - -"Mamma is like the princess who felt the pea through all the dozens of -mattresses, isn't she?" said Hilda, smiling at Odd. "But _I_ buttered -these with scientific exactitude." - -"Exactitude! Ah! the mirage of science! More milk, more milk!" Mrs. -Archinard raised herself on one elbow to watch with expectant -disapproval the concoction of her tea, and, relapsing on her cushions as -the tea was brought to her, "I suppose it _is_ milk, though I prefer -cream." - -"No, it's cream." Hilda should know, as she had herself just darted -round the corner to the _crêmerie_. Odd sprang up to take his cup from -her. He thought she looked in danger of falling to the ground. - -"Do sit down," he said in a low voice; "you look very, very badly." - -"Have you read Meredith's last?" asked Mrs. Archinard from the sofa. -"Hilda is reading it to me in the evenings. We began it, ah! long, long -ago. I have sympathy for Meredith, an _intimité!_ It is so I feel, see -things--super-subtly. Strange how coarsely objective some minds are! Did -you order the oysters for my dinner, Hilda, and the ice from -Gagé's--_pistache?_ I hope you impressed _pistache_. You will dine with -Hilda, of course, Peter; I have my dinner here; I am not yet strong -enough to sit through a meal. And then you must talk to me about -Meredith. I always find you most suggestive--such new lights on old -things. And Verhaeren, too; do you care for Verhaeren? Morbid? Yes, -perhaps, but that is a truism--not like you, Peter. '_Les apparus dans -mes chemins_,' poor, modern, broken, bleeding soul! We must talk of -Verhaeren. Just now I feel very sleepy. You will excuse me if I simply -_sans gêne_ turn over and take a nap? I can often sleep at this hour. -Hilda, show Peter the Burne-Jones Chaucer over there. Hilda doesn't find -him limpid, sweet, healthy enough for Chaucer; but _nous sommes tous les -enfants malades_ nowadays. There is a beauty, you know, in that. Talk it -over." - -Hilda and Peter sat down obediently side by side on the distant little -_canapé_ before the Burne-Jones Chaucer. They went over the pages, not -paying much attention to the woodcuts, but looking down favorite -passages together. The description of "my swete" in "The Book of the -Duchess," the complaint of poor Troilus, and, once more, Arcite's death. -The quiet room was very quiet, and they looked up from the pages now and -then to smile, perhaps a little sadly, at one another. When the dinner -was announced Hilda said, as they went into the dining-room-- - -"If your courage fails you, just say so frankly. I have very childish -tastes and childish fare." - -Indeed, half a cold chicken and a dish of rice constituted the repast. A -bottle of claret stood by Odd's place, and there was a white jar filled -with buttercups on the table; but even Rosalie seemed depressed by the -air of meagreness, and gave them a rather _effaré_ glance as they sat -down. Odd suspected that the cold chicken was in his honor. He had come -to the conclusion that Hilda was capable of dining off rice alone. - -"Delightful!" he said. The chicken and rice were indeed very good, but -Hilda saw that he ate very little. - -"I make no further apologies," she said, smiling at him over the -buttercups; "your hunger be upon your own head." - -"I am not hungry, dear." - -Hilda had to do most of the talking, but they were both rather silent. -It was a happy silence to Hilda, full of a loving trust. - -When he spoke, it was in a voice of the same gentle fatigue that his -eyes showed; but as the eyes rested upon her she felt that the past and -the present had surely joined hands. - - - - -CHAPTER X - - -Odd went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the -next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he -could hardly have told. - -He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d'Assas and go home to tea and dinner -with her. His love for Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that -his late flight seemed degrading. - -So loving her, he could not be base. - -The Rue d'Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling rain. In the Luxembourg -Gardens the first young green made a mist upon the trees. - -It was only half-past four when Odd reached his accustomed post, but -hardly had he taken a turn up and down the street when he saw Hilda come -quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half-an-hour early, but Odd -had merely time to note the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was -in trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him; and he met her -half-way with outstretched hands. - -"O Peter!" It was the first time she had used his name, and Odd's heart -leaped as her hands caught his with a sort of desperate relief. "Come, -come," she said, taking his arm. "Let us go quickly." Peter's heart -after its leap began to thump fast. The white distress of her face gave -him a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had distressed her? He asked the -question as they crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears now -streamed down her face. - -He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and as she hung shaken with -sobs on his arm, the past child, the present Hilda merged into one; his -one, his only love. - -"Let us walk here, dear," he said; "you will be quieter." - -The little path down which they turned was empty, and the fine rain -enveloped but hardly wet them. They came to a bench under a tree, -circled by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the weeping girl to it -and they sat down. She still held his arm tightly. - -"Now, what is it?" - -"O Peter! I can hardly tell you! The brother, the horrible brother." - -"Yes?" Peter felt the accumulations of rage that had been gathering for -months hurrying forward to spring upon, to pulverize "the brother." - -"He made love to me, said awful things!" Odd whitened to the lips. - -"Tell me all you can." - -"I wish I were dead!" sobbed Hilda, "I am so unhappy." - -Peter did not trust himself to speak; he took her hand and held it to -his lips. - -"Yes; you care," said Hilda. She drew herself up and wiped her eyes. "I -never thought he would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he came a -good deal into the studio where we worked and, behind his sister's -back, looked silly. But he never really annoyed me. I thought myself -unkindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon was called away and he -came in. I went on painting. I did not dream--! When, suddenly he put -his arms around me--and tried to kiss me!" Hilda gave an hysterical -laugh. "Do you know, I had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great -blow with it! You should have seen his head! Oh, to think that I can -find that funny now! His ear was covered with cobalt!" Hilda sobbed -again, even while she laughed. "He was very angry and horrible. I said I -would call his mother and sister if he did not leave me at once, and -then--and then"--Hilda dropped her face into her hands--"he jeered at -me; 'You mustn't play the prude,' he said." - -Odd clenched his teeth. - -"Hilda, dear," he said, in a voice cold to severity, "you must go home; -I will put you in a cab. I will come to you as soon as I have punished -that dog." - -"Peter, don't! I beg of you to come _with_ me. You can do nothing. I -must bury it, forget it." She had risen as he rose. - -"Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall never forget it." - -Odd's fixed look as he led her into the street forced her to helpless -silence. - -"Peter, _please!_" she breathed, clasping her hands together and gazing -at him as he hailed a _fiacre_. - -"I will come to you soon. Good-bye." - -And so Hilda was driven away. - -It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened -the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is -lying down. She seemed ill. "_Et bien malade même,_" and had said that -she wanted no dinner. - -"I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I -think," said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost -immediately. - -She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had -cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine -fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the -disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked -ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness -of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as -the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, -beyond all wish for it. The afternoon's unpleasantness had been merely -the last straw. The long endurance of the past month--the past months -indeed--that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on -pity--was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a -quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the -one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and -loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence -of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes. - -He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her -face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden -horrible weakness almost overcame him. - -"Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the -fiery _jeune premier_ to such an extent this afternoon that dramatic -restlessness is in keeping." - -Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns -up and down the room. - -"You look so badly," he said, pausing before her; "how do you feel?" - -"Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself." Hilda tried to smile, -stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. "I feel weak and -foolish," she added, clasping her hands on her knee. - -"It is all right, you know. He apologized profusely." - -"How did you make him do that?" - -"I told him the truth, including the fact of his own despicableness." - -"And he believed it?" - -"I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough thrashing." - -"Oh!" cried Hilda. - -"He deserved it, dear." - -"But--I had exposed myself to it; he thought himself justified." - -"I had to disabuse him of that thought. He bawled out something like a -challenge under the salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the -suggestion--insisted on the extreme satisfaction it would give me to -have a shot at him--the bourgeois strain came out. He fairly whined. I -was disappointed. I had bloodthirsty desires." - -"Oh, I am very glad he whined then! Don't speak of such horrors. You -know I am hysterical." - -Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her hand. - -"How can I thank you?" He put her hand to his lips, not looking at her -but down at the heavy folds of her white dress; it had a shroud-like -look that gave him a shudder. Hilda's life seemed shroud-like, shutting -her out from all brightness, from all love--love hers by right, and only -hers. - -"You know, you know that I would do anything for you," he said. - -The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, hardly consciously, and he -yielded to the longing he felt in her for comforting kindness and -nearness; yielded, too, to his own growing weakness; but he still held -the hand to his lips, not daring to look at her. This childlike trust, -this dependence, were dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled -soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on him when he raised his -own. - -"I never thought it would come true--in this way," she said. - -"What come true?" - -"That you would really care for me." - -Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold peaceful wings on his -breast; its very contentment constituted a caress. The child was still a -child, and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant revelation. A -shock of possibilities made Odd dizzy, and the certain strain of -weakness in him made it impossible for him to warn and protect her -ignorance. - -He was conscious of a quick grasp at the transcendental friendship of -which alone she was aware. - -"My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly." But with the words, -his hold on the transcendental friendship slipped, fundamental truths -surged up; he took both her hands, and clasping them on his breast, -said, hardly conscious of his words-- - -"Sweetest, noblest--dearest," with an emotion only too contagious, for -Hilda's eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, -the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, -to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his -arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him. - -"I understand, Hilda, I understand it all--all you have suffered; the -loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know -that you have been unhappy." - -"Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!" The tears rolled down her -cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd's hands clasping hers. "No one ever -cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn't it -cruel, cruel?" This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did -the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless -terror. "That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be -my fault." The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: "I have been -so lonely." - -"My child! My poor, poor child!" - -"Let me tell you everything. I _must_ tell you now since you care for -me. I have been so fond of you--always. You remember when I was a -child?" Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; -they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling -shipwreck. "Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it -weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what -they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me -that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them -take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It -sounds morbid, doesn't it? But it isn't, for my loneliness was almost -unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things -were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn't you? Only I -don't think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to -you." Hilda's tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled -now at Odd, a quivering smile. - -"And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can't tell you -what I suffered." - -Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his. - -"But how could you have known?" said Hilda tenderly; "I was really very -silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come back _because_ I -needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the -shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was -waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that." -She paused a moment: "It all ended in Florence," she went on sadly; -"such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I see -the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where -I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know -those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for -something that could never come; that you had never really understood, -and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a -pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. -I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be -misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love perhaps. A sort of -cold shame crept through me, and I felt really alone then. Do you know -what that feeling is?" Her hand under his forehead lifted his head a -little as though to question his face, but putting both her hands over -his eyes he would not look at her. - -"You are so sorry?" Odd nodded. "But you have had that feeling? -Imprisoned in oneself; looking, longing for a voice, a smile,--and -silence, always, always silence. A thing quite apart from the surface -intercourse of everyday life, not touched by it. You have so many -friends, so many windows in your prison, you can't know." - -"I know." - -"Really?" - -"Yes, yes." - -"And you call out for help and no one hears. Oh, I can't explain -properly; do you understand?" - -"I understand, dear." - -"Well, after that day in Florence, the last cranny of my prison seemed -walled up. And--oh, then our troubles came, worse and worse. -Responsibilities braced me up--far healthier, of course. And your -books! Their strength; their philosophy--don't tell me I might find it -all in Marcus Aurelius; your way of saying it went more deeply in me. -Just to do one's duty; to love people and be sorry for them, and not -snivel over oneself. Ah! if you knew all your books had been to me! -Would you like it, I wonder?" Again the tenderness, almost playful, in -her voice. Odd raised his head and looked at her. - -"And when I came at last, what did you think?" - -The loving candor of her eyes dwelt on him. - -"When you came?" she repeated. "Then I saw at once that you were -Katherine's friend, and that your books were the nearest I should ever -get to you." Hilda's voice hesitated a little; a doubt of the exactitude -of her perceptions from this point showed itself in a certain perplexity -of tone. "And--I don't quite understand myself, for I didn't plan -anything--but just because I felt so much I was afraid that you would -imagine I made claims on you. I was resolved that you should see that I -had reached your standpoint--that I had forgotten--that the present had -no connection with the past." - -"But I had not forgotten," Odd groaned. - -"No?" Hilda smiled rather lightly; "it would have been very strange if -you hadn't. Besides, as I say, I saw at once that you were Katherine's, -and that it was right and natural. Your books taught me, too, the true -peace of renunciation, you see! Not that this called for renunciation -exactly," and again Hilda paused with the faint look of perplexity. -"There was nothing to renounce since you were hers, except I must have -felt a certain disappointment. I felt a little frozen. Such dull -egotism!" She turned her eyes away, looking vaguely out into the dusky -room. "But even on that first day I meant that you should see, and that -she should see, that I knew that the past made no bond: in my heart it -might, not in yours, I knew, for all your kindness." - -"Go on, Hilda," said Odd, as she paused. - -"Well, you know all the rest. When you were engaged and she more than -friend, I had hoped for it, and I saw that my turn might come; that I -might step into Kathy's vacated shoes, so to speak; that we might be -friends, and all my dreams be fulfilled after all. I began then to let -myself know that I did care, for I had tried to help myself before by -pretending that I didn't. I wouldn't do anything to make you like me. If -you were to like me, you would of yourself; all the joy of having you -care for me would be in having made no effort. And the dream did come -true. I saw more and more that you cared. To-day I feel it, like -sunshine." Odd still stared at her, and again through sudden tears she -smiled at him. "Only--isn't it strange?--things are always so; it must -be, too, that I am weak, overwrought, for I feel so sad, as though I -were at the bottom of the sea, and looking up through it at the sun." - -"Great heavens!" muttered Odd. He looked at her for a silent moment, -then suddenly putting his arm around her neck, he drew her to him. - -He did not kiss her, but he said, leaning his head against hers-- - -"And I--so unworthy!" - -"No, no," said Hilda, and with a little sigh, "not unworthy, dear -Peter." - -"I, dully stumbling about your exquisite soul," Peter went on, pressing -her head more closely to his. "Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -"What, dear friend?" - -"I cannot tell you." - -"Unkind; I tell you everything." - -"You can tell me everything. You can tell me how much you have cared for -me, how much you care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot tell -you how infinitely dear you are to me." He had spoken, her face hidden -from him in its nearness; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and -frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. Hilda drew back -and rose to her feet. A subtle change, perplexity deepened, crossed her -face, but, standing before him, she looked down at him and he saw that -her trust rose as to a test. She put her hands out as though from an -impulse to lay them on his shoulders; then, as an instinct within the -impulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear look untouched, she -clasped them together and said gravely-- - -"You may tell me. You are infinitely dear to _me_." - -Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave him a sense of helpless -baseness. - -"I may tell you how much I love you?" and he too rose and stood before -her. - -"I have always loved you," said Hilda, with her grave look. "I love you -now as much as I did when I was a child." - -The impossible height where she placed him beside her made Odd's head -swim. He felt himself caught up for a moment into the purity of her -eyes, and looking into them he came close to her. - -"My angel! My angel!" he hardly breathed. - -"Dear Peter," and the tears came into the pure eyes. And, at the sight, -the heaven brimmed with loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious -but all revealed, Odd was conscious only of a dizzy descent from -impossibility, the crash of the inevitable. - -One step and he had taken her into his arms, seeing as he did so, in a -flash, the white wonder of her face; he could almost have smiled at -it--divinely dull creature! Holding her closely, the white folds of the -shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, his cheek upon her hair, -he could not kiss her and he could not speak, and in a silence as -unmistakable as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the past and -defied the future. - -The painful image of a bird he had once seen, wings broken, dying of a -shot and feebly fluttering, came to him as he felt her stir; her hands -pushing him away. - -"Dearest--dearest--dearest." - -Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness. - -Stooping his head he looked at her face; it wore an almost tranquil, a -corpse-like look. Her eyes were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a -little in a faint, fixed frown; but the childlike line of her mouth had -all the sad passivity of death. Odd tremblingly kissed the gentle -sternness of the lips. - -She loved him, but how cruel he was. - -"Oh, my precious," he said, "look at me. Forgive me; I love you." - -He had freed her hands, and she raised them and bent her face upon them. - -"You don't hate me for telling you the truth?" And as she made no sign: -"No, no, you don't hate me; you love me and I love you. I have loved you -from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why did you let me think you -did not care? Look at me, dearest." - -"What have I done?" said Hilda. She still kept her face hidden in her -hands. - -"You have done nothing; it is I, I who have done it!" - -"I never could have believed it of you," she said, and he felt it to be -the simple statement of a fact. - -"O Hilda--I have only told you the truth, that is my crime." - -"You told me because of what I said? You love me because of what I -said?" - -"Good God! I have been madly in love with you for months!" - -"For months?" she repeated dully. - -"For years, perhaps, who knows!" - -"I did not know that I--that you--" - -"You knew nothing, my poor angel." - -He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to stumble and grope for an -entreaty; her very powerlessness in the grasp of her realized love -enchanted him. - -"How base! how base!" she moaned. - -"Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, and I cannot help myself." - -"No--you cannot help yourself. I love you and I told you so." - -"You did not mean _this_." - -"I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did not doubt myself. I am -wicked." The strange revulsion from her long selflessness had reached -its height in poor Hilda; but, in her eyes, the discovered self was -indeed wicked, a terrible revelation. - -Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder. - -"O Peter, Peter!" - -"What, my darling child?" - -"That we should be so base!" - -"Not _we_, Hilda. Not _you_!" - -"Yes, I--for I am happy--think of it, happy! Peter, I love you so much." -She wept, her head upon his shoulder. "Keep me for a moment, only a -moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the good of it. I am glad -that you love me. No; don't kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved -me for a long time." - -"From the moment I saw you again, I think. I knew it when I began -meeting you after your lessons. Do you remember that first day in the -rain? I do; and your little hat with the bow on it, the hole in your -little glove, your white little face. I went away to the South because I -could not trust myself with you. I did not dream that you loved me, but -I felt--ah! I felt--that I could have made you love me!" - -"And yet--you loved Katherine!" - -The anguish of the broken words pierced him. - -"Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find myself. I did not love -her." - -"Peter! Peter!" - -"Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you that you are the only -one--my only love!" - -"O Peter!" - -"I never thought that I loved Katherine, but I had no fear of injustice -to her, for I never thought that love would come into my life; and, -hardly was the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth crept upon -me. Friendly comradeship on the one hand, and on the other--O Hilda!--a -passion that has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you like a -thunderbolt; my love for you crashed in upon your heavenly dreaming; but -you see--be brave enough to acknowledge what it all means, your dream -and my love that needed no thunderbolt to wake it,--be brave enough to -own that it is inevitable, that from the time that you put your hand in -mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest thing, a love, a -sympathy infinite. Dear child, be brave enough to own that before it, -mistakes may be put aside without dishonor." - -"Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor! We are both already -dishonorable, and oh! it is that that breaks my heart; that you, that -you who should have helped me, protected me from the folly of my -ignorance, that you should be dishonorable!" - -"O Hilda!" - -"Yes," she said wildly, "yes, yes, Peter; and I am wicked--wicked, for I -love you. Yes--kiss me; there, now I am thoroughly wicked. Now let me -go." - -Odd, white and shaken, still locked his arms about her. - -"I was base if you will, too base for your loveliness; but you, my -darling, have not a shadow on you; you were impossibly noble. Remember, -that if there is dishonor, I am dishonored, not you; remember that _I_ -have done this!" - -As he spoke, holding Hilda in his arms, the door opened and Katherine -entered. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - - -Katherine closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not -with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened -look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a wrap on her arm, and the -thumping of her boxes was heard outside on the stairs. - -Katherine had schemed and success was hers, but this unlooked-for -achievement struck her like a dagger and made triumph bitter. - -Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was the heroine. Katherine -felt herself struck down from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced -to a miserable position, a tool with the other tools--Peter and Hilda. - -To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shattering of ideals and pierced -even her own humiliation, for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked -up to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with her, but for Hilda's -own advantage; she, not Fate, was to put her in Peter's arms, unspotted -and innocent of the combinations that had led her there. All Katherine's -plans in England had prospered and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited -her. Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous perception of his -love for Hilda--a brave, manlike part--to which she had looked forward -as to an atonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine had almost -persuaded herself that there would be little acting needed. Had she not -seen, guessed, the truth? Had the truth not pained her, humiliated her? -Had she not risen finely above her pain and wished them happiness? In -moments of self-scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look -before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorchings, and Katherine -could scorch herself as well as others in the pitiless flame of -clear-sighted analysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome -standards of a higher nature--a rebellion that had carried her into such -opposition as to fall below herself to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, -touched with a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment,--was that -rebellion, that ambition, so base, so pitiful? - -Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes sophistical if carried too -far, and Katherine found excuses that explained for herself. But now all -was base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda's fall, had -risen. On this lowered platform, the advantage was hers, terribly hers, -and it was good, good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them. - -She laid down her wrap on a table and began to slowly draw off her -gloves. - -"My return was inopportune." The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her -own sense of fitness. "Or opportune?" She directed her eyes upon Odd, -and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He -welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he -prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his arm around -Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt -that Hilda's look of frozen horror gave him the advantage. - -"Opportune, Katherine," he said; "now at least I shall not have to lie -to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness." - -"Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?" - -It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel -his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, -for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "I can only beg you to believe that I have -struggled--for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought -that neither of you would ever know the truth." - -This bracketing of Hilda's injury with hers stank in Katherine's -nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, -speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself-- - -"I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so -chivalrously preparing for me," she said. "Marriage with an unloving -man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from -you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?" The -white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their -sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter's futile efforts to -withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his -stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the -retrospect grew lurid. - -"Katherine," said Odd gloomily, "I would not so have insulted you after -this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult." - -"I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have -waited, Peter." - -Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had -been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most -painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew -for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon -her sister. - -"So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda," she said. - -Hilda's wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the -stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds -at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long -resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to -cruelty. - -"Katherine, say anything--anything you will to me," and Odd's voice -broke a little as he spoke, "but not one word to her! Not one word! It -comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire -with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life." He -held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man -driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and -Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight -eyebrows, breathing quickly. - -"Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this -evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this -past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your -mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with -you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life--you and your -father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and -once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard -I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon -her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us." - -"Yes; as I see you." Katharine's very lips were white. - -Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the -terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd -remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the -extremity of self-control. - -"Katherine," she said, "he is trying to shield me. It did not happen -like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always -loved him." - -"Oh! did you?" said Katherine, with a withered little laugh. - -"My child!" cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this -assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him--"my child, -what are you saying? What madness!" - -"I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you." - -"In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love you misunderstood. You -know, as I knew when you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, -so nobly, so purely, was the child's love, the love of the loyal sister -for her friend, the love of an angel." - -"I am not sure," said Hilda. - -"Oh!" cried Odd, looking at her with savage tenderness, "this is -unbearable." - -It was as if they had forgotten, each in the mutual justification of the -other, Katherine standing there a silent spectator. - -But Odd was conscious of that outraging contemplation. - -"Hilda," he said appealingly and yet sternly, "at the very height of -your trust in me I betrayed it. Your nobility had reached its climax. I -had kissed you and you retreated, but without a shadow of doubt; and I, -from the base wish to try your trust to the utmost, said that I loved -you. You never faltered from your innocent outlook in replying; it was I -who saw the truth, not you." - -"Katherine," Hilda repeated, "he is trying to shield me. We are both -base, yes; but I forced him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, -and when he took me in his arms, I was glad." - -"Good God!" cried Peter. - -Katherine averted her eyes from her sister's face. - -"I must own, Peter," she said, "that your position was difficult. Hilda -evidently painted the pathos of her life to you in most touching -colors--she herself very white on the background of our black depravity. -That in itself is enough to shake a rather emotional heart like yours. -And then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a Galahad I fear, she -confesses her love for you, retreating delicately before your kisses. Of -course those kisses she received as platonic pledges--from the man -engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, very; I quite recognize it. -Under such tempting circumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor -must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve the difficulty, she -solved it for you, very effectually, very courageously. When you took -her in your arms--how often we repeat that phrase--the 'truth' at last -flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship could hardly account for such -yielding unconventionality, and Hilda's hidden love won the day." - -During these remarks, Odd felt himself shaking with rage. If Katherine -had been a man he would have knocked her down; as it was, his voice was -the equivalent of a blow as he said, clenching his hand on the back of a -chair-- - -"You despicable creature!" - -He and Katherine glared at one another. - -"Only the higher nature can put itself so hideously in the power of the -lower," Odd went on; "and you dare!" - -"No, no; all she says may be true!" moaned Hilda. She dropped upon the -sofa and hid her face in her hands, adding brokenly: "And how can you be -so cruel? so cruel to her? She loves you too!" - -Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and then, impulse nipped by -quick reflection-- - -"You need not allow for a woman's jealousy, Mr. Odd. Don't, no indeed -you must not, flatter yourself with my broken heart. I don't like -humiliation for myself or for others. I don't like to scorn my sister -whom I trusted, whom I loved. I could have killed the person who had -told me this of her! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too bitter for -charity. But I give you back your word without one regret for myself. -You have killed my love very effectually." - -"Was there ever much to kill, Katherine?" - -"That is ignoble, quite as ignoble as I could predict of you. Hilda's -lesson must necessarily make the past look pale." - -"I can only hope that you do yourself an injustice by such base -speeches, Katherine." - -"Your example has been contagious." - -"Let me think so by proving yourself more worthy than you seem. Ask your -sister's forgiveness--as I ask yours--humbly. She has not feared -humiliation." - -"I do not find myself in a position to fear or accept it. I found Hilda -in the dust, and I cannot forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor -confession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I make an exit more -apropos than my entrance, and leave you with her." Katherine took up her -wrap and walked out without looking again at Hilda. - -"And I have done this," said Odd. Hilda lay motionless, her face upon -her arms, and he approached her. There was a strange effect of no Hilda -at all under the heavy folds of the gown; in the dark it glimmered with -a vacant whiteness; it was as though the cruel words had beaten away her -body and her soul. - -"Hilda!" said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating as he paused beside her, -not daring to touch the still figure. "Hilda!" he repeated; "if only you -will forgive me; if only you will own that it is I, I only who need -forgiveness, and unsay those mad words that gave her the power! Oh! that -she should have had the power! She has made remorse impossible!" Odd -added, addressing himself rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no -hint of sympathy. - -"Why did you put yourself under her feet and make me powerless?" he -asked; "you know that your gentle reticence had for months kept my love -in check; you knew that had I kept at your level, you would have never -realized that you loved me." He bent above her and kissed her hand. -"Precious one! Dearest, dearest child." - -"Oh, don't!" said Hilda. She drew her hand away, not lifting her head. -"Her heart is broken. I am all that she said." - -"Her heart is not broken!" cried Odd, in rather desperate accents. "I -could swear to it! She is a cruel, heartless girl!" - -"What would you have asked of her? You were cruel to her." - -"I am glad of it." And as Hilda made no reply to this statement, he -stooped to her again, imploring: "Will you not look at me? Look up, -dearest; tell me again that you love me." - -"I am already in the dust," said Hilda, after a pause. - -"You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!" cried Odd; he -took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. "Sit -up. Listen to me," he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken -face, his hands on her shoulders. "I have loved you passionately for -months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have -fumbled with that fatally misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved -me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn -out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, -of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, -wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!" Odd added, sitting -down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda -repeated-- - -"Don't." - -"You felt my pity, my sympathy," Odd went on, holding her hands. "You -felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the -child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation--for -love--you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found -more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too -high for the hearer." - -"Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that I _loved_ -you!" Hilda wailed suddenly. - -"Thank God that you own to that!" Odd ejaculated. - -"That does not clear me," she retorted. "No, no; I was a fool. You, the -man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty -of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to -you--it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly -whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all! -I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are -usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are -crimes, and I am wicked. I hate myself!" she sobbed, bending again her -face upon her hands. - -"Hilda," said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, "you could not -have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for -months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold -little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for -you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step--you -retreating before me--to the final realizations; and final they are not, -I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the -real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all -that you have suffered." Hilda interrupted him with an "Oh!" from -between clenched teeth. - -"Katherine was right," she said, "I have painted myself in pathetic -colors. What a prig! What an egotist!" Her voice trembled on its low -note of passionate self-scorn. - -"An egotist!" Odd burst into a loud laugh. "That caps the climax. Come, -Hilda," he added, "don't be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, -still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I -say, I haven't yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as -I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, -unconscious little child." Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but -Hilda's swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision. - -"You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to -speak of some day? There will never be any day for us--together." - -"I say there will be, Hilda." - -"You think that I could ever forget my sister's misery; my shame and -yours?" - -"You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the -day." - -"That is a placid term for such degradation." - -"I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake." - -"You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can't -mend a broken heart by marching over it." - -"One may avoid breaking another." - -"You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the -bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing -that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean." - -"You, Hilda, are only cruel--unutterably cruel," said Odd brokenly. - -"I never wish to see you again." Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his -eyes of pitiful appeal. "You have robbed my life of the little it had; -you have robbed me of self-respect." - -"Shall I leave you, Hilda?" - -"You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me." - -"Good-bye," said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to -the heart, and half-unconscious. - -"Peter!" cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was -standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed -and dilated eyes. - -"What is it, my child?" Odd asked gently. - -"Kiss me good-bye!" - -He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another. - -"Must I leave you?" he asked, in a stammering voice. - -"Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me." - -He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved -away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a -characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, -he said-- - -"I will wait." - -And turning away, he walked out of the room. - - - - -CHAPTER XII - - -For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda -stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant -devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for -Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she -announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine -had returned to England, she added with emphasis-- - -"But I don't go this time, Miss Hilda. It's your turn to have a maid -now." - -The news took a weight of dread from Hilda's heart. She shrank from -again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine's tragic eyes. -She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half -delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, -of everlasting responsibility for her sister's misery. With all the -capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered -natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting -hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored -her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: "I love -you, too!" Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with -cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of -analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so -swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral -visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of -relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine's -ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness. - -Hilda's love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been -growing from the child's devotion, and, with the new torture of a -hopeless longing upon her--for which she despised herself--she saw in -the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart. - -Only a few days after Katherine's departure, the Captain returned. - -Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that -weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked -carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the -door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her -behalf. - -He hardly mentioned Katherine's broken engagement, and, for once in her -life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. -Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit -plaintively beside her daughter's bed; and it was from her that Hilda -learned that they were going back to Allersley. - -Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and -Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities -and to probabilities. The Captain's good fortune showed to her in a -dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at -its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, -and who it was that shielded her from even a feather's weight of -gratitude--for the Captain made no mention of his good luck. - -"Yes, we are going back to the Priory," Mrs. Archinard said, her -melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter's wasted -face. "It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to -compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. -Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I -predicted it rather. You have killed yourself _tout simplement_; I -consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks -it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, -'_Docteur, elle s'est tuée._' I said it frankly." - -Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so -long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones -of pathos and pity on Hilda's behalf, hardly realizing their objective -nature. - -By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like -returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker -chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the -meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and -felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood. - -Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her -sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, -too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa -existence; without the background of Hilda's quiet servitude, it became -flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and -for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in -pensive contemplation of tenants' havoc. She sighed over the Priory and -said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not -think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain -vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a -little--the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as -fishing--and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at -political follies. - -When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, her father often walked -aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed -glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted -passively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only -vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as -her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his -fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing-basket, and showing -evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a -sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a -sudden sense of method underlying the Captain's manoeuvres. - -"Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will -be glad of a respite. Isn't it a little sunny to-day for first-class -fishing?" Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up -to her with shy alacrity. - -"Even first-class fishing is a bore, _I_ think," he observed, not -taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his -daughter and then at the river. - -"Feeling better to-day, aren't you? You might take a stroll with me, -perhaps; but no, you're not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, -isn't it?" - -Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the -Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of -weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and -the absent-minded smile on her face reassured him as to immediate -issues. - -"How are _you_ feeling?" she asked; "I have been looking at the trees -and grass for so long that I had almost forgotten that there are human -beings in the world." - -"Oh, I'm very well; very well indeed." The Captain was again feeling -uncomfortable. An inner coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just -because speaking was not really imperative at the moment. A little glow -of self-approbation suddenly prompted him to add: "You know, I know -about it now. That is to say, I wasn't exactly to speak of it, if it -might pain you; but I don't see why it should do _that_. Upon my word," -said the Captain, feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was -broken, "it's more likely to pain me, isn't it? Rather to my discredit, -you know; though, intrinsically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of -course you helped me over a tight place now and then, but I thought the -money came to you with a mere turn of the hand, so to speak; and, as for -your teaching--wearing yourself out--well, I don't know which I was -angrier with first, you or myself. I never dreamed of it, it never -entered into my head. And then, _my_ daughter and low French cads! Well, -_he_ saw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too; thought it best, -you know; for, naturally, Odd couldn't have my weight and authority. I -was simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me over when he told -me. Odd told me--" - -The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, and then switched its -limber length tentatively through the air. It was embarrassing, after -all, this recognition of his daughter's life. - -"Now your mother doesn't know," he pursued; "Odd seemed rather anxious -that she should; rather unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no -necessity for that, was there? It would have quite killed her, wouldn't -it? Quite." - -"You need neither of you have known." All she was wondering about, -trying to grasp, made Hilda pale. "It came about most naturally; and, if -mamma's illness and that other unpleasant episode had not broken me -down, my modest business might have come to an end--no one the wiser for -it. Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt." - -"Well, I don't know." The Captain now sat down on the chair with a sigh -of some relief. "It's off my mind at all events. I wanted to express -my--pain, you know, and my gratitude--and to say what a jolly trump I -thought you; that kind of thing." - -"Dear papa, I don't deserve it." - -"Ah, well, Odd isn't the man to make misstatements, you know. A bit of -dreamer, unpractical, no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, -you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cutting, to tell you the -truth. Of course he's very fond of you; that's natural. This sad affair -of Katherine's; if it hadn't been for that, you and he would be brother -and sister by this time." - -It was Hilda's turn now to draw in a little breath of relief. At all -events her father was no ally. No other secret had been told, and she -saw, now that the dread had gone, that any cause for it would have -involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of which she knew Odd to be -incapable. - -"Where is he--Mr. Odd?" she asked, steeling herself to the question. - -The look of gloom which touched the Captain's face anew, confirmed Hilda -in her certainty of infinite pecuniary obligation. - -"Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A man can't sit down quietly -under a blow like that." - -A flush came over Hilda's face. Part of her punishment was evident. She -must hear Katherine spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, -guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered and crowned with -praises. Yet Katherine herself--any woman--would choose the part Odd had -given her--the part of jilt rather than jilted; and she, Hilda, was -helpless. - -"Papa," she asked, driving in the dagger up to the hilt--she could at -least punish herself, if no one else could punish her--"where is -Katherine? Is she not coming to stay with us?" The Captain swung one leg -over the other with impatience. - -"I've hardly heard from her; she is with the Leonards in London. Odd -spoke very highly of her; seemed to think she had acted honorably; but, -naturally, Katherine must feel that she has behaved badly." - -"I am sure she has not done that, papa. She found that she would not be -happy with him." - -"Pshaw! That's all feminine folly, you know. She probably saw some one -she liked better, some bigger match. Katherine isn't the girl to throw -over a man like Odd for a whim." - -Hilda's flush was now as much for her father as for herself. She felt -her cheeks burning as she said, her voice trembling-- - -"Papa, papa! How can you say such a thing of Katherine! How can you! I -know it is not true. I know it!" - -"Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well -though, and it's not unimaginable. I don't imply anything vulgar." The -Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; "that's not -conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine's ambitious, very ambitious. -As for you, Hilda--and all that, you know--I am awfully sorry, you -understand." The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased -his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, -and the Captain's conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible. - -Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond -the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery -that her father's cool suppositions on Katherine's conduct had seemed -to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that -shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She -looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside -it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous -droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; -the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too -dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned -her head away from the river and closed her eyes. - -"Allone, withouten any companye," that was the fated motto of her life. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - - -By the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to -seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with -something--with anything--and experienced the odd sensation of a person -upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for -duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, -unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of -labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission -to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with -artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she -told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in -her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks -and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like -crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms. - -Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active _rôle_ in life most -confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard -drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little -_côterie_ of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard's little _Causeries -de Mardi_, her society for little weekly dinners--only six chosen -members--_les Élites_--stirred Allersley to the quick with æsthetic -thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly -at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its -Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations. - -Hilda was not one of _les Élites_. "Just for us old people, trying to -amuse ourselves," Mrs. Archinard said, and at the _Causeries_ Hilda was -an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the _Causeries_ were quite -Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard _causant_ and -Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a -revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the _élites_ -and the _mardis_, and devoted himself to more commonplace -individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn't required to -strain one's temper by listening to fine talk. - -Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she -came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows -of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on -her arm. Mary's mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture -since Peter's flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and -yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary -was generous, and the sight of Hilda's white sunlit face completed -Peter's work. She found that she had kissed Hilda--she, so -undemonstrative--and standing with her arms around the girl's slight -shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the -slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter-- - -"You will see _me_, won't you?" - -Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut--palest -pink and palest purple, "on tiptoe for a flight." - -"How kind of you to come," she said. - -"Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy's camp. That -reckless brother of mine!" - -"Did he send you?" Hilda asked, fright in her eyes. - -"Send me? Oh no, he didn't send me; but after what he has told me, I -came naturally of my own free will." Hilda smiled faintly in reply to -Mary's smile. - -"What has he told you?" - -"Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he -proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really -Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving -him!" - -Hilda winced at the humorous tone. - -"That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in -upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel--natural, though, wasn't -it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been -badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and -that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and--oh, a great -many things." - -"Did he tell you that I loved him?" Hilda asked, looking down at her -sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if -it was demanded of her that she should humiliate herself before Peter's -sister--tell her that she had made love to him. - -"My dear child," Mary's voice dropped to a graver key, "Peter trusts me, -you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to -you, you and he together found out that fact." - -Even Hilda's morbid self-doubt could not deny the essential truth of -this point of view. - -"And now you won't marry him," Mary added, but in a matter-of-fact -manner, and as if the subject were folded up and put away by that -conclusive statement. - -"Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. What a delightful garden -this is. I must have a pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, -why have you always so persistently and doggedly effaced yourself? Why -did you never let anybody know you, and subside passively into the -background _rôle_? I never knew you, I am sure, and if it hadn't been -for Peter I shouldn't have known you now. He made me see things very -clearly. The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, and holding -up a whole edifice on its shoulders." - -"How could he! Why will he always see things so? It makes me miserable." - -"Well, well; perhaps Peter's point of view would seem to you -exaggerated. But, as I say, why did you never let me get a glimpse of -you?" - -"I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me apart. I loved my work." - -"Yes; it must have been charming work, in all its branches." Mary gave -her a gravely gay glance. "When you did emerge from your shadows, why -did you never talk--make an effect, like Katherine?" - -"Katherine makes effects without trying. She is effective, and people -like her for herself. I was fitted for the dark corner. That is why I -stayed there." - -"No, my dear, one can't explain the injustices of fortune by that -comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatalistic philosophy. Noble natures get -oddly jumped on in this world," Mary added reflectively. "The tragedy, -of course, lies in being too noble for one's milieu, for then, not only -does one renounce, but one is expected to, as a matter of course. -Forgive me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am speaking, for -the moment, with gloves off; I know the truth, and you may as well face -it. It's a pity to be too noble; one should have just a spice of -egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one's corner." - -"Peter found me," said Hilda, with a sad smile that evaded the "coarse" -frankness. - -They walked silently along the little path under the sunlit shade of the -fruit-trees. Mary stopped at a turning. - -"Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of Emerson and optimism. Peter -did find you." Her large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda's. -"Peter found you, my dear child; let Peter keep you, then." - -"He always will keep--what he found," said Hilda, trembling. "I love -him. I shall always love him." - -"My dear Hilda!" - -"But I cannot marry him. I cannot." - -"You are a foolish little Hilda." - -"We made Katherine miserable." - -"And therefore all three must be miserable. For Peter to have kept faith -with Katherine--loving you--might have called down a far worse tragedy." - -Hilda gazed widely at her-- - -"Yes; I deserve that suspicion." - -"Oh, you foolish, foolish child!" cried Mary, laughing; and she kissed -her. "Come, come; say that you will be good to my poor brother?" - -"I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness on a wrong." - -"Your happiness would be grounded on a right; the wrong was a mere -incidental. Peter must wait, I see. Perhaps you will own some day that -that was ample expiation." - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - - -One October day Hilda received a queer little note from Katherine. That -Katherine had spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht with a -party of friends, Hilda knew, and the note was dated from Amalfi. - -"Why don't you marry Peter, you little goose?" was all it said. - -Hilda trembled as she read. Katherine's scorn and Katherine's nobility -seemed to breathe from it. - -"I am not as base as you think," was her answer. - -Katherine received this answer in Amalfi. She had come in from a walk -with Allan Hope along the road that runs above the sea between Amalfi -and Sorrento, and one of the yachting party, a girl who much admired -Katherine, was waiting for her before the hotel holding the letter, an -excuse for the excited whisper with which she gave it to her. - -"Dear Miss Archinard, _he_ is here!" - -"What 'he,' Nelly?" asked Katherine; she looked down at the writing on -the envelope of her letter, and the becoming flush that her walk through -the warm evening had brought to her cheeks faded a little. - -Allan Hope had gone on into the hotel, and Nelly's excited eyes followed -him till he was safely out of sight. - -"Mr. Odd," she said with dramatic emphasis. "Of course he didn't know." - -"Oh, he is here!" Katherine's eyes were still on the writing. "No, of -course he didn't know." - -"You aren't afraid of his meeting Allan?" Nelly was Allan Hope's cousin. -"Is there no danger, Miss Archinard? He must be feeling so--dreadfully!" - -"What a romantic little pate it is! I really believe you were looking -forward to a duel. No, no, Nelly, there is nothing of an exciting nature -to hope for!" - -"But won't it be terrible for you to meet him? The first time, you know! -And engaged to Allan!" said Nelly. - -"We are not at all afraid of one another. Don't tremble, Nelly." - -Katherine read her letter standing on the terrace before the hotel. The -dying evening seemed to throb softly in the southern sky, arching -solemnly to the horizon line. Katherine looked out at the sea--it was -characteristic of her deeply set eyes to look straight out and seldom -up. She stood still, holding the letter quietly; Katherine had none of -the weakness that seeks an outlet for the stress of resolution in -nervous gesture. She did not even walk up and down; indeed the -resolution was made and meditation needless. Turning after a moment, she -went into the hotel and asked at the office whether Mr. Odd were to be -found. - -"Yes, he was in his room; he had only arrived an hour ago." - -Katherine requested the man to tell Mr. Odd that Miss Archinard was on -the terrace and would like to see him. In two minutes Peter was walking -out to meet her. - -Peter's eyes, as they shook hands, were rather sternly steady; -Katherine's steady, but more humorous. - -"_Sans rancune?_" she inquired, with some lightness, and then, sparing -him the necessity for a reply that might be embarrassing for both of -them-- - -"I want to ask you a question; pardon abruptness; why don't you marry -Hilda? Won't she? There are two questions!" - -"I don't marry her because she won't. And there is the evident reply, -Katherine." - -"Do you despair?" she asked. - -"I can't say that. Time may wear out her resistance." - -"I know Hilda better than you do--perhaps. You see I have got over my -jealousy." Katherine's smile had all its charm. "She won't if she said -she wouldn't; if she has ideals on the subject." - -"Then I must resign myself to hopeless wretchedness." - -"No; you must not. _I_ am going to help you. Don't look so gloomily -unimpressed. I am going to help you. I am going to do penance, and I -don't believe you will consider it an expiation either! Just encourage -me by a little appreciation of my dubious nobility." Odd looked -questioningly at her. - -"Peter, when I came back that night I was engaged to Allan Hope." - -"Oh!" said Peter. They looked at one another through the almost palpable -dusk of the evening. - -"I'll give you the facts--draw your own conclusions. I'll give you -facts, but don't ask self-abasement put into words. You really haven't -the right, have you, Peter?" - -"No; I suppose not. No, _I_ haven't the right." - -"You put yourself in the wrong, you see. You must allow me to flaunt -that ragged superiority. Peter, very soon after our engagement you began -to dissatisfy me because I realized that I should never satisfy you. The -more you knew me the more you would disapprove, and your nature could -never understand mine to the extent of pardoning. Once I'd seen that, -everything was up. It wouldn't do; and the knowledge grew upon me that -the impossibility was emphasized by the fact that Hilda _would_ do. _I_ -saw that you loved her, Peter; stupid, stupid Peter! And poor little -Hilda! She was ground between two stones, wasn't she? your ignorance and -my knowledge. I give you leave to offer me up as a burnt sacrifice at -her altar, only don't let me hear myself crackling. Yes; I saw that you -were in love with her, and that she would be in love with you if it -could come--as it should have come--as I intended it to come--foolish, -hasty Peter! No; no comments, please! I know everything you can say. I -took precious good care of myself, no doubt; my generosity wasn't very -spontaneous; perhaps I thought you'd get over it; perhaps I wanted you -to get over it; perhaps even while seeing that Allan Hope would do--for -I satisfy him most thoroughly--I kept a tiny indefinite corner in my -motives for possible reactions; I give you leave to draw your -inferences, but don't ask me to dot my i's and cross my t's too -cold-bloodedly. I accepted Allan Hope on the understanding that the -engagement was to be kept secret for a few months. I told Allan that you -did not love me; that I did not love you; that our engagement was -broken. I told him that when I saw his love for me struggling with his -loyalty to you. It was the truth from my point of view; but from his, -from yours, it was a lie--and own that at least I am generous in telling -you! Too generous perhaps. I came back to Paris to tell you that I had -discovered it wouldn't do, and to make you and Hilda happy. And, when I -saw you together, both as bad as I was--at least I thought so at the -time--both disloyal--I forgot my own self-scorn; I felt a right to a -position I had repudiated. I _had_ to be cruel, for, Peter, I was -jealous; I hated her for being the one who would satisfy you thoroughly -and forever." - -There was silence between them. If she had satisfied him as only Hilda -could satisfy him, she would not have gone to Allan perhaps. Odd with a -quick throb of sympathy understood the intimation, understood both her -courage and her reticence. He had seen her at her noblest, yet there was -much not touched upon, far from noble. - -The half avowal of a disappointed love flawed her loyalty to Allan. Such -love deserved disappointment and was of a doubtful quality. Peter -respected her frankness but was not deceived by it. His manliness was -touched by the possibility she had hinted at. He understood Katherine -and he forgave her--with reservations. - -There seemed to be nothing to say, and he did not seek words. He and -Katherine walked slowly to the end of the terrace. - -Then Katherine told him of her note to Hilda and handed him Hilda's -reply. - -"I shall go to England to-morrow, Katherine," said Odd, when he had read -it. - -"You will have to fight, you know. She will say that my wrong did not -excuse hers. She will say that nothing excused you. She _is_ a little -goose." - -"I'll fight." - -They had walked back to the entrance of the hotel and here they paused; -there was a fitness in farewell. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "it would have been very base in you to have kept -silence, and yet, in spite of that, you have been very courageous this -evening." - -"You are a hideously truthful person, Peter. Why put in that damaging -clause? Have I merely escaped baseness?" - -"No, for you have never been finer." - -"That is true. I'll never reach the same heights again," and Katherine -laughed. - -"Understand that _I_ understand. Your story has not absolved _me_." - -"There is the danger with Hilda. You must make my holocaust avail." - -"I hope that a good thing is never lost," Peter replied. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - - -The October day was deliciously warm at Allersley, a fragrant autumnal -warmth, limpid with sunshine, and the woods all golden. - -Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine of home and hope in his -blood, his mood of resolute success tempered by no more than just a -touch of trembling. - -In the distance lay the river, a glitter here and there beyond the tree -trunks; the little landing-wharf where he had first seen Hilda was no -doubt still unchanged and worth a pilgrimage on some later day, but now -he must take the most direct way to the Priory; he had only arrived an -hour before, but a minute's further delay would be unbearable. This day -must atone for all the past failure of his life, and make his autumn -golden. He walked quickly, following, he remembered, almost the same -path among the trees that he and Hilda had gone by that night, ten years -ago; the memory emphasized the touch of trembling. To dwell on her -dearness made fear tread closely. The gray stone wall wound among the -woods, Peter caught sight of it, and, at the same moment, of the -fluttering white of a dress beyond it that made his heart stand still. - -He could not have hoped to find Hilda here with no teasing -preliminaries, no languid mother or sulky father to mar the fine rush of -his onslaught. - -Such good luck augured well, for--yes, it was Hilda walking slowly among -the trees--and at the clear sight of her, Peter wondered if the -breathing space of a conventional preliminary would not have been -better, and felt that he had exaggerated his own courage in picturing -that conquering impetuosity. - -She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an air of patient sadness. -Her hands clasped behind her, she walked aimlessly over the falling -leaves and seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness as her -footsteps passed through them. There was a black bow in the ruffled -bodice, and with her black hair she made on the gold and gray a -colorless silhouette. - -Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached her, the rustling leaves -under his feet, their falling patter from the trees, seemed to fill the -air with loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of her own -footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled at the weary unexpectancy of -her look transformed to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in -a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous comprehension -conceded, Katherine's confession had been cruelly tardy and Hilda's face -was pitiful. She stood silent and motionless looking at him, and Odd, as -he joined her, said the first words that came to his lips. - -"My child! How ill you look!" - -The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across -her face, but Odd, seeing only its frozen pain, remembered those -stabbing words: "You are cruel and weak and mean," which she had spoken -with just such a look, and any lingering thought of a fine onslaught was -nipped in the bud. - -"I may speak to you?" he asked. - -Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impossible to speak; she wanted -to throw herself on his breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, -all the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight of him gave -her such joy that everything was already half forgotten--even Katherine; -even Katherine--she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold -faintness-- - -"Oh, yes;" adding, "you startled me." - -"So thin, so pale, such woful eyes!" He stood staring at her. - -"You--don't look well either," she said, still in the soft cold voice. - -"I should be very sorry to look well." - -Peter was adapting himself to reality; but if the impetuous dream was -abandoned, the courage of humbler methods was growing, and he could -smile a little at her. - -"Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will you walk with me for a -little while? It is a lovely day for walking. How beautiful the woods -are looking." - -"Beautiful. I walk here a great deal." She looked away from him and into -the golden distance. - -"And you will walk here now with me?" he asked, adding, as the pale -hesitation of her face again turned to him, "Don't be frightened, dear, -I am not going to force any solution upon you; I am not going to try to -make you think well of me in spite of your conscience." - -Think well of him! As if, good or bad, he was not everything to her, and -the rest of the world nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves. - -"And here is Palamon," said Peter, as that delightful beast came at a -sort of abrupt and ploughing gallop, necessitated by the extreme -shortness of his crumpled legs, through the heaped and fallen foliage. -"He remembers me, too, the dear old boy," and Palamon, whose very -absorbed and business-like manner gave way to sudden and smiling -demonstration, was patted and rubbed cordially in answer to his cordial -welcome. - -"It must seem strange to you being here again after such a time," said -Odd, when he and Hilda turned towards the river, Palamon, with an air of -happy sympathy, at their heels. The river was invisible, a good -half-mile away, and the whispering hush of the woods surrounded them. - -"It doesn't seem strange, no," Hilda replied; "it seems very peaceful." - -"And are you peaceful with it?" All the implied reserves of her tone -made Peter wonder, as he had often wondered, at the strength of this -fragile creature; for, although that conviction of having wronged -another was accountable for her haggard young face, the crushed anguish -of her love for him was no less apparent in the very aloofness of her -glance. - -"I feel merely very useless," she said with a vague smile. - -"I have seen Katherine, Hilda." Odd waited during a few moments of -silent walking before making the announcement, and Hilda stopped short -and turned wondering eyes on him. - -"It was at Amalfi. She had just received your letter, and she sent for -me; she had something to say to me." Hilda kept silence, and Odd added, -"You knew that she was on a yachting trip?" Hilda bowed assent. "And -that Allan Hope is of the party?" - -"I heard that; yes." - -"And that he and Katherine are to be married?" - -Here Hilda gave a little gasp. - -"She doesn't love him," she cried. Odd considered her with a disturbed -look. - -"You mustn't say that, you know. I fancy she does--love him." - -"She did it desperately after you had failed her; after I had robbed -her." - -Odd was too conscious of the possibility of a subtle half-truth in this -to assert the bold unvarnished whole truth of a negative. - -Hilda's loyalty lent a dignity to Katharine's most doubtful motives, a -dignity that Katherine would probably contemplate with surprise, but -accept with philosophic pleasure. - -Had Hilda indeed robbed her unwittingly? Had he failed her long before -her deliberate breach of faith? He had, she said, shown his love for -Hilda, and would she have turned to Lord Allan's more facile contentment -had she been sure of Peter's? - -Delicate problem, without doubt. His mind dwelt on its vexatious -tragic-comic aspect, while he stared almost absently at Hilda. - -Certainly his disloyalty had been unintentional, guiltless of plot or -falsehood; and Katherine's was intentional, deceitful, ignoble. It would -be possible to shock every chord of honor in Hilda with the bold -announcement that Katherine had been engaged when she came to Paris, and -that her cruel triumph had been won under a lying standard. - -And that shock might shatter forever, not the sense of personal -wrong-doing, but all responsibility towards one so base, all that -brooding consciousness of having spoiled another's life. Katherine had -abandoned the position, and poor Hilda had merely stumbled on its vacant -lie. - -Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble self-interest in showing -the ugly fact with no softening circumstances; circumstances might -indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to -despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of -the circumstances than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to -think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that the irksomeness of -his growing disapproval, rather than the loss of his love, had led -Katherine to seek a more amenable substitute; but with a sense of honor -so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put aside his own advantageous -surmises, and prepared to give Katherine's story from a most delicate -and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Katherine's words, and yet -such artistic chivalry in their setting that even Katherine would find -her sacrifice at Hilda's altar painless. - -"You shall have her own words," he said, after a long pause. He felt -that the inner trembling had grown to a great terror. He became pale -before the compelling necessity for exaggerated magnanimity. - -To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine's loomed a black -probability, yet in his very defeat he would prove himself not unworthy -of Hilda's love; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah! piercing words! At -least he could now draw them from their rankling. And as they walked -together he told Katherine's story, lending to it every charitable -possibility with which she herself could not honestly have invested it. - -When he had done, taking off his hat, for his temples were throbbing -with the stress of the recital, and looking at Hilda with an almost -pitifully boyish look, he had emphasized his own unconscious revelation -of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of broken-hearted generosity -in Katherine, he had hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the -glaring fact that she had made sure of him before giving Peter his -freedom. The soreness that the revelation of Katherine's selfishness had -made between them so soon after their engagement, he had not mentioned. - -Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once or twice during the -story she had clutched her clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice -her step had faltered and she had paused as though to listen more -intently, but the white profile with its framing eddies of hair crossed -the pale gold background, its attitude of intense quiet unchanged. - -The silence that followed his last words seemed cruelly long to Odd, but -at last she lifted her eyes, and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish -look, her own look broke suddenly into passionate sympathy and emotion. - -"Peter," she said, standing still before him, "she didn't love you." - -"I don't think she did." Odd's voice was shaken but non-committal. - -"Perhaps she loved you more than she could love any one else," said -Hilda. - -"Yes; perhaps." - -Hilda's hands were still clasped behind her, and she looked hard into -his face as she added with a certain stern deliberateness-- - -"I don't believe she ever loved anybody." - -Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for such a clear perception. - -"She was very cruel to me," said Hilda, after a little pause, and her -eyes, turning from his, looked far away as if following the fading of a -lost illusion. - -"I don't think she ever cared much for me either," she added. - -"Not much; not as you interpret caring." - -Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over him rushed that -indignant realization of Katherine's intrinsic selfishness. - -"No; I could not have been so cruel to her, not even if she had robbed -me of you." It was the most self-assertive speech he had ever heard her -utter. - -"No; you could not have been so cruel to her," he repeated, "not even -loving me as you did and as she did not." - -There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed to Odd that the very trees -stretched out their branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said -slowly-- - -"But that doesn't make what I did less wrong. I was as weak, as -disloyal, as though Katherine had loved us both as much as I thought she -did." - -"And I as cruel, as weak, as mean?" Odd asked. - -"Ah, don't!" she said, with a look of pain. "You have redeemed -yourself," she added, "and have made me more ashamed." - -"Then I have made a miserable failure of my attempt." - -"No, no; you have not." - -The river was before them now, and the woods sloped down to its curving -band of silver. They both stood still and looked at it, and beyond it at -the gentle stretches of autumnal hill and meadow. - -"Dear Peter," said Hilda gently. He looked down at her and she up at -him, putting her hand in his, but so gravely and quietly that the tender -little action conveyed nothing but a reminiscence of the child of ten -years ago. - -So, holding hands, they were both still silent, and again they looked at -the river, the meadows, and the blue distance of the hills. Palamon, -after running here and there, with rather assumed interest, his nose to -the ground, came and sat down before them with an air of dignified -acquiescence and appreciative contemplation. In the woods the sudden, -sad-sweet twitter of a bird seemed to embroider the silence with -unconscious pathos. - -"O Peter!" said Hilda suddenly, on a note as impulsive and as -inevitable as the bird's. He looked at her and put his arms around her, -saying nothing. - -"Oh!" said Hilda, "I cannot help it. I love you too much, dear Peter. -Everything else may have been wrong, but it is right to love you." - -He took her face between his hands and looked at her. - -"Everything else would be wrong." - -"Then kiss me, Peter." - -He gave himself the joy of a delicious postponement. - -"Not till you tell me that you see that everything else would be wrong." -But the kiss was given before her answer. - -"I trust you, and you must know." - -THE END. - - * * * * * - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -you remem-him=> you remember him {pg 19} - -the coèncirge=> the concièrge {pg 139} - -to forego the enjoyment=> to forgo the enjoyment {pg 158} - -unforgetable=> unforgettable {pg 181} - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - -***** This file should be named 42109-8.txt or 42109-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/0/42109/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -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. 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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> - +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42109 ***</div> </body> </html> diff --git a/42109.txt b/42109.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a3822aa..0000000 --- a/42109.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8688 +0,0 @@ -Project Gutenberg's The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -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/license - - -Title: The Dull Miss Archinard - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 16, 2013 [EBook #42109] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - -The - -Dull Miss Archinard - -By - -Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -New York -Charles Scribner's Sons -1898 - -Copyright, 1898, by -Charles Scribner's Sons - -_All rights reserved_ - -_TO_ - -MY GRANDMOTHER - -H. M. D. - - - - -Prologue - -PETER ODD - - - - -The Dull Miss Archinard - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - -Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream, -whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating -fly, his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisherman reverie, no -definite thought forming from the appreciative impressions of sunlit -meadows, cool stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming curves of -river. For a tired man, fishing is an occupation particularly soothing, -and Peter Odd was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, perhaps, -more that of the lover of nature than of the true sportsman, the -pastoral feast of the landscape with its blue distance of wooded hill, -more to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet-spotted beauty; -yet the attitude of receptive intentness was pleasant in all its phases, -no one weary thought could become dominant while the eyes rested on the -water, or were raised to such loveliness of quiet English country. So -much of what he saw his own too; the sense of proprietorship is, under -such circumstances, an intimately pleasant thing, and although, where -Odd stood at a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall -beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the confines of his -property just here, the woods and meadows before him were all his--to -the blue hills on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched widely -about Allersley Manor, and to the left the river ran for a very -respectable number of miles through woods and meadows as beautiful. The -sense of proprietorship was still new enough to give a little thrill, -for the old squire had died only two years before, and the sorrow of -loss had only recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed -responsibilities, to the realization that energies so called forth may -perhaps make of life a thing well worth living. A life of quiet utility; -to feel oneself of some earthly use; what more could one ask? The duties -of a landowner in our strenuous days may well fill a man's horizon, and -Odd was well content that they should do so; for the present at least; -and he did not look beyond the present. - -In his tweeds and waterproof knee-breeches and boots, a sun-burnt straw -hat shading his thin brown face, his hand steady and dexterous, as brown -and thin, he was a pleasing example of the English country-gentleman -type. He was tall, with the flavor of easy strength and elegance that an -athletic youth gives to the most awkwardly made man. His face was at -once humorous and sad; it is strange how a humorous character shows -itself through the saddest set of feature. Odd's long, rather acquiline -nose and Vandyke beard made a decidedly melancholy silhouette on the -sunlit water, yet all the lines of the face told of a kindly -contemplation of the world's pathetic follies; the mouth was sternly -cut yet very good-tempered, and its firm line held evident suggestions -of quiet smiling. - -Poor Peter Odd had himself committed a pathetic folly, and, as a result, -smiles might be tinged with bitterness. - -A captured trout presently demanded concentrated attention. The vigorous -fish required long playing until worn out, when he was deftly secured in -the landing-net and despatched with merciful promptitude; indeed, a -little look of nervous distaste might have roused in an unsympathetic -looker-on conjectures as to a rather weak strain--a foolish width of -pity in Peter Odd's character. - -"A beauty," he mentally ejaculated. He sat down in the shade. It was -hot; the long, thick grass invited a lolling rest. - -On the other side of the hedge was a rustic bathing-cabin, and from it -Odd heard the laughing chatter of young voices. The adjoining property -was a small one belonging to a Captain Archinard. Odd had seen little of -him; his wife was understood to be something of an invalid, and he had -two girls--these their voices, no doubt. Odd took off his hat and mopped -his forehead, looking at the little landing-wharf which he could just -see beyond the hedge, and where one could moor boats or dive off into -the deepness of the water. The latter form of aquatic exercise was -probably about to take place, for Odd heard-- - -"I can swim beautifully already, papa," in a confident young voice--a -gay voice, quiet, and yet excited too by the prospect of a display of -prowess. - -A tall, thin girl of about fourteen stepped out on to the landing. A -bathing-dress is not as a rule a very graceful thing, yet this child, -her skirt to her knee, a black silk sash knotted around her waist, with -her slim white legs and charming feet, was as graceful as a young Amazon -on a Grecian frieze. A heavy mass of braids, coiled up to avoid a -wetting, crowned her small head. She was not pretty; Odd saw that -immediately, even while admiring the well-poised figure, its gallantly -held little torso and light energy. Her profile showed a short nose and -prominent chin, inharmoniously accentuated. She seemed really ugly when -her sister joined her; the sister was beautiful. Odd roused himself a -little from his half recumbency to look at the sister appreciatively. -Her slimness was exaggerated to an extreme--an almost fluttering -lightness; her long arms and legs seemed to flash their whiteness on the -green; she had an exquisite profile, and her soft black hair swept up -into the same coronet of coils. Captain Archinard joined them as they -stood side by side. - -"You had better race," he said, looking down into the water, and then -away to the next band of shadow. "Dive in, and race to that clump of -aspens. This is a jolly bit for diving." - -"But, papa, we shall wet our hair fearfully," said the elder girl--the -ugly one--for so Odd already ungallantly designated her. "We usually get -in on this shallower side and swim off. We have never tried diving, for -it takes so long to dry our hair. Taylor would not like it at all." - -"It is so deep, too," said the beauty in rather a faltering -voice--unfortunately faltering, for her father turned sharply on her. - -"Afraid, hey? You mustn't be a coward, Hilda." - -"I am not afraid," said the elder girl; "but I never tried it. What must -I do? Put my arms so, and jump head first?" - -"There is nothing to do at all," said the Captain, with some acidity of -tone. "Keep your mouth shut and strike out as you come up. You'll do it, -Katherine, first try. Hilda is in a funk, I see." - -"Poor Hilda," Odd ejaculated mentally. She was evidently in a funk. -Standing on the edge of the landing, one slim foot advanced in a -tentative effort, she looked down shrinking into the water--very deeply -black at this spot--and then, half entreatingly, half helplessly, at her -father. - -"Oh, papa, it is so deep," she repeated. - -The Captain's neatly made face showed signs of peevish irritation. - -"Well, deep or not, in you go. I must break you of that craven spirit. -What are you afraid of? What could happen to you?" - -"I--don't like water over my head--I might strike--on something." - -Tears were near the surface. - -What asses people made of themselves, thought Odd, with their silly -shows of authority. The more the father insisted, the more frightened -the child became; couldn't the idiot see that? The tear-filled eyes and -looks that showed a struggle between fear of her father's anger and fear -of the deep, black pool, moved Odd to a sudden though half-amused -resentment, for the little girl was certainly somewhat of a coward. - -"Let me go in first, papa, and show her. Hilda, dear, it's nothing; -being frightened will make it something, though, so don't be frightened, -and watch me." - -"Yes, go in first, Katherine; show her that I have a girl who isn't a -coward--and how one of my daughters came to be a coward I don't -understand. I am ashamed of you, Hilda." - -Hilda evidently only controlled her sobs by a violent effort; her -caught-in under-lip, wide eyes, and heaving little chest affected Odd -painfully. He frowned, sat up, put his hat on, and watched Miss -Katherine with a lack of sympathy that was certainly unfair, for the -plucky little person went through the performance most creditably, -stretched out and up her thin pretty arms, curved forward her pretty -body, and made the plunge with a lithe elegance that left her father -gazing with complacent approval after the white flash of her feet. - -"Bravo! First-rate! There, Hilda, you see what can be done. Come on, -little white feather." He spoke more kindly; the elder sister's prowess -put him more in humor with his less creditable offspring. - -"Oh, papa!" The child shrank on the edge of the platform--she would go -bundling in, and hurt herself. "But, papa," and her voice held a sharp -accent of distress, "where is Katherine?" - -Indeed Katherine had not reappeared. Only a moment had passed, but a -moment under water is long. Captain Archinard's eyes searched the -surface of the river. - -"But she can swim?" - -"Papa! papa! She is drowned, _drowned_!" Hilda's voice rose to a scream. -With a wild look of resolve she sprang into the river just as Odd dashed -in, knee-deep, and as Katherine's head appeared at some distance down -the current--an angry little head, half choked, and gasping. Katherine -swam and waded to the shore, falling on her knees upon the bank, while -Odd dived into the hole--very bad hole, deep and weedy--after Hilda. - -He groped for the child among a tangle of roots, touched her hair, -grasped her round the waist, and came to the surface with some -difficulty, his strokes impeded by sinuous cord-like weeds. Captain -Archinard was too much astonished by the whole matter to do more than -exclaim, "Upon my word!" as his younger daughter was deposited at his -feet. - -"A nasty hole that. The weeds have probably grown since any one has -dived." - -Odd spoke shortly, having lost his breath, and severely; the child -looked half drowned, and Katherine was still gasping. - -"Why, Mr. Odd! Upon my word!"--the Captain recognized his neighbor--"I -don't know how to thank you." - -The Captain had not recovered from his astonishment, and repeated with -some vehemence: "Upon my word!" - -"Well, papa, you nearly drowned me!" Katherine was struggling between -pride and anger. She would not let the tears come, but they were near -the surface. "Those horrible snaky things got hold of me and I almost -screamed, only I remembered that I mustn't open my mouth, and I thought -I would _never_ come to the top." The self-pitying retrospect brought -the tears to her eyes, but she held up her head and looked and spoke her -resentment, "I think you might have gone in first yourself. And Hilda! -Why didn't you wait until I came to the surface before you made her do -it?" - -Captain Archinard looked more vague under these reproaches than one -would have expected after his exhibition of rather fretful autocracy. - -"Made her!" he repeated, seizing with a rather mean haste at the error; -"made her? She went in herself! Like a rocket, after you. By Jove! she -showed her blood after all." - -"Hilda! you tried to save my life!" - -Odd still held the younger girl on his arm, supporting her while she -choked and panted, for she had evidently had not shown her sister's -_aplomb_ and had opened her mouth. Katherine took her into her arms and -kissed her with a warmth quite dramatic. - -"Darling Hilda! And you were so frightened, too. I would have gone in -after _her_," she added, looking up at Odd with a bright, quick glance, -"but there would have been nothing to my credit in that." - -"And _I_ would have gone in after her, it goes without saying, Mr. Odd," -said the Captain, when Katherine had led away to the bathing-cabin her -still dazed sister, "but you seemed to drop from the clouds. Really, you -have put me under a great obligation." - -"Not at all. I have spent most of the day in the river. I merely went -in a bit deeper to fish out that plucky little girl." - -"I've dived off that spot a hundred times. I'd no idea there were weeds. -I've never known weeds to be there. I'll send down one of the men -directly after lunch and have it seen to. Really I feel a sense of -responsibility." The Captain went on with an air of added -self-justification, "Though, of course, I'm not responsible. I couldn't -have known about the weeds." - -Weeds or no weeds, Odd could not forgive him for the child's fright, -though he replied good-humoredly to the invitation to the house. - -"Mrs. Archinard would have called on Mrs. Odd before this, but my wife -is an invalid--never leaves the house or grounds. She sees a good deal -of Miss Odd. I knew your father myself as well as one may know such a -recluse; spent some pleasant hours in his library--magnificent library -you've got. Peculiarly satisfactory it must be, as you go in for that -sort of thing. Won't you come in to tea this afternoon? And Mrs. Odd? -Miss Odd? I was sorry to find them out when I called the other day. I -haven't seen Mrs. Odd. I don't see her at church." - -"No; we have hardly settled down to our duties yet, and my wife only got -back from the Riviera a few weeks ago." - -"Well, I hope we shall keep you at Allersley now that your _wanderjahre_ -are over, and that you are married. I was wandering myself during your -boyhood. My brother bought the place, you know; liked the country here -immensely. Poor old Jack! Only lived ten years to enjoy it--and died a -bachelor--luckily for me. But we've missed one another, haven't we? -Neighbors too. I have seen Mrs. Odd--at a dance in London, Lady -Bartlebury's, I remember; and I remember that she was the prettiest girl -in the room. Miss Castleton--the beautiful Alicia Castleton." - -Miss Castleton's fame had indeed been so wide that the title was quite -public property, and the Captain's reminiscent tone of admiration most -natural and allowable. Odd accepted the invitation to tea, waded back -round the hedge, gathered up his basket and rod, and made his way up -through the park to Allersley Manor. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Mrs. Odd and Miss Odd, Peter's eldest and unmarried sister, were having -an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes, -came into the morning-room just before lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open -French window cutting the leaves of a review. There were several more -reviews on the table beside her, and with her eyeglasses and fine, -severe profile, she gave one the impression of a woman who would pass -her mornings over reviews and disagree with most of them for reasons not -frivolous. - -Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was very remarkable looking. The -adjective is usually employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty -pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd's dominant characteristic was beauty, pure -and simple; beauty triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable in the -sense that no one could fail to notice her, as when one had noticed her -it was impossible not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness -that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion against an almost -tame conformity, a rash person might assert that to him her type did not -appeal; but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplendent; in this -extreme lay the only hope of escape from conformity. The long figure in -the uniform-like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was almost -too uncommonplace in elegance of outline; the white hand too slender, -too pink as to finger-tips and polished as to nails; the delicate -scarlet splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, too dazzling. - -Mrs. Odd's red-brown hair was a glory, a burnished, well-coiffed, -well-brushed glory; it rippled, coiled, and curved about her head. Her -profile was bewildering--lazily, sweetly petulant. "Is this the face?" a -man might murmur on first seeing Alicia. - -Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon his vision over a year -ago. He was still young and literary, and, as he was swept out of -himself, had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expression. - -Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room. - -"I don't really see, Mary, what duty has got to do with it." Without -turning her head, she turned her eyes on Odd: "How wet your hair is, -Peter!" - -Mary Odd looked up from the review she was cutting rather grimly, and -her cold face was irradiated with a sudden smile. - -"Well, Peter," she said quietly. - -"I fished a little girl out of the river," said Odd, taking a seat near -Alicia, and smiling responsively at his sister. "Captain Archinard's -little girl." He told the story. - -"An interesting contrast of physical and moral courage." - -"I have seen the children. They are noticeable children. They always -ride to hounds." Hunting had been Miss Odd's favorite diversion during -her father's lifetime. "But the pretty one, as I remember, has not the -pluck of her sister--physical, as you say, Peter, no doubt." - -"What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard?" - -"Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an American, and was rich, -I believe. Captain Archinard left the army when he married her, and -immediately spent her money. Luckily for him poor Mr. Archinard -died--Jack Archinard; you remember him, Peter? A nice man. I go to see -Mrs. Archinard now and then. I don't care for her." - -"You don't care much for any one, Mary," said Mrs. Odd, smiling. "Your -remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no -doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection." - -"Yet I have many friends, Alicia." - -"Not near Allersley?" - -"Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, -and Miss Hibbard among my friends." - -"Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn't she? What big caps -she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off -her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an -inveterate matchmaker." - -"She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to -mean." - -"But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when -events are marriageable young men, doesn't she?" - -"Does she?" - -"Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in -saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring." - -"And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect." - -During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look -men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests. - -"I am awfully hungry. Isn't it almost lunch-time?" he said, as they -paused. - -Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. "It only wants five minutes." - -Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its -lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory. - -"How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary," he said, looking down at -the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined -her husband, putting her arm through his. - -"Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter," she smiled at him; and -although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life -with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight -to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty--a rather sickly, pallid -pleasure--and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he -and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of -hurting her. - -After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the -sympathy that allows itself no words. - -There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia's lonely complacency--a -pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness. - -"Mary is so disagreeable to-day," said Alicia, as they walked slowly -across the lawn. "She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of -other people's worthlessness." - -Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen -to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman -he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the -revealment of Alicia's shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She -had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not -found it out--had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these -characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was -born so. - -"It will be dull enough here, at all events," Alicia went on, pressing -her slim patent-leather shoe into the turf with lazy emphasis as she -walked, for Alicia was not bad-tempered, and took things easily; "but if -Mary is going to be disagreeable--" - -"You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived here. It is in a truer -sense her home than mine, but she would go directly if either you or she -found it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially she would never -have stayed." - -"Don't imply extravagant things, Peter. Who thinks of her going?" - -"She would--if _you_ made it disagreeable." - -"I? I do nothing. Surely Mary won't want to go because she scolds me." - -"Come, Ally, surely you don't get scolded--more than is good for you." -Odd smiled down at her. Her burnished head was on a level with his -eyes. "Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, as Mary is -somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought to take her lectures in a humble -spirit, and be thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection than I -am." - -"I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter." Alicia left the subject of -Mary for a still more intimate grievance. - -"The art of not being bored requires patience, not to say genius. It can -be learned though. And there are worse things than being bored." - -"I think I could bear anything better." - -"What would you like, Ally?" Odd's voice held a certain hopefulness. -"I'll do anything I can, you know. I believe in a woman's individuality -and all that. Does your life down here crush your individuality, -Alicia?" - -Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an inward bitterness. - -"Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care for all that woman -business--rights and movements and individualities and all that; a silly -claiming of more duties that do no good when they're done. I am an -absolutely banal person, Peter; my mind to me isn't a kingdom. I like -outside things. I like gayety, change, diversion. I don't like days one -after the other--like sheep--and I don't like sheep!" - -They had passed through the shrubbery, and before them were meadows -dotted with the harmless animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd's simile. - -"Well, we won't look at the sheep. I own that they savor strongly of -bucolic immutability. You've had plenty of London for the past year, -Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are really the change." - -"You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, Peter." - -"Longings for a political salon, Ally? I have hardly time for my -scribbling and landlording as it is." - -"A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as being clever and keeping it -up. No, I like seeing people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I -am absolutely banal, as I tell you." - -"Well, you shall have London next year. We'll go up for the season." - -"You took me for what I was, Peter," Mrs. Odd remarked as they retraced -their steps towards the house. "I have never pretended, have I? You knew -that I was a society beauty and that only. I am a very shallow person, I -suppose, Peter; I certainly can't pretend to have depths--even to give -Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. Why did you fall in -love with me, Peter? It wasn't _en caractere_ a bit, you know." - -"Oh yes, it was, Ally. I fell in love with you because you were -beautiful. Why did you fall in love with me?" - -The mockery with which Alicia's smile was tinged deepened into a -good-humored laugh at her own expense. - -"Well, Peter, I don't think any one before made me feel that they -thought me so beautiful. I am vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was -awfully flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. I am sure -you idealized me. Shall we go in? Lunch must be ready, and you must be -hungrier than ever." - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -At four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary started for the -Archinards' house. Mary had offered to join her brother; the prospect of -the walk together was very pleasant. She could not object when Alicia, -at the last moment, announced her intention of going too. - -"I have never been to see her. I should like the walk, and Mary will -approve of the fulfilment of my duty towards my neighbor." - -Mary's prospects were decidedly nipped in the bud, as Alicia perhaps -intended that they should be; but Alicia's avowed motive was so -praiseworthy that Mary allowed herself only an inner discontent, and, -what with her good-humored demeanor, Odd's placid chat of crops and -tenantry, and Alicia's acquiescent beauty, the trio seemed to enjoy the -mile of beechwood and country road and the short sweep of prettily -wooded drive that led to Allersley Priory, a square stone house covered -with vines of magnolia and wisteria, and incorporating in its walls, -according to tradition, portions of the old Priory which once occupied -the site. From the back of the house sloped a wide expanse of lawn and -shrubberies, and past it ran the river that half a mile further on -flowed out of Captain Archinard's little property into Odd's. The -drawing-room was on the ground-floor, and its windows opened on this -view. - -Mrs. Archinard and the Captain were talking to young Lord Allan Hope, -eldest son of Lord Mainwaring. Mrs. Archinard's invalidism was evidently -not altogether fictitious. She had a look of at once extreme fragility -and fading beauty. One knew at the first glance that she was a woman to -have cushions behind her and her back to the light. There was no -character in the delicate head, unless one can call a passive -determination to do or feel nothing that required energy, character. - -The two little girls came in while Odd talked to their father. They were -dressed alike in white muslins. Katherine's gown reached her ankles; -Hilda's was still at the _mi-jambe_ stage. Their long hair fell about -their faces in childlike fashion. Katherine's was brown and strongly -rippled; Hilda's softly, duskily, almost bluely black; it grew in -charming curves and eddies about her forehead, and framed her little -face and long slim neck in straightly falling lines. - -Katherine gave Odd her hand with a little air that reminded him of a -Velasquez Infanta holding out a flower. - -"You were splendid this morning, Mr. Odd. That hole was no joke, and -Hilda swallowed lots of water as it was. She might easily have been -drowned." - -Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply set black eyes had a -dominant directness. She held her head up, and her smile was charming--a -little girl's smile, yet touched with the conscious power of a clever -woman. Odd felt that the child was clever, and that the woman would be -cleverer. He felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice -of fun as they looked into his as though she knew that he knew, and they -both knew together, that Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his -ducking had been only conventionally "splendid." - -"Hilda wants to thank you herself, don't you, Hilda? She had such a -horrid time altogether; you were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the -sea monster!" Then Katherine, having, as it were, introduced and paved -the way for her sister, went back across the room again, and stood by -young Allan Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd. - -Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. She was not shy, -though she evidently had not her sister's ready mastery of what to say, -and how to say it. Odd was rather glad of this; he had found Katherine's -_aplomb_ almost disconcerting. - -"I do thank you very much." She put her hand into Odd's as he spoke, and -left it there; the confiding little action emphasized her childlikeness. - -"What did you think of as you went down?" he asked her. - -"In the river?" A shade of retrospective terror crossed her face. - -"No, no! we won't talk about the river, will we?" Odd said quickly. -However funny Katherine's greater common sense had found the incident, -it had not been funny to Hilda. "Have you lived here long?" he asked. -Captain Archinard had joined Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either -side, Alicia was enjoying herself. "I have never seen you before, you -know." - -"We have lived here since my uncle died; about eight years ago, I -think." - -"Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley." - -"Didn't you like Allersley?" Hilda asked, with some wonder. - -"Oh, very much; and my father was here, so I often came back; but I -lived in London and Paris, where I could work at things that interested -me." - -"I have been twice in London; I went to the National Gallery." - -"You liked that?" - -"Oh, very much." She was a quiet little girl, and spoke quietly, her -wide gentle gaze on Odd. - -"And what else did you like in London?" - -Hilda smiled a little, as if conscious that she was being put through -the proper routine of questions, but a trustful smile, quite willing to -give all information asked for. - -"The Three Fates." - -"You mean the Elgin Marbles?" - -"Yes, with no heads; but one is rather glad they haven't." - -"Why?" asked Odd, as she paused. Hilda did not seem sure of her own -reason. - -"Perhaps they would be _too_ beautiful with heads," she suggested. "Do -you like dogs?" she added, suddenly turning the tables on him. - -"Yes, I love dogs," Odd replied, with sincere enthusiasm. - -"Three of our dogs are out there on the verandah, if you would care to -know them?" - -"I should very much. Perhaps you'll show me the garden too; it looks -very jolly." - -It was a pleasure to look at his extraordinarily pretty little -Andromeda, and he was quite willing to spend the rest of his visit with -her. They went out on the verandah, where, in the awning's shade, lay -two very nice fox terriers. A dachshund sat gazing out upon the sunlit -lawn in a dog's dignified reverie. - -"Jack and Vic," Hilda said, pointing out the two fox terriers. "They -just belong to the whole family, you know. And this dear old fellow is -Palamon; Arcite is somewhere about; they are mine." - -"Who named yours?" - -"I did--after I read it; they had other names when they were given to -me, but as I had never called them by them, I thought I had a right to -change them. I wanted names with associations, like Katherine's setters; -they are called Darwin and Spencer, because Katherine is very fond of -science." - -"Oh, is she?" said Odd, rather stupefied. "You seem to have a great many -dogs in couples." - -"The others are not; they are more general dogs, like Jack and Vic." - -Hilda still held Odd's hand: she stooped to stroke Arcite's pensive -head, giving the fox terriers a pat as they passed them. - -"So you are fond of Chaucer?" Odd said. They crossed the gravel path and -stepped on the lawn. - -"Yes, indeed, he is my favorite poet. I have not read all, you know, but -especially the Knight's Tale." - -"That's your favorite?" - -"Yes." - -"And what is your favorite part of the Knight's Tale?" - -"The part where Arcite dies." - -"You like that?" - -"Oh! so much; don't you?" - -"Very much; as much, perhaps, as anything ever written. There never was -a more perfect piece of pathos. Perhaps you remember it." He was rather -curious to know how deep was this love for Chaucer. - -"I learnt it by heart; I haven't a good memory, but I liked it so much." - -"Perhaps you would say it to me." - -Hilda looked up a little shyly. - -"Oh, I can't!" she exclaimed timidly. - -"_Can't_ you?" and Odd looked down at her a humorously pleading -interrogation. - -"I can't say things well; and it is too sad to say--one can just bear to -read it." - -"Just bear to say it--this once," Odd entreated. - -They had reached the edge of the lawn, and stood on the grassy brink of -the river. Hilda looked down into the clear running of the water. - -"Isn't it pretty? I don't like deep water, where one can't see the -bottom; here the grasses and the pebbles are as distinct as possible, -and the minnows--don't you like to see them?" - -"Yes, but Arcite. Don't make me tease you." - -Hilda evidently determined not to play the coward a second time. The -quiet pressure of Odd's hand was encouraging, and in a gentle, -monotonous little voice that, with the soft breeze, the quickly running -sunlit river, went into Odd's consciousness as a quaint, ineffaceable -impression of sweetness and sadness, she recited:-- - - "Allas the wo! allas the peynes stronge, - That I for you have suffered, and so longe! - Allas the deth! allas myn Emelye! - Allas departing of our companye! - Allas myn hertes quene! allas, my wyf! - Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf! - What is this world? What asketh man to have? - Now with his love, now in his colde grave - Allone, withouten any companye." - -Odd's artistic sensibilities were very keen. He felt that painfully -delicious constriction of the throat that the beautiful in art can give, -especially the beautiful in tragic art. The far-away tale; the far-away -tongue; the nearness of the pathos, poignant in its "white simplicity." -And how well the monotonous little voice suited its melancholy. - - "Allone, withouten any companye," - -he repeated. He looked down at Hilda; he had tactfully avoided looking -at her while she spoke, fearing to embarrass her; her eyes were full of -tears. - -"Thanks, Hilda," he said. It struck him that this highly strung little -girl had best not be allowed to dwell too long on Arcite and, after a -sympathetic pause (Odd was a very sympathetic person), he added: - -"Now are you going to take me into the garden?" - -"Yes." Hilda turned from the river. "You know he had just gained her, -that made it all the worse. If he had not loved her he would not have -minded dying so much, and being alone. One can hardly bear it," Hilda -repeated. - -"It is intensely sad. I don't think you ought to have learned it by -heart, Hilda. That's ungrateful of me, isn't it? But I am old enough to -take an impersonal pleasure in sad things; I am afraid they make you -sad." - -Hilda's half-wondering smile was reassuringly childlike. - -"Oh, but it's _nice_ being sad like that." - -Odd reflected, as they went into the garden, that she had put herself -into his category. - -After the shadow of the shrubberies through which they passed, the -fragrant sunlight was dazzling. Rows of sweet peas, their mauves and -pinks and whites like exquisite musical motives, ran across the -delicious old garden. A border of deep purple pansies struck a -beautifully meditative chord. Flowers always affected Odd musically; he -half closed his eyes to look at the sweeps of sun-flooded color. A -medley of Schumann and Beethoven sang through his head as he glanced -down, smiling at Hilda Archinard; her gently responsive little smile was -funnily comprehensive; one might imagine that tunes were going through -her head too. - -"Isn't it jolly, Hilda?" - -"Very jolly," she laughed, and, as they walked between the pansy borders -she kept her gentle smile and her gentle stare up at his appreciative -face. - -She thought his smile so nice; his teeth, which crowded forward a -little, lent it perhaps its peculiar sweetness; his eyelids, drooping at -the outer corners, gave the curious look of humorous sadness to the -expression of his brown eyes. His moustache was cut shortly on his upper -lip, and showed the rather quizzical line of his mouth. Hilda, -unconsciously, enumerated this catalogue of impressions. - -"What fine strawberries," said Odd. "I like the fragrance almost more -than the flavor." - -"But won't you taste them?" Hilda dropped his hand to skip lightly into -the strawberry bed. "They are ripe, lots of them," she announced, and -she came running back, her outstretched hands full of the summer fruit, -red, but for the tips, still untinted. The sunlit white frock, the long -curves of black hair, the white face, slim black legs, and the spots of -crimson color made a picture--a sunshiny Whistler. - -Odd accepted the strawberries gratefully; they were very fine. - -"I don't think you can have them better at Allersley Manor," said Hilda, -smiling. - -"I don't think mine are as good. Won't you come some day to Allersley -Manor and compare?" - -"I should like to very much." - -"Then you and Miss Katherine shall be formally invited to tea, with the -understanding that afterwards the strawberry beds are to be invaded." - -"I should like to very much," Hilda repeated. - -"Hullo! Don't make me feel a pig! Eat some yourself," said Odd, who had -finished one handful. - -"No, no, I picked them for you." - -Odd took her disengaged hand in his as they walked on again, Hilda -resisting at first. - -"It is so sticky." - -"I don't mind that: it is very generous." She laughed at the -extravagance. - -"And what do you do all day besides swimming?" Odd asked. - -"We have lessons with our governess. She is strict, but a splendid -teacher. Katherine is quite a first-rate Latin scholar." - -"Is Katherine fond of Chaucer?" - -"Katherine cares more for science and--and philosophy." Hilda spoke with -a respectful gravity. "That's why she called her dogs Darwin and -Spencer. She hasn't read any of Spencer yet, but of course he is a great -philosopher. She knows that, and she has read a good deal of a big book -by Darwin, 'The Origin of Species,' you know." - -"Yes, I know." Odd found Katherine even more startling than her sister. - -"I tried to read it, but it was so confusing--about selection and -cabbages--I don't see how cabbages _can_ select, do you?" Hilda's voice -held a reminiscent vagueness. "Katherine says that she did not care for -it _much_, but she thought she ought to look through it if she wanted a -foundation; she is very keen on foundations, and she says Darwin is the -foundation-key--or corner-stone--no, keystone to the arch of modern -science--at least she did not say so, but she read me that from her -journal." - -"Oh! Katherine wrote that, did she?" - -"Yes; but you mustn't think that Katherine is a blue-stocking." -Something in Odd's tone made Hilda fear misunderstanding. "She loves -sports of all kinds, and fun. She goes across country as well as any -woman--that is what Lord Mainwaring said of her last winter during -fox-hunting. She isn't afraid of anything." - -"And what else do you do besides lessons?" - -"Well, I read and walk; there are such famous walks all about here, -walks in woods and on hills. I don't care for roads, do you? And I stay -with mamma and read to her when she is tired." - -"And Katherine?" - -"She is more with papa." In her heart Hilda said: "He loves her best," -but of that she could not speak, even to this new friend who seemed -already so near; to no one could she hint of that ache in her heart of -which jealousy formed no part, for it was natural that papa should love -Katherine best, that every one should; she was so gay and courageous; -but though it was natural that Katherine should be loved best, it was -hard to be loved least. - -"You are by yourself a good deal, then?" said Odd. "Do you walk by -yourself, too?" - -"Yes, with the dogs. I used to have grandmamma, you know; she died a -year ago." - -"Oh, yes! Mrs. Archinard's mother." - -Hilda nodded; her grasp on Odd's hand tightened and they walked in -silence. Odd remembered the fine portrait of a lady in the drawing-room; -he had noticed its likeness and unlikeness to Mrs. Archinard; a delicate -face, but with an Emersonian expression of self-reliance, a puritan look -of stanchness and responsibility. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -On the way home, cool evening shadows slanting across the road, Alicia -declared that she had really enjoyed herself. - -"Captain Archinard is quite jolly. He has seen everybody and everything -under the sun. He is most entertaining, and Lord Allan is remarkably -uncallow." - -"He thinks of standing for Parliament next year. A nice, steady, honest -young fellow. How do you like the Archinards, Peter?" - -"The child--Hilda--is a dear child." - -"She is awfully pretty," said Alicia, who could afford to be generous; -"I like that colorless type." - -"She is delicate, I am afraid," said Mary. - -"She has the mouth of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a -Gainsborough; you know the portrait of Sheridan's wife at Dulwich?" - -Alicia had never been to Dulwich. Mary assented. - -"The other one--the ugly one--is very clever," Alicia went on; she was -in a good temper evidently. Not that Alicia was ever exactly -bad-tempered. "She said some very clever things and looked more." - -"She is too clever perhaps," Mary remarked. "As for Mrs. Archinard, I -should like to slap her. I think that my conventionality is of a -tolerant order, but Mrs. Archinard's efforts at aesthetic originality -make me feel grimly conventional." - -"Mary! Mary! how delightful to hear such uncharitable remarks from you. -_I_ should rather like to slap her too, though she struck me as awfully -conventional." - -"Oh, she is, practically. It is the artistic _argot_ that bores one so -much." - -"She is awfully self-satisfied too. Dear me, Peter, I wish we had driven -after all. I hate the next half-mile. It is just uphill enough to be -irritating--fatigue without realizing exactly the cause of it. Why -didn't we drive, Peter?" - -"I thought we all preferred walking. You are a very energetic young -person as a rule." - -"Not for tiresome country roads. They should be got over as quickly as -possible." - -"Well, we will cut through the beech-woods as we came." - -"Oh dear," Alicia yawned, "how tired I am already of those tiresome -beech-woods. I wish it were autumn and that the hunting had begun. -Captain Archinard gives me glowing accounts, and promises me a lead for -the first good run. We must fill the house with people then, Peter." - -"The house shall be filled to overflowing. Perhaps you would like some -one now. Mrs. Laughton and her girls; you like them, don't you?" - -Alicia wrinkled up her charming nose. - -"Can't say I do. I've stopped with them too much perhaps. They bore me. -I am afraid no one would come just now, everything is so gay in London. -I wish I were there." - -Alicia was not there because the doctor had strongly advised country air -and the simple inaction of country life. Alicia had lost her baby only -three weeks after its birth--two months ago--and had herself been very -ill. - -"But I think I shall write to some people and ask them to take pity on -me," she added, as they walked slowly through the woods. "Sir John, and -Mr. and Mrs. Damian, Gladys le Breton, and Lord Calverly." - -"Well!" Peter spoke in his usual tone of easy acquiescence. - -Mary walked on a little ahead. What good did it do to trouble her -brother uselessly by her impatient look? But how could Peter yield so -placidly? Mary respected him too much to allow herself an evil thought -of his wife; but Alicia was a person to be talked about. Mary did not -doubt that she had been talked about already, and would be more so if -she were not careful. - -Lord Calverly and Sir John dangling attendance would infallibly cause -comment on any woman--let alone the beautiful Mrs. Odd. Yet Peter said, -"Well!" - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -The evening did not pass pleasantly at the Priory. Captain Archinard's -jolliness did not extend to family relationships; he often found family -relationships a bore, and the contrasted stodginess of his own -surroundings seemed greater after Mrs. Odd's departure. - -He muttered and fumed about the drawing-room after dinner. - -He was confoundedly pinched for money, and upon his word he would not be -surprised if he should have to sell the horses. "And what my life will -be stuck down here without the hunting, I can't imagine. Damnable!" - -The Captain growled out the last word under his breath in consideration -of Katherine and Hilda, who had joined their father and mother after -their own tea and a game of lawn-tennis. But Mrs. Archinard was not the -woman to allow to pass unnoticed such a well-founded cause of grievance. - -With a look of delicate disgust she laid down the volume of Turgenieff -that she was reading. - -"Shall I send the children away, Charles? Either they or you had best -go, if you are going to talk like that." - -"Beg pardon," said the Captain shortly. "No, of course they don't go." - -"I am sure I have few enough enjoyments without being made to suffer -because you are to lose one of yours." - -"Who asks you to suffer, Kate? But you don't wait for the asking. You're -only too willing to offer yourself as a _souffre-douleur_ on all -occasions." - -Then Mrs. Archinard retired behind her book in scornful resignation and, -after twenty minutes of silence, the little girls were very glad to get -away to bed. - -Hilda was just undressed when Mrs. Archinard sent for her to come to her -room. Her head ached, and Hilda must brush her hair; it was early yet. -This was a customary task, and one that Hilda prided herself upon -accomplishing with sovereign beneficence. Taylor's touch irritated Mrs. -Archinard; Hilda only was soothing. - -In dressing-gown and slippers she ran to her mother's room. - -Mrs. Archinard's long hair--as black and as fine as Hilda's--fell over -the back of the large arm-chair in which she reclined. - -"Such a headache!" she sighed, as Hilda took up the brush and began to -pass it slowly and gently down the length of hair. "It is really brutal -of your father to forget my head as he does." - -Hilda's heart sank. The unideal attitude of her father and mother toward -one another was one of her great sorrows. Papa was certainly fond of his -pretty wife, but he was so fretful and impatient, and mamma so -continually grieved. It was all wrong. Hilda had already begun to pass -judgment, unconsciously, on her father; but her almost maternal -tenderness for her mother as yet knew no doubt. - -"It would be very dreadful if the horses had to go, wouldn't it?" she -said. Her father's bad temper might be touching if its cause were -suggested. - -"Of course it would; and so are most things dreadful. I am sure that -life is nothing but dreadfulness in every form." Yet Mrs. Archinard was -not at all an unhappy woman. Her life was delicately epicurean. She had -few wants, but those few were never thwarted. From the early cup of -exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all the day of dilettante -lounging over a clever book--a day relieved from monotony by pleasant -episodes--dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from acquaintances, -with whom she had a reputation for languid cynicism and quite awesome -literary and artistic cleverness--to this hour of hair-brushing, few of -her moments were not consciously appreciative of the most finely -flavored mental and physical enjoyment. But the causes for enjoyment -certainly seemed so slight that Mrs. Archinard's graceful pessimism -usually met with universal sympathy. Hilda was very sorry for her -mother. To lie all day reading dreary books; condemned to an inaction -that cut her off from all the delights of outdoor life, seemed to her -tragic. Mrs. Archinard did not undeceive her; indeed, perhaps, the most -fascinating of Mrs. Archinard's artistic occupations was to fancy -herself very tragic. Hilda went back to her room much depressed. - -The girls slept together, and Katherine was sitting up in her night-gown -writing her journal by candlelight and enjoying a sense of talent -flowing at all costs--for writing by candlelight was strictly -forbidden--as she dotted down what she felt to be a very original and -pungent account of the day and the people it had introduced. - -When, however, she heard the patter of Hilda's heedless slippers in the -corridor, she blew out the candle in a hurry, pinched the glowing wick, -and skipped into bed. She might take an artistic pleasure in braving -rules, but Katherine knew that Hilda would have shown an almost dull -amazement at her occupation; and although Katherine characterized it as -dull, she did not care to arouse it. She wished to stand well in Hilda's -eyes in all things. Hilda must find nothing to criticise in her either -mentally or morally. - -"What shall we do if the horses are sold?" she exclaimed, as Hilda got -into the little bed beside hers. "Only imagine! no hunting next winter! -at least, none for us!" - -"Poor papa," Hilda sighed. - -"Oh, you may be sure that he will keep one hunter at least, but of -course he will be dreadfully cut off from it with only one, and of -course our horses will have to go if the worst comes to the worst. You -won't miss it as much as I will, Hilda; the riding, yes, no doubt, but -not the hunting. Still Lord Mainwaring will give us a mount, and now -that Mr. Odd is here, he will be sure to have a lot of horses. The old -squire let everything of that sort run down so, Miss Odd had only two -hunters. Well, Hilda, and what do you think of Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh, I love him, Katherine!" Hilda lay looking with wide eyes into the -soft darkness of the room. The windows were open, and the drawn chintz -curtains flapped gently against the sills. - -"I wouldn't say that if I were you, Hilda," Katherine remarked, with -some disapproval. - -"Why not?" Hilda's voice held an alarmed note. Katherine was, to a great -extent, her mentor. - -"It doesn't sound very--dignified. Of course you are only a little girl, -but still--one doesn't say such things." - -"But I do love him; how can one help loving a person who treats one so -kindly. And then--anyway--even if he had not been kind to me I should -love him, I think." - -Hilda would have liked to be able properly to analyze her sensations and -win her sister's approval; but how explain clearly? - -"That would be rather foolish," Katherine said, in a tone of kind but -restraining wisdom; "one shouldn't let one's feelings run away with one -like that. Shall I tell you what _I_ think about Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh yes, please." - -"I think he is like the river where we jumped in to-day--ripples on the -top, kindness and smiles, you know--but somewhere in his heart a big -hole--a hole with stones and weeds in it." Katherine was quoting from -her journal, but Hilda might as well think the simile improvised: -Katherine felt some pride in it; it certainly justified, she thought, -the conventionally illicit act of the candle. - -Hilda lay in silent admiration. - -"Oh, Katherine, I never know how I feel things till you tell me like -that," she said at last. "How beautiful! Yes, I am sure he has a hole in -his heart." And tears came into Hilda's eyes and into her mind the -line:-- - - "Allone, withouten any companye." - -"As for Mrs. Odd," Katherine continued, pleased with the success of her -psychology, "she has no heart to make a hole in." - -"Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful!" - -"She is a thorough egotist. She doesn't know much either, Hilda, for -when Darwin came in she laughed a lot at the name and said she wouldn't -be paid to read him--the real Darwin." - -"Perhaps she likes other things best." - -"Herself," said Katherine decisively. "Miss Odd of course we have had -time to make up our minds about." - -"I like her; don't you? She has such a clear, trustful face." - -"She is rather rigid; about as hard on other people as she would be on -herself. She could never do anything wrong." - -"I don't quite like _that_; being hard on other people, I mean. One -could be quite sure about one's own wrongness, but how can one about -other people's? It is rather uncharitable, isn't it, Katherine?" - -"She isn't very charitable, but she is very just. As for Lord Allan, he -is a sort of type, and, therefore, not very entertaining." - -"A type of what?" - -"Oh, just the eldest son type; very handsome, very honest, very good, -with a strong sense of responsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him, -which is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the younger -son--more interest." - -Katharine went to sleep with a warmly comfortable sense of competence. -She doubted whether many people saw things as clearly as she did. - -She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming scream from Hilda. - -"What is the matter, Hilda?" She spoke crossly. "How you startled me." - -"Oh, such a horrid dream!" Hilda half sobbed. "How glad I am that it -isn't so!" - -"What was it?" Katherine asked, still crossly; severity she thought the -best attitude towards Hilda's fright. - -"About the river, down in the hole; I was choking, and my legs and arms -were all tangled in roots." - -"Well, go to sleep now," Katherine advised. - -Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, supplicating voice -was heard. - -"Katherine--I'm so sorry--don't be angry--might I come to you? I'm so -frightened." - -"Come along," said Katherine, still severely, but she put her arms very -fondly around her shivering sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed -her. - -"Silly little Hilda," she said. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Three days before the arrival of Gladys le Breton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord -Calverly, and Sir John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia's -invitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother. - -She came into the library early one morning before breakfast. Odd was -there, writing. - -"Peter," she said, "last night, before going to bed, I wrote to Mr. -Apswith and accepted him." - -Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled round his chair in -amazement. - -"Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary?" - -"Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I felt that the time had -come." - -Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with -Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, -and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love when she first came -out twelve years ago. Mr. Apswith's patience, perseverance, and fidelity -were certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had thought that -as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty in maintaining her severe -independence, it would, in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith's -ardor. - -Mary, however, was a person to keep her own counsel. During her father's -lifetime, when much responsibility and many duties had claimed her, she -had certainly doubted more than once the possibility of Mr. Apswith's -ultimate success; there was a touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great -deal of the Minerva. But, since her father's death, since Peter's bridal -home-coming, Mary often found herself thinking of Mr. Apswith, her -fundamental sympathy with him on all things, her real loneliness and his -devotion. They had corresponded for years, and often saw one another. -Familiarity had not bred contempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust -and dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary's letters had called -forth from Mr. Apswith a most domineering and determined love-letter. -Mary had yielded to it--gladly, as she now realized. Yet her heart -yearned over Peter. He got up now, and kissed her. - -"Mary, my dear girl"--he could hardly find words--"may you be very, very -happy. You deserve it; so does he." - -Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful decision, on the fact -that by it Peter would be left to the solitary companionship of his -wife; it was not a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her arms -around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her happiness made his missing -it so apparent, but she shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge. - -"We must ask Apswith down at once," said Odd. "It's a busy session, but -he can manage a few days." - -"Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within -the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. -She stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get -my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks' time. -Delay would be rather silly--he has waited so long." - -"You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don't like to -lose you." - -"It isn't losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I -shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the -Mainwarings." - -When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for -a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one -does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to -himself that Mary's prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even -character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a -sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia's influence was a very air-pump. Poor -Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather -unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green -stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and -his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two -months ago, just after the baby's death and just before Alicia's -departure for the Riviera. - -Alicia was lying on the sofa--Peter staring at the distant trees, did -not see them but that scene--her magnificent health had made lying on -sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort -of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin -white cheek. His heart was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not -said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in -any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how -keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal -pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the -baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of -longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers -about it, was that of his child--dead. - -On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover's -tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all -tenderness out of it. - -"My dear girl, my poor, dear girl," he said, kissing her; and he sat -down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up -at him with those wonderful eyes--looked up with a smile. - -"Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter." - -Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her--her beauty -entranced him as it had done from the beginning. - -"Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?" His earnestness pleased her; she felt -in it her own power. - -"What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever imagine I didn't?" - -"Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of our child? Will you -feel for my sorrow as I feel for yours, my poor darling?" - -"Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It is especially hard on you, -too, losing your heir." - -Her look, her words crushed all the sudden impulse of resolve, hope, -love even. - -"My heir?" Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone. "That has nothing to do -with it. I wasn't thinking of that." - -"Weren't you?" said Alicia, rather wearily. She felt her weakness, it -irked her, and her next words were more fretfully uttered-- - -"Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot to go through, too, and -for nothing." She saw the pain setting her husband's lips sternly. "I -suppose now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing about baby," -she remarked. - -"I hope I am not a brute," said Peter gloomily. - -"You hope _I'm_ not, too, no doubt." - -"Don't, don't, Alicia." - -"I felt awfully about it; simply awfully," Alicia declared. - -Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library -windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an -epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia -could disappoint him no longer. - -In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness -had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a -nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points -with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a -thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia's -perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all -consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He -was carefully just to Alicia. - -Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia's guests had arrived. Mrs. -Marchant, an ugly, "smart," vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and -good singer; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to -head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and -supposed to be clever. - -"Clever, I suppose," Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, "because she has the -reputation of doing foolish things badly--dancing on dinner-tables and -thoroughly _bete_ things like that. She has not danced on Peter's table -as yet." - -Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily, -and Peter's placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le -Breton's coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a -charitable point of view. - -"Poor little girl," said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with -some severity; "it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is -to make a fool of herself," and with this rather unexpected piece of -opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially -hated the big man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. His -cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of -protecting partisanship in Mary's breast, and his looks at Alicia made -her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly -more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a -reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent -good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter's -good-humor might fail. - -The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peter -_dans cette galere_. - -Peter, however, did not much mind the _galere_. His duties as host lay -lightly on him. He did not mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at -the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and -pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs -and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary -tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John -and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite -falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced -definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter. - -Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show -that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less -gayety than when Mary was there. - -She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard--who -had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his -horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at -odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir -John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight -effects in the drawing-room. - -Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day -Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked -to bring his girls to tea. - -Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the -drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory -introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while -he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain -followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two -children. Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the -hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at -Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a -white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right -about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed -gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their -dogs-- - -"I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day." - -"We didn't know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to -bring them," said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like -effect: "We _should_ have liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully." - -That Palamon's despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen. - -"Hey! What's that?" Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard -the faint ejaculation; "what is your dog called?" - -"Palamon." Hilda's voice was reserved; she had already thought that she -did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, -she was sure of it. - -"What funny names you give your dogs," said Alicia. "The other is called -Darwin," she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; "but Palamon -is pretty--prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him -that?" - -"It is out of 'The Knight's Tale,'" said Katherine; "Hilda is very fond -of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite." - -Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of -his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby's, -hugely amused him. - -"So you like Chaucer?" Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very -uncomfortable. "Strong meat that for babes," Lord Calverly added, -looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant -vagueness. - -"Never read it," she replied briskly; "not to remember. If I had had -literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books -without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently." - -Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did -not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as -"improper" showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm -and wonder. Alicia's expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her -even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly's appreciative monocle--the -monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with -abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man -who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a -child's quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if -Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up -with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a -half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two -little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them -hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda's glad face. - -"I'm sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?" - -He shook hands, smiling at them. - -"Don't, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring," -called the Captain; "they can find their way to the garden without an -escort." - -"But it won't put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if -I couldn't," and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious -and hesitating. - -Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for -strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of -unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, -and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out -with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention -between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not -interest her, but she found Alicia's low, musical laughter, and the -enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly's half-muffled -utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well -in her journal. - -"He is probably flattering her," thought Katherine; "that is what she -likes best." - -Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly's stare and Alicia's -frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He -took her first to the picture gallery--having noticed as they went -through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with -evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the -Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from -picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle -smile, so that, after the half-hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure -that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was -singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in -answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw. - -"All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!" she said; "almost -everything would be beautiful, wouldn't it, if one were great enough?" - -The strawberry beds were visited, and-- - -"Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first -acquaintance?" asked Peter; "we have plenty of time before tea." But, -seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda's eyes, "Well, not there, -then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our -boating-house is a mile from yours, and I'll give you a paddle in my -Canadian canoe,--such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, -or you'll spill us both into the river." - -"I shouldn't mind, as you would be there," laughed Hilda; and so they -went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made -the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that -she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the -best and oldest of friends. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with -an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation -deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind. - -The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the -acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and -kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the -shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable -mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and -self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence. - -Mary's wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone -for two months' cruising in a friend's yacht about the North Sea, Peter -set to work with vigor. "The Sonnet" was in a year's time to make him -famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went -to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found -a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were -thoroughly irreproachable--a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty -but very sensible wife. - -Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her own fashion, felt no -weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, -and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd -when the news reached him at his sister's, was as unjust as it was -poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd's death had -broken her husband's heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false -premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia's -death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was -a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures -haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which -she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away -from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of -the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came -the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death -more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks, -seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive -suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married -there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must -have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of -the wisdom of the decision. - -At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way--the -dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of -helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she -heard that her friend was going away. - -The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her -capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to -her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense -of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity -for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly -bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the -hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she -never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had -seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession. - -"Odd goes to-morrow," the Captain announced one evening in the -drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather -cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she -was not reading, and her father's words seemed to stop her heart in its -heavy beating. - -"I met Thompson"--Mr. Thompson was Peter's land-agent--"and everything -is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he's badly broken up." - -"How futile to mourn over death," Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa. -"Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and -circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great -illusion?" Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely -yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking "rot" before -the children. - -"Move this lamp away, Hilda," said Mrs. Archinard. "I think I can take a -nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal." - -It was a warm autumn night, and the windows were open. Hilda slipped -out when she had moved the lamp away. - -She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge, -but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the -lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness -her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came -to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda's heart -stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at -night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage, -and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only -mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree -trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were -all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an -indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all -the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without -stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance -she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the -lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her -breath. Yes, _he_ was there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet -of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of -the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and -Hilda pushed it open and went in. - -At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half -incredulous stupefaction. Hilda's white face, tossed hair, the -lamentable condition of her muslin frock, made of her indeed a -startling apparition. - -"My dear Hilda!" he exclaimed. - -Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared silently at him. Mr. Odd's -face looked so much older; its gravity made her heart stand still with -an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood helplessly before him, -tears brimming to her eyes. - -"My dear child, what is the matter? You positively frightened me." - -"I came to say 'Good-bye,'" said Hilda brokenly. - -Peter's gravity was mere astonishment and sympathetic dismay. The -tear-brimmed eyes, after his weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with -a most exquisite rush of pity and tenderness. - -"Come here, you dear child," he said, holding out his arms to her; "you -came to say 'Good-bye?' I am very grateful to you." - -Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and wept. After the frozen -nightmare moment, the old kindness was a delicious contrast; she almost -forgot the purport of her journey, though she knew that she was crying. -Odd stroked her long hair; her tears slightly amused and slightly -alarmed him, even while the pathos of the affection they revealed -touched him deeply. - -"Did you come alone?" he asked. - -Hilda nodded. - -"That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank you for it. There, can't -you smile at me? Don't cry." - -"Oh, I love you _so_ much, I can hardly bear it." Peter felt -uncomfortable. The capacity for suffering revealed in these words gave -him a sense of responsibility. Poor child! Would her lot in life be to -cry over people who were not worth it? - -"I shall come back some day, Hilda." Hilda stopped crying, and Peter was -relieved by the sobs' cessation. "I have a wandering fit on me just now; -you understand that, don't you?" - -She held his hand tightly. She could not speak; her heart swelled so at -his tone of mutual understanding. - -"I am going to see my sister. I haven't seen her for five years; but -long before another five years are passed I shall be here again, and the -thing I shall most want to see when I get back will be your little -face." - -"But you will be different then, I will be different, we will both be -changed." Hilda put her hands before her face and sobbed again. Peter -was silent for a moment, rather aghast at the child's apprehension of -the world's deepest tragedy. He could not tell her that they would be -unchanged--he the man of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor -little Hilda! Her grief was but too well founded, and his thoughts -wandered for a moment with Hilda's words far away from Hilda herself. -Hilda wiped her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He had a keen -sense of the unconventional in beauty, and her tears had not disfigured -her small face--had only made it strange. He patted her cheek and smiled -at her. - -"Cheer up, little one!" She evidently tried to smile back. - -"I am afraid you have idealized me, my child--it's a dangerous faculty. -I am a very ordinary sort of person, Hilda; you must not imagine fine -things about me nor care so much. I'm not worth one of those tears, poor -little girl!" - -It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn gaze; a sage prophecy -of inevitable recovery would be brutal; to show too much sympathy -equally cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her grief, and -he found himself looking gravely into her large eyes. - -"You're not worth it?" she repeated. - -"No, really." - -"I don't imagine things about you." - -"Well, I am glad of that," said Peter, feeling rather at a loss. - -"I love you dearly," said Hilda, with a certain air of dreary dignity; -"you are you. I don't have to imagine anything." - -Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. - -"Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and certainly I don't have to -imagine anything." - -Hilda's eyes, with their effect of wide, almost unseeing expansion, -rested on his for a moment longer. She drew herself up, and a look of -resolution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young face. Odd -still felt somewhat disconcerted, somewhat at a loss. - -"I must go now; they don't know that I am here." - -"They didn't know that you were coming, I suppose?" - -"No; they wouldn't have let me come if I had told them before, but I -will tell them now." - -"Well, we will tell them together." - -"Are you going to take me home?" - -"Did you imagine that I would let you go alone?" - -"You are very kind." - -"And what are you, then? Your shoes are wringing wet, my child. Your -dress is thin, too, for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine around -you. There! and put on this hat." - -Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat that came down over -her ears; she looked charming and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda -responded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering together the -wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd lit a cigar, put on his own hat, -took her hand, and they sallied forth. - -"You came across, I suppose?" - -"Yes, by the woods." - -"And you weren't frightened?" - -He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as she replied-- - -"You know already that I am a coward." - -"I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly courageous. The flesh -may be weak, but the spirit is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda?" - -"Yes," said Hilda vaguely. - -They walked in silence through the woods. Clouds hid the moon, and the -wind had risen. - -Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost in the ghost-like -unreality of existence. The walk through the melancholy dimness seemed -symbolical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of Hilda Archinard's -little hand in his was comforting. When they had passed through the -Priory shrubbery and were nearing the house, Hilda's step beside him -paused. - -"Will you kiss me 'Good-bye' here, not before them all?" - -"What beastly things 'Good-byes' are," Odd said, looking down at the -glimmering oval of her uplifted face; "what thoroughly beastly things." -He took the little face between his hands and kissed her: "Good-bye, -dear little Hilda." - -"Thank you so much--for everything," she said. - -"Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you." - -"Don't be different. _Try_ not to change." - -"Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -That she, not he, would change was the inevitable thing. He stooped and -kissed again the child beside him. - - - - -Part I - -KATHERINE - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Odd knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysees in a -rattling, closed _fiacre_. He and Besseint had talked so late into the -evening that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in the -Marboeuf quarter and dress. - -Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers of the day; he and -Peter had battled royally and delightfully over the art of writing, and -as Besseint was certainly more interesting than would be the dinner at -the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable. - -Lady---- welcomed him unresentfully-- - -"Just, only just in time. I am going to send you down with Miss -Archinard--over there talking to my husband--she is such a clever girl." - -Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise; a shock so strong that -Lady---- saw a really striking change come over his face. Peter himself -was startled by his own pleasure and eagerness. - -"Evidently you know her; and evidently you _were_ going to be bored and -are _not_ going to be now! Your change of expression is really -unflattering!" Lady---- laughed good humoredly. - -"I haven't seen her for ten years; we were the greatest chums. Oh! it -isn't Hilda, then!" Odd caught sight of the young lady. - -"I am _very_ sorry it isn't 'Hilda.' Hilda is the beauty; she is, -unfortunately, almost an unknown quantity; but Katherine will be a -stepping-stone, and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on her -own account." - -Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone; that atoned somewhat for the -disappointment that Odd felt as he followed his hostess across the room. - -"Miss Archinard--an old friend. Mr. Odd tells me he has not seen you for -ten years." - -"Mr. Odd!" cried Miss Archinard. She was evidently very glad to see him. - -"It is astonishing, isn't it?" said Peter. "Ten years does mean -something, doesn't it?" - -"So much and yet so little. It hasn't changed you a bit," said -Katherine. "And here is papa. Papa, isn't this nice? Mr. Odd, do you -remember the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor Hilda! And her -romantic farewell escapade?" - -Captain Archinard was changed; his hair had become very white, and his -good looks well worn, but his greeting had the cordiality of old -friendship. - -"And Hilda?" Peter questioned, as he and Katherine went into the -dining-room together. "Hilda is well? And as lovely as ever?" - -"Well, and as lovely as ever," Katherine assured him. "She is not here -because she rarely goes out. Papa and I are the frivolous members of the -family. Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art." Peter had a good -look at her as they sat side by side. - -Katherine was no more beautiful than in childhood, but she was -distinctly interesting and--yes--distinctly charming. Her black eyes, -deeply set under broad eyebrows, held the same dominant significance; -humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her white teeth gave a brilliant gayety -to her smile. There was distinction in her coiffure--the thick deeply -rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled smoothly from crown to neck; -and Peter recognized in her dress a personal taste as distinctive--the -long unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were untinged by any -hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, and yet the dress wrinkled about -her waist as she moved with a daring elegance far removed from the -moulded conventionality of the other women's bodices. This glowing gown -was cut off the shoulders; Katherine's shoulders were beautiful, and -they were triumphantly displayed. - -"And now, please tell me," said Peter, "how it comes that I haven't seen -you for ten years?" - -"How comes it that we have not seen _you_? You have been everywhere, and -so have we; really it is odd that we should never have met. Of course -you know that we left the Priory only a year after you went to India?" - -Peter nodded. - -"I was dismayed to find you gone when I got back. I heard vague rumors -of Florence, and when I went there one winter you had disappeared." - -"We must have been in Dresden. How I hated it! All the shabby -second-rate culture of the world seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had -to let the Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor." - -Katherine's smiling assertion was not carried out in her appearance, yet -the statement put a bond of familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as -to an old friend who had a right to know. - -"Then we had a year or two at Dinard--loathsome place I think it! Then -Florence again, and at last Paris, and here we have been for over three -years, and here we shall probably stick for who knows how long! Hilda's -painting gives us a reasonable background; at least as reasonable as -such exiles can hope for." - -"But you don't mean to say that your exile is indefinite?" - -Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a suggestion of shrug in the -creamy expanse of shoulder. - -"And Hilda paints? Well?" - -"Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, and her work is -really individual, unaffectedly individual, and that's the rare thing, -you know. Over four years of atelier work didn't scotch Hilda's -originality, and she has a studio of her own now, and is never happy out -of it." - -"What kind of work does she go in for?" Peter was conscious of a vague -uneasiness about Hilda. "Portraits?" - -"No; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her things are very -decorative--not Japanese either--except in their air of choice and -selection; well, you must see them, they really are original, and, in -their own little way, quite delightful; they are, perhaps, a wee bit -like baby Whistlers--not that I intimate any real resemblance--but the -sense of color, the harmony; but you must see them," Katherine repeated. - -"And Mrs. Archinard?" Peter felt some remorse at having forgotten that -rather effaced personality. - -"Mamma is just the same, only stronger than she used to be in England. -I think the Continent suits her better. And now _you_, Mr. Odd. The idea -of talking about such nobodies as we are when you have become such a -personage! You have become rather cynical too, haven't you? As a child -you did not make a cynical impression on me, and your 'Dialogues' did. I -think you are even more cynical than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to -me of a _rapport_ between your 'Dialogues' and his 'Dialogues -Philosophiques.' I don't imply that, except that you are both sceptical -and both smiling, only your smile is more bitter, your scepticism less -frivolous." - -"I'm sceptical as to people, not as to principles," said Peter, smiling -not bitterly. - -"Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate people." - -"I don't admire them." - -"You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The -Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And -then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn't -it? Why didn't you keep on?" - -"Because I didn't keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were -dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure." - -"I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren't -'practical,' and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we -should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring." - -"Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got back three weeks ago." - -"How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since -getting back?" - -"Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London." - -"We were with Lady Mainwaring." - -"Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my -having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has -been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?" - -"Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us." - -"And Hilda enjoyed herself?" - -Katherine smiled: "How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed -herself after a fashion, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn't -care much for that sort of thing really." - -Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful -complaint of Mrs. Archinard's weekly letter had cut short Hilda's -season, and brought her back to the little room in the little -_appartement, 3ieme au dessus de l'entresol_, where Mrs. Archinard spent -her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at -Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard's -lace-frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long-suffering that -went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people's -deficiencies. - -"But Hilda's month meant more than other girls' years," Katherine went -on; "you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor -Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those -big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old -friend," and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, "Allan Hope." - -Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt -its concealment. - -"Allan Hope?" he repeated. "It is impossible for me to imagine little -Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!" - -"Allan Hope is very nice," Katherine said lightly. - -"Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a -child." - -Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine. - -"And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is." - -"That depends." Katherine laughed. "But regrets of that kind are -unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don't think little Hilda is -much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn't -imply that one is ready for them, and I don't think that Hilda is -ready." - -Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine's black eyes rested on -him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully -in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of -white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might -not constitute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear -glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all. - -There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years -ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet -mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look -of middle age. - -"His Parliamentary experience probably knocked the remaining illusions -out of him," Katherine reflected. "He was certainly very unsuccessful, -he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit -now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill -hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home -and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a -woman who would be nice to him." And it was characteristic of Katherine -that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether -it would be feasible, or rather desirable--for Katherine intended to -please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she -could make up her mind--to contemplate that role for herself. Miss -Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of -matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent -indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly -attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would -choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a -husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful; -and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of -every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss -Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd -would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was -excellent--not glittering--Katherine would have liked glitter, and the -more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, -that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of -modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit only to impress ignorance or -vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one -wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that -she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to -him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could -at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy -memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friendship; but -Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked -anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation. - -Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to -the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, -rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking. -Indeed his next words showed as much. - -"How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you -know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find -myself an uncle with a vengeance." - -"I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages -ago, that wedding." - -"Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently. - -"She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, -at Allersley?" - -"Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is -rather lonely." - -"Why don't you fill it with people?" - -"You forget that I don't like people," said Odd. - -"You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be -something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty -as landowner and country gentleman." - -"Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come -back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness." - -"The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I -think I prefer Paris to the Priory." - -"What do you do with yourself in Paris?" - -"Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very -well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one -must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good -fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed -round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with -which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. -He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him. - -"Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you -fight?" - -"The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the -pity." - -"And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral -crusade?" - -"I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of -conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine, -chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would -be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the -people I liked." - -"And all the others would be in cages!" - -"They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very -tolerant." - -"And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all -marching and caging." - -"I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but -not meanly so, I assure you." - -"No; not meanly so, I am sure." Odd's eyes were quietly scrutinizing, -as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and -looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic. - -"And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but, -meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?" - -"Meanwhile I study my _milieu_. I go out a good deal, if one can call it -going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-American _melange_; I read a -bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like -sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in -papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!" - -"You rode so well, too, Mary told me." - -"Yes, I rode well, otherwise I shouldn't regret it." Katherine smiled -with even more assurance under the added intensity of the _pince-nez_. - -"You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the feeling." - -"That sounds vain; I certainly shouldn't feel pleasure if I were -conscious of playing second fiddle to anybody." - -"A very vain young lady," Odd's smile was quite alertly interested, "and -a self-conscious young lady, too." - -"Yes, rather, I think," Katherine owned; frankness became her, "but I am -very conscious of everything, myself included. I am merely one among the -many phenomena that come under my notice, and, as I am the nearest of -them all, naturally the most intimately interesting. Every one is -self-conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at all." - -"And you are clever," Peter pursued, in a tone of enumeration, his smile -becoming definitely humorous as he added: "And I am very impudent." - -Katherine was not sure that she had made just the effect she had aimed -for, but certainly Mr. Odd would give her credit for frankness. - -It was agreed that he should come for tea the next afternoon. - -"After five," Katherine said; "Hilda doesn't get in till so late; and I -know that Hilda is the _clou_ of the occasion." - -"Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all that?" - -"She doesn't care about anything, _anything_ else," Katherine said -gravely, adding, still gravely, "Hilda is very, very lovely." - -"I hope you weren't too much disappointed," Lady---- said to Odd, just -before he was going; "is she not a charming girl?" - -"She really is; the disappointment was only comparative. It was Hilda -whom I knew so well. The dearest little girl." - -"I have not seen much of her," Lady---- said, with some vagueness of -tone. "I have called on Mrs. Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever, -too; but the other girl was never there. I don't fancy she is much help -to her mother, you know, as Katherine is. Katherine goes about, brings -people to see her mother, makes a _milieu_ for her; such a sad invalid -she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in her work, I believe. Rather -a pity, don't you think, for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like -that? She paints very nicely, to be sure; I fancy it all goes into that, -you know." - -"What goes into that?" Odd asked, conscious of a little temper; all -seemed combined to push Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory -and very mysterious background. - -"Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Katherine can entertain a -roomful of people. Grace, tact, sympathy, the impalpable something that -makes success of the best kind, Katherine has it." - -Katherine's friendly, breezy frankness had certainly amused and -interested Odd at the dinner-table, but Lady ----'s remarks now produced -in him one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions of feeling -by which the judgments of a half-hour before are suddenly reversed. -Katherine's cleverness was that of the majority of the girls he took -down to dinner, rather _voulu_, banal, tiresome. Odd felt that he was -unjust, also that he was a little cross. - -"There are some clevernesses above entertaining a roomful of people. -After all, success isn't the test, is it?" - -Lady---- smiled, an unconvinced smile-- - -"You should be the last person to say that." - -"I?" Odd made no attempt to contradict the evident flattery of his -hostess' tones, but his ejaculation meant to himself a volume of -negatives. If success were the test, he was a sorry failure. - -He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped -him. - -"I have hardly had one word with you, Odd," said the Captain, whose -high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its -fundamental look of peevish pettiness. "Mrs. Brooke is going to take -Katherine home. It's a fine night, won't you walk?" - -Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never -found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke -and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men -turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore together. - -"We are not far from you, you know," the Captain said--"Rue Pierre -Charron; you said you were in the Marboeuf quarter, didn't you? We are -rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I'll leave you at the door of your -hotel." - -They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night -was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysees, as they turned into it, -almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights. - -"Ten years is a jolly long time," remarked Captain Archinard, "and a -jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we'd -left the Priory, of course?" - -"I was very sorry to hear it." - -"Devilish hard luck. It wasn't a choice of evils, though, if that is -any consolation; it was that or starvation." - -"As bad as that?" - -"Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations--safe -enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one -thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I -simply can't go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of -creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is -mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the -interest; and hard luck it is altogether," the Captain repeated. -"Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep -all worry from her; she doesn't know anything about my troubles; she -lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself -rather than deprive her of one luxury." The tone in which the Captain -alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. "And -the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have -of it. But what is my life, I ask you?" The Captain's voice was very -resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good -gentleman's unhappy situation. "What is my life, I ask you? I go -dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and -five o'clock tea in grass widows' drawing-rooms for all distraction. -Paris is full of grass widows," he added, with an even deepened -resentment of tone; "and I never cared much about the play, and French -actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared -about that sort of thing, which I never did--much," and the Captain -drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the -tip as they passed beneath a lamp. - -"I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer," he declared, "smokable -tobacco. Thought I'd economize on these, and they're beastly, like all -economical things!" And the Captain cast away the cigar with a look of -disgust. - -Peter offered him a substitute. - -"You are a lucky dog, Odd, to come to contrasts," the Captain paused to -shield his lighted match as he applied it to the fresh cigar; "I don't -see why things should be so deuced uneven in this world. One fellow born -with a silver spoon in his mouth--and you've got a turn for writing, -too; once one's popular, that's the best paying thing going, I -suppose--and the other hunted all over Europe, through no fault of his -own either. Rather hard, I think, that the man who doesn't need money -should be born with a talent for making it." - -"It certainly isn't just." - -"Damned unjust." - -Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and smiled as he smoked and -walked beside the rebellious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd -had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble futility pathetic, -especially as there was a certain amount of truth in the Captain's -diatribes, the old eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in -this badly managed world. It would be kinder to immediately offer the -loan for which the Captain was evidently paving the way to a request. -But he reflected that the display of such quickness of comprehension -might make the request too easy; and in the future the Captain might -profit by a discovered weakness a little too freely. He would let him -ask. And the Captain was not long in coming to the point. He was in a -devilish tight place, positively couldn't afford a pair of boots -(Peter's eyes involuntarily sought the Captain's feet, neatly shod in -social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one hundred pounds? (The -Captain was frank enough to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc. - -Peter cut short the explanation with a rather unwise manifestation of -sympathetic comprehension; the Captain went upstairs with him to his -room when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check for 3000 -francs in his pocket; the extra 500 francs were the price of Peter's -readiness. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -It rained next day, and Peter took a _fiacre_ from the Bibliotheque -Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove -through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just five -when he got there, and already almost dark. There were four flights to -be ascended before one reached the Archinards' apartment; four steep and -rather narrow flights, for the house was not one of the larger newer -ones, and there was no lift. Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley, -opened the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently not denuded -himself of a valet when he had parted with his horses; that sacrifice -had probably seemed too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether -Wilson's wages were ever paid, and thought it more probable that a -mistaken fidelity attached him to his master. In view of year-long -arrears, he might have found it safer to stay with a future possibility -of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever to even the hope of -compensation. - -The little entrance was very pretty, and the drawing-room, into which -Peter was immediately ushered, even prettier. Evidently the Archinards -had brought their own furniture, and the Archinards had very good taste. -The pale gray-greens of the room were charming. Peter noticed -appreciatively the Copenhagen vases filled with white flowers; he could -find time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archinard's sofa, for no -one else was in the room, a fact of which he was immediately and -disappointedly aware. Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband's -monetary embarrassments had made even less impression on her than upon -the surroundings, for though the little salon was very pretty, it was -not the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, if anything, -plumper and prettier than when Peter had last seen her. - -"This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!" -Mrs. Archinard's slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate -warmth. "Katherine told us this morning about the _rencontre_. I was -expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really -impossible!" Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad -and pretty smile. "I could hardly realize it, were it not that your -books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years." - -Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar -bindings. - -"I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them -again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links -before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!" Mrs. Archinard laid -her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the "Dialogues," which was -uppermost. "Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on -your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art -productions of our age. Pater is more _etincellant_--a style too -jewelled perhaps--one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty; -but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life--a chain of -flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very -sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic." - -Peter was conscious of being sorry for it. - -"I think we are both of us tired." Mrs. Archinard's smile grew even more -sadly sweet; "both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. -How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched, -do they not? Everything crumbles." Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter -found nothing to say ("How dull a man who writes quite clever books can -be!" thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone-- - -"And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She -told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely. -Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very -proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I -always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much." -The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard's voice irritated Odd to -such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own -pleasant as he replied-- - -"Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl." - -"Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is! -Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term -is flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical -woman of the world." - -Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass--very -unjustly--Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the -atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made -upon _ce type la_. She welcomed Katherine's entrance as a diversion from -looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in -dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high -collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points -were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly -set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a -well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the -pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and -shadows. - -"I _am_ glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little -diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there--a big bit!" - -"And you are a perfectly delightful condensation of everything -delightfully Parisian." - -"The heart is British. True oak!" laughed Katherine; "don't judge me by -the foliage." - -"Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to choose such foliage." - -"No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, to mamma. But thanks, -very much. I am glad you are appreciative." Katherine smiled so gayly, -and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, that Peter forgot for a -moment to wonder where Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget. - -"I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them to wait tea until she -comes, poor dear! 'Them' is Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose; Taylor, our -old maid; and the cook! The cook is French, otherwise our staff is -shrunken, but of the same elements. One doesn't mind having no servants -in a little box like this. Yes, mamma, I have paid _all_ the calls, and -only two people were out; so I deserve petting and tea. I hope Hilda -will hurry." Mrs. Archinard's face took on a look of ill-used -resignation. - -"We all pay dearly for Hilda's egotism," she remarked, and for a moment -there was a rather uncomfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation -and a queerer melancholy rising within him. - -The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than the Hilda of ten years -ago. They talked in a rather desultory fashion for some time. Mrs. -Archinard's presence was damping, and even Katherine's smile was like a -flower seen through rain. The little clock on the mantelpiece struck the -quarter. - -"Almost six!" exclaimed Katherine; "we must have tea." - -"Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not sacrifice Mr. Odd," -said Mrs. Archinard with distinct fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell, -and Peter, with a quickness of combination that surprised himself, -surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she become emancipated? Bohemian? -His melancholy grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of -daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint and delicate -design. - -"Hilda designed it in Florence," said Katherine, seeing him looking at -it; "an Italian friend had it made for her after her own model and -drawings. Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. People who -know about it have admired that teapot, as you do, I see." - -"It's a lovely thing," said Peter, as Katherine turned it before him; -"the simplicity of the outline and the delicate bas-relief"--he bent his -head to look more closely--"exquisite." And he thought it rather rough -on Hilda; to pour the tea from her own teapot without waiting for her. - -Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at fully half-past six, -that he might have been asking for too much patience. - -"There she is," said Katherine; "I must go and tell her that you are -here." Katherine went out, and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the -entrance. He was conscious of feeling excited, and unconsciously rose to -his feet and looked eagerly toward the door. But only Katherine came in. - -"I don't believe I shall ever see Hilda!" he exclaimed, with an -assumption of exasperation that hid some real nervousness. Katherine -laughed. - -"Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to wash her face and hands. -Artists are untidy people, you know," and Odd, with that same strange -acuteness of perception with which he seemed dowered this afternoon, -felt that Hilda had been coming in in all her artistic untidiness, and -that Katherine had seen to a more respectable _entree_. - -It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that tactful young lady -probably guessed at his disappointment, for she went to the piano and -began to play a sad aria from one of Schumann's Sonatas that sighed and -pled and sobbed. She played very well, with the same perfect taste that -she showed in her gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond of -Schumann especially, not to listen to her. - -In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was over in a moment, the -meeting, as the most exciting things in life are. Peter had not realized -till the moment came how much it would excite him. - -Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put her hand in his with all the -pretty gravity he remembered in the child. Odd took the other hand too -and stared at her. He was conscious then of being very much excited, and -conscious that she was not. - -Her eyes were "big and vague," but they were the most beautiful eyes he -had ever seen, and the vagueness was only in a certain lack of -expression, for they looked straight into his. Carried along by that -first impulse of excitement, despite the little shock of half-felt -disappointment, Peter bent his head and kissed her on each cheek. - -"Bravo!" said Katherine, still striking soft chords at the piano, -"Bravo, Mr. Odd! considering your first meeting and your last parting, -you have a right to that!" And Katherine laughed pleasantly, though she -was a trifle displeased. - -"Yes, I have, haven't I?" said Peter, smiling. He still held Hilda's -hands. The little flush that had come to her cheeks when he had kissed -her was gone, and she looked very white. - -"Are you glad to see me, Hilda?" he asked; "I beg your pardon, but it -comes naturally to call you that." - -"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Odd," Hilda smiled. Her voice was very -like the child's voice saying, "I thank you very much," ten years ago. -The same voice, grave and gentle. Odd had expected some little warmth, -some little embarrassment even, in the girl, considering the parting -from the child. But Hilda did not show any warmth, neither did she seem -at all embarrassed, and Odd felt rather as one does when an unnecessary -downward stride reveals level ground where one expected another step. He -had stumbled a little, and now, half ruefully, half humorously, he -considered the child Hilda grown up. She sat down near her mother. - -"I am so sorry. I am afraid you waited for me," she said, bending -towards her; "I really couldn't help it, mamma." - -"No, I think it kindest to consider you irresponsible; there is -certainly an element of insanity in your exaggerated devotion to your -work." Mrs. Archinard smiled acidly, and Hilda, Odd thought, did look a -little embarrassed now. He had adjusted himself to the reality of the -present, and was able to study her. The same Botticelli Madonna mouth, -the same Gainsborough eyes; the skin of dazzling whiteness--an almost -unnatural white--but she was evidently tired. - -Certainly her black gown looked strangely beside Katherine's velvet, -Mrs. Archinard's silk and laces. Odd saw that there was mud on the -skirt, a very short skirt, and Hilda's legs were very long. She had -walked, then. His own paternal solicitude struck him as amusing, and -rather touching, as he glanced at her slim feet, to see with -satisfaction that wet boots had been replaced by patent-leather -shoes--heelless little shoes. - -"I am afraid you work too much, you tire yourself," he said, for after -her mother's rebuff she had sunk back in her chair with a weary -lassitude of pose. Hilda immediately sat up straightly, giving him an -almost frightened glance. How unchanged the little face, though the -cloud of her hair no longer framed it. Hilda's hair was as smooth as her -sister's, only it was brushed straight back, and the soft blue-black -coils were massed from ear to ear, and showed, in a coronet-like effect -above her head, almost too much hair; it emphasized the pale fragility -of her look. - -"Oh no, I am not tired," she said, "not particularly. I walked home, you -see. I am very fond of walking." - -"Hilda is fond of such funny things," said Katherine, coming from the -piano, "of walking in the mud and rain for instance. She is the most -persistently, consistently energetic person I ever knew." Katherine -paused pleasantly as though for Hilda to speak, but Hilda said nothing -and looked even more vague than before, almost dull in fact. - -"Well, she has had no tea," said Odd, "and after mud and rain that is -rather cruel, even as a punishment." - -Again Hilda gave him the alarmed quick glance; his eyes were humorously -kind, and she smiled a slight little smile. - -"Some tea!" Katherine cried; "my poor Hilda, I'm afraid it is -hard-boiled by this time"--she laid her hand on the teapot--"and -_almost_ cold. Shall I heat some more water, dear?" - -"Oh! don't think of it, Katherine, it is almost dinner-time." - -"Must I be off?" asked Odd, laughing. - -"How absurd; we don't dine till eight," Katherine said. - -"It wasn't a hint to me, then, Hilda?" Hilda looked helplessly -distressed. - -"A hint? Oh no, no. How could you think that?" - -"I was only joking. I didn't really believe you so anxious to get rid of -an old friend." Odd, with some determination, crossed the room and sat -down beside her. - -"I want to see a great deal of you if you will let me." - -"No one sees much of Hilda, not even her own mother," said Mrs. -Archinard from her sofa. "It is terrible indeed to feel oneself a -cumberer of the earth, unable to suffice to oneself, far less to others. -With my failing eyesight I simply cannot read by lamplight, and there -are three or four hours at this season when I am absolutely without -resources. Yet even those hours Hilda cannot give me." - -Hilda now looked so painfully embarrassed that Odd was perforce obliged, -for very pity's sake, to avert his eyes from her face. - -"Ah, Mr. Odd," Mrs. Archinard went on, "you do not know what that is. To -lie in the gray dusk and watch one's own gray, gray thoughts." - -"It must be very unpleasant," Odd owned unwillingly, feeling that his -character of old friend was being rather imposed upon; this degree of -intimacy was certainly unwarranted. - -"Now, mamma, you usually have friends every afternoon," said Katherine, -in her pleasant, even voice. She was preparing some fresh tea. "You make -me as well as Hilda feel a culprit." - -"No, my dear." Mrs. Archinard's deep sense of accumulated injury -evidently got quite the better of her manners. "No, my dear, you never -_could_ read aloud and never _did_. I never asked it of you. You are -really occupied as a girl should be. At all events you fulfil your -social duties. You see that people come to see me. As I cannot go out, -as Hilda will not, I really don't know what I should do were it not for -you. And, as it is, no one came this afternoon until Mr. Odd made his -welcome appearance." - -"But Mr. Odd came at five, and you always read till then." Katherine's -voice was gently playful. Hilda had not said one word, and her -expression seemed now absolutely dogged. - -"At this season, Katherine! You forget that it is night by four! And how -a girl with any regard for her mother's wishes can walk about the -streets of Paris alone after that hour it passes my comprehension to -understand." - -"Do you care about bicycling, Mr. Odd?" The change was abrupt but -welcome. "Because I am going to the Bois to-morrow morning, and alone -for once." Katherine smiled at him over the kettle which she was -lifting. "Papa has deserted me." - -"I should enjoy it immensely. And you," he looked at Hilda, "won't you -come?" - -"Oh, I can't," said Hilda, with a troubled look. "Thanks so much." - -"Oh no, Hilda can't," laughed Mrs. Archinard. - -"And where is the Captain off to?" queried Peter hastily. He felt that -he would like to shake Mrs. Archinard. Hilda's stubborn silence might -certainly be irritating, and Odd had sympathy for parental claims and -wishes, especially concerning the advisability of a beautiful girl -walking in the streets at night unescorted, sacrificed to youthful -conceit; but Mrs. Archinard's personality certainly weakened all claims, -and her taste was as certainly atrocious. - -"Papa," said Katherine, pouring out the tea, "is going to-morrow morning -to the Riviera. Lucky papa!" Odd thought with some amusement of the L120 -that constituted papa's "luck." "I have only been once to Monte Carlo, -and I won such a lot. Only imagine how forty pounds turned my head. I -revelled in hats and gloves for a whole year. Then we go to-morrow, Mr. -Odd? I have my own bicycle. I have kept it near the Porte Dauphine, and -you can hire a very nice one at the same place." - -"May I call for you here at ten, then? Will that suit you?" - -"Very well." Odd watched Katherine as she carried the tea and cake to -her sister. Hilda gave a little start. - -"O Katherine, how good of you! I didn't realize what you were doing." - -"It is you who are good, my pet," said Katherine in a low, gentle voice. -Peter thought it a pretty little scene. - -"A great deal of latitude must be granted to the young person who -invented that teapot," he said to Hilda. "One must work hard to do -anything in art, mustn't one? A most lovely teapot, Hilda." - -"I am glad you like it." Hilda smiled her thanks, but her eyes still -expressed that distance and reserve that showed no consciousness of the -past, no intention of admitting it as a link to the present. She did not -seem exactly shy, but her whole manner was passive--negative. Katherine -probably thought that Mr. Odd had by this time realized the futility of -an attempt to draw out the unresponsive artist, for she seated herself -between Odd and the sofa, thus protecting Hilda from Mrs. Archinard's -severities and Odd from the ineffectual necessity for talking to Hilda. -Odd thought that were Katherine and Mrs. Archinard not there he might -have "come at" Hilda, but the sense of ease Katherine brought with her -was undeniable. She was charmingly mistress of herself, made him talk, -appealed prettily to her mother, who even gave more than one melancholy -laugh, and, with a tactful give and take, yet kept the reins of -conversation well within her own hands. - -Odd found her a nice girl, but the undercurrent of his thought dwelt on -Hilda, and at every gayety of Katherine's, his eyes sought her sister's -face; Hilda's eyes were always fixed on Katherine, and she smiled a -certain dumbly admiring smile. As he sat near her, he could see that the -little black dress was very shabby. He could not have associated Hilda -with real untidiness, and indeed the dress with its white linen cuffs -and collar, its inevitable grace of severely simple outline, was neat to -an almost painful degree. Hilda's artistic proclivities perhaps showed -themselves in shiny seams and careful darns and patches. - -When he rose to go he took her hands again; he hoped that his -persistency did not make him appear rather foolish. - -"I am sorry you won't come to-morrow. May I hope for another day?" - -"I can't come to-morrow"--there was a touch of self-defence in Hilda's -smile--"but perhaps some other day. I should love to," she finished -rather abruptly. - -"But you will be different--I will be different. We will both be -changed," repeated itself in Odd's mind as he walked down the Rue Pierre -Charron. Poor little child-voice! how sadly it sounded. How true had -been the prophecy. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter Odd, at this epoch of his life, felt that he was resting on his -oars and drifting. He had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had -seen much, thought much, done much; yet he had made for no goal, and had -won no race; how should he, when he had not yet made up his mind that -racing for anything was worth while? - -Perhaps the two years in Parliament had most closely savored of -consciously applied contest, and in that contest Odd considered himself -beaten, and its efforts as though they had never been. Every one had -told him that to bring the student's ideals into the political arena was -to insure defeat; one's friends would consider a carefully -discriminating honesty and broad-mindedness mere disloyal luke-warmness, -foolish hair-splitting feebleness; one's enemies would rejoice and -triumph in the impartiality of an opponent. Certainly he had been -defeated, and he could not see that his example had in any way been -effectual. At all events, he had held to the ideals. - -His fine critical taste found even his own books but crude and partial -expressions of still groping thoughts. His unexpressed intention, good -indeed, if one might so call its indefiniteness, had been to make the -world better for having lived in it; better, or at least wiser. But he -doubted the saving power of his own sceptical utterances; the world -could not be saved by the balancings of a mind that saw the tolerant -point of view of every question, a mind itself so unassured of results. -A strong dash of fanaticism is necessary for success, and Odd had not -the slightest flavor of fanaticism. Perhaps he had given a little -pleasure in his more purely literary studies, and Peter thought that he -would stick to them in the future, but he had put the future away from -him just now. He had only returned from the great passivity of the -Orient a few weeks ago, and its example seemed to denote drifting as the -supreme wisdom. No effort, no desire; a peaceful receptivity, a peaceful -acceptance of the smiles or buffets of fate; that was Odd's ideal--for -the present. He was a little sick of everything. The Occidental's energy -for combat was lulled within him, and the Occidental's individualistic -tendencies seemed to stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an -amused and tolerant observation free from striving; and, for an -Occidental, this mood is dangerous. Odd also did a good deal of -listening to very modern and very clever French talk. He knew many -clever Frenchmen. He did not agree with all of them, but, as he was not -sure of his own grounds for disagreement, he held his peace and listened -smilingly. Certainly the exclusively artistic standpoint was a most -comforting and absorbing plaything to fall back on. - -Peter's friends talked of the amusing and touching spectacle of the -universe. The representation of each man's illusion on the subject, and -the manner of that representation, were never-ceasing sources of -interest. Peter also read a little at the Bibliotheque Nationale, paid a -few calls, dined out pretty constantly, and bicycled a great deal in the -mornings with Katherine Archinard. She understood things well, and her -taste was as sure and as delicate as even Odd could ask. Katherine had -absorbed a great deal of culture during her wanderings, and it would -have taken a long time for any one to find out that it was of a rather -second-hand quality, and sought more for attainment than for enjoyment. -Katherine talked with clever people and read clever reviews, and being -clever herself, with a very acute critical taste, she knew with the -utmost refinement of perception just what to like and just what to -dislike; and as she tolerated only the very best, her liking gave value. -Yet _au fond_ Katherine did not really care even for the very very best. -Her appreciation was negative. She excelled in a finely smiling, -superior scorn, and could pick flaws in almost any one's enjoyment, if -she chose to do so. Katherine, however, was kind-hearted and tactful, -and did not arouse dislike by displaying her cleverness except to people -who would like it. Enthusiasm was banal, and Katherine was not often -required to feign where she did not feel it; her very rigor and -exclusiveness of taste implied an appreciation too high for expression; -but Katherine had no enthusiasm. - -Her rebellious and iconoclastic young energy amused Odd. He thought her -rather pathetic in a way. There was a look of daring and revolt in her -eye that pleased his lazy spirit. Meanwhile Hilda troubled him. - -Would she never bicycle? Katherine, wheeling lightly erect beside him, -gave the little shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders -characteristic of her. She evidently found no fault with Hilda. Others -might do so--the shrug implied that, implied as well that Katherine -herself perhaps owned that her sister's impracticable unreason gave -grounds for fault-finding--but Hilda was near her heart. - -When could he see her? That, too, seemed wrapped in the general cloud of -vagueness, unaccountableness that surrounded Hilda. Odd called twice in -the evening; once to be received by Katherine alone, Hilda was already -in _deshabille_ it seemed, and once to find not even Katherine; she was -dining out, and Miss Hilda in bed. In bed at nine! "Was she ill?" he -asked of Taylor. Wilson had evidently accompanied the Captain. - -"No wonder if she were, sir," Taylor had replied, with a touch of the -grievance in her tone that Hilda always seemed to arouse in those about -her; "but no, she's only that tired!" and Odd departed with a deepened -sense of Hilda's wilful immolation. Katherine brought him home to lunch -on several occasions after the bicycling, but Hilda was never there. She -lunched at her studio. - -On a third call Hilda appeared, but only as he was on the point of -going. She wore the same black dress, and the same look of unnatural -pallor. - -"Hilda," said Odd, for amid these unfamiliar conditions he still used -the familiar appellation, "I must see the cause of all this." - -"Of what?" Her smile was certainly the sweet smile he remembered. - -"Of this unearthly devotion; these white cheeks." - -"Hilda is naturally pale," put in Mrs Archinard; "she has my skin. But, -of course, now she is a ghost." - -"Well, I want to see the haunted studio. I want to see the -masterpieces." Odd spoke with a touch of gentle irony that did not seem -to offend Hilda. - -"You will see nothing either uncanny or unusual." - -"Well, at all events, when can I come to see you in your studio?" The -vague look crossed Hilda's smile. - -"You see--I work very hard;" she hesitated, seemed even to cast a -beseeching glance at Katherine, standing near. Katherine was watching -her. - -"She is getting ready her pictures for the Champs de Mars. But, Hilda, -Mr. Odd may come some morning." - -"Oh yes. Some morning. I thought you always bicycled in the morning. I -wish you _would_ come, it would be so nice to see you there!" she spoke -with a gay and sudden warmth; "only you must tell me when to expect you. -My studio must be looking nicely and my model presentable." - -"I will take Mr. Odd to-morrow," said Katherine, "he would never find -his way." - -"Thanks, that will be very jolly," said Odd, conscious that an -unescorted visit would have been more so, yet wondering whether Hilda -alone might not be more disconcerting than Hilda aided and abetted by -her sister. - -So the next morning he called for Katherine, and they walked to a -veritable nest of _ateliers_ near the Place des Ternes, where they -climbed interminable stairs to the very highest studio of all, and here, -in very bare and business-like surroundings, they found Hilda. She left -her easel to open the door to them. A red-haired woman was lying on a -sofa in a far, dim corner, a vase of white flowers at her head. There -was a big linen apron of butcher's blue over the black dress, and Hilda -looked very neat, less pallid, too, than Odd had seen her look as yet. -Her skin had blue shadows under the chin and nose, and a blue shadow -made a mystery beneath the long sweep of her eyebrows and about her -beautiful eyes. But when she turned her head to the light, Odd saw that -the lips were red and the cheeks freshly and faintly tinted. - -He was surprised by the picture on the big easel; the teapot had not -prepared him for it. A rather small picture, the figure flung to its -graceful, lazy length, only a fourth life-size. It was a picture of -elusive shadows, touched with warmer lights in its grays and greens. The -woman's half-hidden face was exquisite in color. The sweep of her pale -gown, half lost in demi-tint, lay over her like the folded wings of a -tired moth. The white flowers stood like dreams in the dreamy -atmosphere. - -"Hilda, I can almost forgive you." Odd stood staring before the canvas; -he had put on his eye-glass. "Really this atones." - -"Isn't it wonderfully simple, wonderfully decorative?" said Katherine, -"all those long, sleepy lines. My clever little Hilda!" - -"My clever, clever little Hilda!" Odd repeated, turning to look at the -young artist. Her eyes met his with their wide, sweet gaze that said -nothing. Hilda was evidently only capable of saying things on canvas. - -"It is lovely." - -"You like it really?" - -"I really think it is about as charming a picture as I have seen a woman -do. So womanly too." Odd turned to Katherine, it was difficult not to -merge Hilda in her art, not to talk about her talent as a thing apart -from her personality: "She expresses herself, she doesn't imitate." - -"Perhaps that is rather unwomanly," laughed Katherine: "a crawling -imitativeness seems unfortunately characteristic. Certainly Hilda has -none of it. She has inspired me with hopes for my sex." - -"Really cleverer than Madame Morisot," said Odd, looking back to the -canvas, "delightful as she is! She could touch a few notes surely, -gracefully; Hilda has got hold of a chord. Yes, Hilda, you are an -artist. Have you any others?" - -Hilda brought forward two. One was a small study of a branch of pink -blossoms in a white porcelain vase; the other a woman in white standing -at a window and looking out at the twilight. This last was, perhaps, the -cleverest of the three; the lines of the woman's back, shoulder, _profil -perdu_, astonishingly beautiful. - -"You are fond of dreams and shadows, aren't you?" - -"I haven't a very wide range, but one can only try to do the things one -is fitted for. I like all sorts of pictures, but I like to paint -demi-tints and twilights and soft lamplight effects." - - "'Car nous voulons la nuance encor-- - pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,'" - -chanted Katharine. "Hilda lives in dreams and shadows, I think, Mr. Odd, -so naturally she paints them. '_L'art c'est la nature, vue a travers un -temperament_.' Excuse my spouting." - -"So your temperament is a stuff that dreams are made of. Well, Hilda, -make as many as you can. Hello! is that another old friend I see?" On -turning to Hilda he had caught sight of a dachshund--rather white about -the muzzle, but very luminous and gentle of eye--stretching himself from -a nap behind the little stove in the corner. He came toward them with a -kindly wag of the tail. - -"Is this Palamon or Arcite?" - -A change came over Hilda's face. - -"That is Palamon; poor old Palamon. Arcite fulfilled his character by -dying first." - -"And Darwin and Spencer?" - -"Dead, too; Spencer was run over." - -"Poor old Palamon! Poor old dog!" Odd had lifted the dog in his arms, -and was scratching the silky smooth ears as only a dog-lover knows how. -Palamon's head slowly turned to one side in an ecstasy of appreciation. -Odd looked down at Hilda. Katherine was behind him. "Poor Palamon, -'allone, withouten any companye.'" Hilda's eyes met his in a sad, -startled look, then she dropped them to Palamon, who was now putting out -his tongue towards Odd's face with grateful emotion. - -"Yes," she said gently, putting her hand caressingly on the dog's head; -her slim, cold fingers just brushed Odd's; "yes, poor Palamon." She was -silent, and there was silence behind them, for Katherine, with her usual -good-humored tact, was examining the picture. The model on the sofa -stretched her arms and yawned a long, scraping yawn. Palamon gave a -short, brisk bark, and looked quickly and suspiciously round the studio. -Both Odd and Hilda laughed. - -"But not 'allone,' after all," said Odd. "Is he a great deal with you? -That is a different kind of company, but Palamon is the gainer." - -"We mustn't judge Palamon by our own standards," smiled Hilda, "though -highly civilized dogs like him don't show many social instincts towards -their own kind. He did miss Arcite though, at first, I am sure; but he -certainly is not lonely. I bring him here with me, and when I am at home -he is always in my room. I think all the walking he gets is good for -him. You see in what good condition he is." - -Palamon still showing signs of restlessness over the yawn, Odd put him -down. He was evidently on cordial terms with the model, for he trotted -affably toward her, standing with a lazy, smiling wave of the tail -before her, while she addressed him with discreetly low-toned, -whispering warmth as "_Mon chou! Mon bijou! Mon petit lapin a la sauce -blanche!_" - -"Don't you get very tired working here all day?" Odd asked. - -"Sometimes. But anything worth doing makes one tired, doesn't it?" - -"You take your art very seriously, Hilda?" - -"Sometimes--yes--I take it seriously." Hilda smiled her slight, reserved -smile. - -"Well, I can't blame you; you really have something to say." - -"Hilda, I am afraid we are becoming _de trop_. I must carry you off, Mr. -Odd. Hilda's moments are golden." - -"That is a sisterly exaggeration," said Hilda. Had all her personality -gone into her pictures? was she a self-centred little egotist? Odd -wondered, as he and Katherine walked away together. Katherine's warmly -human qualities seemed particularly consoling after the chill of the -abstract one felt in Hilda's studio. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -"Peter, she is a nice, a clever, a delightful girl," said Mary Apswith. - -Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlooking the Rue de la -Paix. For her holiday week of shopping Peter's hotel was not central -enough, but Peter himself was at her command from morning till night. He -stood before her now, his back to the flaming logs in the fireplace, -looking alternately down at his boots and up at his sister. Peter's face -wore an amused but pleasant smile. Katherine must certainly be nice, -clever, and delightful, to have won Mary, usually so slow in friendship. - -"Whether she is deep--deeply good, I mean--I don't know; one can't tell. -But, at all events, she is sincere to the core." Mary had called on the -Archinards some days ago, and had seen Katherine every day since then. - -Mary's stateliness had not become buxom. The fine lines of her face had -lost their former touch of heaviness. Her gray hair--grayer than -Peter's--and fresh skin gave her a look of merely perfected maturity. -Life had gone well with her; everybody said that; yet Mary knew the -sadness of life. She had lost two of her babies, and sorrow had -softened, ripened her. The Mary of ten years ago had not had that tender -look in her eyes, those lines of sympathetic sensibility about the -lips. Her decisively friendly sentence was followed by a little sigh of -disapprobation. - -"As for Hilda!" - -"As for Hilda?" - -"I am disappointed, Peter. Yes; we went to her studio this morning; -Katherine took me there; Katherine's pride in her is pretty. Yes; I -suppose the pictures are very clever, if one likes those rather misty -things. They look as though they were painted in the back drawing-room -behind the sofa!" Peter laughed. "I don't pretend to know. I suppose _au -fond_ I am a Philistine, with a craving for a story on the canvas. I -don't really appreciate Whistler, so of course I haven't a right to an -opinion at all. But however clever they may be, I don't think those -pictures should fill her life to the exclusion of _everything_. The girl -owes a duty to herself; I don't speak of her duty to others. I have no -patience with Mrs. Archinard, she is simply insufferable! Katherine's -patience with her is admirable; but Hilda is completely one-sided, and -she is not great enough for that. But she will fancy herself great -before long. Lady---- told me that she was never seen with her -sister--there is that cut off, you see--how natural that they should go -out together! Of course she will grow morbidly egotistic, people who -never meet other people always do; they fancy themselves grandly -misunderstood. So unhealthy, too! She looked like a ghost." - -"Poor little Hilda! She probably fancies an artist's mission the -highest. Perhaps it is, Mary." - -"Not in a woman's case"--Mrs. Apswith spoke with a vigorous decision -that would have stamped her with ignominy in the eyes of the perhaps -mythical New Woman; "woman's art is never serious enough for heroics." - -"Perhaps it would be, if they would show a consistent heroism for it." -Peter opposed Mary for the sake of the argument, and for the sake of an -old loyalty. _Au fond_ he agreed with her. - -"A female Palissy would revolutionize our ideas of woman's art." - -"A pleasant creature she would be! Tearing up the flooring and breaking -the chairs for firewood! An abominable desecration of the housewifely -instincts! I don't know what Allan Hope will do about it," Mary pursued. - -"Ah! That is an accepted fact, then?" - -"Dear me, yes. Lady Mainwaring is very anxious for it. It shows what -Allan's steady persistency has accomplished. The child hasn't a penny, -you know." - -"You think she'd have him?" - -"Of course she will have him. And a lucky girl she is for the chance! -But, before the definite acceptance, she will, of course, lead him the -usual dance; it's quite the thing now among girls of that type. -Individuality; their own life to be lived, their Art--in capitals--to be -lived for; home, husband, children, degrading impediments. Such tiresome -rubbish! I am very sorry for poor Allan." Peter studied his boots. - -"Allan probably accounts for that general absent-mindedness I observed -in her; perhaps Allan accounts for more than we give her credit for; -this desperate devotion to her painting, her last struggle to hold to -her ideal. Really the theory that she is badly in love explains -everything. Poor child!" - -"Why poor, Peter? Allan Hope is certainly the very nicest man I know, -barring yourself and Jack. He has done more than creditably in the -House, and now that he is already on the Treasury Bench, has only to -wait for indefinite promotion. He is clever, kind, honest as the day. He -will be an earl when the dear old earl dies, and that that is a pretty -frame to the picture no one can deny. What more can a girl ask?" - -"This girl probably asks some impossible dream. I'm sorry for people who -haven't done dreaming." - -"Between you and me, Peter, I don't think Hilda is really clever enough -to do much dreaming--of the pathetic sort. Her eyes are clever; she sees -things prettily, and puts them down prettily; but there is nothing more. -She struck me as a trifle stupid--really dull, you know." - -Odd shifted his position uncomfortably. - -"That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self-expression." He leaned -his arm on the mantelpiece and studied the fire with a puzzled frown. -"That exquisite face must _mean_ something." - -"I don't know. By the law of compensation Katherine has the brains, the -heart, and Hilda the beauty. _I_ didn't find her shy. She seemed -perfectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of absorption in her -love affair, as you say. I am not sure that he has asked her yet. He is -a most modest lover." - -Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her stay, and her first -impression was strengthened. - -Katherine shopped with her; they considered gowns together. Katherine's -taste was exquisite, and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming -Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not above liking pretty -things--that was already nice in her--for the girl was clever enough to -pose indifference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. Katherine was -very independent, but very attentive. Her sincerity was charmingly gay, -and not priggish. She said just what she thought; but she thought things -that were worth saying. She made little display of learning, but one -felt it--like the silk lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk -too much; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. Mary took her twice -to the play with Peter and herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd -sat in the back of the box and watched for the effect on her face of the -clever play interpreted by the best talent of the Theatre Francais. The -quiet absorption of her look might imply much intelligent appreciation; -but Katherine's little ripples of glad enjoyment, clever little thrusts -of criticism, made Hilda's silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while -between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke a scintillating sense -of intellectual enjoyment about her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda -sat listening with that same smile of admiration that almost irritated -Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability--inferiority. - -The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, was rather -touching; and Mary owned that Hilda was "sweet," but the adjective did -not mitigate the former severity of judgment--that was definite. - -When Mary went, she begged Katherine to accept the prettiest gown Doucet -could make her, and Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness. -The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine Braun photograph, -which Hilda received with surprised delight, for she had done nothing to -make Mrs. Apswith's stay in Paris pleasant. She thought such kindness -touching, and Katherine's gown the loveliest she had ever seen. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Mary gone, the bicycling tete-a-tetes were resumed, and Odd, too, began -to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were -bon camarades in the best sense of the term, and Peter found it a very -pleasant sense. He realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in -his present desoeuvree condition would have been intolerable. The -melancholy of laziness could not creep to him while this girl laughed -beside him. The frank, sympathetic relation--almost that of man to -man--was untouched by the faintest infusion of sentiment; delicious -breeziness and freedom of intercourse was the result. Peter listened to -Katherine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to laugh at him. He -told her a good many of his thoughts; she criticised them, approved of -them, encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present -contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any affirmation. He had -never felt so little sure of anything nor so conscious of everything in -general. Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he continued to drift. -He still read in an objectless way at the Bibliotheque, hunting out old -references, pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of view of -all times. Katherine offered to help him, and in the morning he would -bring her his notes to look over; her quick comprehension formed -another link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She had no taste for -drifting. In her eye he read a dissatisfaction, a thirst for wider -vision, wider action, a restless impatience with the narrowness, the -ineffectiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her probable future -with a sense of pathos. Hilda's wide gaze showed no such rebellion with -the actual; her art had filled it with a distant content that shut -strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was it merely the placid -consciousness of Allan Hope--a future assured and fully satisfactory? -Under Katherine's gayety there was a fierce beating of caged wings, and -Odd fancied at times that, freed, the imprisoned birds might be strong -and beautiful. He fancied this especially when she played to him; she -played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, as the winter came -and it grew too cold for bicycling, Peter often spent the morning in -listening to her. Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon in -the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually met her dining out or -at some reception; their intimacy once noticed, they were invited -together. Lady---- was especially anxious that Odd should have every -opportunity for meeting her favorite. - -But with all this intimacy, to Peter's consciousness thoroughly, -paternally platonic, under all its daily interests and quiet pleasure -lay a half-felt hurt, a sense of injury and loss. The little voice, -seldom thought of during the last ten years, now repeated often: "But -you will be different; I will be different; we will both be changed." - -Captain Archinard returned from the Riviera in a temper that could mean -but one thing; he had gambled at Monte Carlo, and he had lost. He did -not mention the fact in the family circle; indeed, by a tacit agreement, -money matters were never alluded to before Mrs. Archinard. Her years of -successful invalidism had compelled even her husband's acquiescence in -the decision early arrived at by Hilda and Katherine: mamma must be -spared the torments to which they had grown accustomed. But to Katherine -the Captain freed his querulous soul, never to Hilda. There was a look -in Hilda's eyes that made the Captain very uncomfortable, very angry; -conscious of those cases of wonderful champagne, the races, the clubs, -the boxes at the play, and all the infinite array of his wardrobe--a -sad, wondering look. Katherine's scoldings were far preferable, for -Katherine was not so devilish superior to human weaknesses; she had -plenty of unpaid bills on her own conscience, and understood the -necessities of an aristocratic taste. He and Katherine had their little -secrets, and were mutually on the defensive. Hilda never criticised, to -be sure, but her very difference was a daily criticism. The Captain -thought his younger daughter rather dull; Katherine, of finer calibre -than her father, admired such dulness, and found some difficulty in -stilling self-reproachful comparisons; temperament, circumstance, made a -comforting philosophy. And then Hilda's art made things easy for Hilda; -with such a refuge, would she, Katherine, ask for more? Katherine rather -wondered now, after her father's exasperated recountal of ill-luck, -where papa had got the money to lose; but papa on this point was -prudently reticent, and borrowed two one-hundred-franc notes from Peter -while the latter waited in the drawing-room for Katherine one morning. - -Katherine and her father were making a round of calls one day, and the -Captain stopped at his bank to cash a check. Katherine stood beside him, -and, although he manoeuvred concealment with hand and shoulder, her -keen eyes read the name. - -Her mouth was stern as they walked away--the Captain had folded the -notes and put them in his pocket. - -"A good deal of money that, papa." - -"I suppose I owe twice as much to my tailor," Captain Archinard replied, -with irritation. - -"Has Mr. Odd lent you money before this?" - -"I really don't know that Mr. Odd's affairs--or mine--are any business -of yours, Katherine." - -"Yours certainly are, papa. When a father puts his daughter in a false -position, his affairs decidedly become her business." - -"What rubbish, Katherine. Better men than Odd have been glad to give me -a lift. I can't see that Odd has been ill-used. He is rolling in money." - -"I don't quite believe that, papa. Allersley is not such a rich -property. But it is not of Mr. Odd's ill-usage I complain, it is of -mine; for if this borrowing goes on, I hardly think I can continue my -relations with Mr. Odd. It would rather look like--decoying." - -The Captain stopped and fixed a look of futile dignity on his daughter. - -"That's a strange word for you to use, Katherine. I would horsewhip the -man who would suggest it. Odd is a gentleman." - -"Decidedly. I did not speak of his point of view but of mine. All -frankness of intercourse between us is impossible if you are going to -sponge on him." - -"Katherine! I can't allow such impertinence! Outrageous! It really is! -Sponge! Can't a man borrow a few paltry hundreds from another without -exposing himself to such insulting language?--especially as Odd is to -become my son-in-law, I suppose. He is always hanging about you." - -"That is what I meant, papa." Katherine's tone was icy. "Your -suppositions were apparent to me, you drain Mr. Odd on the strength of -them. Borrow from any one else you like as much as you can get, but, if -you have any self-respect, you won't borrow from Mr. Odd in the hope -that I will marry him." - -"Devilish impertinent! Upon my word, devilish impertinent!" the Captain -muttered. He drew out his cigar-case with a hand that trembled. -Katherine's bitter look was very unpleasant. - -Katherine expected Odd the next morning; he was reading a manuscript to -her, and would come early. - -She was waiting for him at ten. She had put on her oldest dress. The -severe black lines, a silk sash, knotted at the side, suggested a -soutane--the slim buckled shoes with their square tips carried out the -monastic effect, and Katherine's strong young face was cold and stern. - -"Shall we put off our work for a little while? I want to speak to you," -she said, after Odd had come, and greetings had passed between them. - -"Shall we? You have been too patient all along, Miss Archinard." Odd -smiled down at her as he held her hand. "You make me feel that I have -been driving you--arrantly egotistic." - -"No; I like our work immensely, as you know." Katherine remained -standing by the fireplace. She leaned her arm on the mantelpiece, and -turned her head to look directly at him. "I am not at all happy this -morning, Mr. Odd." Odd's kind eyes showed an almost boyish dismay. - -"What is it? Can I help you?" His tone was all sympathetic anxiety and -friendly warmth. - -"No; just the contrary. Mr. Odd, I am ashamed that you should have seen -the depths of our poverty. It is not a poverty one can be proud of. -Poverty to be honorable must work, and must not borrow." - -Odd flushed. - -"You exaggerate," he said, but he liked her for the exaggeration. - -"I did not know till yesterday that papa owed to you his Riviera trip." - -"Really, Katherine"--he had not used her name before, it came now most -naturally with this new sense of intimacy--"you mustn't misunderstand, -misjudge your father. He couldn't work; his life has unfitted him for -it; it would be a false pride that would make him hesitate to ask an old -friend for a loan; an old friend so well able to lend as I am. You women -judge these things far too loftily." And Peter liked her for the -loftiness. - -"Would you mind telling me how much you lent him last time? I was with -him when he cashed the check. I saw the name, not the amount." - -"It was nothing of any importance," said Odd shortly. He exaggerated -now. The Captain had told him that the furniture would be seized unless -some creditors were satisfied, and, with a very decided hint as to the -inadvisability of another trip for retrievement to the Riviera, Peter -had given him the money, ten thousand francs; a sum certainly of -importance, for Odd was no millionaire. - -Katherine looked hard at him. - -"You won't tell me because you want to spare me." - -"My dear Katherine, I certainly want to spare you anything that would -add a straw's weight to your distress; you have no need, no right to -shoulder this. It is your father's affair--and mine. You must not give -it another thought." - -"That is so easy!" Katherine clenched her hand on the mantelpiece. She -was not given to vehemence of demonstration; the little gesture showed a -concentration of bitter rebellion. Odd, standing beside her, put his own -hand over hers; patted it soothingly. - -"It's rather hard on me, you know, a slur on my friendship, that you -should take a merely conventional obligation so to heart." - -Katherine now looked down into the fire. - -"Take it to heart? What else have I had on my heart for years and years? -It is a mere variation on the same theme, a little more poignantly -painful than usual, that is all! What a life to lead. What a future to -look forward to. I wonder what else I shall have to endure." Odd had -never seen her before in this mood of fierce hopelessness. - -"Our poverty has poisoned everything, everything. I have had no youth, -no happiness. Every moment of forgetfulness means redoubled keenness of -gnawing anxiety. Debts! Duns! harassing, sordid cares that drag one -down. Mr. Odd, I have had to coax butchers and bakers; I have had to -plead with horrible men with documents of all varieties! I have had to -pawn my trinkets, and all with surface gayety; everything must be kept -from mamma, and papa's extravagance is incorrigible." - -Odd was all grave amazement, grave pity, and admiration. - -"You are a brave woman, Katherine." - -"No, no; I am not brave. I am frightened--frightened to death sometimes. -I see before me either a hideous struggle with want or--a _mariage de -convenance_. I have none of the classified, pigeon-holed knowledge one -needs nowadays to become a teaching drudge, and I can't make up my mind -to sell myself, though, in spite of my lack of beauty and lack of money, -that means of escape has often presented itself. I have had many offers -of marriage. Only I _can't_." - -Odd was silent under the stress of a new thought, an entirely new -thought. - -"For Hilda I have no fear," Katherine continued, still speaking with the -same steady quiet voice, still looking into the fire. "In the past her -art has absorbed and protected her, and her future is assured. She will -marry a good husband." A flash as of Hilda's beauty crossed the growing -definiteness of Peter's new thought. That old undoing, that mirage of -beauty; he put it aside with some self-disgust, feeling, as he did so, -a queer sense of impersonality as though putting away himself as he put -away his weakness. He seemed to contemplate himself from an outside -aloofness of observation. The trance-like feeling of the illusion of all -things which he had felt more than once of late made him hold more -firmly to the tonic thought of a fine common-sense. - -"Of course, mamma will be safe when Hilda is Lady Hope," Katherine said; -"perhaps I shall be forced to accept the same charity." Her voice broke -a little, and she turned the sombre revolt of her look on Peter; her -eyes were full of tears. - -"Katherine," he said, "will you marry me?" - -Odd, five minutes before, had not had the remotest idea that he would -ask Katherine Archinard to be his wife. Yet one could hardly call the -sudden decision that had brought the words to his lips, impulsive. While -Katherine spoke, the bitter struggle of the fine young life, surely -meant for highest things; the courage of the cheerfulness she never -before had failed in; the pride of that repulsion for the often offered -solution to her difficulties--a solution many women would have accepted -with a sense of the inevitable--became admirably apparent to Odd. Their -mutual sympathy and good-fellowship and, almost unconsciously, Hilda's -assured future--Allan Hope--had defined the thought. He felt none of -that passion which, now that he looked back on it, made of the miserable -year of married life that followed but the logical retribution of its -reckless and wilful blindness. The very lack of passion now seemed an -added surety of better things. His life with Katherine could count on -all that his life with Alicia had failed in. He did not reason on that -unexcited sense of impersonality and detachment. He would like her to -accept him. He would like to help this fine, proud young creature; he -would like sympathetic companionship. He was sure of that. He had not -surprised Katherine; she had seen, as clearly as he now saw, what Peter -Odd would do. She had not exactly intended to bring him to a realization -of this by the morning's confession, for on the whole Katherine had been -perfectly sincere in all that she had said, but she felt that she could -rely on no better opportunity. Now she only turned her head towards him, -without moving from her position before the fireplace. Katherine never -took the trouble to act. She merely aimed at the most advantageous line -of conduct and let taste and instinct lead her. Her taste now told her -that quiet sincerity was very suitable; she felt, too, a most sincere -little dash of proud hesitation. - -"Are you generously offering me another form of charity, Mr. Odd? My -distress was not conscious of an appeal." - -"You know your own value too well, Katherine, to ask me that. _I_ -appeal." - -"Yet the apropos of your offer makes me smart. Another joy of poverty. -One can't trust." - -"It was apropos because a man who loves you would not see you suffer -needlessly." Peter, too, was sincere; he did not say "loved." - -"Shall I let you suffer needlessly?" asked Katherine, smiling a little. -"I sha'n't, if that implies that you love me." - -"Suppose I do. And suppose I stand on my dignity. Pretend to distrust -your motives. Refuse to be married out of pity?" - -"That sort of false dignity wouldn't suit you; you have too much of the -real." - -"Would you be good to me, Mr. Odd?" - -"Very, very good, Katherine." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it, and Katherine's smile shone out in all -its frank gayety. "I think I can make you happy, dear." - -"I think you can, Mr. Odd." - -"You must manage 'Peter' now." - -"I think you can, Peter," Katherine said obediently. - -"And Katherine--I would not have dared say this before, you would have -flung it back at me as bribery--but I can give you weapons." - -"Yes, I shall be able to fight now." She looked up at him with her -charming smile. "And you will help me, you must fight too. You must be -great, Peter, great, _great!_" - -"With such a fiery little engine throbbing beside my laggard bulk, I -shall probably be towed into all sorts of combats and come off -victorious." - -They sat down side by side on the sofa. Katherine was a delightfully -comfortable person; no change, but a pleasant development of relation -seemed to have occurred. - -"You won't expect any flaming protestations, will you, Katherine," said -Peter; "I was never good at that sort of thing." - -"Did you never flame, then?" - -"I fancy I flamed out in about two months--a long time ago; that is -about the natural life of the feeling." - -"And you bring me ashes," said Katherine, rallying him with her smile. - -"You mustn't tease me, Katherine," said Peter. He found her very dear, -and kissed her hand again. - - - - -Part II - -HILDA. - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -"Well, Hilda, we have some news for you!" With these words, spoken in -the triumphant tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his -daughter as she came into the drawing-room at half-past six. Odd had -been paying his respects to his future parents-in-law, and was sitting -near Mrs. Archinard's sofa. He rose to his feet as Hilda entered and -looked at her, smiling a trifle nervously. - -"Guess what has happened, my dear," said the Captain, whose good humor -was apparent, while Mrs. Archinard murmured, "_She_ would never guess. -Hilda, only look at your hat in the mirror." It was windy, and Hilda's -shabby little hat was on the back of her head. - -"What must I guess? Is it about you?" she asked, turning her sweet -bewildered eyes from Odd to her father, to her mother, and back to Odd -again. - -"Yes, about me and another person." - -"You are going to marry Katherine!" Her eyes dilated and their sweetness -deepened to a smile; "you are going to marry Katherine, that _must_ be -it." - -"That is it, Hilda. Congratulate me." He took her hands in his and -kissed her. "Welcome me, and tell me you are glad." - -"Oh! I am very glad. I welcome you. I congratulate you!" - -"You will like your brother?" - -"A brother is dearer than a friend, and you have always been a friend, -haven't you, Mr. Odd?" - -"Always, always, Hilda; I didn't know that you realized it." - -"Did _you_ realize it?" - -"_Did_ I, my dear Hilda! I did, I do, I always will." Hilda's face -seemed subtly irradiated. Her listless look of pallor had brightened -wonderfully. No one could have said that the lovely face was dull with -this sudden change upon it. Peter felt that he himself was grave in -comparison. - -"And I am going to claim all a brother's rights immediately, Hilda." - -"What are a brother's rights?" - -"I am going to look after you, to scold you, to see you don't overwork -yourself." - -"I give you leave, but you mustn't presume _too_ much on the new -rights." - -"Ah! but I have old ones as well." - -"You mustn't be tyrannical!" she still laughed gently as she withdrew -her hands; "I must go and see Katherine." - -"Yes, go and dress now, Hilda." Mrs. Archinard spoke from the sofa, -having watched the scene with a slight air of injury; Hilda's unwonted -gayety constituted a certain grievance. "Mr. Odd dines with us, and I -really can't bear to see you in that costume. The skirt especially is -really ludicrous, my dear. I am glad that I don't see you walking -through the streets in it." - -"Hilda knows that her feet bear showing," remarked the Captain, crossing -his own with complacency; "she has her mother's foot in size and mine -in make--the Archinard foot; narrow, arched instep, and small heel. - -"Really, Charles, I think the Maxwells will bear the comparison!" Mrs. -Archinard, though she smiled, looked distinctly distressed. - -Hilda found her sister before the long mirror in her room, Taylor -fastening the nasturtium velvet. Katherine always had a commanding air, -and it was quite regally apparent to-night; all things seemed made to -serve her, and Taylor's crouching attitude symbolic. - -Hilda put her arms around her neck. - -"My dear, dear Kathy, I am so glad! To think that good things _do_ come -true!" - -"You like my choice, pet?" - -"_No_ one else would have done," cried Hilda; "he is the only man I ever -saw whom I could have thought of for you. Why, Katherine, from that -first day when you told me you had met him at the dinner, I _knew_ it -would happen." - -"Yes, I certainly felt a prophetic sense of proprietorship from the -first," Katherine owned musingly. She looked over her sister's shoulder -at the fine outline of her own head and neck in the glass. - -"Aren't you rather splashed and muddy, pet? Poor people can't afford an -affection that puts their velvet gowns in danger. There, I mustn't -rumple my lace." - -"I haven't hurt, have I?" Hilda stood back hastily. "I forgot, I _am_ -rather muddy. And, Katherine, you will help one another so much; that -makes it so ideal." - -"Idealistic little Hilda!" - -"But that is evident, isn't it? You with all your energy and cleverness -and general _sanity_, and he so widely sympathetic that he is a bit -impersonal. I mean that he doubts himself because he doubts everything -rather; he sees how relative everything is; he probably thinks too much; -I am sure that is dangerous. You will make him act." - -"I am to be the concrete to his abstract. He certainly does lack energy. -I wonder if even I shall be able to prod him into initiative." - -Katherine patted down the fine old lace that edged her bodice, and -looked a smiling question from her own reflection in the mirror to her -sister. "Suppose I fail to arouse him." - -"You will understand him. He will have something to live for; that is -what he needs. He won't be able to say, 'Is it worth while?' about -_your_ happiness. As for initiative, you will probably have to have that -for both. After all, he has made his name and place. He has the nicest -kind of fame; the more apparent sort made up by the admiration of -mediocrities isn't half as nice." - -"Ah, pet, you are an intellectual aristocrat. My _pate_ is coarser. I -like the real thing; the donkey's brayings make a noise, and one must -take the whole world with all its donkeys conscious of one, to be -famous. I like noise." Katherine smiled as she spoke, and Hilda smiled, -too, a little smile of humorous comprehension, for she did not take -Katherine in this mood at all seriously. She was as stanch in her belief -of Katherine's ideals as she was in sticking to her own. - -"We will be married in March," said Katherine, pausing before her -dressing-table to put on her rings--a fine antique engraved gem and a -splendid opal. "You may go, Taylor; and Taylor, you may put out my -opera-cloak after dinner. I think, Hilda, I will go to the opera; papa -has a box. He and I and Peter might care about dropping in for the last -two acts. You don't care to come, do you?" - -"Well, mamma expects me to read to her; it's a charming book, too," -added Hilda, with tactful delicacy. - -"Well, I shall envy you your quiet evening. I can't ask Peter to spend -his here in the bosom of my family. Yes, March, I think, unless I decide -on making that round of visits in England; that would put it off for a -month. I hope the ravens will fetch me a trousseau--for I don't know who -else will." - -"I shall have quite a lot by that time, Katherine. I haven't heard from -the dealer in London yet, but those two pictures will sell, I hope. And, -at all events, with the other things, you know, I shall have about a -hundred pounds." - -Katherine flushed a little when Hilda spoke of "other things," and -looked round at her sister. - -"I _hate_ to think of taking the money, Hilda." - -"My dear, why should you? Except, of course--the debts," Hilda sighed -deeply: "but I think on _this_ occasion you have a right to forget -them." Katherine's flush perhaps showed a consciousness of having -forgotten the debts on many occasions less pressing. - -"I meant, in particular, taking the money from you." - -Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest. - -"Kathy! as if it were not my pleasure! my joy! I am lucky to be able to -get it for you. _Can_ you get a trousseau for that much, Kathy?" - -"Well, linen, yes. I don't care how little I get, but it must be -good--good lace. I shall manage; I don't care about gowns, I can get -them afterwards. Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband." A -pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine's lips. "He _is_ a -dear! I only hope, pet, that you will be able to hold on to the money. -Don't let the duns worry it out of you!" The weary, pallid look came to -Hilda's face. - -"I'll try, Kathy dear. I'll do my very best." - -"My precious Hilda! You need not tell me _that!_ Run quickly and dress, -dear, it must be almost dinner-time. What _have_ you to wear? Shall I -lend you anything?" - -"Why, you forgot my gray silk! My fichu! Insulting Kathy!" - -"So I did! And you look deliciously pretty in that dress, though she -_did_ make a fiasco of the back; let the fichu come well down over it. -You really shouldn't indulge your passion for _petites couturieres_, -child. It doesn't pay." - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Odd climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Hilda's studio. The -concierge below at the entrance to the court had looked at him with the -sourness common to her class, as she stood spaciously in her door. The -gentleman had, evidently, definite intentions, for he had asked her no -questions, and Madame Prinet felt his independence as a slur upon her -Cerberus qualifications. - -Odd was putting into practice his brotherly principles. He had spent the -morning with Katherine--the fifth morning since their engagement--and -time hanging unemployed and heavy on his hands this afternoon, a visit -to Hilda seemed altogether desirable. It really behoved him to solve -Hilda's dubious position and, if possible, help her to a more normal -outlook; he felt the task far more feasible since that glimpse of gayety -and confidence. Indeed he was quite unconscious of Madame Prinet's -suspicious observation as he crossed the court, and the absorption in -his pleasant duty held his mind while he wound up the interminable -staircase. - -His knock at Hilda's door--there was no mistaking it, for a card bearing -her name was neatly nailed thereon--was promptly answered, and Odd found -himself face to face with a middle-aged maiden of the artistic type -with which Paris swarms; thin, gray-haired, energetic eyes behind -eyeglasses, and a huge palette on her arm, so huge that it gave Odd the -impression of a misshapen table and blocked the distance out with its -brave array of color. Over the lady's shoulder, Odd caught sight of a -canvas of heroic proportions. - -"Oh! I thought it was the concierge," said the artist, evidently -disappointed; "have you come to the right door? I don't think I know -you." - -"No; I don't know you," Odd replied, smiling and casting a futile glance -around the studio, now fully revealed by the shifting of the palette to -a horizontal position. - -"I expected to find Miss Archinard. Are you working with her? Will she -be back presently?" - -The gray-haired lady smiled an answering and explanatory smile. - -"Miss Archinard rents me her studio in the afternoon. She only uses it -in the morning; she is never here in the afternoon." - -Odd felt a huge astonishment. - -"Never here?" - -"No; can I give her any message? I shall probably see her tomorrow if I -come early enough." - -"Oh no, thanks. Thanks very much." He realized that to reveal his dismay -would stamp Hilda with an unpleasantly mysterious character. - -"I shall see her this evening--at her mother's. I am sorry to have -interrupted you." - -"Oh! Don't mention it!" The gray-haired lady still smiled kindly; Peter -touched his hat and descended the stairs. Perhaps she worked in a large -atelier in the afternoon; strange that she had never mentioned it. - -Madame Prinet, who had followed the visitor to the foot of the staircase -and had located his errand, now stood in her door and surveyed his -retreat with a fine air of impartiality; people who consulted her need -not mount staircases for nothing. - -"Monsieur did not find Mademoiselle." - -Odd paused; he certainly would ask no questions of the concierge, but -she might, of her own accord, throw some light on Hilda's devious ways. - -"No; I had hoped to find her. Mademoiselle was in when I last called -with her sister. I did not know that she went out every afternoon." - -Odd thought this tactful, implying, as it did, that Miss Archinard's -friends were not in ignorance of her habits. - -"Every afternoon, monsieur; _elle et son chien_." - -"Ah, indeed!" Odd wished her good day and walked off. He had stumbled -upon a mystery only Hilda herself might divulge: it might be very -simple, and yet a sense of anxiety weighed upon him. - -At five he went to call on a pleasant and pretty woman, an American, who -lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He was to dine with the Archinards, -and Katherine had said she might meet him at Mrs. Pope's; if she were -not there by five he need not wait for her. She was not there, and Mr. -Pope took possession of him on his entrance and led him into the library -to show him some new acquisitions in bindings. Mrs. Pope was not a grass -widow, and her husband, a desultory dilettante, was always in evidence -in her graceful, crowded salon. He was a very tall, thin man, with -white hair and a mild, almost timid manner, dashed with the collector's -eagerness. - -"Now, Mr. Odd, I have a treasure here; really a perfect treasure. A -genuine Grolier; I captured it at the La Hire sale. Just look here, -please; come to the light. Isn't that a beauty?" - -Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter; she did not approve of -the hiding of her lion in the library. She took him into the -drawing-room, where a great many people were drinking tea and talking, -and he was passed dexterously from group to group; Mrs. Pope, gay and -stout, shuffling the pack and generously giving every one a glimpse of -her trump. It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find himself -at last in Mrs. Pope's undivided possession. He was sitting on a sofa -beside her, talking and drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a -picture on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He put down the -cup of tea and put up his eyeglasses to look at it. A woman in a dress -of Japanese blue, holding a paper fan; pink azaleas in the foreground. -The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality made it unmistakable. -He got up to look more closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing -signature: "Hilda Archinard." - -He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise. - -"I didn't know that Hilda had reached this degree of popularity. You are -very lucky. Did she give it to you?" - -Katherine's engagement was generally known, and Mrs. Pope reproached -herself for having failed to draw Mr. Odd's attention before this to the -work of his future sister. - -"Oh no; she is altogether too distinguished a little person to give away -her pictures. That was in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The -two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of her things; for -high prices, too. Always the way, you know; a starving genius is allowed -to starve, but material success comes to a pretty girl who doesn't need -it. Katherine is so well known in Paris that Hilda's public was already -made for her; there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her due. -Her work is certainly charming." - -Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could not share Mrs. Pope's -feeling of easy pleasantness. Hilda _did_ need it. Certainly there was -nothing pathetic in doing what she liked best and making money at it. -Yet he wondered just how far Hilda's earnings helped the family; kept -the butcher and baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture he -thought of the black serge dress; somewhere about Hilda's artistic -indifference there might well lurk a tragic element. Did she not really -care to wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings perhaps went to -provide? The vague distress that had never left him since his first -disappointment at the Embassy dinner, that the afternoon's discovery at -the atelier had sharpened, now became acute. - -"I always think it such a pretty compensation of Providence," said Mrs. -Pope, gracefully anxious to please, "that all the talent that Hilda -Archinard expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in Katherine; -is part of herself as it were, like a perfume about her." - -"Yes," said Odd rather dully, not particularly pleased with the -comparison. - -"She is such a brilliant girl," Mrs. Pope added, "such a splendid -character. I can't tell you how it delighted me to hear that Katherine -had at last found the rare some one who could really appreciate her. It -strengthened my pet theory of the fundamental fitness of things." - -"Yes," Odd repeated, so vaguely that Mrs. Pope hurriedly wondered if she -had been guilty of bad taste, and changed the subject. - -When Peter reached the Archinards' at half-past six that evening, he -found the Captain and Mrs. Archinard alone in the drawing-room. - -"Hilda not in yet?" he asked. His anxiety was so oppressive that he -really could not forbear opening the old subject of grievance. Indeed, -Odd fancied that in Mrs. Archinard's jeremiads there was an element of -maternal solicitude. That Hilda should voluntarily immolate herself, -have no pretty dresses, show herself nowhere--these facts perhaps moved -Mrs. Archinard as much as her own neglected condition. At least, so -Peter charitably hoped, feeling almost cruel as he deliberately broached -the painful subject. - -Mrs. Archinard now gave a dismal sigh, and the Captain shook his head -impatiently as he put down _Le Temps_. - -Odd went on quite doggedly-- - -"I didn't know that Hilda sold her pictures. I saw one of them at Mrs. -Pope's this afternoon." - -There could certainly be no indiscretion in the statement, for Mrs. -Pope herself had mentioned the fact of Hilda's success as well known. -Indeed, although the Captain's face showed an uneasy little change, Mrs. -Archinard's retained its undisturbed pathos. - -"Yes," she said, "oh yes, Hilda has sold several things, I believe. She -certainly needs the money. We are not _rich_ people, Peter." Mrs. -Archinard had immediately adopted the affectionate intimacy of the -Christian name. "And we could hardly indulge Hilda in her artistic -career if, to some extent, she did not help herself. I fancy that Hilda -makes few demands on her papa's purse, and she must have many expenses. -Models are expensive things, I hear. I cannot say that I rejoice in her -success. It seems to justify her obstinacy--makes her independent of our -desires--our requests." - -Odd felt that there was a depth of selfish ignorance in these remarks. -The Captain's purse he knew by experience to be very nearly mythical, -and the Captain's expression at this moment showed to Peter's sharpened -apprehension an uncomfortable consciousness. Peter was convinced that, -far from making demands on papa's purse, Hilda had replenished it, and -further conjectures as to Hilda's egotistic one-sidedness began to shape -themselves. - -"And a very lucky girl she is to be able to make money so easily," the -Captain remarked, after a pause. "By Jove! I wish that doing what -pleased me most would give me a large income!" and the Captain, who -certainly had made most conscientious efforts to fulfil his nature, and -had, at least, tried to do what most pleased him all his life long, and -with the utmost energy, looked resentfully at his narrow well-kept -finger-nails. - -"Does she work all day long at her studio?" Peter asked, conscious of a -certain hesitation in his voice. The mystery of Hilda's afternoon -absences would now be either solved or determined. It was -determined--definitely. There was no shade of suspicion in Mrs. -Archinard's sighing, "Dear me, yes!" or in the Captain's, "From morning -till night. Wears herself out." - -Hilda, all too evidently, had a secret. - -"She ought to go to two studios, it would tire her less. Her own half -the day, and a large atelier the other." Assurance might as well be made -doubly sure. - -"Hilda left Julian's a long time ago. She has lived in her own place -since then, really lived there. I haven't seen it; of course I could not -attempt the stairs. Katherine tells me there are terrible stairs. Most -shockingly unhealthy life she leads, I think, and most, _most_ -inconsiderate." - -At the dinner-table Odd knew that Hilda had only him to thank for the -thorough "heckling" she received at the hands of both her parents. Her -silence, with its element of vacant dulness, now admitted many -interpretations. It hedged round a secret unknown to either father or -mother. Unknown to Katherine? Her grave air of aloofness might imply as -much, or might mean only a natural disapproval of the scolding process -carried on before her lover, a loyalty to Hilda that would ask no -question and make no reproach. - -"Any one would tell you, Hilda, that it is positively not _decent_ in -Paris for a young girl to be out alone after dusk," said the Captain. -"Odd will tell you so; he was speaking about it only this evening. You -must come home earlier; I insist upon it." - -Odd sat opposite to her, and Hilda raised her eyes and met his. - -He smiled gravely at her, and shook his head. - -"Naughty little Hilda!" but his voice expressed all the tender sympathy -the very sight of her roused in him, and Hilda smiled back faintly. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter brought Katherine the engagement ring a few days afterward. The -drifting had ceased abruptly, and he felt the new sense of reality as -most salutary. His personality and hers now filled the horizon; their -relations demanded a healthy condensation of thoughts before expanded in -wandering infinity, and he was thankful for the consciousness of -definite duty and responsibility that made past years seem the -refinement of egotism. - -Katherine looked almost roguishly gay that afternoon, and, even after -the ring was exclaimed over, put on, and Peter duly kissed for it, he -felt that there was still an expression of happy knowingness not yet -accounted for. - -"The ring wasn't a surprise, but you have one for me, Katherine." - -Katherine laughed out at his acuteness. - -"The ring is lovely; clever, sensitive Peter!" - -"You have quite convinced me of your pleasure and my own good taste. -What is the news?" - -"Well, Peter, a delightful thing has happened, or is _going_ to happen, -rather. Allan Hope is coming to Paris next week! Peter, we may have a -double wedding!" - -"Hilda has accepted him?" - -"Oh, we have not openly discussed it, you know. Mamma got his letter -this morning; very short. He hoped to see us all by Wednesday. Of -course, mamma is charmed. Hilda said nothing, and went off to the studio -as usual; but Hilda never _does_ say anything if she is really feeling." - -"Doesn't she?" There was a musing quality in Odd's voice. - -"_I_ think the child is in love with him; I thought so from the first. -Wednesday! A week from to-morrow! Oh, of course she will have him!" -Katherine said jubilantly. - -"Allan isn't the man to fail in anything. He has a great deal of -determination." - -"Yes, he seems the very embodiment of success, doesn't he? That is -because he doesn't try to see everything at once, like some people I -know." And Katherine nodded her head laughingly at her _fiance_. -"Intellectual epicureanism is fatal. Allan Hope has no unmanageable -opinions. His party can always count on him. He is always there, -unchanged--unless they change! He pins his faith to his party, and -verily he shall have his reward! By mere force of honest mediocrity he -will mount to the highest places!" - -"Venomous little Katherine! What are you trying to insinuate?" - -"Why, that Lord Allan isn't particularly clever, nor particularly -anything, except particularly useful to men who can be clever for him. -He is the bricks they build with." - -"Allan is as honest as the day," said Peter, a little shortly. - -"Honest? Who's a denygin' of it, pray? His honesty is part of his -supreme utility. My simile holds good; he is a brick; a dishonest man is -a mere tool, fit only to be cast away, once used." - -"How rhetorical we are!" said Odd, smiling at her with a touch of -friendly mockery. - -"Lord Allan most devoutly believes that in his party lies the salvation -of his country," Katherine pursued. "Oh, I have talked to him!" - -"You have, have you? Poor chap!" ejaculated Peter. "Will you ever serve -me up in this neatly dissected way, as a result of our confidential -conversations?" - -"Willingly! but only to yourself. Don't be afraid, Peter. I could -dissect myself far more neatly, far more unpleasantly. I have a genius -for the scalpel! And I have said nothing in the least derogatory to -Allan Hope. He couldn't disagree with his party, any more than a pious -Catholic could disagree with his church. It is a matter of faith, and of -shutting the eyes." - -If Hilda was so soon to pass to the supreme authority of an accepted -lover, Peter felt that for his own satisfaction he must make the most of -the time left him, and solve the riddle of her occupations. That -delicate sense of loyal reticence had held him from a hinted question to -even Katherine. If Katherine were as ignorant as he, a question would -arouse and imply suspicion. Odd could suspect Hilda of nothing worse -than a silly disobedience founded on a foolish idea of her own artistic -worth; a dull self-absorption, unsaved by a touch of humor. Yet this -very suspicion irritated Odd profoundly; it seemed logical and yet -impossible. He felt, in his very revulsion from it, a justification for -a storming of her barriers. - -That very evening, while Katherine played Schumann, the Captain having -gone out and Mrs. Archinard dozing on the sofa, he determined to have -the truth if possible. - -Hilda stood behind her sister, listening. Her tall slenderness looked -well in anything that fell in long lines, even if made by the most -_petite_ of _petite couturieres_, as the gray silk had been. The white -fichu covered deficiencies of fit, and left free the exquisite line of -her throat. Her head, in its attitude of quiet listening, struck Odd -with the old sense of a beauty significant, not the lovely mask of -emptiness. - -"Come and sit by me, Hilda," he said from his place on the sofa, "you -can hear better at this distance." - -The quick turn of her head, her pretty look of willingness were -charming, he thought. - -"I like to see you in that dress," he said, as she sat down beside him -on the sofa, "there isn't a whiff of paint or palette about it, except -that, in it, you look like a picture, and a prettier one than even you -could paint." - -"That is a very subtle insult!" Hilda's smile showed a most encouraging -continuation of the pretty willingness. - -"You see," said Odd, "you are not fair to your friends. You should paint -fewer pictures, and be more constantly a picture in yourself." She -showed a little uneasy doubtfulness of look. - -"I am afraid I don't understand you. I am afraid I am stupid." - -"You should _be_ a little more, and _act_ a little less." - -"But to act is to be," said Hilda, with a sudden laugh. "We are not -listening to Schumann," she added, a trifle maliciously. Her face turned -toward him in a soft shadow, a line of light just defining the cheek's -young oval, the lovely slimness of the throat affected Odd with a really -rapturously artistic appreciation. The shape of her small head, too, -with its high curves of hair, was elegant with an intimate elegance -peculiarly characteristic. An inner gentle dignity, a voluntary -submission to exterior facts of existence resulting in a higher freedom, -a more perfect self-possession, seemed to emanate from her; the very -poise of her head suggested it, and so strong and so sudden was the -suggestion that Odd felt his curiosity intolerable, and those groping -suspicions outrageously at sea. - -"Hilda," he said abruptly, "I went to your studio the other afternoon. -You were not there." - -Her finger flashed warningly to her lip, and her glance towards her -mother turned again to him, pained and beseeching. - -"She--they can't hear," said Odd, in a still lower voice. - -"No, I was not there," Hilda repeated. - -"And your father, your mother, Katherine, think you are there when you -are not. Is that wise? Don't be angry with me, my dear Hilda. You may -have confidence in me. Tell me, do you work somewhere else?" - -"_No._ I am not angry. You startled me." Her look was indeed shaken, -but sweet, touched even. "Yes, I work somewhere else." - -"And you keep it a secret?" - -She nodded. - -"Is it safe to keep secrets from your father and mother? Or is it a -secret kept for their sakes, Hilda?" Peter had made mental combinations, -yet he suspected that in this one he was shooting rather far from the -mark. No matter. Hilda looked away, and seemed revolving some inner -doubt. Her hesitation surprised him; he was more surprised when, half -unwillingly, she whispered, "Yes," still not looking at him. - -"For their sakes," repeated Odd, his curiosity redoubled. "Come, Hilda, -please tell me all about it. For _their_ sakes?" - -"In one way." Hilda spoke with the same air of half-unwilling -confidence. But that she should confide, that she should not lock -herself in stubborn silence, was much. - -"And as you need not keep it for my sake, you may tell me," he urged; "I -may be able to help you." - -"Oh! I don't need help." She turned a slightly challenging look upon -him. "It is no hardship to me, no trouble to keep my little secret." - -"You are really unkind now, Hilda." - -"No,"--her smile dwelt on him meditatively; "but I see no reason, no -necessity for telling you. I have nothing naughty to confess!" and there -was a touch of pride in her laugh. - -"Yes, you are unkind, for you turn my real anxiety to a jest." - -"You must not be anxious." Her eyes still rested on his, sweetly and -gently. - -"Not when I see you surrounded by an atmosphere of carping criticism? -When I see you coming home, night after night, worn out, too fatigued to -speak? When I see that you are thin and white and sad?" - -Hilda drew herself up a little. - -"Oh, you are mistaken. But--how _kind_ of you!" and again the irradiated -look lit up her face. - -"Does _that_ surprise you? Hilda, Katherine is in the dark about this -too?" - -"Katherine knows; but please don't ask her about it." - -"She doesn't approve, then?" - -"Not exactly. Besides, it might hurt her. Please don't ask me either. It -really isn't worth any mystery, and yet I must keep it a secret." - -Odd was silent for a moment, a baffling sense of pitfalls and -hiding-places upon him. - -"But Katherine ought to tell me," he said at last, smiling. - -"Now you are pushing an unfair advantage. She thinks, probably, that it -might hurt _me_. Really, _really_," she added urgently, "it isn't so -serious as all this seems to make it. The one serious thing is that it -_would_ hurt mamma, and that is why I make such a mountain out of my -mole-hill. How mystery does magnify the tiniest things!" - -"Tell me, at least, where you go in the afternoon. I mean to what part -of Paris, to what street." - -"I go to several streets," said Hilda, smiling resignedly, "since you -_will_ be so curious." - -"Where are you going to-morrow? Give me just an idea of your prowess." - -"I go to-morrow to the Rue d'Assas." - -"Near the Luxembourg Gardens?" - -"Yes." - -"I fancied you were walking yourself to death. And next day?" - -"Next day--the Rue Poulletier." - -"And where may that be? I fancied I knew my Paris well." - -"It is a little street in the Ile St. Louis. That is my favorite walk; -home along the quays. I get the view of Notre Dame from the back, with -all the flying buttresses, and the sunset beyond." - -"No wonder you are tired every night. You always walk?" - -"Usually. I have Palamon with me, and they would not take him in a 'bus. -But from the Ile St. Louis I often take the boat, and that is one of the -treats of Paris, I think, especially when the lights are lit. And on -some days I go to the Boulevard St. Germain. There; now you shall ask me -no more questions." - -Odd made no further comment on the information he had received, but he -resolved to be in the Rue d'Assas to-morrow. He did not intend to spy, -but he did intend to walk home with Hilda, and to make her understand -that one of the brotherly offices he claimed was the right to protecting -companionship. He revolved the _role_ and its possibilities, as he lay -back in the sofa watching Hilda's profile, and listening to Schumann--a -_role_ that could, at all events, not last long, since Allan Hope -arrived on Wednesday. Allan's arrival would put an end to mysteries, to -a need for brotherly protection. Odd felt a certain curiosity on this -point; indeed his attitude towards Hilda was one of continual curiosity. - -"So Allan Hope turns up Wednesday week," he said. "I shall be glad to -see Allan again." - -Hilda's silence might imply displeasure, but Odd, in an attitude of -manly laziness, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding an -ankle, thought a little gentle teasing quite allowable. - -"Will you go bicycling with him, unkind Hilda?" He was not prepared for -the startled look she turned on him. - -"When I would not go with _you_?" Her own vehemence seemed to embarrass -her. "I hardly know how to bicycle at all," she added lamely; "I would -have gone with you if I had had time." She looked away again, and then, -taking a book from the table beside her-- - -"Have you seen the last volume of _decadent_ poetry? Isn't the binding -nice?" Odd felt himself justly, but rather severely, reproved; yet the -gentle candor of her eyes was kind and soothing. Katherine was playing -the "Chopin" from Schumann's "Carnaval," and Peter, still holding his -ankle and feeling rather like a naughty little boy forgiven, did not -look at the fantastic volume she held, but at Hilda herself. How blue -the shadows were on the milky whiteness of her skin. Odd's eyes followed -the thick, soft eddies of hair about her forehead. - -"Aren't the margins generous?" said Hilda, turning the pages; "a mere -trickle of print through the whiteness. Some of the verses are really -very pretty," and she talked gayly, in her gentle way, as they went -through the pages together. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -It was just past four when Peter walked up the Rue Bonaparte and -stationed himself at the corner of the Rue Vavin and the Rue d'Assas, -opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. - -From this point of vantage he could look up and down the street, and -there would be no chance of missing her. She rarely reached home till -past six, and, even allowing for very slow walking, he was if anything -too early. - -He felt, as he opened his umbrella--it had begun to rain--that his -present position might look foolish, but was certainly justifiable. He -would ask Hilda no questions, force in no way her confidence, but really -on the gray dreariness of such a day she ought not to reject but rather -to be glad for his proffered and unexpected companionship. The combined -dreariness of the afternoon with its cold rain, the gray street, the -desolate-looking branches of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, -inspired him with a painful sympathy for Hilda's pursuits. She was, -probably, working in one of these tall, severe houses; perhaps with some -atelier chum fallen beneath the ban of Mrs. Archinard's disapproval, and -clung to with a girl's enthusiasm. Disobedient of Hilda, very. The chum -might be masculine. This was a new and disagreeable supposition; a Marie -Bashkirtseff, Bastien Lepage affair; Bohemia gloried in such -audacities; it was difficult to associate Hilda with such feats of -independence. There was a mystery somewhere, however, and if not -mountainous, it must be more than mere mole-hill. It was very windy, and -the rain blew slantingly. Katherine would find the situation amusing. A -vision of the sympathetic amusement was followed by the realization that -to betray his Quixotism might be to betray Hilda's confidence. Yet Hilda -had made no confidence. Peter rebelled at the mere suggestion of -concealment. Knowing all, Katherine could surely know that he had been -admitted into the outer courts of the mystery. He had ample time for -every variety of reflection, for he had been standing in the rain for -over an hour, when Hilda appeared not far from him, stepping from the -door of one of the largest and most dignified of the gray houses. She -paused on the wet pavement to open her umbrella, and Peter had a glimpse -of the wide red lips and small black beard of an unpleasant-looking -French youth, who seemed to loiter behind her with a certain air of -expectancy. It was impossible to connect his commonplace vulgarity of -aspect with Bohemian friendships or with Hilda, and, indeed, she gave -him a mere nod, not looking at him at all, and came walking up the -street, her skirt raised in one hand, showing slim feet and ankles. Odd, -as he contemplated her advance, was reminded of the light poise of a -Jean Goujon nymph. Her umbrella, lowered against the wind, hid him from -her. - -"Well, Hilda," he said amicably, when she was almost beside him--the -umbrella tilted back over her shoulder, and the rain fell on her -startled face--"Here I am." - -Her stare of utmost amazement was very amusing, but she looked white and -tired. - -"I must get a _fiacre_, I haven't your taste for plodding through rain -and mud, and you'll be kind enough to forgo the enjoyment for one day, -won't you?" Her stupefaction at last resolved itself into one word: -"Well!" she exclaimed with emphasis, and then she laughed outright. - -"By Jove, child, you look done up. I'm glad you're not angry, though. -You wouldn't laugh if you were angry, would you? Here is a _fiacre_." He -hailed the approaching vehicle; the _cocher's_ hat and cape, the roof of -the cab, the horse's waterproof covering glistened with rain in the -dying light. - -"You are very, very kind," Hilda said, rather gravely now, as they stood -side by side on the curb while the _fiacre_ rattled up to them. - -"I always intend to be kind, Hilda, if you will let me. Jump in." He -followed her, slamming the door with relief, and depositing the two -dripping umbrellas in a corner. - -"You must be drenched," said Hilda solemnly. - -"Imitation is the sincerest flattery, I believe; your fondness for -drenchings inspired me. You are not one bit angry, then? You see I ask -you no questions." - -"Angry? It was too good of you!" Her voice was still meditative. - -"I am much relieved that you should say so. I was only conscious of -guilt." - -"How long did you wait?" - -"About an hour." - -"And it was _pouring_!" - -"Oh no, not pouring. I have suffered far worse drenchings for far less -pleasure. One has no umbrella in Scotland on the moors." - -"One has, at least, the scenery." Hilda smiled. - -"Yes; the Rue d'Assas isn't particularly inspiring. I don't disclaim -honor; that corner was most wearing. Only the irritation of waiting for -my mysterious little truant kept me from finding it dreary." - -"Don't call me mysterious, please." - -"But you are mysterious, Hilda; very. However, I promised myself, and I -promise you, to say no more about it, to ask no questions." - -"You are so kind, so good." There was deep feeling in her voice; she -looked at him with a certain wistful eagerness. "You really do care, -don't you? Shall I tell you? I should like to. It seems silly not to -tell you, and I think you have a right to know--after to-day." - -"I really care a great deal, Hilda; but--I don't want to take an unfair -advantage, you know; I really have no right whatsoever. Wait till this -impulse of unmerited gratitude has passed." - -"But it is nothing to tell, really nothing. You see--I make money. I -have to--I teach. There; that is all." - -Peter looked at her, at the white oval of her face, at the unfashionable -little hat, at the shabby coat and skirt. A lily of the field who toiled -and spun. And a hot resentment rose within him as he thought of the -father, the mother, the sister. - -"Why _have_ you to?" he asked, in a hard voice. - -"We are so dreadfully poor, and we are so dreadfully in debt." - -"But why you alone? What can _you_ do?" - -"I can do a good deal. I have been very lucky. I love my work too, and I -make money by it, so it is natural. Mamma, of course, would think it -terrible, degrading even; but I can't agree with mamma's point of view; -I think it is quite wrong. I see nothing terrible or degrading." - -"No; nothing terrible or degrading, I grant you." - -"You think I am right, don't you?" - -"Yes; quite right, dear, quite right." - -Odd paused before adding: "It is the incongruity that is shocking." - -"The incongruity?" Hilda's voice was vague. - -"Between your life and theirs; yes." - -"Oh, you don't understand. I love my work; it is my pleasure. Besides, -they don't know; they don't realize the necessity either." - -"Why the teaching? I thought your pictures sold well." - -"And so they do, often; but I took up the teaching some years ago, -before I had any hope of selling my pictures; it is very _sure_, very -well paid, and I really find it a rest after five hours of studio work; -after five hours I don't feel a picture any longer." - -"Yet they must know that the money comes from somewhere?" - -Hilda's voice in replying held a pained quality; this attack on her -family very evidently perplexed her. - -"Mamma thinks it comes from papa, and papa, I suppose, doesn't think -about it at all; he knows, too, that I sell my pictures. You mustn't -imagine," she added, with a touch of pride and resentment, "that they -would let me teach if they knew; you mustn't imagine that for one -moment. And I don't mean to let them know, for then I couldn't help -them; as it is, my help is limited. The money goes, for the most part, -towards _guarding_ mamma. She could not bear shocks and anxiety." - -Odd said nothing for some moments. - -"How did it begin? how did you come to think of it?" he asked. - -"It began some years ago, at the studio where I worked when I first came -to Paris. There was a kind, dull French girl there; she had no talent, -and she was very rich. She heard my work praised a good deal, and one -day, after I had got a picture into the Salon for the first time, she -came and asked me if I would give her lessons. Fifteen francs an hour." -Hilda paused in a way which showed Odd that the recollection was painful -to her. - -"It seemed a _very_ strange thing to me at first, that she should ask -me. I had, I'm afraid, rather silly ideas about Katherine and myself; as -though we were very elevated young persons, above all the unpleasant -realities of life. But my common sense soon got the better of my pride; -or rather, I should say, the false pride made way for the honest. We -were _awfully_ poor just then. Papa, of course, never could, never even -tried to make money; but that winter he went in for exasperated -speculation, and really Katherine and I did not know what was to become -of us. To keep it from mamma was the great thing. Katherine was just -beginning to go out, and no money for gowns and cabs; no money, even, -for mamma's books. Keeping up with current literature is expensive, you -know, and mamma has a horror of circulating libraries. The thought of -poor mamma's empty life soon decided me. I remember she had asked one -day for John Addington Symonds's last book, and Katherine and I looked -at one another, knowing that it could not be bought. I realized then, -that at all events I could make enough to keep mamma in books and -Katherine in gloves. You can't think how nasty, how egotistic my vulgar -hesitation seemed to me. My life so full, so happy, and theirs on the -verge of ruin. There is something very selfish about art, you know; it -shuts one off so much from real life, makes one so indifferent to -scrapings and pinchings. I realized that, with my shabby clothes and -apparent talent, it was most natural for the French girl to think I -should be glad of her offer; and indeed I was. It was soothing, too, to -have her so eager. She wanted me very much, so I yielded gracefully." -Hilda gave a little smile of self-mockery. "I have taught her ever -since. She lives in that house in the Rue d'Assas; rich, bourgeois -people, common, but kind. She has no talent"--Hilda's matter-of-fact -manner of knowledge was really impressive--"but I don't feel unfair in -going on with her, for she really does see things now, and that is the -greatest pleasure next to seeing and accomplishing; and, indeed, how -rarely one accomplishes. Through her I have a great many pupils, for -other girls at the studio heard of her progress with me, and wanted -private lessons too. All my afternoons are taken up, and, with fifteen -francs an hour, you can see what a lot I make. It rather annoys me to -think of people far cleverer than I am who can make nothing, and I, just -because I have had luck, making so much. But among my pupils, I really -have quite a _vogue_; and I _am_ a good teacher, I really think I am." - -"I am sure your pupils are very lucky. You have a great many, you say?" - -"Yes, quite a lot. Sometimes I give three lessons in an afternoon. With -Mademoiselle Lebon, my first pupil, I spend all the afternoon twice a -week. She has a gorgeous studio." Hilda smiled again. "It is very nice -working there. To-morrow I go for two hours to an old lady; she lives in -the Boulevard St. Germain; she is a dear, and a great deal of talent -too; she does flowers exquisitely; not the dreadful feminine vulgarities -one usually associates with women's flower-painting; why all the -incompetents should fall back on those loveliest and most difficult -things, I never could understand. But my pupil really sees and selects. -Only think how funny! Katherine met her son at a dance one night--the -Comte de Chalons--insignificant but nice, she said; how little he could -have connected Katherine with his mother's teacher! Indeed, he never saw -me," and Hilda's smile became decidedly clever. "I suppose the -comtesse--she really is a dear, too--thinks that for a penniless young -teacher I am too pretty. Well, I make on an average thirty francs an -afternoon. I give Mademoiselle Lebon and Madame de Chalons double time -for their money, as old pupils. It would be easier to have a class in -my studio, of course, but I would lose many of my most interesting -pupils, who don't care about going out; then, too, it would be almost -impossible to keep my misdoings undiscovered. And there is all the -mystery!" She leaned forward in the dusk of the cab to smile at him -playfully. "I am glad to get it off my mind; glad, too, that you should -know why I am so often cross and dull; by the time I reach home I am -tired. I always bring Palamon, unless it is as rainy as to-day, and of -course he puts omnibuses out of the question; omnibuses mount up, too, -when one takes them every day. Excuse these sordid details." - -"I should think that a young lady who earns thirty francs an afternoon -might afford a cab." Odd found it rather difficult to speak. She was -mercifully unaware of the aspect in which her drudging, crushed young -life appeared to him. - -"And then, what would Palamon and I do for exercise!" said Hilda -lightly; "it is the walking that keeps me well, I am sure." - -His silence seemed to depress her gayety, for after a moment she added: -"And really you don't know how poor we are. I have no right to cabs, -really. As it is, it often seems wrong to me spending the money as I do -when we owe so much, so terribly much. Thirty francs is a lot, but we -need every penny of it, for mere everyday life. I have paid off some of -the smaller debts by instalments, but the weekly bills seem to swallow -up everything." - -His realization of this silent struggle--the whole weight of her -selfish family on her frail shoulders--made Odd afraid of his own -indignation. The remembrance of Mrs. Archinard's whines, the Captain's -taunts, yes, and worst of all, Katherine's gowns and gayety, almost -overcame him. He took her hand in his and held it as they rolled along -through the wetly shining streets. His continued silence rather alarmed -Hilda. The relief of full confidence was so great that she could not -bear it impaired by any misinterpretation. - -"You do understand," she said; "you do think I am right? My success -seems unmerited to you, perhaps? But I try to give my best. I seem very -selfish and unkind to mamma, I know, but I really am kind--don't you -think so?--in keeping the truth from her and letting her misjudge me. I -know you have thought of me that I was one of those selfish idiots who -neglect their real duties for their art; but I can do more for mamma -outside our home. And I read to her in the evening. Oh, how conceited, -egotistic, all that sounds! But I do want you to believe that I try to -do what seems best and wisest." - -"Hilda! Hilda!" he put her hand to his lips and kissed the worn glove. - -"You simply astound me," he said, after a moment; "your little life -facing this great Paris." - -"Oh, I am very careful, very wise," Hilda said quickly. - -"Careful? You mean that if you were not you might encounter -unpleasantnesses?" - -She looked at him with a look of knowledge that went strangely with her -delicate face. - -"Of course one must be careful. I am young--and pretty. I have learned -that." - -"My child, what other things have you learned?" And Odd's hold tightened -on her hand. - -"That terrifying things might happen if one were not brave. Don't -exaggerate, please. I really have found so few lions in my path, and a -girl of dignity cannot be really annoyed beyond a certain point. Lions -are very much magnified in popular and conventional estimation. A girl -can, practically, do anything she likes here in Paris if she is quiet -and self-reliant." - -Odd stared at her. - -"Of course I have always been a coward, after a fashion; I was -frightened at first," said Hilda. He understood now the look of moral -courage that had haunted him; natural timidity steeled to endurance. -"The greatest trouble with me is that I am too noticeable, too pretty." -She spoke of her beauty in a tone of matter-of-fact experience; "it is a -pity for a working woman." - -"My child," Odd repeated. He felt dazed. - -"Please don't exaggerate," Hilda reiterated. - -"Exaggerate? Tell me about these lions. How have you vanquished them?" - -"I have merely walked past them." - -His evident dismay gave her a merry little moment of superior wisdom. - -"They frightened me and that was all. One was the husband of a person I -taught. He used to lie in wait for me in the dining-room." Hilda gave -Odd a rather meditative glance. "You won't be angry? Angry with _me_ -for keeping on in my path of independence?" - -"No; I won't be angry with you." Odd felt that his very lips were white. - -"Well, he gave me a letter one day." Hilda paused. "What a despicable -man!" she said reflectively; "I taught his wife! I tore the letter in -two, gave it back to him, and walked out. Naturally, I never went back -again." Her voice suddenly broke. "Oh! it was horrible! I felt--" - -"What did you feel?" - -"I felt as though I were for evermore set apart from _my_ kind of girl, -from girls like Katherine. I felt smirched, as though some one had -thrown mud at me. That was morbid. I got over it." - -"Heavens!" Odd ejaculated. "Katherine knows this too?" he asked -bitingly. - -"Oh no, no! Mr. Odd, you are the only person. Never speak of it, will -you? Never, never! Poor Kathy! It would drive her mad!" - -"And she knows of your work?" - -"Yes; I had to tell her of that. She felt dreadfully about it. She -wanted me to go out with her, and have pretty dresses, and meet the -clever people she meets. You should have seen how happy she was in -London last spring! To have me with her! Wrenched away from my paint! Of -course I could not give up my work, even if there had been money enough. -I made her see that, and I can't say I made her agree, but I made her -yield. She takes a false view of it still, and worries over it. She -wants me to give up the teaching and paint pictures only; but that would -be too risky, they don't sell so surely. I have several on my hands. -But Katherine knows nothing of lions and unpleasantness. I must keep -such things secret, or I should not be allowed to go on." - -"You think I am safe. I must allow you, I suppose?" - -"Yes, you must." She smiled a very decided little smile, adding gravely, -"I have confided in you." - -"Trust me." There was silence in the cab for some moments. The tall -trees of the Cours la Reine dripped in a misty mass on one side; on the -other was the Seine with its lights. - -"And the young man I saw at the door as you came out to-day?" said Odd. - -"Oh, that is nothing, I hope. He is Mademoiselle Lebon's brother. A -harmlessly disagreeable creature, I fancy." Odd resumed his brooding -silence. "What are you thinking of so solemnly?" she asked. - -"Of you." - -"Why so solemnly? I am afraid you are laboring under all sorts of false -impressions. I have told my story stupidly." - -"The true impression has stupefied me. Good heavens! Theoretically I -believe in the development of character at all costs, and you have -certainly developed a _rara avis_ in the line; but practically, -practically, my dear little girl, I would have you taken care of in -cotton-wool, guarded, protected; you would always be lovely, and you -would have been happy. You have been very unhappy." - -Hilda was looking at him with that rather vague look of impersonal -contemplation characteristic of her. - -"How you exaggerate things," she said, smiling; "I have not been -unhappy." - -"The pity of it! The pathos!" Odd pursued, not heeding her comment. -Hilda looked at him rather sadly. - -"You mean that I should have lost my ignorance? Yes, that made me feel -badly," she assented. "That is the worst of it. One becomes so -suspicious. But, Mr. Odd, that is merely a sentimental regret. I have -not lost my self-respect. I am not ignorant of things I should like to -ignore; but one may know a great many things, and be unharmed." - -"My dear child, you are probably innocent of things familiar to many -modern girls. No knowledge could harm you. You have a right to more than -self-respect. You are a little heroine. Your unrewarded, unrecognized -fight fills me with amazement and reverence. I did not know that such -self-forgetful devotion existed." - -"Oh, please don't talk like that! It is quite ridiculous! We must have -money, and I can make it easily. I would be quite a monster if I sat -idly at home, and saw mamma in squalid misery. I merely do my duty." -Hilda spoke quite sharply and decisively. - -"Merely!" Odd ejaculated. - -A thought of the near future, of Allan Hope, kept him silent, otherwise -he might have indulged in reckless invective. He still held her hand, -and again he raised it to his lips. - -"That is a very stubborn and unconvinced salute, I am afraid," Hilda -said good-humoredly. - -"May I come and get you now and then?" he asked. - -"You think it would be wise?" - -"How do you mean wise, Hilda?" - -"I might be found out. I have given you my secret. You must help me to -keep it." - -"I may speak of it to Katharine--since she knows?" - -"Oh, of course, to Katherine. But don't _egg_ her on to worry me!" -laughed Hilda; "and speak to her with _reservations_--there are things -she must not know." - -Peter wondered if the child-friendship, the brotherly relations, -entitled him to seal the compact with a kiss upon her lips. He looked at -her with a sudden quickening of breath. Her dimly seen face was very -beautiful. This realization of her beauty's attraction at that moment -struck him with a sense of abasement before her. Surely no such poor tie -held him to this lovely soul. And, at the turn of his own thoughts, Odd -felt a vague stir of fear. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Odd was to take a walk in the Bois with Katherine the next morning, and -he found her waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delightfully -smart and wintry little figure. Katherine never failed in elegance, in -well-groomed finish--her low-heeled little boots, her irreproachable -snowy gloves, bore the same unmistakable stamp of the _cachet_ that -costs, that is not to be procured ready made. Odd, as a rich man, had -given very little thought to the power of money, and little thought to -Katherine's garments except as charmingly characteristic symbols of good -taste; but to-day his eye noted the black fur that fell about her -shoulders and trailed lustrous ends to her very feet, more for its -richness than its becomingness. - -Her bright though slightly grave smile failed to restore him to his -usual attitude of _bon camaraderie_. He smiled and kissed her, but he -was conscious of underlying soreness, conscious, too, that he might lose -his temper with Katherine; he had never lost it with Alicia. Katherine's -very superiority made it imperative to have things out with her. Kindly -resignation was an impossibility. He realized that not to admire -Katherine would make life with her intolerable. She would immediately -perceive reservations and she would revolt against them. He wondered -whether he should be the one to broach the subject of Hilda's -ill-treatment, and was amazed at a certain embarrassed shrinking, as -from a feeling too deep for words, that kept him silent as they walked -along, taking a short cut to the Place de l'Etoile, where the Arc stood -in almost cardboard clearness on the pale cold sky. It was Katherine who -spoke-- - -"Hilda told me of your kindness yesterday. It touched her very much." - -In some subtle way it irritated Odd to hear Katherine vouch for Hilda's -feeling. - -"And Hilda told you that I had been admitted into the mystery of the -Archinard family?" His voice was even enough, but it held a certain -keenness that Katherine was quick to recognize. - -"You don't think their mystery creditable, do you? Nor do I, Peter. But -mamma knows nothing of it, nor papa; and I have tried to dissuade Hilda -from the first." - -"My dear Katherine, the child has worked like a galley-slave for you -all! Your necessities were more potent facts than your dissuasions, I -fancy!" - -Katherine gave a look at the fine severity of the profile beside her. -She felt herself arraigned, and her impulse was towards rebellion. -However, her voice was gentle, submissive even, as she answered him-- - -"I know it must look badly to you--cruel even. But, Peter, don't you -know--you do know--how things _grow_ around one? One can hardly tell -where the definite wrongdoing comes in, or rather the definite -submission to a wrong situation." This was so true, that Katherine felt -immediately the mollified quality of his voice as he answered-- - -"I know. I know submission was forced upon you, no doubt. But I had -rather you had not submitted when once the situation grew definite. And -I wish, Katherine, that you had helped her in making the situation -easier. Granting that you could give her no material aid--granting that -her faculty is good luck--still the actual burden might have been -lightened." - -Odd paused; he could not say his thoughts outright--tell her that the -comparative luxury of her life and her mother's was outrageous, shocking -to him now that he understood its source. - -"It is part of Hilda's good luck that her pleasures are not costly, or -rather that she can herself defray their cost," said Katherine quietly. -"She has always lived in her art--seemed to care for nothing else. My -life would indeed have been dreadful had I not accepted the interests -that came into it. I have always felt, too, that in following the -natural bent of my own character, I was laying foundations that might -some day repay Hilda for everything. If she has friends--a public--it is -owing to me. It was I who persuaded her to come to London last spring. -I, therefore, who assured her future, in a sense, for there Allan Hope -fell in love with her. I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my -own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it nevertheless. I make -a circle for mamma; I brighten her life and my own and Hilda's, as far -as she will let me. Certain _tools_ are necessary--Hilda needs brushes -and canvases and studios; I, a few gowns, a few cabs, and a supply of -neat boots and gloves. Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I -own; but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I entreated her to give -up the idea--I said we would all starve together rather. She insisted, -and how can I interfere?" - -"I can understand, Katherine, that everything you say is most convincing -to yourself; I see the perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, -my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda denies herself -the commonest comforts of life, not only to give you the luxuries, but -because her high sense of honor rebels against spending on herself money -that is owed to others. Don't misunderstand me; I don't ask any such -perhaps overstrained sense of responsibility from you. You have, no -doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; but could it not -have been lived with a little less elegance? I am sure that you would be -welcomed everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and fewer gloves." - -Katherine flushed lightly; her flushes were never deep, and always -becoming. It certainly cut her now to hear his almost unconscious -implication--that from her he expected a less perfect sense of honor -than from her sister. She swallowed a certain wrathful mortification -that welled up, and answered with some apparent cheerfulness-- - -"You don't know your world, Peter, if you fancy that even Katherine -Archinard would be welcome in darned and dirty gloves!" - -Odd walked on silently. - -"And might she not be forced into taking some girlish distraction?" he -said presently. "It came out yesterday, with that astounding air of -_excusing_ herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the evening! -Could not you do that, Katherine, and let Hilda profit now and then by -the _entourage_ you have created for her?" - -Katherine's flush deepened. - -"Mamma doesn't care for my reading, and Hilda won't go out; she goes to -bed too early." - -"And then," Odd continued, ignoring her comment in a way most irritating -to Katherine's smarting susceptibility, "you might have gone with her -now and again to these houses where she teaches. You would have stood -for protection. You would have seen for yourself if, in this drudgery, -there lurked any unpleasantness, any danger. A girl of her extreme -beauty is--exposed to insult." - -Katherine gave him a stare of frank astonishment. - -"Oh, you must not give way to unpleasant romancing of that sort! Things -like that only happen in novels of the silliest sort--even to beauties! -And Hilda would have told _me_. She tells me _everything_. Really, -Peter, she must have given you a wrong impression; she enjoys her life!" - -"So she tried to convince me," said Odd, with a good deal of sharpness; -"there was no hint of complaint, regret, reproach, in Hilda's recountal; -don't imagine it, Katherine." - -Katherine was telling herself that never in all her life had she -experienced so many rebuffs. She contemplated her own good temper with -some amazement; she also wondered how long it would last. By this time -they were half-way down the Avenue du Bois; the day was fine and clear, -and the wintry trees were sharply definite against the sky. - -"I have never even seen her in a well-made gown," said Odd. - -"Hilda scorns the fashion-plate garment, as I do. We are both original -in that respect." - -"Your originality takes different forms." - -"Because it must adapt itself to different conditions, Peter. I won't be -scolded about my dresses. Men like you imagine that, because a woman -looks well, she must spend a lot. It isn't so with me. My dresses last -forever, and, to go into details, Hilda by no means clothes me. Papa has -money--now and then. Even Hilda could not support the family, and her -money mainly goes for mamma's books and oysters and hot-house grapes. If -she will not spend it on herself, and if, now and then, I accept some of -it, I cannot consent to feel unduly humiliated." - -There was a decisiveness in Katherine's tone that warned Peter to -self-control. Indeed the situation had been created for her. She had -owned up frankly to her distaste for it, her realization of its wrong. - -"I am not going to ask undue humiliation of you, my dear Katherine. -Don't think me such a priggish brute; but I am going to ask you to help -me to put an end to this." Katherine's smiles had returned. - -"Allan Hope will." - -Peter walked on, looking gloomy. - -"You won't realize that Hilda's life is the one that gives her the -greatest enjoyment. I have always envied Hilda till _you_ came; and even -now"--Katherine's smile was playful--"Allan Hope is very nice! Take -patience, Peter, till Wednesday." - -"Yes; we must wait." - -"I have waited for so long! Hilda could not have minded what you call -the 'drudgery.' She had only to lift her finger to end it." - -"Hilda would not be the girl to lift her finger." - -"You appreciate my Hilda, Peter; I am glad." Katherine gave his -abstracted countenance another of her bright contemplative glances. -There was nothing sly in Katherine's glances, and yet underlying this -one was a world of kindly, though very keen analysis; disappointment, -rebellion, and level-headed tolerance. This was decidedly not the man to -be fitted to her frame. He could not be moulded to a clever woman's -liking, for all his indefiniteness. On certain points of the conduct of -life, Katherine felt that she would meet an opposition sharply definite. -Katherine understood and was perfectly tolerant of criticism, but she -did not like it; nor did she like being put in the wrong. That Peter now -considered her very much in the wrong was evident. She was also aware -that the sophistry of her explanation had deceived herself even less -than it had deceived him. That Hilda spent her life in drudgery, and -that she spent hers in pleasure-seeking, were facts most palpable to -Katherine's very impartial vision. She knew she was wrong, and she knew -that only frank avowal would meet Peter's severity and touch his -tenderness and humor. If she heaped shame on her own head, he would be -the first to cry out against the injustice. - -Yet Katherine hesitated to own herself wrong. She was not sure that she -cared to place her lover in the sheltering and leading attitude of the -Love in the "Love and Life." The meek, trembling look of Life had -always irritated her in the picture. Katherine felt herself quite strong -enough to stand alone, and felt that she would like to lead in all -things. It was with a deep inner sense of humiliation that she said-- - -"Please don't be cross with me, Peter. Please don't scold me. I have -been naughty--far naughtier than I dreamed of--you have made me realize -it, though you are not quite just. But you must comfort me for my own -misdoings." - -As Katherine went on she felt an artistic impulsiveness, almost real, -and which sounded so real that Peter met the sweet pleading of her eyes -with a start of self-disgust. - -Peter was very tender-hearted, very sympathetic, very prone to -self-doubt. Katherine's look made him feel a very prig of pompous -righteousness. - -"Why, Katherine!" he said, pausing in his walk. "My dear Katherine! as -if I could not appreciate the slow growth of necessity! I only hope you -may never have to comfort me for far worse sins!" - -This was satisfactory. But Katherine's pride still squirmed. - -Odd went to meet Hilda on Thursday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The -distances were always great, and he insisted on cabs for the return -trip. Palamon must be tired, even if Hilda were not. He was too old for -such journeyings; and Hilda had smilingly to submit. Wednesday would end -it all definitely; Peter thought that he saw the end with unmixed -satisfaction, and yet when Allan Hope walked into his rooms early on -Wednesday morning, this Perseus of Hilda's womanhood gave the Perseus -of her childhood a really unpleasant turn of the blood. There was -something irritating in Allan Hope's absolute fitness for the _role_, -emphasizing, as it did, Peter's own unfitness, his forty years, and his -desultory life. - -Active energy, the go-ahead perseverance that knows no doubts, the -honest and loyal convictions which were all arranged for him from his -cradle, and which he would bequeath to his children unaltered, all -things that make for order and well-being, looked at one from Lord -Allan's clear, light eyes. Odd suddenly felt himself to be an uncertain -cumberer of the earth; failure personified beside the other's air of -inevitable success. He was fond of Hope and Hope fond of him, and they -talked as old friends talk, with the intimacy that time brings; an -intimacy far removed from the strong knittings of sympathy that an hour -may accomplish; for, though Odd understood Allan very well, Allan did -not muddle his direct views of things by a comprehension that implied -condonation. He thought it rather a pity that Odd had not made more of -his life. Odd's books weren't much good that he could see; better do -something than write about the things other men have done. Odd felt that -Allan was probably quite right. They hardly spoke of Hilda, but in -Hope's congratulations on Peter's engagement there was a ring of -heartfelt brotherly warmth that implied much, and left Peter in a gloomy -rage with himself for feeling miserable. Peter had not analyzed the -darks and glooms of the last few days. - -Growth does not admit of much self-contemplation. One wakes suddenly to -the accomplished change. If Peter was conscious of developments, he -defined them as morbid enlargements of that self-doubt which would -naturally thrill under the stress of new responsibilities. - -Only from the force of newly formed habit did he go to the Rue -Poulletier that afternoon, hardly expecting to meet Hilda. But Hilda -had, as yet, not interrupted her usual avocations. She emerged from the -gloomy portals of one of the old dismantled-looking _hotels_ that line -the Rue Poulletier with a certain dignity, and she looked toward the -corner where he stood with a confident glance. It was the second time he -had met her there, twice in the Rue d'Assas too. - -"It is so kind of you," she said, as she joined him and they turned into -the _quai_; "only you mustn't think that you _must_, you know." - -"_May_ I think that I _must_? Give me the assurance of necessity. I am -always a little afraid of seeming officious." - -Hilda smiled round at him. - -"Who is fishing? You know I love to have you come. You can't think how I -look forward to it." She was walking beside him along the _quai_. The -unobtrusive squareness of the "Doric little Morgue" was on their left, -as they faced the keen wind and the dying sunset. Notre Dame stood gray -upon a chilly evening sky of palest yellow. "I know now that I _was_ -lonely." - -"That implies the kindest compliment." - -"More than _implies_, I hope." - -"You really like to have me come?" - -"You know I do. I am only afraid that you will rob yourself--of other -things for me." - -The candor of her eyes was childlike. - -"My little friend." Odd felt that he could not quite trust himself, and -took refuge in the convenient assertion. - -The cold, clear wind blew against their faces; it ruffled the water, and -the gray waves showed sharp steely lights. The leafless trees made an -arabesque of tracery on the river and the sky. Hilda looked up at the -kind, melancholy face beside her, a faint touch of cynicism in her sad -smile; but the cynicism was all for herself, and it was not excessive. -She accepted this renaissance gratefully, though the disillusions of the -past were unforgettable. - -"Tell me, Hilda, that you will be my friend whatever happens--to you or -to me." - -"I have always been your friend, have I not?" - -"Have you, Hilda, always?" - -"I am dully faithful." Hilda's smile was a little baffling; it gave no -warrant for the sudden quickening of the breath that he had experienced -more than once of late. - -"I feel as if I had _found_ you, Hilda." - -"Did you _look_ for me, then?" - -The smile was now decidedly baffling and yet very sweet. - -"You know," she added, "I liked you from that first moment when you -fished me out of the river. It seems that you are fated to act always -the chivalrous part toward me." - -"I would ask no better fate. Hilda, you have seen Allan Hope? Not yet?" - -"No; not yet." Hilda's face grew serious. "He is coming to tea this -afternoon." - -"But you must be there." - -"Yes, I suppose I must." This affectation of girlish indifference seemed -to Odd more significant than noticeable shyness. - -"We must take a cab," he said, trying to keep his voice level. - -"Oh, it makes no difference. Cabs, you see, are never reckoned with in -my arrivals. I am warranted to be late." - -"But you must not be late." - -"But if I want to?" There was certainly a touch of roguery in her eyes. - -"If you want to and if I want you to, it shows that you are cruel and I -conscienceless. Here is a cab. Away with you, Hilda. _Au revoir_." - -"Aren't you coming too?" asked Hilda, pausing in the act of lifting -Palamon. - -"Not to-day; I can't." Odd knew that he was cowardly. "I shall see you -to-morrow? I suppose not." - -"Why, yes, if you come to the Boulevard St. Germain." Hilda had -deposited Palamon on the floor of the cab and still stood by the open -door looking rather dismayed. - -"Really!" - -"I shall go there." - -"I too, then. Remember our vow of friendship, Hilda. I wish you -everything that is good and happy." - -There was seemingly a slightly hurt look on Hilda's face as she drove -away. In spite of the vow, Peter feared that this was the last of Hilda, -of even this rather shadowy second edition of friendship. - -He had done his duty; to hurt oneself badly seems a surety of having -done one's duty thoroughly. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Hilda drove home, with Palamon leaning his warm body against her feet as -he sat on the floor of the cab. She put out her hand now and then and -laid it on his head, but absently. She leaned back presently and closed -her eyes, only rousing herself with a little start when the cab drew up -with a jerk in the Rue Pierre Charron. Palamon stood dully on the -pavement while she spoke to the cabman--but the _monsieur_ had paid him, -as Hilda had forgotten for the moment. Palamon was evidently tired too, -and with a little turn of dread she wondered if the time would come when -she must leave Palamon to a lonely day in the apartment. Mrs. Archinard -did not like dogs near her. Katherine was always out, and although -Rosalie the cook was devoted to the _tou-tou_, Hilda would miss him -terribly and he would miss her. - -She said to herself that if it came to that she would allow herself a -daily cab-fare rather than leave Palamon, and she toiled up the steep -stairs carrying him. Taylor opened the door to her. - -"Give me the dog, Miss Hilda; you do look that tired. You are to go at -once into the drawing-room, Miss. Lord Allan Hope has been waiting for -some time." - -Hilda was surprised to find that she had been thinking of Palamon -rather than of the ordeal before her. She felt calm now, perfectly, as -she walked into the drawing-room, a little taken aback, however, to find -Lord Allan there waiting for her and alone. - -Katherine was in the next room, her own pretty room, a rather perplexed -smile of expectancy on her face. Taylor brought in Palamon, and -Katherine gave him a drink and patted him kindly. Palamon would go with -Hilda to her new home--dear old Palamon! The thought of Hilda's new home -and homes--of the castle in Somersetshire and the shooting-lodge in -Scotland, and the big house in Grosvenor Square, deepened the look of -perplexity on Katherine's brow. - -While Palamon lapped the water, she watched him with an expression of -absent-minded concentration. She could hear nothing in the drawing-room, -except now and then the slightly raised quiet of Allan Hope's fine -voice. Presently there was a long silence, and Katherine paused near the -door. - -The quizzical lift of her eyebrows spoke her amused inquiry. She could -hardly imagine Hilda allowing herself to be kissed, and as the silence -continued, Katherine felt a touch of impatience color her sisterly -sympathy. Lord Allan's voice, pitched on a deep note of pain, startled -her. There followed quite a burst of ardent eloquence. With a little -_moue_ of self-disapproval Katherine bent her ear to the door. She heard -Lord Allan quite distinctly. He was pleading in more desperate accents -than she could have imagined possible from him, and Katherine caught, -too, the half frightened reiteration of Hilda's voice: "I can't, I -can't; really I can't. I am so--_so_ sorry, so sorry--" The -childishness of this helpless repetition brought a quick frown to -Katherine's brow. - -"Little idiot! Baby!" - -She straightened herself and stood staring at the gray houses across the -way. Then, at renewed silence in the drawing-room, she walked to the -mirror and looked at her amethyst-robed reflection. - -Her eyes lingered on the contour of her waist, the supple elegance of -the line that fell gleaming from her hip. She met the half-shamed, -half-daring glance of her deeply set eyes. The silence continued, and -Katherine walked out through the entrance and into the drawing-room. - -Hilda was sitting upright on a tall chair, looking at the floor with an -expression of painful endurance, and Lord Allan stood looking at her. - -He turned his eyes almost unseeingly on Katherine and remained silent, -while Hilda rose and put out her hand to him. Hilda had no variety of -metaphor; "I am so sorry," she repeated. - -She left her hand in his for one moment and then passed swiftly out of -the room. Katherine was left facing the unfortunate lover. Katherine -showed great tact. - -"Lord Allan, don't mind me. Sit down for a moment. Perhaps then you may -be able to tell me. Perhaps I can help you." - -"No good, Miss Archinard; it's all up with me." - -Her gentle voice evidently turned aside the current of his frank -despair. Instead of rushing out, he dropped on the sofa and looked at -the carpet over his locked hands. - -"I am not going to talk to you for a little while." - -The lamps were lighted and the tea-things all in readiness on the little -table. Katherine lit the kettle and turned a log on the fire. Lord -Allan's silence implied a dull acquiescence. He did not move until -Katherine came and sat down on the chair beside him. - -"_I_ am so sorry, too," she said, with a sad little smile. "Lord Allan, -I thought she cared for you." - -"I hoped so." - -"And have you no more hope?" - -"None--absolutely none. I tell you it's rough on a fellow, Miss -Archinard. I--I _adore_ that child." - -"Poor Lord Allan," Katherine gently breathed. She stretched out her slim -hand and laid it almost tenderly on his. Katherine was rather surprised -at herself, and to herself her motives were rather confused. "I should -have liked you as a brother, Lord Allan." - -"You are awfully kind." He lifted his dreary eyes and surveyed her -absently, but with some gratitude. "I suppose I had best be going," he -added suddenly, as if struck by the anti-climax of his position. - -"No, no; not unless you feel you must." Katherine put out her hand again -and detained his rising. "I can't bear to think of you going out alone -like that into the cold. Just wait. You are bruised. Get back your -breath. I am not going to be tiresome." - -Lord Allan leaned back in the sofa with a long sigh, relapsing into the -same half stunned silence, while Katherine moved about the tea-table, -measuring out the tea from the caddy to the teapot, pouring on the -boiling water, and pausing to wait for the tea to steep. Presently Lord -Allan was startled by a proffered steaming cup. - -"Will you?" she said. "I made it for you. It is such a chilly evening." - -"Oh, how awfully kind of you," he started from his crushed recumbency of -attitude, "but you know I really _can't!_" But at the grieved gentleness -of Katherine's eyes he took the cup. "It is too awfully kind of you. I -do feel abominably chilly." He gulped down the tea, and gave a half -shame-faced smile as she took the cup for replenishment. - -"No, don't get up," she urged, as he made an effort to collect his -courtesy; "let me wait on you," and she returned with a discreetly -tempting plate of the thinnest bread and butter. She sat down beside him -again, looking into the fire with kind, sad eyes as she stirred her tea. -She asked him presently, in the same quietly gentle voice, some little -question about the most recent debate in the House. Lord Allan had -rather distinguished himself in that debate; it was on the crest of that -wave of triumph that he had come to Hilda. From monosyllabic replies he -was led on to a rather doleful recitation of his own prowess; it seemed -that Katherine had followed it all in the newspapers, so tactfully -intelligent were her comments. He found himself sipping his third cup of -tea, enjoying in a dreary way the expounding of his favorite political -theories to the quiet, purple-robed figure beside him. He remembered -that Miss Archinard had always been interested in his career; she, of -course, was the intellectual one, though Hilda's beauty sent a sharp -stab of pain through him as he made the comparison; he appreciated now -Miss Archinard's kindness and sympathy with a brotherly warmth of -gratitude. When he at last rose to go, he was dejected; but no longer -the crushed individual of an hour before. - -"You have been too good to a beaten man," he said, taking her hand. - -"Oh, Lord Allan, by the laws of compensation you must lose _sometimes_. -Hilda, poor child, doesn't know what she has done; she cannot know. Her -little achievements bound the world for her. She doesn't see outside her -studio walls. _Your_ great world of action, true beneficent action, -would stun her. Do you leave Paris directly, Lord Allan? Yes! Then won't -you write to me now and then? I am interested in you. I won't relinquish -the claim of 'it might have been.' May I keep in touch with you--as a -sister would?" - -"You are too good, Miss Archinard." - -"To an old friend? A man I have followed and admired as I have you? Lord -Allan, I respect you from the bottom of my heart for the way in which -you have borne this knock-down from fate. You are strong, it won't hurt -you in the end. Let me know how you get on." - -Katherine's eyes were compelling in their candid kindness. Lord Allan -said that he would, with emphasis. As he went down the long staircase, -the purple-robed figure filled his thoughts with a reviving -beneficence. He felt that the blow was perhaps not so bad as he had -imagined--might even be for the best; better for him, for his career. -Katherine's words enveloped him in an atmosphere that was soothing. - -Left alone, Katherine finished her second cup of tea, and made, as she -looked thoughtfully into the fire, a second little _moue_ of -self-disapprobation. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next -morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of -illusions of late; for the regularity of his daily routine--the morning -spent with Katherine, and the afternoon with Hilda--excluded the hours -of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the discovered immunity. - -Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim sole tilted towards the -blaze, and she looked round at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd's -face wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, seemed -thinner, older than usual. He looked even haggard, Katherine thought. -She liked his thin face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as -Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pretences of any kind for -mockery to fasten on. The clever feminine eye is quick to remark the -subtlest signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine's eye was very -clever, and this morning, in looking at Odd, she was conscious of a -little inner sigh. Katherine had asked herself more than once of late -whether a husband, not only too superior for success, but morally her -superior, might not make life a little wearing. Some such thought -crossed her mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized that through -Allan Hope's discomfiture she herself was as wrongly placed as ever, and -Hilda's drudgery as binding. - -Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that general sense of _malaise_. - -One was that Allan Hope's smooth, handsome face was rather fatuous; the -face that knows no doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a -Katherine. - -Another thought held a keen conjecture on Peter's haggard looks. - -She put out her hand to him, and, stooping over her, he kissed her with -more tenderness than he always showed. Their engagement had left almost -untouched the easy unsentimental attitude of earlier days. - -"Well," he said, and Katherine understood and resented somewhat the -quick attack of the absorbing subject. She shook her head. - -"Bad news, Peter. Bad and very unexpected." - -Odd stood upright and looked at her. - -"Bad!" he repeated. - -"She refused him," Katherine said tersely, and her glance turned once -more from the fire to Peter's face. He looked at her silently. - -"She is a foolish baby," added Katherine. - -"She refused him--definitely?" - -"Quite. She had to face the music last night, of course. Mamma and papa -were rather--shabby--let us say, in their disinterested disappointment." -Odd flushed a little at the cool cynicism of Katherine's tone. "She told -me, when I removed her from the battlefield, that she doesn't love him -and never will. So, of course, from every high and mighty point of view -she is right, quite right." - -Katherine's eyes returned contemplatively to the fire. Odd was still -silent. - -"She ought to love him, of course; that is where she is so foolish. I am -afraid she has ruined her life. I love you, Peter, and he is every bit -as good-looking as you are." Katherine glanced at him with a sad and -whimsical smile. Peter, certainly, was looking rather dazed. He stooped -once more and kissed her. - -"Thank you for loving me, Katherine." - -"You are welcome. It _is_ a pity, isn't it?" - -"Yes, it is"--Peter seated himself on the sofa, where Allan had sat the -night before--"an awful pity," he added. "I am astonished. I thought she -cared for him." - -"So did I." - -"She cares for some one else, perhaps." Odd locked his hands behind his -head, and he too stared at the fire. - -"There is no one else she could care for. I know Hilda's outlook too -well." - -"And she refused him," he repeated musingly. - -"Really, Peter, that sounds a little dull--not like you." Katherine -smiled at him. - -"I feel dulled. I am awfully sorry. It would have been so satisfactory. -And what's to be done now?" - -"That is for you to suggest, Peter. My power over Hilda is very limited. -You may have more influence." - -"She might come and live with us." - -"That would be very nice," Katherine assented, "and it is very dear of -you to suggest it." - -Peter was conscious of sudden terrors that prompted him to add with -self-scorn-- - -"What would your mother do?" - -"Without her? I don't know." - -"Of course," Peter hastened to add, "as far as money goes, you know; you -understand, dear, that your mother shall want nothing. But to rob her of -the companionship of both daughters?" Peter rose and walked to the -window. It needed some heroism, he thought, to put aside the idea of -Hilda living with them; he tried to pride himself on the renunciation, -while under the poor crust of self-approbation lurked jibing depths of -consciousness. Heroism would not lie in renunciation, but in living with -her. The cowardice of his own retreat left him horribly shaken. - -Katherine watched him from her chair, calmly. - -"But Hilda's work must cease at once," he said presently, finding a -certain relief in decisive measures. "She won't show any false pride, I -hope, about allowing me to put an end to it." - -"It would be like her," said Katherine, sliding a sympathetic gloom of -voice over the hard reality of her conclusions; conclusions half angry, -half sarcastic. Peter was dull after all. Katherine felt alarmed, -humiliated, and amused, but she steeled herself inwardly to a calm -contemplation of facts. She joined him at the window. "What a burden you -have taken on your poor shoulders, Peter." Peter immediately put his arm -around her waist, and, though Katherine felt a deeper humiliation, she -saw that alarm was needless; a proof of Peter's superiority, a proof, -too, of his stupidity; as her own most original and clever superiority -was proved by the fact of her calm under humiliation. Could she accept -that humiliation as the bitter drop in the cup of good things Peter had -to offer her? Katherine asked herself the question; it was answered by -another. Just how far did the humiliation go? Peter's infidelity might -be mere shallow passion, _passagere;_ the fine part might be to feign -blindness and help him out of it. _Attendons_ summed up Katherine's -mental attitude at the moment. - -"Don't talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine," said Peter. "Don't try to -spoil my humble little pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, -what more can I ask?" He looked at her with kind, tired eyes. - -"I won't thwart you, but Hilda will." - -"Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. That must be soon, -Katherine." - -Katherine looked pensively out of the window. - -"We will see," she replied, with a pretty evasiveness. - -It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the Boulevard St. Germain that -afternoon. He walked at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to -cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did not think much, and -was convinced that his mind was a comparatively happy blank as he paused -before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her avocations. If he -made any definite reflections while he walked up and down between the -doorway and the next corner, they were on his last few conversations -with Hilda; and then on rather abstract points merely. He had drawn the -child out. He had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired for -enjoyment, not for display. He had found out that Hilda knew Italian -literature, from Dante to Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, -and loved it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandinavia was -deeply appreciated by her, and the essayists of France. Her tastes were -as delicately discriminative as Katherine's, but lacked that metallic -assurance of which lately Peter had become rather uncomfortably aware. -As for the English tongue, from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they -could range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson's sweet radiance. - -Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey and evaded any -trespassing beyond its limits. His reticence was not put to a prolonged -test. Hilda met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were -accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious guilt, though Peter was -not sure that she was not a "foolish baby." - -"Let us walk," she said, "it is such a lovely day." - -"We will walk at least till the sun goes. We will just have time to -catch the sunset on the Seine." - -"Yes; what a _lovely_ day! I wish I were ten, with short skirts, and a -hoop, that I could run and roll." - -"You would like a bicycle ride. Come to-morrow with Katherine and me." - -"I can't. Don't think me a prig, but my model is due and I am finishing -my picture. Thanks so much; and this walk is almost as good." - -"If Palamon is tired I will carry him, Hilda." - -"Oh, he isn't tired. See how he pulls at his cord. The sunlight is -getting into his veins. What delicious air." - -"The sunlight is getting into your veins too, Hilda. You are looking a -little as you should look." - -Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It was an original -characteristic of Hilda's that she did not seem at all anxious to talk -about herself, and Odd continued, looking down at her profile-- - -"That's what you ought to have--sunlight. You are a little white flower -that has grown in a shadow." Hilda did not glance up at him; she smiled -rather distantly. - -"What a sad simile!" - -"Is it a true one, Hilda?" - -"I don't think so. I never thought of myself in that sentimental light. -I suppose to friendly eyes every life has a certain pathos." - -"No; some lives are too evidently and merely flaunting in the sunlight -for even friendly eyes to poetize--to sentimentalize, as you rather -unkindly said." - -"Sunlight is poetic, too." - -"Success and selfishness, and all the commonplaces that make up a happy -life, are not poetic." - -"That is rather morbid, you know--_decadent_." - -"I don't imply a fondness for illness and wrongness. Rather the -contrary. It is a very beautiful rightness that keeps in the shade to -give others the sunshine." - -Hilda's eyes were downcast, and in her look a certain pale reserve that -implied no liking for these personalities--personalities that glanced -from her to others, as Odd realized. - -He paused, and it was only after quite a little silence that Hilda said, -with all her gentle quiet-- - -"You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or that my life has been an -unhappy life. It is very good of you to trouble about it, but I can't -claim the rather self-righteously heroic _role_ you give me. I think it -is others who live in the shadow. I think that any work, however feebly -done, is a happy thing. I find so much pleasure in things other people -don't care about." - -"A very nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You couldn't have told me -to mind my own business more kindly." Odd's humorous look met her glance -of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, "Will you try to find -pleasure in a thing most girls _do_ care for? Will you go to the -Meltons' dance on Monday? Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and -I said I would try to persuade you." - -"I _didn't_ mean to snub you." - -"Very well; convince me of it by saying you will come to the dance." - -The girlish pleasure of her face was evident. - -"Do you really want me to?" - -"It would make me very happy." - -"It is against my rules, you know. I can't get up at six and go out in -the evening besides. But I will make an exception for this once, to show -you I wasn't snubbing you! And, besides, I should love to." The gayety -of her look suddenly fell to hesitation. "Only I am afraid I can't. I -remember I haven't any dress." - -"_Any_ dress will do, Hilda." - -"But I haven't any dress. The gray silk is impossible." - -Peter's mind made a most unmasculine excursion into the position. - -"But you were in London last year. You went to court. You must have had -dresses." - -"Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came back. I had no need for -them. Her own wore out, and mine fit her very well--a little too long -and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps the white satin would -do, if it wasn't cut at the bottom; it could be let down again, if it -was only turned up. It is trimmed with _mousseline de soie_, and the -flounce would hide the line." - -Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; he found it horribly -touching. "It might do." - -"It must do. If it doesn't, another of Katherine's can be -metamorphosized." - -"And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don't know many -people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I -should like to _depend_ on you; and if I am left sitting alone in a -corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?" Her -smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look. - -"Hilda, you are quite frivolous." Terms of reckless endearment were on -his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. "How shall I manoeuvre -that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle -occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no." - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - - -Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for -several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he -would see her at the Meltons' on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had -been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a -witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that -might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine -had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety. - -The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton's -apartment--one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the -Avenue du Bois de Boulogne--and after greeting his hostess, he waited -for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully -apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine's -smooth dark head, the Captain's correctly impassive good looks, and -Hilda's loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter -thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility -as acute as a fond mother's, he saw--felt, even--the stir, the ripple of -inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of -a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious -of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a -bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the -very air with sudden perfume. "Her dear little head," "Her lovely little -head," he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally -spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, -which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. -Then, turning to Hilda-- - -"The white satin _does_," he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did -not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her -sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen -people already. - -"See that Hilda, in her _embarras de choix_, doesn't become too much -embarrassed," she said to Peter. "Exercise for her a brotherly -discretion." - -The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton--a pretty little woman with -languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself -there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her -exclusiveness, which she took _au grand serieux_, highly amused -Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton's. -She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself -at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as -tolerant of a millionaire _parvenu_ as might be a duchess with a -political _entourage_ to manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton's anxious -social self-satisfaction humorous--a fact of which Mrs. Melton was -unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly -impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull too, and a few grievances -whispered behind her fan in Katherine's ear _en passant_--for subject, -the unfortunate and eternal _nouveau riche_--made pleasant gravity -difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her -dull and funny. - -Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the -opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes. - -"I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, -led by your father and Mrs. Melton." - -He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced -it--charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, -surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, -with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else's hair -was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was -a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and -floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz -came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his -felicity carry him too far into conjecture. - -"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked, as they joined the eddy circling -around Mrs. Melton's ballroom. - -"So much; thanks to you." Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at -the joy of dancing. "I had almost forgotten how delicious it was." - -"More delicious than the studio, isn't it?" - -"You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche -could do it--all light and movement and color. I should like to come -out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows -everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls' throats. There is -the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly -heads! Isn't that worth while?" - -Odd's eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda's throat. - -"Everything you do is worth while--from painting to dancing. You dance -very well." - -The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display -of which he recognized the gown's quondam possessor, gave him a little -pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of -cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the -happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue--the long fatigue of a -weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge -of the aloofness--the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night -Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago. - -"You dance well, too, Mr. Odd," she said. - -"I very seldom waltz." - -"In _my_ honor then?" - -"Solely in your honor. I haven't waltzed five times in one evening with -one young woman--for ages!" - -"You haven't waltzed five times with me yet. I may wear you out!" - -"What an implied reflection on my forty years! Do I seem so old to you, -Hilda?" - -"No; I don't think of you as old." - -"But I think of you as young, very young, deliciously young." - -"Deliciously?" she repeated. "That is a fallacy, I think. Youth is sad; -doesn't see things in _value_; everything is blacker or whiter than -reality, so that one is disappointed or desperate all the time." - -"And you, Hilda?" - -Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful defiance. - -"Don't be personal." - -"But you were. And, after the other day--your declaration of -contentment." - -"Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. I hate people who talk -about themselves," Hilda added; "it's the worst kind of immodesty. -Material and mental braggarts are far more endurable than the people who -go round telling about their souls." - -"Severe, rigid child!" Odd laughed, and, after a little pause, laughed -again. "You are horribly reserved, Hilda." - -"Very sage when one has nothing to show. Silence covers such a multitude -of sins. If one is consistently silent, people may even imagine that one -isn't dull," said Hilda maliciously. - -"You are dull and silent, then?" - -"I have few opinions; that is, perhaps, dulness." - -"It may be a very wide cleverness." - -"Yes; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz is yours too, you know. -You have quite a cluster here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an -ice." - -Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on a small sofa in a corner -of the ballroom. Katherine passed, dancing; her dark eyes flashed upon -them a glance that might have been one of amusement. Odd was conscious -of a painful effort in his answering smile. - -Hilda's eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her sister with a fond -contemplation. - -"Isn't that dress becoming to her? The shade of deepening, changing -rose." - -"Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely." - -"Do you notice dresses, care about them?" - -"I think I do, sometimes; not in detail as a woman would, but in the -blended effect of dress and wearer." - -"I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you -noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? -I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has -visions of crushed ribs, don't you think?" - -Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile -that he still felt to be painful. "And is not this lace gathered around -the shoulders pretty too?" Hilda turned to him for inspection. - -"You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, -Hilda." Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her -gown. - -"The lace is mamma's. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem -hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has -Meredith's last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing -all the talking. _You_ talk now." - -"About Meredith, your dress, or you?" - -"About yourself, if you please." - -"It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me -than you were in yourself." - -Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers -with a force which almost compelled her-- - -"No; I am very much interested in you." Odd was silent, studying her -face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown--the -expression of painfully controlled emotion. - -"There is nothing comparably interesting in me," he said; "I have had my -story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story." - -"What do you mean?" - -"Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn't." - -"And your books?" - -"They are as negative as I am." - -"Yet they have helped me to live." Hilda looked hard at him while she -spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the -emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white. - -"Helped you to live, Hilda!" he almost stammered; "my gropings!" - -"You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like -Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and -lit my path!" She smiled, adding: "I suppose you think you have failed -because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you -yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success." - -"I didn't even know you read my books." - -"I know your books very well; much better than I know you." - -"Don't say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them." - -"One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. -Perhaps you _do_ even better than you write." - -"Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison." His voice -stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile-- - -"Shall we dance?" - -In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the -dance's circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of -desire; he must hear from Hilda's lips why she had refused Allan Hope. - -An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed his mind once and again -with a dull ache of self-reproach, all the more insistent from his -realization that its cause was not so much the infidelity to Katherine -as that Hilda would think him a sorry villain. - -Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying herself. She knew that his -energy this evening was on Hilda's account; he had claimed the -responsibility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider herself -neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, with perhaps a display of -the dulness she had discovered in him, upon her confidence and common -sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray that confidence; there -was some rather dislocated consolation in that. - -Hilda was a little breathless when he came to claim her for the second -cluster of waltzes. It was near the end of the evening. - -"I have been dancing _steadily_," she announced, "and twice down to -supper! Did you try any of the narrow little sandwiches? So good!" - -"And you still don't grudge me my waltzes?" - -"I like yours _best_!" she said, smiling at him as she laid her hand on -his shoulder. They took a few turns around the room and then Hilda owned -that she was a little tired. They sat down again on the sofa. - -"Hilda!" said Odd suddenly, "will you think me very rude if I ask you -why you refused Allan Hope?" - -Hilda turned a startled glance upon him. - -"No; perhaps not," she answered, though the voice was rather frigid. - -"You don't think I have a right to ask, do you?" - -"Well, the answer is so evident." - -"Is it?" Hilda had looked away at the dancers; she turned her head now -half unwillingly and glanced at him, smiling. - -"I would not have refused him if I had loved him, would I? You know -that. It doesn't seem quite fair, quite kind, to talk of, does it?" - -"Not to me even? I have been interested in it for a long time. Katherine -told me, and Mary." - -"I don't know why they should have been so sure," said Hilda, with some -hardness of tone. "I never encouraged him. I avoided him." She looked at -Odd again. "But I am not angry with you; if any one has a right, you -have." - -"Thanks; thanks, dear. You understand, you know my interest, my -anxiety. It seemed so--happy for both. And you care for no one else?" - -"No one else." Hilda's eyes rested on his with clear sincerity. - -"Don't you ever intend to marry, Hilda?" Odd was leaning forward, his -elbows on his knees, and looking at the floor. There was certainly a -tension in his voice, and he felt that Hilda was scanning him with some -wonder. - -"Does a refusal to take one person imply that? I have made no vows." - -"I don't see--" Odd paused; "I don't see why you shouldn't care for -Hope." - -"Are you going to plead his cause?" she asked lightly. - -"Would it not be for your happiness?" Odd sat upright now, putting on -his eyeglasses and looking at her with a certain air of resolution. - -"I don't love him." Hilda returned the look sweetly and frankly. - -"What do you know of love, you child? Why not have given him a chance, -put him on trial? Nothing wins a woman like wooing." - -"How didactic we are becoming. I am afraid I should really get to loathe -poor Lord Allan if I had given him leave to woo me." - -"I suppose you think him too unindividual, too much of a pattern with -other healthy and hearty young men. Don't you know, foolish child, that -a good man, a man who would love you as he would, make you the husband -he would, is a rarity and very individual?" - -Odd found a perverse pleasure in his own paternally admonishing -attitude. Hilda's lightly amused but touched look implied a confidence -so charming that he found the attitude sublimely courageous. - -"I suppose so," she said, and she added, "I haven't one word to say -against Lord Allan, except--" She paused meditatively. - -"Except what?" Odd asked rather breathlessly. - -"He doesn't really _need_ me." - -"Doesn't _need_ you! Why, the man is desperately in love with you!" - -"He needs a wife, but he doesn't need _me_." - -"You are subtle, Hilda." - -"I don't think I am _that_." - -"You are waiting, then, for some one who can satisfy you as to his -_need_ of you?" - -"I shall only marry that person." - -Hilda jumped up. "But I'm not waiting at all, you know. _Dansons -maintenant!_ Your task is nearly over!" - -It was very late when Odd gave Hilda up to her last partner, and joined -Katherine in a small antechamber, where she was sitting among flowers, -talking to an appreciative Frenchman. This gentleman, with the -ceremonious bow of his race, made away when Miss Archinard's _fiance_ -appeared, and Odd dropped into the vacated seat with a horrible sinking -of the heart. The dull self-reproach was now acute, he felt meanly -guilty. Katherine looked at him funnily--very good-humoredly. - -"I didn't know you had it in you to dance so well and so persistently, -Peter. You have done honor to Hilda's ball." - -"I hope I wasn't too selfishly monopolizing." - -"Oh, you had a right to a certain monopoly since, owing to you only, she -came," and Katherine added, smiling still more good-humoredly, "I am -_not_ jealous, Peter." - -He turned to look at her. The words, the playful tone in which they were -uttered, struck him like a blow. His guilty consciousness of his own -feeling gave them a supreme nobility. She was _not_ jealous. What a cur -he would be if ever he gave her apparent cause for jealousy. The cause -was there; his task must be to keep it hidden. - -"But suppose _I_ am?" he said; "you haven't given me a single dance." - -Katherine's smile was placid; she did not say that he had not asked for -one. Indeed they had rarely danced together. - -"I think of going to England in a day or two, Peter," she observed. "The -Devreuxs have asked me to spend a month with them." - -Peter sat very still. - -"A sudden decision, Kathy?" - -"No, not so sudden. Our _tete-a-tete_ can't be prolonged forever." - -"Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the wedding day must be fixed -before you go." - -"I yield. The first part of May." - -"Three months! Let it be April at least, Kathy." - -"No, I am for May." - -"It's an unlucky month." - -"Oh, _we_ can defy bad luck, can't we?" Katherine smiled. - -"If you go away, I shall," said Odd, after a moment's silence. - -"Why, I thought you would stay here and look after mamma--and Hilda," -said Katherine slowly, and with a wondering thought for this revealment -of poor Peter's folly. Peter then intended to heroically sacrifice his -infidelity. That he should think she did not see it! - -"I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip through Provence would set -me right. I should come back through Touraine just at the season of -lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in Paris. I see so little -of your mother--and Hilda. Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after -her lessons." - -"I am afraid that mamma can't spare Taylor." - -Peter moved impatiently. - -"Katherine, may I give you some money? She would take it from you. -Persuade her to give up that work. You could do it delicately." - -"As I have told you, you exaggerate my influence. She would suspect the -donor. She would not take the money." - -"I could speak to your father; lend him a sum." - -Katherine flushed. - -"It would make him very angry with her if he knew. And the lessons are a -fixed sum; only a steady income would be the equivalent." - -"Oh dear!" sighed Peter. He suddenly realized that of late he had talked -of little else but Hilda in his conversations with Katherine. - -"When do you go to London, dear?" he asked. - -"The day after to-morrow." Katherine, above the waving of her fan, -smiled slightly at his change of tone. "Will you miss me, Peter?" - -"All the more for being cross with you. It is very wrong of you to play -truant like this." - -"It will be good for both of us." Katherine's voice was playful, and -showed no trace of the bitterness she was feeling. "I might get tired of -you, Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence is the best fuel -to appreciation. I shall come back realizing more fully than ever your -perfection." - -"What a sage little person it is! Sarcastic as well! May I write to you -very often?" - -"As often as you feel like it; but don't force feeling." - -"May I describe chateaux and churches? And will you read my descriptions -if I do?" - -"With pleasure--and profit. Let me know, too, how the book gets on. Can -I do anything for you at the British Museum?" - -It struck Katherine that the change in their relation which she now -contemplated as very probably definite might well allow of a return to -the first phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan Hope which -she had received that morning, though satisfactory in many respects, was -not quite so from an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friendship -with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for any woman, and Katherine -perhaps, with an excusable malice, rather anticipated the time when -Peter might have regrets, and find in that friendship the solace of -certain disappointments from which Katherine had almost decided not to -withhold him. - -"I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, even in London, shall -I?" said Odd, in reply to an offer more generous than he could have -divined. "Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. Don't -be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the Elgin Marbles if you like. I -shall set you no heavier task." - -"They are so profoundly melancholy in their cellared respectable abode, -poor dears! I know they would have preferred dropping to pieces under a -Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in an insulting -immortality. The frieze especially, stretched round the ugly wall like a -butterfly under a glass case!" Odd laughed with more light-heartedness -than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced him to feel that he still -found Katherine charming. There must certainly be safety in that -affectionate admiration. - -"I won't even ask you to harrow your susceptibility by a look at the -insulted frieze, then; you must know it well, to enter with such -sympathy into its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I shall be -lonely down there. A daily letter would be none too many." - -"I can't quite see why you are exiling yourself. Of course, the weather -here is nasty just now. I have noticed your cough all the evening. Come -and say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so fix your hour." - -"Our usual hour? In the morning?" - -"You will not see Hilda then." - -"Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. You will kiss her _au -revoir_ for me." - -Odd felt a certain triumph. - -Katherine's departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for -makeshift flight. After a month or two of solitary wrestling and -wandering, he might find that the dubiously directed forces of -Providence were willing to help one who helped himself. - -His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly -entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him. -The disclosure of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how -face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight -the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest -emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too -late? A love as far removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as it -was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; -and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and -kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more -fearful shipwreck. - -Hilda's selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave -her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be -dreaded than any hurt to himself. - -And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - - -An April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd's return. A rather -prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs. - -He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had -announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied -some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard's. -Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the -Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she -knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter -had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the -Captain's projected jaunt. He surmised that her father's absence would -lighten Hilda's load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain's -hands--on the understanding that most of it was to be given to -Hilda--but _from_ her father, would relieve her from the necessity for -teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, -but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking -individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told -him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed -"_toujours souffrante_," and "Mademoiselle 'Ilda"--Odd had hesitated -uncomfortably before asking for her--was out. "_Pas bien non plus, -celle-la_," she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still -more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; "_Elle -s'ereinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle_." With a sick -sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she -might be found. All the morning, it seemed "_Il faut bien qu'elle soigne -madame, et puis elle m'aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop -lourde_," and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that "_Madame est -tres, mais tres exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une -dame comme celle-la_." - -Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her -days he should probably find her in the Rue d'Assas, and, with the -angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda -excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in -fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he -caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. -The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half -dazed her evidently. - -"You? I can hardly believe it!" she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that -plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was -wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips -a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had -reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the -slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable -little hat symbolized a biting poverty. - -"Hilda! Hilda!" was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He -was aghast. - -"I _am_ glad to see you," she said, and her voice had a forced gayety -over its real weakness; "I haven't seen any of my people for so long, -except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn't it? -Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I -could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and -Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and -mamma is much, _much_ better. As for papa, the last time I heard from -him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that -he hasn't been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last -letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you -are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking." - -Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be -over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control. - -"If I had known I would have come sooner," he said; "you would have let -me help you, wouldn't you?" - -"I am afraid you couldn't have _helped_ me. That is the worst of -illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up." - -"My poor child!" Odd inwardly cursed himself. "If I had known! What have -you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look--" - -"Fagged, don't I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since -you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We'll all go -to the _vernissage_ together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer -have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for -mamma." - -"Taylor helped you, I suppose?" - -"Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and -indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that -she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, -of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed -her." There was an explanatory note in Hilda's voice; indeed Odd's -silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. "It made double -duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not -minded." - -"And Wilson?" - -"He went with papa. I don't think papa could live without Wilson." - -"Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of your ghastly little face. -You have been housemaid, _garde-malade_, and bread-winner. Had you no -money at all?" Hilda flushed--the quick flush of physical weakness. - -"Yes, at first," she replied; "papa gave me quite a lot before going, -and that has paid part of the doctor's bills, and my lessons brought in -the usual amount." - -"Could you not have given up the lessons for the time being?" - -"I know you think it dreadful in me to have left mamma for all those -afternoons." Her acceptation of a blame infinitely removed from his -thoughts stupefied Odd. "And mamma has thought it heartless, most -naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy and kind. The doctor came three -times a day and I can explain to _you_"--Hilda hesitated--"the money -papa gave me went almost immediately--some unpaid bills." - -"What bills?" Odd spoke sternly. - -"Why, we owe bills right and left!" said Hilda. - -"But what bills were these?" - -"There was the rent of the apartment for one thing; we should have had -to go had that not been paid; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker; they -threatened to seize the furniture." - -"Katherine's dressmaker?" - -"Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that she would be so impatient; -but I suppose, on hearing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman -became frightened." Peter controlled himself to silence. The very -fulness of Hilda's confidence showed the strain that had been put upon -her. "And then," she went on, as he did not speak, "some of the money -had to go to Katherine in England. Poor Kathy! To be pinched like that! -She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling to tip the -servants and get her railway ticket to Surrey." - -"Why did she not write to me? Considering all things--" - -"Oh!" said Hilda--her tone needed no comment--"we have not quite come to -that." She added presently and gently, "I had money for her." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it; the glove was loose upon it. - -"And now," said Hilda, leaning forward and smiling at him, "you have -heard me _filer mon chapelet_. Tell me what you have been doing." - -"My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too grossly egotistic after -your story." - -"Has my story sounded so dismal? _I_ have been egotistic, then. I had -hoped that perhaps you would write to me," she added, and a delicately -malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard at her, with a -half-dreamy stare. - -"I thought of you," he said; "I should have liked to write." - -"Well, in the future do, please, when you feel like it." - -Mrs. Archinard was extended on the sofa in the drawing-room when they -reached the Rue Pierre Charron. The crisp daintiness of -pseudo-invalidism had withered to a look of sickly convalescence. She -was much faded, and her little air of melancholy affectation pitifully -fretful. - -"You come before my own daughter, Peter," she said; "I don't _blame_ -Katherine, since Hilda tells me that she did not let her know of my -dangerous condition." - -"Not _dangerous_, mamma," Hilda said, with a patient firmness not -untouched by resentment, a touch to Odd most new and pleasing. "The -doctor had perfect confidence in me, and would have told me. I should -have sent for papa and Katherine the moment he thought it advisable. -Under the circumstances they could have done nothing for you that I did -not do." Hilda had, indeed, rather distorted facts to shield Katherine. -What would Mrs. Archinard have said had she known that Katherine, in -answer to a letter begging her to return, had replied that she _could_ -not? Even in Hilda's charitable heart that "_could_ not" had rankled. -Odd's despairing gloom discerned something of this truth, as he realized -that the uncharacteristic self-justification was prompted by a rebellion -against misinterpretation before _him_. Mrs. Archinard showed some -nervous surprise. - -"Very well, very well, Hilda," she said, "I am sure I ask no sacrifices -on _my_ account. One may die alone as one has lived--alone. My life has -trained me in stoicism. You had better wash your face, Hilda. There is a -great smudge of charcoal on your cheek," and, as Hilda turned and walked -out, "I have looked on the face of the King of Terrors, Peter. Peter! -dear old homely name! the faithful ring in it! It is easy for Hilda to -talk! I make no complaint. She has nursed me excellently well--as far as -her nursing went. But she has a _hard_ soul! no tenderness! no sympathy! -To leave her dying mother every afternoon! To sacrifice me to her -_painting_! At such a time! Ah me!" Large tears rolled down Mrs. -Archinard's cheeks, and her voice trembled with weakness and self-pity. -Odd, in his raging resentment, could have exploded the truth upon her; -the tears arrested his impulse, and he sat moodily gazing at the floor. -Mrs. Archinard raised her lace-edged handkerchief and delicately touched -away the tears. - -"I have given my whole life, my whole life, Peter, for my girls! I have -borne this long exile from my home for their sakes!" At Allersley Mrs. -Archinard had never ceased complaining of her restricted lot, and had -characterized her neighbors as "yokels and Philistines." Speaking with -her handkerchief pressed by her finger-tips upon her eyelids, she -continued, "I have asked nothing of them but sympathy; _that_ I have -craved! And in my hour of need--" Mrs. Archinard's _point de Venise_ -bosom heaved once more. Odd took her hand with the unwilling yet pitying -kindness one would show towards a silly and unpleasant child. - -"I don't think you are quite fair," he said; "Hilda looks as badly as -you do. She has had a heavy load to carry." - -"I told her again and again to get a _garde-malade_, two if necessary." -Mrs. Archinard's voice rose to a higher key. "She has chosen to ruin her -appearance by sitting up to all hours of the night, and by working all -day in that futile studio." - -"_Garde-malades_ are expensive." Odd could not restrain his voice's -edge. - -"Expensive! For a dying mother! And with all that is lavished on her -studio--canvases, paints, models!" - -The depths of misconception were too hopelessly great, and, as Mrs. -Archinard's voice had now become shrilly emphatic, he kept silence, his -heart shaken with misery and with pity, despairing pity for Hilda. She -re-entered presently, wearing on her face too evident signs of -contrition. She spoke to her mother in tones of gentle entreaty, humored -her sweetly, gayly even, while she made tea. - -"You know I cannot touch cake, Hilda." - -"There are buttered _brioches_, mamma, piping hot." - -"Properly buttered, I hope. Rosalie usually places a great clot in the -centre, leaving the edges uneatable." - -"Mamma is like the princess who felt the pea through all the dozens of -mattresses, isn't she?" said Hilda, smiling at Odd. "But _I_ buttered -these with scientific exactitude." - -"Exactitude! Ah! the mirage of science! More milk, more milk!" Mrs. -Archinard raised herself on one elbow to watch with expectant -disapproval the concoction of her tea, and, relapsing on her cushions as -the tea was brought to her, "I suppose it _is_ milk, though I prefer -cream." - -"No, it's cream." Hilda should know, as she had herself just darted -round the corner to the _cremerie_. Odd sprang up to take his cup from -her. He thought she looked in danger of falling to the ground. - -"Do sit down," he said in a low voice; "you look very, very badly." - -"Have you read Meredith's last?" asked Mrs. Archinard from the sofa. -"Hilda is reading it to me in the evenings. We began it, ah! long, long -ago. I have sympathy for Meredith, an _intimite!_ It is so I feel, see -things--super-subtly. Strange how coarsely objective some minds are! Did -you order the oysters for my dinner, Hilda, and the ice from -Gage's--_pistache?_ I hope you impressed _pistache_. You will dine with -Hilda, of course, Peter; I have my dinner here; I am not yet strong -enough to sit through a meal. And then you must talk to me about -Meredith. I always find you most suggestive--such new lights on old -things. And Verhaeren, too; do you care for Verhaeren? Morbid? Yes, -perhaps, but that is a truism--not like you, Peter. '_Les apparus dans -mes chemins_,' poor, modern, broken, bleeding soul! We must talk of -Verhaeren. Just now I feel very sleepy. You will excuse me if I simply -_sans gene_ turn over and take a nap? I can often sleep at this hour. -Hilda, show Peter the Burne-Jones Chaucer over there. Hilda doesn't find -him limpid, sweet, healthy enough for Chaucer; but _nous sommes tous les -enfants malades_ nowadays. There is a beauty, you know, in that. Talk it -over." - -Hilda and Peter sat down obediently side by side on the distant little -_canape_ before the Burne-Jones Chaucer. They went over the pages, not -paying much attention to the woodcuts, but looking down favorite -passages together. The description of "my swete" in "The Book of the -Duchess," the complaint of poor Troilus, and, once more, Arcite's death. -The quiet room was very quiet, and they looked up from the pages now and -then to smile, perhaps a little sadly, at one another. When the dinner -was announced Hilda said, as they went into the dining-room-- - -"If your courage fails you, just say so frankly. I have very childish -tastes and childish fare." - -Indeed, half a cold chicken and a dish of rice constituted the repast. A -bottle of claret stood by Odd's place, and there was a white jar filled -with buttercups on the table; but even Rosalie seemed depressed by the -air of meagreness, and gave them a rather _effare_ glance as they sat -down. Odd suspected that the cold chicken was in his honor. He had come -to the conclusion that Hilda was capable of dining off rice alone. - -"Delightful!" he said. The chicken and rice were indeed very good, but -Hilda saw that he ate very little. - -"I make no further apologies," she said, smiling at him over the -buttercups; "your hunger be upon your own head." - -"I am not hungry, dear." - -Hilda had to do most of the talking, but they were both rather silent. -It was a happy silence to Hilda, full of a loving trust. - -When he spoke, it was in a voice of the same gentle fatigue that his -eyes showed; but as the eyes rested upon her she felt that the past and -the present had surely joined hands. - - - - -CHAPTER X - - -Odd went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the -next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he -could hardly have told. - -He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d'Assas and go home to tea and dinner -with her. His love for Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that -his late flight seemed degrading. - -So loving her, he could not be base. - -The Rue d'Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling rain. In the Luxembourg -Gardens the first young green made a mist upon the trees. - -It was only half-past four when Odd reached his accustomed post, but -hardly had he taken a turn up and down the street when he saw Hilda come -quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half-an-hour early, but Odd -had merely time to note the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was -in trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him; and he met her -half-way with outstretched hands. - -"O Peter!" It was the first time she had used his name, and Odd's heart -leaped as her hands caught his with a sort of desperate relief. "Come, -come," she said, taking his arm. "Let us go quickly." Peter's heart -after its leap began to thump fast. The white distress of her face gave -him a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had distressed her? He asked the -question as they crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears now -streamed down her face. - -He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and as she hung shaken with -sobs on his arm, the past child, the present Hilda merged into one; his -one, his only love. - -"Let us walk here, dear," he said; "you will be quieter." - -The little path down which they turned was empty, and the fine rain -enveloped but hardly wet them. They came to a bench under a tree, -circled by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the weeping girl to it -and they sat down. She still held his arm tightly. - -"Now, what is it?" - -"O Peter! I can hardly tell you! The brother, the horrible brother." - -"Yes?" Peter felt the accumulations of rage that had been gathering for -months hurrying forward to spring upon, to pulverize "the brother." - -"He made love to me, said awful things!" Odd whitened to the lips. - -"Tell me all you can." - -"I wish I were dead!" sobbed Hilda, "I am so unhappy." - -Peter did not trust himself to speak; he took her hand and held it to -his lips. - -"Yes; you care," said Hilda. She drew herself up and wiped her eyes. "I -never thought he would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he came a -good deal into the studio where we worked and, behind his sister's -back, looked silly. But he never really annoyed me. I thought myself -unkindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon was called away and he -came in. I went on painting. I did not dream--! When, suddenly he put -his arms around me--and tried to kiss me!" Hilda gave an hysterical -laugh. "Do you know, I had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great -blow with it! You should have seen his head! Oh, to think that I can -find that funny now! His ear was covered with cobalt!" Hilda sobbed -again, even while she laughed. "He was very angry and horrible. I said I -would call his mother and sister if he did not leave me at once, and -then--and then"--Hilda dropped her face into her hands--"he jeered at -me; 'You mustn't play the prude,' he said." - -Odd clenched his teeth. - -"Hilda, dear," he said, in a voice cold to severity, "you must go home; -I will put you in a cab. I will come to you as soon as I have punished -that dog." - -"Peter, don't! I beg of you to come _with_ me. You can do nothing. I -must bury it, forget it." She had risen as he rose. - -"Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall never forget it." - -Odd's fixed look as he led her into the street forced her to helpless -silence. - -"Peter, _please!_" she breathed, clasping her hands together and gazing -at him as he hailed a _fiacre_. - -"I will come to you soon. Good-bye." - -And so Hilda was driven away. - -It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened -the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is -lying down. She seemed ill. "_Et bien malade meme,_" and had said that -she wanted no dinner. - -"I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I -think," said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost -immediately. - -She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had -cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine -fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the -disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked -ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness -of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as -the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, -beyond all wish for it. The afternoon's unpleasantness had been merely -the last straw. The long endurance of the past month--the past months -indeed--that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on -pity--was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a -quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the -one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and -loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence -of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes. - -He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her -face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden -horrible weakness almost overcame him. - -"Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the -fiery _jeune premier_ to such an extent this afternoon that dramatic -restlessness is in keeping." - -Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns -up and down the room. - -"You look so badly," he said, pausing before her; "how do you feel?" - -"Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself." Hilda tried to smile, -stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. "I feel weak and -foolish," she added, clasping her hands on her knee. - -"It is all right, you know. He apologized profusely." - -"How did you make him do that?" - -"I told him the truth, including the fact of his own despicableness." - -"And he believed it?" - -"I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough thrashing." - -"Oh!" cried Hilda. - -"He deserved it, dear." - -"But--I had exposed myself to it; he thought himself justified." - -"I had to disabuse him of that thought. He bawled out something like a -challenge under the salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the -suggestion--insisted on the extreme satisfaction it would give me to -have a shot at him--the bourgeois strain came out. He fairly whined. I -was disappointed. I had bloodthirsty desires." - -"Oh, I am very glad he whined then! Don't speak of such horrors. You -know I am hysterical." - -Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her hand. - -"How can I thank you?" He put her hand to his lips, not looking at her -but down at the heavy folds of her white dress; it had a shroud-like -look that gave him a shudder. Hilda's life seemed shroud-like, shutting -her out from all brightness, from all love--love hers by right, and only -hers. - -"You know, you know that I would do anything for you," he said. - -The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, hardly consciously, and he -yielded to the longing he felt in her for comforting kindness and -nearness; yielded, too, to his own growing weakness; but he still held -the hand to his lips, not daring to look at her. This childlike trust, -this dependence, were dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled -soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on him when he raised his -own. - -"I never thought it would come true--in this way," she said. - -"What come true?" - -"That you would really care for me." - -Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold peaceful wings on his -breast; its very contentment constituted a caress. The child was still a -child, and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant revelation. A -shock of possibilities made Odd dizzy, and the certain strain of -weakness in him made it impossible for him to warn and protect her -ignorance. - -He was conscious of a quick grasp at the transcendental friendship of -which alone she was aware. - -"My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly." But with the words, -his hold on the transcendental friendship slipped, fundamental truths -surged up; he took both her hands, and clasping them on his breast, -said, hardly conscious of his words-- - -"Sweetest, noblest--dearest," with an emotion only too contagious, for -Hilda's eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, -the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, -to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his -arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him. - -"I understand, Hilda, I understand it all--all you have suffered; the -loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know -that you have been unhappy." - -"Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!" The tears rolled down her -cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd's hands clasping hers. "No one ever -cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn't it -cruel, cruel?" This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did -the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless -terror. "That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be -my fault." The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: "I have been -so lonely." - -"My child! My poor, poor child!" - -"Let me tell you everything. I _must_ tell you now since you care for -me. I have been so fond of you--always. You remember when I was a -child?" Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; -they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling -shipwreck. "Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it -weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what -they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me -that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them -take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It -sounds morbid, doesn't it? But it isn't, for my loneliness was almost -unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things -were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn't you? Only I -don't think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to -you." Hilda's tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled -now at Odd, a quivering smile. - -"And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can't tell you -what I suffered." - -Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his. - -"But how could you have known?" said Hilda tenderly; "I was really very -silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come back _because_ I -needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the -shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was -waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that." -She paused a moment: "It all ended in Florence," she went on sadly; -"such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I see -the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where -I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know -those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for -something that could never come; that you had never really understood, -and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a -pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. -I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be -misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love perhaps. A sort of -cold shame crept through me, and I felt really alone then. Do you know -what that feeling is?" Her hand under his forehead lifted his head a -little as though to question his face, but putting both her hands over -his eyes he would not look at her. - -"You are so sorry?" Odd nodded. "But you have had that feeling? -Imprisoned in oneself; looking, longing for a voice, a smile,--and -silence, always, always silence. A thing quite apart from the surface -intercourse of everyday life, not touched by it. You have so many -friends, so many windows in your prison, you can't know." - -"I know." - -"Really?" - -"Yes, yes." - -"And you call out for help and no one hears. Oh, I can't explain -properly; do you understand?" - -"I understand, dear." - -"Well, after that day in Florence, the last cranny of my prison seemed -walled up. And--oh, then our troubles came, worse and worse. -Responsibilities braced me up--far healthier, of course. And your -books! Their strength; their philosophy--don't tell me I might find it -all in Marcus Aurelius; your way of saying it went more deeply in me. -Just to do one's duty; to love people and be sorry for them, and not -snivel over oneself. Ah! if you knew all your books had been to me! -Would you like it, I wonder?" Again the tenderness, almost playful, in -her voice. Odd raised his head and looked at her. - -"And when I came at last, what did you think?" - -The loving candor of her eyes dwelt on him. - -"When you came?" she repeated. "Then I saw at once that you were -Katherine's friend, and that your books were the nearest I should ever -get to you." Hilda's voice hesitated a little; a doubt of the exactitude -of her perceptions from this point showed itself in a certain perplexity -of tone. "And--I don't quite understand myself, for I didn't plan -anything--but just because I felt so much I was afraid that you would -imagine I made claims on you. I was resolved that you should see that I -had reached your standpoint--that I had forgotten--that the present had -no connection with the past." - -"But I had not forgotten," Odd groaned. - -"No?" Hilda smiled rather lightly; "it would have been very strange if -you hadn't. Besides, as I say, I saw at once that you were Katherine's, -and that it was right and natural. Your books taught me, too, the true -peace of renunciation, you see! Not that this called for renunciation -exactly," and again Hilda paused with the faint look of perplexity. -"There was nothing to renounce since you were hers, except I must have -felt a certain disappointment. I felt a little frozen. Such dull -egotism!" She turned her eyes away, looking vaguely out into the dusky -room. "But even on that first day I meant that you should see, and that -she should see, that I knew that the past made no bond: in my heart it -might, not in yours, I knew, for all your kindness." - -"Go on, Hilda," said Odd, as she paused. - -"Well, you know all the rest. When you were engaged and she more than -friend, I had hoped for it, and I saw that my turn might come; that I -might step into Kathy's vacated shoes, so to speak; that we might be -friends, and all my dreams be fulfilled after all. I began then to let -myself know that I did care, for I had tried to help myself before by -pretending that I didn't. I wouldn't do anything to make you like me. If -you were to like me, you would of yourself; all the joy of having you -care for me would be in having made no effort. And the dream did come -true. I saw more and more that you cared. To-day I feel it, like -sunshine." Odd still stared at her, and again through sudden tears she -smiled at him. "Only--isn't it strange?--things are always so; it must -be, too, that I am weak, overwrought, for I feel so sad, as though I -were at the bottom of the sea, and looking up through it at the sun." - -"Great heavens!" muttered Odd. He looked at her for a silent moment, -then suddenly putting his arm around her neck, he drew her to him. - -He did not kiss her, but he said, leaning his head against hers-- - -"And I--so unworthy!" - -"No, no," said Hilda, and with a little sigh, "not unworthy, dear -Peter." - -"I, dully stumbling about your exquisite soul," Peter went on, pressing -her head more closely to his. "Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -"What, dear friend?" - -"I cannot tell you." - -"Unkind; I tell you everything." - -"You can tell me everything. You can tell me how much you have cared for -me, how much you care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot tell -you how infinitely dear you are to me." He had spoken, her face hidden -from him in its nearness; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and -frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. Hilda drew back -and rose to her feet. A subtle change, perplexity deepened, crossed her -face, but, standing before him, she looked down at him and he saw that -her trust rose as to a test. She put her hands out as though from an -impulse to lay them on his shoulders; then, as an instinct within the -impulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear look untouched, she -clasped them together and said gravely-- - -"You may tell me. You are infinitely dear to _me_." - -Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave him a sense of helpless -baseness. - -"I may tell you how much I love you?" and he too rose and stood before -her. - -"I have always loved you," said Hilda, with her grave look. "I love you -now as much as I did when I was a child." - -The impossible height where she placed him beside her made Odd's head -swim. He felt himself caught up for a moment into the purity of her -eyes, and looking into them he came close to her. - -"My angel! My angel!" he hardly breathed. - -"Dear Peter," and the tears came into the pure eyes. And, at the sight, -the heaven brimmed with loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious -but all revealed, Odd was conscious only of a dizzy descent from -impossibility, the crash of the inevitable. - -One step and he had taken her into his arms, seeing as he did so, in a -flash, the white wonder of her face; he could almost have smiled at -it--divinely dull creature! Holding her closely, the white folds of the -shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, his cheek upon her hair, -he could not kiss her and he could not speak, and in a silence as -unmistakable as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the past and -defied the future. - -The painful image of a bird he had once seen, wings broken, dying of a -shot and feebly fluttering, came to him as he felt her stir; her hands -pushing him away. - -"Dearest--dearest--dearest." - -Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness. - -Stooping his head he looked at her face; it wore an almost tranquil, a -corpse-like look. Her eyes were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a -little in a faint, fixed frown; but the childlike line of her mouth had -all the sad passivity of death. Odd tremblingly kissed the gentle -sternness of the lips. - -She loved him, but how cruel he was. - -"Oh, my precious," he said, "look at me. Forgive me; I love you." - -He had freed her hands, and she raised them and bent her face upon them. - -"You don't hate me for telling you the truth?" And as she made no sign: -"No, no, you don't hate me; you love me and I love you. I have loved you -from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why did you let me think you -did not care? Look at me, dearest." - -"What have I done?" said Hilda. She still kept her face hidden in her -hands. - -"You have done nothing; it is I, I who have done it!" - -"I never could have believed it of you," she said, and he felt it to be -the simple statement of a fact. - -"O Hilda--I have only told you the truth, that is my crime." - -"You told me because of what I said? You love me because of what I -said?" - -"Good God! I have been madly in love with you for months!" - -"For months?" she repeated dully. - -"For years, perhaps, who knows!" - -"I did not know that I--that you--" - -"You knew nothing, my poor angel." - -He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to stumble and grope for an -entreaty; her very powerlessness in the grasp of her realized love -enchanted him. - -"How base! how base!" she moaned. - -"Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, and I cannot help myself." - -"No--you cannot help yourself. I love you and I told you so." - -"You did not mean _this_." - -"I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did not doubt myself. I am -wicked." The strange revulsion from her long selflessness had reached -its height in poor Hilda; but, in her eyes, the discovered self was -indeed wicked, a terrible revelation. - -Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder. - -"O Peter, Peter!" - -"What, my darling child?" - -"That we should be so base!" - -"Not _we_, Hilda. Not _you_!" - -"Yes, I--for I am happy--think of it, happy! Peter, I love you so much." -She wept, her head upon his shoulder. "Keep me for a moment, only a -moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the good of it. I am glad -that you love me. No; don't kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved -me for a long time." - -"From the moment I saw you again, I think. I knew it when I began -meeting you after your lessons. Do you remember that first day in the -rain? I do; and your little hat with the bow on it, the hole in your -little glove, your white little face. I went away to the South because I -could not trust myself with you. I did not dream that you loved me, but -I felt--ah! I felt--that I could have made you love me!" - -"And yet--you loved Katherine!" - -The anguish of the broken words pierced him. - -"Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find myself. I did not love -her." - -"Peter! Peter!" - -"Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you that you are the only -one--my only love!" - -"O Peter!" - -"I never thought that I loved Katherine, but I had no fear of injustice -to her, for I never thought that love would come into my life; and, -hardly was the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth crept upon -me. Friendly comradeship on the one hand, and on the other--O Hilda!--a -passion that has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you like a -thunderbolt; my love for you crashed in upon your heavenly dreaming; but -you see--be brave enough to acknowledge what it all means, your dream -and my love that needed no thunderbolt to wake it,--be brave enough to -own that it is inevitable, that from the time that you put your hand in -mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest thing, a love, a -sympathy infinite. Dear child, be brave enough to own that before it, -mistakes may be put aside without dishonor." - -"Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor! We are both already -dishonorable, and oh! it is that that breaks my heart; that you, that -you who should have helped me, protected me from the folly of my -ignorance, that you should be dishonorable!" - -"O Hilda!" - -"Yes," she said wildly, "yes, yes, Peter; and I am wicked--wicked, for I -love you. Yes--kiss me; there, now I am thoroughly wicked. Now let me -go." - -Odd, white and shaken, still locked his arms about her. - -"I was base if you will, too base for your loveliness; but you, my -darling, have not a shadow on you; you were impossibly noble. Remember, -that if there is dishonor, I am dishonored, not you; remember that _I_ -have done this!" - -As he spoke, holding Hilda in his arms, the door opened and Katherine -entered. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - - -Katherine closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not -with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened -look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a wrap on her arm, and the -thumping of her boxes was heard outside on the stairs. - -Katherine had schemed and success was hers, but this unlooked-for -achievement struck her like a dagger and made triumph bitter. - -Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was the heroine. Katherine -felt herself struck down from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced -to a miserable position, a tool with the other tools--Peter and Hilda. - -To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shattering of ideals and pierced -even her own humiliation, for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked -up to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with her, but for Hilda's -own advantage; she, not Fate, was to put her in Peter's arms, unspotted -and innocent of the combinations that had led her there. All Katherine's -plans in England had prospered and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited -her. Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous perception of his -love for Hilda--a brave, manlike part--to which she had looked forward -as to an atonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine had almost -persuaded herself that there would be little acting needed. Had she not -seen, guessed, the truth? Had the truth not pained her, humiliated her? -Had she not risen finely above her pain and wished them happiness? In -moments of self-scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look -before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorchings, and Katherine -could scorch herself as well as others in the pitiless flame of -clear-sighted analysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome -standards of a higher nature--a rebellion that had carried her into such -opposition as to fall below herself to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, -touched with a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment,--was that -rebellion, that ambition, so base, so pitiful? - -Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes sophistical if carried too -far, and Katherine found excuses that explained for herself. But now all -was base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda's fall, had -risen. On this lowered platform, the advantage was hers, terribly hers, -and it was good, good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them. - -She laid down her wrap on a table and began to slowly draw off her -gloves. - -"My return was inopportune." The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her -own sense of fitness. "Or opportune?" She directed her eyes upon Odd, -and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He -welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he -prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his arm around -Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt -that Hilda's look of frozen horror gave him the advantage. - -"Opportune, Katherine," he said; "now at least I shall not have to lie -to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness." - -"Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?" - -It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel -his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, -for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "I can only beg you to believe that I have -struggled--for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought -that neither of you would ever know the truth." - -This bracketing of Hilda's injury with hers stank in Katherine's -nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, -speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself-- - -"I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so -chivalrously preparing for me," she said. "Marriage with an unloving -man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from -you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?" The -white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their -sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter's futile efforts to -withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his -stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the -retrospect grew lurid. - -"Katherine," said Odd gloomily, "I would not so have insulted you after -this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult." - -"I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have -waited, Peter." - -Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had -been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most -painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew -for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon -her sister. - -"So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda," she said. - -Hilda's wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the -stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds -at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long -resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to -cruelty. - -"Katherine, say anything--anything you will to me," and Odd's voice -broke a little as he spoke, "but not one word to her! Not one word! It -comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire -with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life." He -held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man -driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and -Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight -eyebrows, breathing quickly. - -"Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this -evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this -past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your -mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with -you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life--you and your -father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and -once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard -I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon -her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us." - -"Yes; as I see you." Katharine's very lips were white. - -Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the -terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd -remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the -extremity of self-control. - -"Katherine," she said, "he is trying to shield me. It did not happen -like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always -loved him." - -"Oh! did you?" said Katherine, with a withered little laugh. - -"My child!" cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this -assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him--"my child, -what are you saying? What madness!" - -"I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you." - -"In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love you misunderstood. You -know, as I knew when you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, -so nobly, so purely, was the child's love, the love of the loyal sister -for her friend, the love of an angel." - -"I am not sure," said Hilda. - -"Oh!" cried Odd, looking at her with savage tenderness, "this is -unbearable." - -It was as if they had forgotten, each in the mutual justification of the -other, Katherine standing there a silent spectator. - -But Odd was conscious of that outraging contemplation. - -"Hilda," he said appealingly and yet sternly, "at the very height of -your trust in me I betrayed it. Your nobility had reached its climax. I -had kissed you and you retreated, but without a shadow of doubt; and I, -from the base wish to try your trust to the utmost, said that I loved -you. You never faltered from your innocent outlook in replying; it was I -who saw the truth, not you." - -"Katherine," Hilda repeated, "he is trying to shield me. We are both -base, yes; but I forced him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, -and when he took me in his arms, I was glad." - -"Good God!" cried Peter. - -Katherine averted her eyes from her sister's face. - -"I must own, Peter," she said, "that your position was difficult. Hilda -evidently painted the pathos of her life to you in most touching -colors--she herself very white on the background of our black depravity. -That in itself is enough to shake a rather emotional heart like yours. -And then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a Galahad I fear, she -confesses her love for you, retreating delicately before your kisses. Of -course those kisses she received as platonic pledges--from the man -engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, very; I quite recognize it. -Under such tempting circumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor -must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve the difficulty, she -solved it for you, very effectually, very courageously. When you took -her in your arms--how often we repeat that phrase--the 'truth' at last -flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship could hardly account for such -yielding unconventionality, and Hilda's hidden love won the day." - -During these remarks, Odd felt himself shaking with rage. If Katherine -had been a man he would have knocked her down; as it was, his voice was -the equivalent of a blow as he said, clenching his hand on the back of a -chair-- - -"You despicable creature!" - -He and Katherine glared at one another. - -"Only the higher nature can put itself so hideously in the power of the -lower," Odd went on; "and you dare!" - -"No, no; all she says may be true!" moaned Hilda. She dropped upon the -sofa and hid her face in her hands, adding brokenly: "And how can you be -so cruel? so cruel to her? She loves you too!" - -Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and then, impulse nipped by -quick reflection-- - -"You need not allow for a woman's jealousy, Mr. Odd. Don't, no indeed -you must not, flatter yourself with my broken heart. I don't like -humiliation for myself or for others. I don't like to scorn my sister -whom I trusted, whom I loved. I could have killed the person who had -told me this of her! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too bitter for -charity. But I give you back your word without one regret for myself. -You have killed my love very effectually." - -"Was there ever much to kill, Katherine?" - -"That is ignoble, quite as ignoble as I could predict of you. Hilda's -lesson must necessarily make the past look pale." - -"I can only hope that you do yourself an injustice by such base -speeches, Katherine." - -"Your example has been contagious." - -"Let me think so by proving yourself more worthy than you seem. Ask your -sister's forgiveness--as I ask yours--humbly. She has not feared -humiliation." - -"I do not find myself in a position to fear or accept it. I found Hilda -in the dust, and I cannot forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor -confession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I make an exit more -apropos than my entrance, and leave you with her." Katherine took up her -wrap and walked out without looking again at Hilda. - -"And I have done this," said Odd. Hilda lay motionless, her face upon -her arms, and he approached her. There was a strange effect of no Hilda -at all under the heavy folds of the gown; in the dark it glimmered with -a vacant whiteness; it was as though the cruel words had beaten away her -body and her soul. - -"Hilda!" said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating as he paused beside her, -not daring to touch the still figure. "Hilda!" he repeated; "if only you -will forgive me; if only you will own that it is I, I only who need -forgiveness, and unsay those mad words that gave her the power! Oh! that -she should have had the power! She has made remorse impossible!" Odd -added, addressing himself rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no -hint of sympathy. - -"Why did you put yourself under her feet and make me powerless?" he -asked; "you know that your gentle reticence had for months kept my love -in check; you knew that had I kept at your level, you would have never -realized that you loved me." He bent above her and kissed her hand. -"Precious one! Dearest, dearest child." - -"Oh, don't!" said Hilda. She drew her hand away, not lifting her head. -"Her heart is broken. I am all that she said." - -"Her heart is not broken!" cried Odd, in rather desperate accents. "I -could swear to it! She is a cruel, heartless girl!" - -"What would you have asked of her? You were cruel to her." - -"I am glad of it." And as Hilda made no reply to this statement, he -stooped to her again, imploring: "Will you not look at me? Look up, -dearest; tell me again that you love me." - -"I am already in the dust," said Hilda, after a pause. - -"You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!" cried Odd; he -took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. "Sit -up. Listen to me," he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken -face, his hands on her shoulders. "I have loved you passionately for -months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have -fumbled with that fatally misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved -me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn -out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, -of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, -wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!" Odd added, sitting -down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda -repeated-- - -"Don't." - -"You felt my pity, my sympathy," Odd went on, holding her hands. "You -felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the -child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation--for -love--you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found -more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too -high for the hearer." - -"Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that I _loved_ -you!" Hilda wailed suddenly. - -"Thank God that you own to that!" Odd ejaculated. - -"That does not clear me," she retorted. "No, no; I was a fool. You, the -man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty -of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to -you--it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly -whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all! -I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are -usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are -crimes, and I am wicked. I hate myself!" she sobbed, bending again her -face upon her hands. - -"Hilda," said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, "you could not -have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for -months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold -little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for -you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step--you -retreating before me--to the final realizations; and final they are not, -I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the -real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all -that you have suffered." Hilda interrupted him with an "Oh!" from -between clenched teeth. - -"Katherine was right," she said, "I have painted myself in pathetic -colors. What a prig! What an egotist!" Her voice trembled on its low -note of passionate self-scorn. - -"An egotist!" Odd burst into a loud laugh. "That caps the climax. Come, -Hilda," he added, "don't be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, -still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I -say, I haven't yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as -I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, -unconscious little child." Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but -Hilda's swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision. - -"You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to -speak of some day? There will never be any day for us--together." - -"I say there will be, Hilda." - -"You think that I could ever forget my sister's misery; my shame and -yours?" - -"You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the -day." - -"That is a placid term for such degradation." - -"I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake." - -"You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can't -mend a broken heart by marching over it." - -"One may avoid breaking another." - -"You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the -bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing -that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean." - -"You, Hilda, are only cruel--unutterably cruel," said Odd brokenly. - -"I never wish to see you again." Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his -eyes of pitiful appeal. "You have robbed my life of the little it had; -you have robbed me of self-respect." - -"Shall I leave you, Hilda?" - -"You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me." - -"Good-bye," said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to -the heart, and half-unconscious. - -"Peter!" cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was -standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed -and dilated eyes. - -"What is it, my child?" Odd asked gently. - -"Kiss me good-bye!" - -He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another. - -"Must I leave you?" he asked, in a stammering voice. - -"Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me." - -He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved -away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a -characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, -he said-- - -"I will wait." - -And turning away, he walked out of the room. - - - - -CHAPTER XII - - -For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda -stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant -devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for -Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she -announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine -had returned to England, she added with emphasis-- - -"But I don't go this time, Miss Hilda. It's your turn to have a maid -now." - -The news took a weight of dread from Hilda's heart. She shrank from -again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine's tragic eyes. -She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half -delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, -of everlasting responsibility for her sister's misery. With all the -capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered -natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting -hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored -her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: "I love -you, too!" Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with -cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of -analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so -swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral -visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of -relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine's -ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness. - -Hilda's love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been -growing from the child's devotion, and, with the new torture of a -hopeless longing upon her--for which she despised herself--she saw in -the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart. - -Only a few days after Katherine's departure, the Captain returned. - -Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that -weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked -carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the -door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her -behalf. - -He hardly mentioned Katherine's broken engagement, and, for once in her -life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. -Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit -plaintively beside her daughter's bed; and it was from her that Hilda -learned that they were going back to Allersley. - -Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and -Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities -and to probabilities. The Captain's good fortune showed to her in a -dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at -its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, -and who it was that shielded her from even a feather's weight of -gratitude--for the Captain made no mention of his good luck. - -"Yes, we are going back to the Priory," Mrs. Archinard said, her -melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter's wasted -face. "It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to -compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. -Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I -predicted it rather. You have killed yourself _tout simplement_; I -consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks -it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, -'_Docteur, elle s'est tuee._' I said it frankly." - -Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so -long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones -of pathos and pity on Hilda's behalf, hardly realizing their objective -nature. - -By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like -returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker -chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the -meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and -felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood. - -Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her -sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, -too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa -existence; without the background of Hilda's quiet servitude, it became -flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and -for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in -pensive contemplation of tenants' havoc. She sighed over the Priory and -said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not -think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain -vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a -little--the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as -fishing--and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at -political follies. - -When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, her father often walked -aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed -glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted -passively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only -vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as -her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his -fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing-basket, and showing -evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a -sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a -sudden sense of method underlying the Captain's manoeuvres. - -"Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will -be glad of a respite. Isn't it a little sunny to-day for first-class -fishing?" Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up -to her with shy alacrity. - -"Even first-class fishing is a bore, _I_ think," he observed, not -taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his -daughter and then at the river. - -"Feeling better to-day, aren't you? You might take a stroll with me, -perhaps; but no, you're not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, -isn't it?" - -Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the -Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of -weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and -the absent-minded smile on her face reassured him as to immediate -issues. - -"How are _you_ feeling?" she asked; "I have been looking at the trees -and grass for so long that I had almost forgotten that there are human -beings in the world." - -"Oh, I'm very well; very well indeed." The Captain was again feeling -uncomfortable. An inner coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just -because speaking was not really imperative at the moment. A little glow -of self-approbation suddenly prompted him to add: "You know, I know -about it now. That is to say, I wasn't exactly to speak of it, if it -might pain you; but I don't see why it should do _that_. Upon my word," -said the Captain, feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was -broken, "it's more likely to pain me, isn't it? Rather to my discredit, -you know; though, intrinsically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of -course you helped me over a tight place now and then, but I thought the -money came to you with a mere turn of the hand, so to speak; and, as for -your teaching--wearing yourself out--well, I don't know which I was -angrier with first, you or myself. I never dreamed of it, it never -entered into my head. And then, _my_ daughter and low French cads! Well, -_he_ saw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too; thought it best, -you know; for, naturally, Odd couldn't have my weight and authority. I -was simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me over when he told -me. Odd told me--" - -The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, and then switched its -limber length tentatively through the air. It was embarrassing, after -all, this recognition of his daughter's life. - -"Now your mother doesn't know," he pursued; "Odd seemed rather anxious -that she should; rather unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no -necessity for that, was there? It would have quite killed her, wouldn't -it? Quite." - -"You need neither of you have known." All she was wondering about, -trying to grasp, made Hilda pale. "It came about most naturally; and, if -mamma's illness and that other unpleasant episode had not broken me -down, my modest business might have come to an end--no one the wiser for -it. Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt." - -"Well, I don't know." The Captain now sat down on the chair with a sigh -of some relief. "It's off my mind at all events. I wanted to express -my--pain, you know, and my gratitude--and to say what a jolly trump I -thought you; that kind of thing." - -"Dear papa, I don't deserve it." - -"Ah, well, Odd isn't the man to make misstatements, you know. A bit of -dreamer, unpractical, no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, -you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cutting, to tell you the -truth. Of course he's very fond of you; that's natural. This sad affair -of Katherine's; if it hadn't been for that, you and he would be brother -and sister by this time." - -It was Hilda's turn now to draw in a little breath of relief. At all -events her father was no ally. No other secret had been told, and she -saw, now that the dread had gone, that any cause for it would have -involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of which she knew Odd to be -incapable. - -"Where is he--Mr. Odd?" she asked, steeling herself to the question. - -The look of gloom which touched the Captain's face anew, confirmed Hilda -in her certainty of infinite pecuniary obligation. - -"Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A man can't sit down quietly -under a blow like that." - -A flush came over Hilda's face. Part of her punishment was evident. She -must hear Katherine spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, -guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered and crowned with -praises. Yet Katherine herself--any woman--would choose the part Odd had -given her--the part of jilt rather than jilted; and she, Hilda, was -helpless. - -"Papa," she asked, driving in the dagger up to the hilt--she could at -least punish herself, if no one else could punish her--"where is -Katherine? Is she not coming to stay with us?" The Captain swung one leg -over the other with impatience. - -"I've hardly heard from her; she is with the Leonards in London. Odd -spoke very highly of her; seemed to think she had acted honorably; but, -naturally, Katherine must feel that she has behaved badly." - -"I am sure she has not done that, papa. She found that she would not be -happy with him." - -"Pshaw! That's all feminine folly, you know. She probably saw some one -she liked better, some bigger match. Katherine isn't the girl to throw -over a man like Odd for a whim." - -Hilda's flush was now as much for her father as for herself. She felt -her cheeks burning as she said, her voice trembling-- - -"Papa, papa! How can you say such a thing of Katherine! How can you! I -know it is not true. I know it!" - -"Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well -though, and it's not unimaginable. I don't imply anything vulgar." The -Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; "that's not -conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine's ambitious, very ambitious. -As for you, Hilda--and all that, you know--I am awfully sorry, you -understand." The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased -his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, -and the Captain's conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible. - -Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond -the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery -that her father's cool suppositions on Katherine's conduct had seemed -to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that -shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She -looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside -it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous -droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; -the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too -dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned -her head away from the river and closed her eyes. - -"Allone, withouten any companye," that was the fated motto of her life. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - - -By the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to -seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with -something--with anything--and experienced the odd sensation of a person -upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for -duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, -unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of -labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission -to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with -artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she -told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in -her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks -and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like -crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms. - -Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active _role_ in life most -confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard -drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little -_coterie_ of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard's little _Causeries -de Mardi_, her society for little weekly dinners--only six chosen -members--_les Elites_--stirred Allersley to the quick with aesthetic -thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly -at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its -Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations. - -Hilda was not one of _les Elites_. "Just for us old people, trying to -amuse ourselves," Mrs. Archinard said, and at the _Causeries_ Hilda was -an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the _Causeries_ were quite -Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard _causant_ and -Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a -revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the _elites_ -and the _mardis_, and devoted himself to more commonplace -individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn't required to -strain one's temper by listening to fine talk. - -Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she -came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows -of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on -her arm. Mary's mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture -since Peter's flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and -yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary -was generous, and the sight of Hilda's white sunlit face completed -Peter's work. She found that she had kissed Hilda--she, so -undemonstrative--and standing with her arms around the girl's slight -shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the -slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter-- - -"You will see _me_, won't you?" - -Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut--palest -pink and palest purple, "on tiptoe for a flight." - -"How kind of you to come," she said. - -"Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy's camp. That -reckless brother of mine!" - -"Did he send you?" Hilda asked, fright in her eyes. - -"Send me? Oh no, he didn't send me; but after what he has told me, I -came naturally of my own free will." Hilda smiled faintly in reply to -Mary's smile. - -"What has he told you?" - -"Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he -proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really -Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving -him!" - -Hilda winced at the humorous tone. - -"That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in -upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel--natural, though, wasn't -it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been -badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and -that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and--oh, a great -many things." - -"Did he tell you that I loved him?" Hilda asked, looking down at her -sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if -it was demanded of her that she should humiliate herself before Peter's -sister--tell her that she had made love to him. - -"My dear child," Mary's voice dropped to a graver key, "Peter trusts me, -you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to -you, you and he together found out that fact." - -Even Hilda's morbid self-doubt could not deny the essential truth of -this point of view. - -"And now you won't marry him," Mary added, but in a matter-of-fact -manner, and as if the subject were folded up and put away by that -conclusive statement. - -"Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. What a delightful garden -this is. I must have a pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, -why have you always so persistently and doggedly effaced yourself? Why -did you never let anybody know you, and subside passively into the -background _role_? I never knew you, I am sure, and if it hadn't been -for Peter I shouldn't have known you now. He made me see things very -clearly. The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, and holding -up a whole edifice on its shoulders." - -"How could he! Why will he always see things so? It makes me miserable." - -"Well, well; perhaps Peter's point of view would seem to you -exaggerated. But, as I say, why did you never let me get a glimpse of -you?" - -"I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me apart. I loved my work." - -"Yes; it must have been charming work, in all its branches." Mary gave -her a gravely gay glance. "When you did emerge from your shadows, why -did you never talk--make an effect, like Katherine?" - -"Katherine makes effects without trying. She is effective, and people -like her for herself. I was fitted for the dark corner. That is why I -stayed there." - -"No, my dear, one can't explain the injustices of fortune by that -comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatalistic philosophy. Noble natures get -oddly jumped on in this world," Mary added reflectively. "The tragedy, -of course, lies in being too noble for one's milieu, for then, not only -does one renounce, but one is expected to, as a matter of course. -Forgive me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am speaking, for -the moment, with gloves off; I know the truth, and you may as well face -it. It's a pity to be too noble; one should have just a spice of -egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one's corner." - -"Peter found me," said Hilda, with a sad smile that evaded the "coarse" -frankness. - -They walked silently along the little path under the sunlit shade of the -fruit-trees. Mary stopped at a turning. - -"Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of Emerson and optimism. Peter -did find you." Her large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda's. -"Peter found you, my dear child; let Peter keep you, then." - -"He always will keep--what he found," said Hilda, trembling. "I love -him. I shall always love him." - -"My dear Hilda!" - -"But I cannot marry him. I cannot." - -"You are a foolish little Hilda." - -"We made Katherine miserable." - -"And therefore all three must be miserable. For Peter to have kept faith -with Katherine--loving you--might have called down a far worse tragedy." - -Hilda gazed widely at her-- - -"Yes; I deserve that suspicion." - -"Oh, you foolish, foolish child!" cried Mary, laughing; and she kissed -her. "Come, come; say that you will be good to my poor brother?" - -"I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness on a wrong." - -"Your happiness would be grounded on a right; the wrong was a mere -incidental. Peter must wait, I see. Perhaps you will own some day that -that was ample expiation." - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - - -One October day Hilda received a queer little note from Katherine. That -Katherine had spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht with a -party of friends, Hilda knew, and the note was dated from Amalfi. - -"Why don't you marry Peter, you little goose?" was all it said. - -Hilda trembled as she read. Katherine's scorn and Katherine's nobility -seemed to breathe from it. - -"I am not as base as you think," was her answer. - -Katherine received this answer in Amalfi. She had come in from a walk -with Allan Hope along the road that runs above the sea between Amalfi -and Sorrento, and one of the yachting party, a girl who much admired -Katherine, was waiting for her before the hotel holding the letter, an -excuse for the excited whisper with which she gave it to her. - -"Dear Miss Archinard, _he_ is here!" - -"What 'he,' Nelly?" asked Katherine; she looked down at the writing on -the envelope of her letter, and the becoming flush that her walk through -the warm evening had brought to her cheeks faded a little. - -Allan Hope had gone on into the hotel, and Nelly's excited eyes followed -him till he was safely out of sight. - -"Mr. Odd," she said with dramatic emphasis. "Of course he didn't know." - -"Oh, he is here!" Katherine's eyes were still on the writing. "No, of -course he didn't know." - -"You aren't afraid of his meeting Allan?" Nelly was Allan Hope's cousin. -"Is there no danger, Miss Archinard? He must be feeling so--dreadfully!" - -"What a romantic little pate it is! I really believe you were looking -forward to a duel. No, no, Nelly, there is nothing of an exciting nature -to hope for!" - -"But won't it be terrible for you to meet him? The first time, you know! -And engaged to Allan!" said Nelly. - -"We are not at all afraid of one another. Don't tremble, Nelly." - -Katherine read her letter standing on the terrace before the hotel. The -dying evening seemed to throb softly in the southern sky, arching -solemnly to the horizon line. Katherine looked out at the sea--it was -characteristic of her deeply set eyes to look straight out and seldom -up. She stood still, holding the letter quietly; Katherine had none of -the weakness that seeks an outlet for the stress of resolution in -nervous gesture. She did not even walk up and down; indeed the -resolution was made and meditation needless. Turning after a moment, she -went into the hotel and asked at the office whether Mr. Odd were to be -found. - -"Yes, he was in his room; he had only arrived an hour ago." - -Katherine requested the man to tell Mr. Odd that Miss Archinard was on -the terrace and would like to see him. In two minutes Peter was walking -out to meet her. - -Peter's eyes, as they shook hands, were rather sternly steady; -Katherine's steady, but more humorous. - -"_Sans rancune?_" she inquired, with some lightness, and then, sparing -him the necessity for a reply that might be embarrassing for both of -them-- - -"I want to ask you a question; pardon abruptness; why don't you marry -Hilda? Won't she? There are two questions!" - -"I don't marry her because she won't. And there is the evident reply, -Katherine." - -"Do you despair?" she asked. - -"I can't say that. Time may wear out her resistance." - -"I know Hilda better than you do--perhaps. You see I have got over my -jealousy." Katherine's smile had all its charm. "She won't if she said -she wouldn't; if she has ideals on the subject." - -"Then I must resign myself to hopeless wretchedness." - -"No; you must not. _I_ am going to help you. Don't look so gloomily -unimpressed. I am going to help you. I am going to do penance, and I -don't believe you will consider it an expiation either! Just encourage -me by a little appreciation of my dubious nobility." Odd looked -questioningly at her. - -"Peter, when I came back that night I was engaged to Allan Hope." - -"Oh!" said Peter. They looked at one another through the almost palpable -dusk of the evening. - -"I'll give you the facts--draw your own conclusions. I'll give you -facts, but don't ask self-abasement put into words. You really haven't -the right, have you, Peter?" - -"No; I suppose not. No, _I_ haven't the right." - -"You put yourself in the wrong, you see. You must allow me to flaunt -that ragged superiority. Peter, very soon after our engagement you began -to dissatisfy me because I realized that I should never satisfy you. The -more you knew me the more you would disapprove, and your nature could -never understand mine to the extent of pardoning. Once I'd seen that, -everything was up. It wouldn't do; and the knowledge grew upon me that -the impossibility was emphasized by the fact that Hilda _would_ do. _I_ -saw that you loved her, Peter; stupid, stupid Peter! And poor little -Hilda! She was ground between two stones, wasn't she? your ignorance and -my knowledge. I give you leave to offer me up as a burnt sacrifice at -her altar, only don't let me hear myself crackling. Yes; I saw that you -were in love with her, and that she would be in love with you if it -could come--as it should have come--as I intended it to come--foolish, -hasty Peter! No; no comments, please! I know everything you can say. I -took precious good care of myself, no doubt; my generosity wasn't very -spontaneous; perhaps I thought you'd get over it; perhaps I wanted you -to get over it; perhaps even while seeing that Allan Hope would do--for -I satisfy him most thoroughly--I kept a tiny indefinite corner in my -motives for possible reactions; I give you leave to draw your -inferences, but don't ask me to dot my i's and cross my t's too -cold-bloodedly. I accepted Allan Hope on the understanding that the -engagement was to be kept secret for a few months. I told Allan that you -did not love me; that I did not love you; that our engagement was -broken. I told him that when I saw his love for me struggling with his -loyalty to you. It was the truth from my point of view; but from his, -from yours, it was a lie--and own that at least I am generous in telling -you! Too generous perhaps. I came back to Paris to tell you that I had -discovered it wouldn't do, and to make you and Hilda happy. And, when I -saw you together, both as bad as I was--at least I thought so at the -time--both disloyal--I forgot my own self-scorn; I felt a right to a -position I had repudiated. I _had_ to be cruel, for, Peter, I was -jealous; I hated her for being the one who would satisfy you thoroughly -and forever." - -There was silence between them. If she had satisfied him as only Hilda -could satisfy him, she would not have gone to Allan perhaps. Odd with a -quick throb of sympathy understood the intimation, understood both her -courage and her reticence. He had seen her at her noblest, yet there was -much not touched upon, far from noble. - -The half avowal of a disappointed love flawed her loyalty to Allan. Such -love deserved disappointment and was of a doubtful quality. Peter -respected her frankness but was not deceived by it. His manliness was -touched by the possibility she had hinted at. He understood Katherine -and he forgave her--with reservations. - -There seemed to be nothing to say, and he did not seek words. He and -Katherine walked slowly to the end of the terrace. - -Then Katherine told him of her note to Hilda and handed him Hilda's -reply. - -"I shall go to England to-morrow, Katherine," said Odd, when he had read -it. - -"You will have to fight, you know. She will say that my wrong did not -excuse hers. She will say that nothing excused you. She _is_ a little -goose." - -"I'll fight." - -They had walked back to the entrance of the hotel and here they paused; -there was a fitness in farewell. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "it would have been very base in you to have kept -silence, and yet, in spite of that, you have been very courageous this -evening." - -"You are a hideously truthful person, Peter. Why put in that damaging -clause? Have I merely escaped baseness?" - -"No, for you have never been finer." - -"That is true. I'll never reach the same heights again," and Katherine -laughed. - -"Understand that _I_ understand. Your story has not absolved _me_." - -"There is the danger with Hilda. You must make my holocaust avail." - -"I hope that a good thing is never lost," Peter replied. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - - -The October day was deliciously warm at Allersley, a fragrant autumnal -warmth, limpid with sunshine, and the woods all golden. - -Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine of home and hope in his -blood, his mood of resolute success tempered by no more than just a -touch of trembling. - -In the distance lay the river, a glitter here and there beyond the tree -trunks; the little landing-wharf where he had first seen Hilda was no -doubt still unchanged and worth a pilgrimage on some later day, but now -he must take the most direct way to the Priory; he had only arrived an -hour before, but a minute's further delay would be unbearable. This day -must atone for all the past failure of his life, and make his autumn -golden. He walked quickly, following, he remembered, almost the same -path among the trees that he and Hilda had gone by that night, ten years -ago; the memory emphasized the touch of trembling. To dwell on her -dearness made fear tread closely. The gray stone wall wound among the -woods, Peter caught sight of it, and, at the same moment, of the -fluttering white of a dress beyond it that made his heart stand still. - -He could not have hoped to find Hilda here with no teasing -preliminaries, no languid mother or sulky father to mar the fine rush of -his onslaught. - -Such good luck augured well, for--yes, it was Hilda walking slowly among -the trees--and at the clear sight of her, Peter wondered if the -breathing space of a conventional preliminary would not have been -better, and felt that he had exaggerated his own courage in picturing -that conquering impetuosity. - -She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an air of patient sadness. -Her hands clasped behind her, she walked aimlessly over the falling -leaves and seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness as her -footsteps passed through them. There was a black bow in the ruffled -bodice, and with her black hair she made on the gold and gray a -colorless silhouette. - -Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached her, the rustling leaves -under his feet, their falling patter from the trees, seemed to fill the -air with loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of her own -footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled at the weary unexpectancy of -her look transformed to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in -a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous comprehension -conceded, Katherine's confession had been cruelly tardy and Hilda's face -was pitiful. She stood silent and motionless looking at him, and Odd, as -he joined her, said the first words that came to his lips. - -"My child! How ill you look!" - -The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across -her face, but Odd, seeing only its frozen pain, remembered those -stabbing words: "You are cruel and weak and mean," which she had spoken -with just such a look, and any lingering thought of a fine onslaught was -nipped in the bud. - -"I may speak to you?" he asked. - -Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impossible to speak; she wanted -to throw herself on his breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, -all the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight of him gave -her such joy that everything was already half forgotten--even Katherine; -even Katherine--she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold -faintness-- - -"Oh, yes;" adding, "you startled me." - -"So thin, so pale, such woful eyes!" He stood staring at her. - -"You--don't look well either," she said, still in the soft cold voice. - -"I should be very sorry to look well." - -Peter was adapting himself to reality; but if the impetuous dream was -abandoned, the courage of humbler methods was growing, and he could -smile a little at her. - -"Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will you walk with me for a -little while? It is a lovely day for walking. How beautiful the woods -are looking." - -"Beautiful. I walk here a great deal." She looked away from him and into -the golden distance. - -"And you will walk here now with me?" he asked, adding, as the pale -hesitation of her face again turned to him, "Don't be frightened, dear, -I am not going to force any solution upon you; I am not going to try to -make you think well of me in spite of your conscience." - -Think well of him! As if, good or bad, he was not everything to her, and -the rest of the world nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves. - -"And here is Palamon," said Peter, as that delightful beast came at a -sort of abrupt and ploughing gallop, necessitated by the extreme -shortness of his crumpled legs, through the heaped and fallen foliage. -"He remembers me, too, the dear old boy," and Palamon, whose very -absorbed and business-like manner gave way to sudden and smiling -demonstration, was patted and rubbed cordially in answer to his cordial -welcome. - -"It must seem strange to you being here again after such a time," said -Odd, when he and Hilda turned towards the river, Palamon, with an air of -happy sympathy, at their heels. The river was invisible, a good -half-mile away, and the whispering hush of the woods surrounded them. - -"It doesn't seem strange, no," Hilda replied; "it seems very peaceful." - -"And are you peaceful with it?" All the implied reserves of her tone -made Peter wonder, as he had often wondered, at the strength of this -fragile creature; for, although that conviction of having wronged -another was accountable for her haggard young face, the crushed anguish -of her love for him was no less apparent in the very aloofness of her -glance. - -"I feel merely very useless," she said with a vague smile. - -"I have seen Katherine, Hilda." Odd waited during a few moments of -silent walking before making the announcement, and Hilda stopped short -and turned wondering eyes on him. - -"It was at Amalfi. She had just received your letter, and she sent for -me; she had something to say to me." Hilda kept silence, and Odd added, -"You knew that she was on a yachting trip?" Hilda bowed assent. "And -that Allan Hope is of the party?" - -"I heard that; yes." - -"And that he and Katherine are to be married?" - -Here Hilda gave a little gasp. - -"She doesn't love him," she cried. Odd considered her with a disturbed -look. - -"You mustn't say that, you know. I fancy she does--love him." - -"She did it desperately after you had failed her; after I had robbed -her." - -Odd was too conscious of the possibility of a subtle half-truth in this -to assert the bold unvarnished whole truth of a negative. - -Hilda's loyalty lent a dignity to Katharine's most doubtful motives, a -dignity that Katherine would probably contemplate with surprise, but -accept with philosophic pleasure. - -Had Hilda indeed robbed her unwittingly? Had he failed her long before -her deliberate breach of faith? He had, she said, shown his love for -Hilda, and would she have turned to Lord Allan's more facile contentment -had she been sure of Peter's? - -Delicate problem, without doubt. His mind dwelt on its vexatious -tragic-comic aspect, while he stared almost absently at Hilda. - -Certainly his disloyalty had been unintentional, guiltless of plot or -falsehood; and Katherine's was intentional, deceitful, ignoble. It would -be possible to shock every chord of honor in Hilda with the bold -announcement that Katherine had been engaged when she came to Paris, and -that her cruel triumph had been won under a lying standard. - -And that shock might shatter forever, not the sense of personal -wrong-doing, but all responsibility towards one so base, all that -brooding consciousness of having spoiled another's life. Katherine had -abandoned the position, and poor Hilda had merely stumbled on its vacant -lie. - -Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble self-interest in showing -the ugly fact with no softening circumstances; circumstances might -indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to -despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of -the circumstances than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to -think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that the irksomeness of -his growing disapproval, rather than the loss of his love, had led -Katherine to seek a more amenable substitute; but with a sense of honor -so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put aside his own advantageous -surmises, and prepared to give Katherine's story from a most delicate -and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Katherine's words, and yet -such artistic chivalry in their setting that even Katherine would find -her sacrifice at Hilda's altar painless. - -"You shall have her own words," he said, after a long pause. He felt -that the inner trembling had grown to a great terror. He became pale -before the compelling necessity for exaggerated magnanimity. - -To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine's loomed a black -probability, yet in his very defeat he would prove himself not unworthy -of Hilda's love; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah! piercing words! At -least he could now draw them from their rankling. And as they walked -together he told Katherine's story, lending to it every charitable -possibility with which she herself could not honestly have invested it. - -When he had done, taking off his hat, for his temples were throbbing -with the stress of the recital, and looking at Hilda with an almost -pitifully boyish look, he had emphasized his own unconscious revelation -of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of broken-hearted generosity -in Katherine, he had hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the -glaring fact that she had made sure of him before giving Peter his -freedom. The soreness that the revelation of Katherine's selfishness had -made between them so soon after their engagement, he had not mentioned. - -Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once or twice during the -story she had clutched her clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice -her step had faltered and she had paused as though to listen more -intently, but the white profile with its framing eddies of hair crossed -the pale gold background, its attitude of intense quiet unchanged. - -The silence that followed his last words seemed cruelly long to Odd, but -at last she lifted her eyes, and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish -look, her own look broke suddenly into passionate sympathy and emotion. - -"Peter," she said, standing still before him, "she didn't love you." - -"I don't think she did." Odd's voice was shaken but non-committal. - -"Perhaps she loved you more than she could love any one else," said -Hilda. - -"Yes; perhaps." - -Hilda's hands were still clasped behind her, and she looked hard into -his face as she added with a certain stern deliberateness-- - -"I don't believe she ever loved anybody." - -Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for such a clear perception. - -"She was very cruel to me," said Hilda, after a little pause, and her -eyes, turning from his, looked far away as if following the fading of a -lost illusion. - -"I don't think she ever cared much for me either," she added. - -"Not much; not as you interpret caring." - -Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over him rushed that -indignant realization of Katherine's intrinsic selfishness. - -"No; I could not have been so cruel to her, not even if she had robbed -me of you." It was the most self-assertive speech he had ever heard her -utter. - -"No; you could not have been so cruel to her," he repeated, "not even -loving me as you did and as she did not." - -There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed to Odd that the very trees -stretched out their branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said -slowly-- - -"But that doesn't make what I did less wrong. I was as weak, as -disloyal, as though Katherine had loved us both as much as I thought she -did." - -"And I as cruel, as weak, as mean?" Odd asked. - -"Ah, don't!" she said, with a look of pain. "You have redeemed -yourself," she added, "and have made me more ashamed." - -"Then I have made a miserable failure of my attempt." - -"No, no; you have not." - -The river was before them now, and the woods sloped down to its curving -band of silver. They both stood still and looked at it, and beyond it at -the gentle stretches of autumnal hill and meadow. - -"Dear Peter," said Hilda gently. He looked down at her and she up at -him, putting her hand in his, but so gravely and quietly that the tender -little action conveyed nothing but a reminiscence of the child of ten -years ago. - -So, holding hands, they were both still silent, and again they looked at -the river, the meadows, and the blue distance of the hills. Palamon, -after running here and there, with rather assumed interest, his nose to -the ground, came and sat down before them with an air of dignified -acquiescence and appreciative contemplation. In the woods the sudden, -sad-sweet twitter of a bird seemed to embroider the silence with -unconscious pathos. - -"O Peter!" said Hilda suddenly, on a note as impulsive and as -inevitable as the bird's. He looked at her and put his arms around her, -saying nothing. - -"Oh!" said Hilda, "I cannot help it. I love you too much, dear Peter. -Everything else may have been wrong, but it is right to love you." - -He took her face between his hands and looked at her. - -"Everything else would be wrong." - -"Then kiss me, Peter." - -He gave himself the joy of a delicious postponement. - -"Not till you tell me that you see that everything else would be wrong." -But the kiss was given before her answer. - -"I trust you, and you must know." - -THE END. - - * * * * * - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -you remem-him=> you remember him {pg 19} - -the coencirge=> the concierge {pg 139} - -to forego the enjoyment=> to forgo the enjoyment {pg 158} - -unforgetable=> unforgettable {pg 181} - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - -***** This file should be named 42109.txt or 42109.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/0/42109/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -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. 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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/license - - -Title: The Dull Miss Archinard - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 16, 2013 [EBook #42109] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - -The - -Dull Miss Archinard - -By - -Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -New York -Charles Scribner's Sons -1898 - -Copyright, 1898, by -Charles Scribner's Sons - -_All rights reserved_ - -_TO_ - -MY GRANDMOTHER - -H. M. D. - - - - -Prologue - -PETER ODD - - - - -The Dull Miss Archinard - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - -Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream, -whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating -fly, his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisherman reverie, no -definite thought forming from the appreciative impressions of sunlit -meadows, cool stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming curves of -river. For a tired man, fishing is an occupation particularly soothing, -and Peter Odd was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, perhaps, -more that of the lover of nature than of the true sportsman, the -pastoral feast of the landscape with its blue distance of wooded hill, -more to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet-spotted beauty; -yet the attitude of receptive intentness was pleasant in all its phases, -no one weary thought could become dominant while the eyes rested on the -water, or were raised to such loveliness of quiet English country. So -much of what he saw his own too; the sense of proprietorship is, under -such circumstances, an intimately pleasant thing, and although, where -Odd stood at a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall -beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the confines of his -property just here, the woods and meadows before him were all his--to -the blue hills on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched widely -about Allersley Manor, and to the left the river ran for a very -respectable number of miles through woods and meadows as beautiful. The -sense of proprietorship was still new enough to give a little thrill, -for the old squire had died only two years before, and the sorrow of -loss had only recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed -responsibilities, to the realization that energies so called forth may -perhaps make of life a thing well worth living. A life of quiet utility; -to feel oneself of some earthly use; what more could one ask? The duties -of a landowner in our strenuous days may well fill a man's horizon, and -Odd was well content that they should do so; for the present at least; -and he did not look beyond the present. - -In his tweeds and waterproof knee-breeches and boots, a sun-burnt straw -hat shading his thin brown face, his hand steady and dexterous, as brown -and thin, he was a pleasing example of the English country-gentleman -type. He was tall, with the flavor of easy strength and elegance that an -athletic youth gives to the most awkwardly made man. His face was at -once humorous and sad; it is strange how a humorous character shows -itself through the saddest set of feature. Odd's long, rather acquiline -nose and Vandyke beard made a decidedly melancholy silhouette on the -sunlit water, yet all the lines of the face told of a kindly -contemplation of the world's pathetic follies; the mouth was sternly -cut yet very good-tempered, and its firm line held evident suggestions -of quiet smiling. - -Poor Peter Odd had himself committed a pathetic folly, and, as a result, -smiles might be tinged with bitterness. - -A captured trout presently demanded concentrated attention. The vigorous -fish required long playing until worn out, when he was deftly secured in -the landing-net and despatched with merciful promptitude; indeed, a -little look of nervous distaste might have roused in an unsympathetic -looker-on conjectures as to a rather weak strain--a foolish width of -pity in Peter Odd's character. - -"A beauty," he mentally ejaculated. He sat down in the shade. It was -hot; the long, thick grass invited a lolling rest. - -On the other side of the hedge was a rustic bathing-cabin, and from it -Odd heard the laughing chatter of young voices. The adjoining property -was a small one belonging to a Captain Archinard. Odd had seen little of -him; his wife was understood to be something of an invalid, and he had -two girls--these their voices, no doubt. Odd took off his hat and mopped -his forehead, looking at the little landing-wharf which he could just -see beyond the hedge, and where one could moor boats or dive off into -the deepness of the water. The latter form of aquatic exercise was -probably about to take place, for Odd heard-- - -"I can swim beautifully already, papa," in a confident young voice--a -gay voice, quiet, and yet excited too by the prospect of a display of -prowess. - -A tall, thin girl of about fourteen stepped out on to the landing. A -bathing-dress is not as a rule a very graceful thing, yet this child, -her skirt to her knee, a black silk sash knotted around her waist, with -her slim white legs and charming feet, was as graceful as a young Amazon -on a Grecian frieze. A heavy mass of braids, coiled up to avoid a -wetting, crowned her small head. She was not pretty; Odd saw that -immediately, even while admiring the well-poised figure, its gallantly -held little torso and light energy. Her profile showed a short nose and -prominent chin, inharmoniously accentuated. She seemed really ugly when -her sister joined her; the sister was beautiful. Odd roused himself a -little from his half recumbency to look at the sister appreciatively. -Her slimness was exaggerated to an extreme--an almost fluttering -lightness; her long arms and legs seemed to flash their whiteness on the -green; she had an exquisite profile, and her soft black hair swept up -into the same coronet of coils. Captain Archinard joined them as they -stood side by side. - -"You had better race," he said, looking down into the water, and then -away to the next band of shadow. "Dive in, and race to that clump of -aspens. This is a jolly bit for diving." - -"But, papa, we shall wet our hair fearfully," said the elder girl--the -ugly one--for so Odd already ungallantly designated her. "We usually get -in on this shallower side and swim off. We have never tried diving, for -it takes so long to dry our hair. Taylor would not like it at all." - -"It is so deep, too," said the beauty in rather a faltering -voice--unfortunately faltering, for her father turned sharply on her. - -"Afraid, hey? You mustn't be a coward, Hilda." - -"I am not afraid," said the elder girl; "but I never tried it. What must -I do? Put my arms so, and jump head first?" - -"There is nothing to do at all," said the Captain, with some acidity of -tone. "Keep your mouth shut and strike out as you come up. You'll do it, -Katherine, first try. Hilda is in a funk, I see." - -"Poor Hilda," Odd ejaculated mentally. She was evidently in a funk. -Standing on the edge of the landing, one slim foot advanced in a -tentative effort, she looked down shrinking into the water--very deeply -black at this spot--and then, half entreatingly, half helplessly, at her -father. - -"Oh, papa, it is so deep," she repeated. - -The Captain's neatly made face showed signs of peevish irritation. - -"Well, deep or not, in you go. I must break you of that craven spirit. -What are you afraid of? What could happen to you?" - -"I--don't like water over my head--I might strike--on something." - -Tears were near the surface. - -What asses people made of themselves, thought Odd, with their silly -shows of authority. The more the father insisted, the more frightened -the child became; couldn't the idiot see that? The tear-filled eyes and -looks that showed a struggle between fear of her father's anger and fear -of the deep, black pool, moved Odd to a sudden though half-amused -resentment, for the little girl was certainly somewhat of a coward. - -"Let me go in first, papa, and show her. Hilda, dear, it's nothing; -being frightened will make it something, though, so don't be frightened, -and watch me." - -"Yes, go in first, Katherine; show her that I have a girl who isn't a -coward--and how one of my daughters came to be a coward I don't -understand. I am ashamed of you, Hilda." - -Hilda evidently only controlled her sobs by a violent effort; her -caught-in under-lip, wide eyes, and heaving little chest affected Odd -painfully. He frowned, sat up, put his hat on, and watched Miss -Katherine with a lack of sympathy that was certainly unfair, for the -plucky little person went through the performance most creditably, -stretched out and up her thin pretty arms, curved forward her pretty -body, and made the plunge with a lithe elegance that left her father -gazing with complacent approval after the white flash of her feet. - -"Bravo! First-rate! There, Hilda, you see what can be done. Come on, -little white feather." He spoke more kindly; the elder sister's prowess -put him more in humor with his less creditable offspring. - -"Oh, papa!" The child shrank on the edge of the platform--she would go -bundling in, and hurt herself. "But, papa," and her voice held a sharp -accent of distress, "where is Katherine?" - -Indeed Katherine had not reappeared. Only a moment had passed, but a -moment under water is long. Captain Archinard's eyes searched the -surface of the river. - -"But she can swim?" - -"Papa! papa! She is drowned, _drowned_!" Hilda's voice rose to a scream. -With a wild look of resolve she sprang into the river just as Odd dashed -in, knee-deep, and as Katherine's head appeared at some distance down -the current--an angry little head, half choked, and gasping. Katherine -swam and waded to the shore, falling on her knees upon the bank, while -Odd dived into the hole--very bad hole, deep and weedy--after Hilda. - -He groped for the child among a tangle of roots, touched her hair, -grasped her round the waist, and came to the surface with some -difficulty, his strokes impeded by sinuous cord-like weeds. Captain -Archinard was too much astonished by the whole matter to do more than -exclaim, "Upon my word!" as his younger daughter was deposited at his -feet. - -"A nasty hole that. The weeds have probably grown since any one has -dived." - -Odd spoke shortly, having lost his breath, and severely; the child -looked half drowned, and Katherine was still gasping. - -"Why, Mr. Odd! Upon my word!"--the Captain recognized his neighbor--"I -don't know how to thank you." - -The Captain had not recovered from his astonishment, and repeated with -some vehemence: "Upon my word!" - -"Well, papa, you nearly drowned me!" Katherine was struggling between -pride and anger. She would not let the tears come, but they were near -the surface. "Those horrible snaky things got hold of me and I almost -screamed, only I remembered that I mustn't open my mouth, and I thought -I would _never_ come to the top." The self-pitying retrospect brought -the tears to her eyes, but she held up her head and looked and spoke her -resentment, "I think you might have gone in first yourself. And Hilda! -Why didn't you wait until I came to the surface before you made her do -it?" - -Captain Archinard looked more vague under these reproaches than one -would have expected after his exhibition of rather fretful autocracy. - -"Made her!" he repeated, seizing with a rather mean haste at the error; -"made her? She went in herself! Like a rocket, after you. By Jove! she -showed her blood after all." - -"Hilda! you tried to save my life!" - -Odd still held the younger girl on his arm, supporting her while she -choked and panted, for she had evidently had not shown her sister's -_aplomb_ and had opened her mouth. Katherine took her into her arms and -kissed her with a warmth quite dramatic. - -"Darling Hilda! And you were so frightened, too. I would have gone in -after _her_," she added, looking up at Odd with a bright, quick glance, -"but there would have been nothing to my credit in that." - -"And _I_ would have gone in after her, it goes without saying, Mr. Odd," -said the Captain, when Katherine had led away to the bathing-cabin her -still dazed sister, "but you seemed to drop from the clouds. Really, you -have put me under a great obligation." - -"Not at all. I have spent most of the day in the river. I merely went -in a bit deeper to fish out that plucky little girl." - -"I've dived off that spot a hundred times. I'd no idea there were weeds. -I've never known weeds to be there. I'll send down one of the men -directly after lunch and have it seen to. Really I feel a sense of -responsibility." The Captain went on with an air of added -self-justification, "Though, of course, I'm not responsible. I couldn't -have known about the weeds." - -Weeds or no weeds, Odd could not forgive him for the child's fright, -though he replied good-humoredly to the invitation to the house. - -"Mrs. Archinard would have called on Mrs. Odd before this, but my wife -is an invalid--never leaves the house or grounds. She sees a good deal -of Miss Odd. I knew your father myself as well as one may know such a -recluse; spent some pleasant hours in his library--magnificent library -you've got. Peculiarly satisfactory it must be, as you go in for that -sort of thing. Won't you come in to tea this afternoon? And Mrs. Odd? -Miss Odd? I was sorry to find them out when I called the other day. I -haven't seen Mrs. Odd. I don't see her at church." - -"No; we have hardly settled down to our duties yet, and my wife only got -back from the Riviera a few weeks ago." - -"Well, I hope we shall keep you at Allersley now that your _wanderjahre_ -are over, and that you are married. I was wandering myself during your -boyhood. My brother bought the place, you know; liked the country here -immensely. Poor old Jack! Only lived ten years to enjoy it--and died a -bachelor--luckily for me. But we've missed one another, haven't we? -Neighbors too. I have seen Mrs. Odd--at a dance in London, Lady -Bartlebury's, I remember; and I remember that she was the prettiest girl -in the room. Miss Castleton--the beautiful Alicia Castleton." - -Miss Castleton's fame had indeed been so wide that the title was quite -public property, and the Captain's reminiscent tone of admiration most -natural and allowable. Odd accepted the invitation to tea, waded back -round the hedge, gathered up his basket and rod, and made his way up -through the park to Allersley Manor. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Mrs. Odd and Miss Odd, Peter's eldest and unmarried sister, were having -an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes, -came into the morning-room just before lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open -French window cutting the leaves of a review. There were several more -reviews on the table beside her, and with her eyeglasses and fine, -severe profile, she gave one the impression of a woman who would pass -her mornings over reviews and disagree with most of them for reasons not -frivolous. - -Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was very remarkable looking. The -adjective is usually employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty -pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd's dominant characteristic was beauty, pure -and simple; beauty triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable in the -sense that no one could fail to notice her, as when one had noticed her -it was impossible not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness -that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion against an almost -tame conformity, a rash person might assert that to him her type did not -appeal; but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplendent; in this -extreme lay the only hope of escape from conformity. The long figure in -the uniform-like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was almost -too uncommonplace in elegance of outline; the white hand too slender, -too pink as to finger-tips and polished as to nails; the delicate -scarlet splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, too dazzling. - -Mrs. Odd's red-brown hair was a glory, a burnished, well-coiffed, -well-brushed glory; it rippled, coiled, and curved about her head. Her -profile was bewildering--lazily, sweetly petulant. "Is this the face?" a -man might murmur on first seeing Alicia. - -Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon his vision over a year -ago. He was still young and literary, and, as he was swept out of -himself, had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expression. - -Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room. - -"I don't really see, Mary, what duty has got to do with it." Without -turning her head, she turned her eyes on Odd: "How wet your hair is, -Peter!" - -Mary Odd looked up from the review she was cutting rather grimly, and -her cold face was irradiated with a sudden smile. - -"Well, Peter," she said quietly. - -"I fished a little girl out of the river," said Odd, taking a seat near -Alicia, and smiling responsively at his sister. "Captain Archinard's -little girl." He told the story. - -"An interesting contrast of physical and moral courage." - -"I have seen the children. They are noticeable children. They always -ride to hounds." Hunting had been Miss Odd's favorite diversion during -her father's lifetime. "But the pretty one, as I remember, has not the -pluck of her sister--physical, as you say, Peter, no doubt." - -"What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard?" - -"Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an American, and was rich, -I believe. Captain Archinard left the army when he married her, and -immediately spent her money. Luckily for him poor Mr. Archinard -died--Jack Archinard; you remember him, Peter? A nice man. I go to see -Mrs. Archinard now and then. I don't care for her." - -"You don't care much for any one, Mary," said Mrs. Odd, smiling. "Your -remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no -doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection." - -"Yet I have many friends, Alicia." - -"Not near Allersley?" - -"Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, -and Miss Hibbard among my friends." - -"Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn't she? What big caps -she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off -her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an -inveterate matchmaker." - -"She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to -mean." - -"But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when -events are marriageable young men, doesn't she?" - -"Does she?" - -"Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in -saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring." - -"And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect." - -During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look -men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests. - -"I am awfully hungry. Isn't it almost lunch-time?" he said, as they -paused. - -Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. "It only wants five minutes." - -Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its -lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory. - -"How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary," he said, looking down at -the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined -her husband, putting her arm through his. - -"Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter," she smiled at him; and -although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life -with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight -to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty--a rather sickly, pallid -pleasure--and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he -and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of -hurting her. - -After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the -sympathy that allows itself no words. - -There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia's lonely complacency--a -pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness. - -"Mary is so disagreeable to-day," said Alicia, as they walked slowly -across the lawn. "She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of -other people's worthlessness." - -Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen -to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman -he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the -revealment of Alicia's shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She -had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not -found it out--had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these -characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was -born so. - -"It will be dull enough here, at all events," Alicia went on, pressing -her slim patent-leather shoe into the turf with lazy emphasis as she -walked, for Alicia was not bad-tempered, and took things easily; "but if -Mary is going to be disagreeable--" - -"You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived here. It is in a truer -sense her home than mine, but she would go directly if either you or she -found it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially she would never -have stayed." - -"Don't imply extravagant things, Peter. Who thinks of her going?" - -"She would--if _you_ made it disagreeable." - -"I? I do nothing. Surely Mary won't want to go because she scolds me." - -"Come, Ally, surely you don't get scolded--more than is good for you." -Odd smiled down at her. Her burnished head was on a level with his -eyes. "Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, as Mary is -somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought to take her lectures in a humble -spirit, and be thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection than I -am." - -"I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter." Alicia left the subject of -Mary for a still more intimate grievance. - -"The art of not being bored requires patience, not to say genius. It can -be learned though. And there are worse things than being bored." - -"I think I could bear anything better." - -"What would you like, Ally?" Odd's voice held a certain hopefulness. -"I'll do anything I can, you know. I believe in a woman's individuality -and all that. Does your life down here crush your individuality, -Alicia?" - -Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an inward bitterness. - -"Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care for all that woman -business--rights and movements and individualities and all that; a silly -claiming of more duties that do no good when they're done. I am an -absolutely banal person, Peter; my mind to me isn't a kingdom. I like -outside things. I like gayety, change, diversion. I don't like days one -after the other--like sheep--and I don't like sheep!" - -They had passed through the shrubbery, and before them were meadows -dotted with the harmless animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd's simile. - -"Well, we won't look at the sheep. I own that they savor strongly of -bucolic immutability. You've had plenty of London for the past year, -Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are really the change." - -"You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, Peter." - -"Longings for a political salon, Ally? I have hardly time for my -scribbling and landlording as it is." - -"A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as being clever and keeping it -up. No, I like seeing people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I -am absolutely banal, as I tell you." - -"Well, you shall have London next year. We'll go up for the season." - -"You took me for what I was, Peter," Mrs. Odd remarked as they retraced -their steps towards the house. "I have never pretended, have I? You knew -that I was a society beauty and that only. I am a very shallow person, I -suppose, Peter; I certainly can't pretend to have depths--even to give -Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. Why did you fall in -love with me, Peter? It wasn't _en caractère_ a bit, you know." - -"Oh yes, it was, Ally. I fell in love with you because you were -beautiful. Why did you fall in love with me?" - -The mockery with which Alicia's smile was tinged deepened into a -good-humored laugh at her own expense. - -"Well, Peter, I don't think any one before made me feel that they -thought me so beautiful. I am vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was -awfully flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. I am sure -you idealized me. Shall we go in? Lunch must be ready, and you must be -hungrier than ever." - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -At four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary started for the -Archinards' house. Mary had offered to join her brother; the prospect of -the walk together was very pleasant. She could not object when Alicia, -at the last moment, announced her intention of going too. - -"I have never been to see her. I should like the walk, and Mary will -approve of the fulfilment of my duty towards my neighbor." - -Mary's prospects were decidedly nipped in the bud, as Alicia perhaps -intended that they should be; but Alicia's avowed motive was so -praiseworthy that Mary allowed herself only an inner discontent, and, -what with her good-humored demeanor, Odd's placid chat of crops and -tenantry, and Alicia's acquiescent beauty, the trio seemed to enjoy the -mile of beechwood and country road and the short sweep of prettily -wooded drive that led to Allersley Priory, a square stone house covered -with vines of magnolia and wisteria, and incorporating in its walls, -according to tradition, portions of the old Priory which once occupied -the site. From the back of the house sloped a wide expanse of lawn and -shrubberies, and past it ran the river that half a mile further on -flowed out of Captain Archinard's little property into Odd's. The -drawing-room was on the ground-floor, and its windows opened on this -view. - -Mrs. Archinard and the Captain were talking to young Lord Allan Hope, -eldest son of Lord Mainwaring. Mrs. Archinard's invalidism was evidently -not altogether fictitious. She had a look of at once extreme fragility -and fading beauty. One knew at the first glance that she was a woman to -have cushions behind her and her back to the light. There was no -character in the delicate head, unless one can call a passive -determination to do or feel nothing that required energy, character. - -The two little girls came in while Odd talked to their father. They were -dressed alike in white muslins. Katherine's gown reached her ankles; -Hilda's was still at the _mi-jambe_ stage. Their long hair fell about -their faces in childlike fashion. Katherine's was brown and strongly -rippled; Hilda's softly, duskily, almost bluely black; it grew in -charming curves and eddies about her forehead, and framed her little -face and long slim neck in straightly falling lines. - -Katherine gave Odd her hand with a little air that reminded him of a -Velasquez Infanta holding out a flower. - -"You were splendid this morning, Mr. Odd. That hole was no joke, and -Hilda swallowed lots of water as it was. She might easily have been -drowned." - -Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply set black eyes had a -dominant directness. She held her head up, and her smile was charming--a -little girl's smile, yet touched with the conscious power of a clever -woman. Odd felt that the child was clever, and that the woman would be -cleverer. He felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice -of fun as they looked into his as though she knew that he knew, and they -both knew together, that Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his -ducking had been only conventionally "splendid." - -"Hilda wants to thank you herself, don't you, Hilda? She had such a -horrid time altogether; you were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the -sea monster!" Then Katherine, having, as it were, introduced and paved -the way for her sister, went back across the room again, and stood by -young Allan Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd. - -Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. She was not shy, -though she evidently had not her sister's ready mastery of what to say, -and how to say it. Odd was rather glad of this; he had found Katherine's -_aplomb_ almost disconcerting. - -"I do thank you very much." She put her hand into Odd's as he spoke, and -left it there; the confiding little action emphasized her childlikeness. - -"What did you think of as you went down?" he asked her. - -"In the river?" A shade of retrospective terror crossed her face. - -"No, no! we won't talk about the river, will we?" Odd said quickly. -However funny Katherine's greater common sense had found the incident, -it had not been funny to Hilda. "Have you lived here long?" he asked. -Captain Archinard had joined Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either -side, Alicia was enjoying herself. "I have never seen you before, you -know." - -"We have lived here since my uncle died; about eight years ago, I -think." - -"Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley." - -"Didn't you like Allersley?" Hilda asked, with some wonder. - -"Oh, very much; and my father was here, so I often came back; but I -lived in London and Paris, where I could work at things that interested -me." - -"I have been twice in London; I went to the National Gallery." - -"You liked that?" - -"Oh, very much." She was a quiet little girl, and spoke quietly, her -wide gentle gaze on Odd. - -"And what else did you like in London?" - -Hilda smiled a little, as if conscious that she was being put through -the proper routine of questions, but a trustful smile, quite willing to -give all information asked for. - -"The Three Fates." - -"You mean the Elgin Marbles?" - -"Yes, with no heads; but one is rather glad they haven't." - -"Why?" asked Odd, as she paused. Hilda did not seem sure of her own -reason. - -"Perhaps they would be _too_ beautiful with heads," she suggested. "Do -you like dogs?" she added, suddenly turning the tables on him. - -"Yes, I love dogs," Odd replied, with sincere enthusiasm. - -"Three of our dogs are out there on the verandah, if you would care to -know them?" - -"I should very much. Perhaps you'll show me the garden too; it looks -very jolly." - -It was a pleasure to look at his extraordinarily pretty little -Andromeda, and he was quite willing to spend the rest of his visit with -her. They went out on the verandah, where, in the awning's shade, lay -two very nice fox terriers. A dachshund sat gazing out upon the sunlit -lawn in a dog's dignified reverie. - -"Jack and Vic," Hilda said, pointing out the two fox terriers. "They -just belong to the whole family, you know. And this dear old fellow is -Palamon; Arcite is somewhere about; they are mine." - -"Who named yours?" - -"I did--after I read it; they had other names when they were given to -me, but as I had never called them by them, I thought I had a right to -change them. I wanted names with associations, like Katherine's setters; -they are called Darwin and Spencer, because Katherine is very fond of -science." - -"Oh, is she?" said Odd, rather stupefied. "You seem to have a great many -dogs in couples." - -"The others are not; they are more general dogs, like Jack and Vic." - -Hilda still held Odd's hand: she stooped to stroke Arcite's pensive -head, giving the fox terriers a pat as they passed them. - -"So you are fond of Chaucer?" Odd said. They crossed the gravel path and -stepped on the lawn. - -"Yes, indeed, he is my favorite poet. I have not read all, you know, but -especially the Knight's Tale." - -"That's your favorite?" - -"Yes." - -"And what is your favorite part of the Knight's Tale?" - -"The part where Arcite dies." - -"You like that?" - -"Oh! so much; don't you?" - -"Very much; as much, perhaps, as anything ever written. There never was -a more perfect piece of pathos. Perhaps you remember it." He was rather -curious to know how deep was this love for Chaucer. - -"I learnt it by heart; I haven't a good memory, but I liked it so much." - -"Perhaps you would say it to me." - -Hilda looked up a little shyly. - -"Oh, I can't!" she exclaimed timidly. - -"_Can't_ you?" and Odd looked down at her a humorously pleading -interrogation. - -"I can't say things well; and it is too sad to say--one can just bear to -read it." - -"Just bear to say it--this once," Odd entreated. - -They had reached the edge of the lawn, and stood on the grassy brink of -the river. Hilda looked down into the clear running of the water. - -"Isn't it pretty? I don't like deep water, where one can't see the -bottom; here the grasses and the pebbles are as distinct as possible, -and the minnows--don't you like to see them?" - -"Yes, but Arcite. Don't make me tease you." - -Hilda evidently determined not to play the coward a second time. The -quiet pressure of Odd's hand was encouraging, and in a gentle, -monotonous little voice that, with the soft breeze, the quickly running -sunlit river, went into Odd's consciousness as a quaint, ineffaceable -impression of sweetness and sadness, she recited:-- - - "Allas the wo! allas the peynes stronge, - That I for you have suffered, and so longe! - Allas the deth! allas myn Emelye! - Allas departing of our companye! - Allas myn hertes quene! allas, my wyf! - Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf! - What is this world? What asketh man to have? - Now with his love, now in his colde grave - Allone, withouten any companye." - -Odd's artistic sensibilities were very keen. He felt that painfully -delicious constriction of the throat that the beautiful in art can give, -especially the beautiful in tragic art. The far-away tale; the far-away -tongue; the nearness of the pathos, poignant in its "white simplicity." -And how well the monotonous little voice suited its melancholy. - - "Allone, withouten any companye," - -he repeated. He looked down at Hilda; he had tactfully avoided looking -at her while she spoke, fearing to embarrass her; her eyes were full of -tears. - -"Thanks, Hilda," he said. It struck him that this highly strung little -girl had best not be allowed to dwell too long on Arcite and, after a -sympathetic pause (Odd was a very sympathetic person), he added: - -"Now are you going to take me into the garden?" - -"Yes." Hilda turned from the river. "You know he had just gained her, -that made it all the worse. If he had not loved her he would not have -minded dying so much, and being alone. One can hardly bear it," Hilda -repeated. - -"It is intensely sad. I don't think you ought to have learned it by -heart, Hilda. That's ungrateful of me, isn't it? But I am old enough to -take an impersonal pleasure in sad things; I am afraid they make you -sad." - -Hilda's half-wondering smile was reassuringly childlike. - -"Oh, but it's _nice_ being sad like that." - -Odd reflected, as they went into the garden, that she had put herself -into his category. - -After the shadow of the shrubberies through which they passed, the -fragrant sunlight was dazzling. Rows of sweet peas, their mauves and -pinks and whites like exquisite musical motives, ran across the -delicious old garden. A border of deep purple pansies struck a -beautifully meditative chord. Flowers always affected Odd musically; he -half closed his eyes to look at the sweeps of sun-flooded color. A -medley of Schumann and Beethoven sang through his head as he glanced -down, smiling at Hilda Archinard; her gently responsive little smile was -funnily comprehensive; one might imagine that tunes were going through -her head too. - -"Isn't it jolly, Hilda?" - -"Very jolly," she laughed, and, as they walked between the pansy borders -she kept her gentle smile and her gentle stare up at his appreciative -face. - -She thought his smile so nice; his teeth, which crowded forward a -little, lent it perhaps its peculiar sweetness; his eyelids, drooping at -the outer corners, gave the curious look of humorous sadness to the -expression of his brown eyes. His moustache was cut shortly on his upper -lip, and showed the rather quizzical line of his mouth. Hilda, -unconsciously, enumerated this catalogue of impressions. - -"What fine strawberries," said Odd. "I like the fragrance almost more -than the flavor." - -"But won't you taste them?" Hilda dropped his hand to skip lightly into -the strawberry bed. "They are ripe, lots of them," she announced, and -she came running back, her outstretched hands full of the summer fruit, -red, but for the tips, still untinted. The sunlit white frock, the long -curves of black hair, the white face, slim black legs, and the spots of -crimson color made a picture--a sunshiny Whistler. - -Odd accepted the strawberries gratefully; they were very fine. - -"I don't think you can have them better at Allersley Manor," said Hilda, -smiling. - -"I don't think mine are as good. Won't you come some day to Allersley -Manor and compare?" - -"I should like to very much." - -"Then you and Miss Katherine shall be formally invited to tea, with the -understanding that afterwards the strawberry beds are to be invaded." - -"I should like to very much," Hilda repeated. - -"Hullo! Don't make me feel a pig! Eat some yourself," said Odd, who had -finished one handful. - -"No, no, I picked them for you." - -Odd took her disengaged hand in his as they walked on again, Hilda -resisting at first. - -"It is so sticky." - -"I don't mind that: it is very generous." She laughed at the -extravagance. - -"And what do you do all day besides swimming?" Odd asked. - -"We have lessons with our governess. She is strict, but a splendid -teacher. Katherine is quite a first-rate Latin scholar." - -"Is Katherine fond of Chaucer?" - -"Katherine cares more for science and--and philosophy." Hilda spoke with -a respectful gravity. "That's why she called her dogs Darwin and -Spencer. She hasn't read any of Spencer yet, but of course he is a great -philosopher. She knows that, and she has read a good deal of a big book -by Darwin, 'The Origin of Species,' you know." - -"Yes, I know." Odd found Katherine even more startling than her sister. - -"I tried to read it, but it was so confusing--about selection and -cabbages--I don't see how cabbages _can_ select, do you?" Hilda's voice -held a reminiscent vagueness. "Katherine says that she did not care for -it _much_, but she thought she ought to look through it if she wanted a -foundation; she is very keen on foundations, and she says Darwin is the -foundation-key--or corner-stone--no, keystone to the arch of modern -science--at least she did not say so, but she read me that from her -journal." - -"Oh! Katherine wrote that, did she?" - -"Yes; but you mustn't think that Katherine is a blue-stocking." -Something in Odd's tone made Hilda fear misunderstanding. "She loves -sports of all kinds, and fun. She goes across country as well as any -woman--that is what Lord Mainwaring said of her last winter during -fox-hunting. She isn't afraid of anything." - -"And what else do you do besides lessons?" - -"Well, I read and walk; there are such famous walks all about here, -walks in woods and on hills. I don't care for roads, do you? And I stay -with mamma and read to her when she is tired." - -"And Katherine?" - -"She is more with papa." In her heart Hilda said: "He loves her best," -but of that she could not speak, even to this new friend who seemed -already so near; to no one could she hint of that ache in her heart of -which jealousy formed no part, for it was natural that papa should love -Katherine best, that every one should; she was so gay and courageous; -but though it was natural that Katherine should be loved best, it was -hard to be loved least. - -"You are by yourself a good deal, then?" said Odd. "Do you walk by -yourself, too?" - -"Yes, with the dogs. I used to have grandmamma, you know; she died a -year ago." - -"Oh, yes! Mrs. Archinard's mother." - -Hilda nodded; her grasp on Odd's hand tightened and they walked in -silence. Odd remembered the fine portrait of a lady in the drawing-room; -he had noticed its likeness and unlikeness to Mrs. Archinard; a delicate -face, but with an Emersonian expression of self-reliance, a puritan look -of stanchness and responsibility. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -On the way home, cool evening shadows slanting across the road, Alicia -declared that she had really enjoyed herself. - -"Captain Archinard is quite jolly. He has seen everybody and everything -under the sun. He is most entertaining, and Lord Allan is remarkably -uncallow." - -"He thinks of standing for Parliament next year. A nice, steady, honest -young fellow. How do you like the Archinards, Peter?" - -"The child--Hilda--is a dear child." - -"She is awfully pretty," said Alicia, who could afford to be generous; -"I like that colorless type." - -"She is delicate, I am afraid," said Mary. - -"She has the mouth of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a -Gainsborough; you know the portrait of Sheridan's wife at Dulwich?" - -Alicia had never been to Dulwich. Mary assented. - -"The other one--the ugly one--is very clever," Alicia went on; she was -in a good temper evidently. Not that Alicia was ever exactly -bad-tempered. "She said some very clever things and looked more." - -"She is too clever perhaps," Mary remarked. "As for Mrs. Archinard, I -should like to slap her. I think that my conventionality is of a -tolerant order, but Mrs. Archinard's efforts at æsthetic originality -make me feel grimly conventional." - -"Mary! Mary! how delightful to hear such uncharitable remarks from you. -_I_ should rather like to slap her too, though she struck me as awfully -conventional." - -"Oh, she is, practically. It is the artistic _argot_ that bores one so -much." - -"She is awfully self-satisfied too. Dear me, Peter, I wish we had driven -after all. I hate the next half-mile. It is just uphill enough to be -irritating--fatigue without realizing exactly the cause of it. Why -didn't we drive, Peter?" - -"I thought we all preferred walking. You are a very energetic young -person as a rule." - -"Not for tiresome country roads. They should be got over as quickly as -possible." - -"Well, we will cut through the beech-woods as we came." - -"Oh dear," Alicia yawned, "how tired I am already of those tiresome -beech-woods. I wish it were autumn and that the hunting had begun. -Captain Archinard gives me glowing accounts, and promises me a lead for -the first good run. We must fill the house with people then, Peter." - -"The house shall be filled to overflowing. Perhaps you would like some -one now. Mrs. Laughton and her girls; you like them, don't you?" - -Alicia wrinkled up her charming nose. - -"Can't say I do. I've stopped with them too much perhaps. They bore me. -I am afraid no one would come just now, everything is so gay in London. -I wish I were there." - -Alicia was not there because the doctor had strongly advised country air -and the simple inaction of country life. Alicia had lost her baby only -three weeks after its birth--two months ago--and had herself been very -ill. - -"But I think I shall write to some people and ask them to take pity on -me," she added, as they walked slowly through the woods. "Sir John, and -Mr. and Mrs. Damian, Gladys le Breton, and Lord Calverly." - -"Well!" Peter spoke in his usual tone of easy acquiescence. - -Mary walked on a little ahead. What good did it do to trouble her -brother uselessly by her impatient look? But how could Peter yield so -placidly? Mary respected him too much to allow herself an evil thought -of his wife; but Alicia was a person to be talked about. Mary did not -doubt that she had been talked about already, and would be more so if -she were not careful. - -Lord Calverly and Sir John dangling attendance would infallibly cause -comment on any woman--let alone the beautiful Mrs. Odd. Yet Peter said, -"Well!" - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -The evening did not pass pleasantly at the Priory. Captain Archinard's -jolliness did not extend to family relationships; he often found family -relationships a bore, and the contrasted stodginess of his own -surroundings seemed greater after Mrs. Odd's departure. - -He muttered and fumed about the drawing-room after dinner. - -He was confoundedly pinched for money, and upon his word he would not be -surprised if he should have to sell the horses. "And what my life will -be stuck down here without the hunting, I can't imagine. Damnable!" - -The Captain growled out the last word under his breath in consideration -of Katherine and Hilda, who had joined their father and mother after -their own tea and a game of lawn-tennis. But Mrs. Archinard was not the -woman to allow to pass unnoticed such a well-founded cause of grievance. - -With a look of delicate disgust she laid down the volume of Turgenieff -that she was reading. - -"Shall I send the children away, Charles? Either they or you had best -go, if you are going to talk like that." - -"Beg pardon," said the Captain shortly. "No, of course they don't go." - -"I am sure I have few enough enjoyments without being made to suffer -because you are to lose one of yours." - -"Who asks you to suffer, Kate? But you don't wait for the asking. You're -only too willing to offer yourself as a _souffre-douleur_ on all -occasions." - -Then Mrs. Archinard retired behind her book in scornful resignation and, -after twenty minutes of silence, the little girls were very glad to get -away to bed. - -Hilda was just undressed when Mrs. Archinard sent for her to come to her -room. Her head ached, and Hilda must brush her hair; it was early yet. -This was a customary task, and one that Hilda prided herself upon -accomplishing with sovereign beneficence. Taylor's touch irritated Mrs. -Archinard; Hilda only was soothing. - -In dressing-gown and slippers she ran to her mother's room. - -Mrs. Archinard's long hair--as black and as fine as Hilda's--fell over -the back of the large arm-chair in which she reclined. - -"Such a headache!" she sighed, as Hilda took up the brush and began to -pass it slowly and gently down the length of hair. "It is really brutal -of your father to forget my head as he does." - -Hilda's heart sank. The unideal attitude of her father and mother toward -one another was one of her great sorrows. Papa was certainly fond of his -pretty wife, but he was so fretful and impatient, and mamma so -continually grieved. It was all wrong. Hilda had already begun to pass -judgment, unconsciously, on her father; but her almost maternal -tenderness for her mother as yet knew no doubt. - -"It would be very dreadful if the horses had to go, wouldn't it?" she -said. Her father's bad temper might be touching if its cause were -suggested. - -"Of course it would; and so are most things dreadful. I am sure that -life is nothing but dreadfulness in every form." Yet Mrs. Archinard was -not at all an unhappy woman. Her life was delicately epicurean. She had -few wants, but those few were never thwarted. From the early cup of -exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all the day of dilettante -lounging over a clever book--a day relieved from monotony by pleasant -episodes--dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from acquaintances, -with whom she had a reputation for languid cynicism and quite awesome -literary and artistic cleverness--to this hour of hair-brushing, few of -her moments were not consciously appreciative of the most finely -flavored mental and physical enjoyment. But the causes for enjoyment -certainly seemed so slight that Mrs. Archinard's graceful pessimism -usually met with universal sympathy. Hilda was very sorry for her -mother. To lie all day reading dreary books; condemned to an inaction -that cut her off from all the delights of outdoor life, seemed to her -tragic. Mrs. Archinard did not undeceive her; indeed, perhaps, the most -fascinating of Mrs. Archinard's artistic occupations was to fancy -herself very tragic. Hilda went back to her room much depressed. - -The girls slept together, and Katherine was sitting up in her night-gown -writing her journal by candlelight and enjoying a sense of talent -flowing at all costs--for writing by candlelight was strictly -forbidden--as she dotted down what she felt to be a very original and -pungent account of the day and the people it had introduced. - -When, however, she heard the patter of Hilda's heedless slippers in the -corridor, she blew out the candle in a hurry, pinched the glowing wick, -and skipped into bed. She might take an artistic pleasure in braving -rules, but Katherine knew that Hilda would have shown an almost dull -amazement at her occupation; and although Katherine characterized it as -dull, she did not care to arouse it. She wished to stand well in Hilda's -eyes in all things. Hilda must find nothing to criticise in her either -mentally or morally. - -"What shall we do if the horses are sold?" she exclaimed, as Hilda got -into the little bed beside hers. "Only imagine! no hunting next winter! -at least, none for us!" - -"Poor papa," Hilda sighed. - -"Oh, you may be sure that he will keep one hunter at least, but of -course he will be dreadfully cut off from it with only one, and of -course our horses will have to go if the worst comes to the worst. You -won't miss it as much as I will, Hilda; the riding, yes, no doubt, but -not the hunting. Still Lord Mainwaring will give us a mount, and now -that Mr. Odd is here, he will be sure to have a lot of horses. The old -squire let everything of that sort run down so, Miss Odd had only two -hunters. Well, Hilda, and what do you think of Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh, I love him, Katherine!" Hilda lay looking with wide eyes into the -soft darkness of the room. The windows were open, and the drawn chintz -curtains flapped gently against the sills. - -"I wouldn't say that if I were you, Hilda," Katherine remarked, with -some disapproval. - -"Why not?" Hilda's voice held an alarmed note. Katherine was, to a great -extent, her mentor. - -"It doesn't sound very--dignified. Of course you are only a little girl, -but still--one doesn't say such things." - -"But I do love him; how can one help loving a person who treats one so -kindly. And then--anyway--even if he had not been kind to me I should -love him, I think." - -Hilda would have liked to be able properly to analyze her sensations and -win her sister's approval; but how explain clearly? - -"That would be rather foolish," Katherine said, in a tone of kind but -restraining wisdom; "one shouldn't let one's feelings run away with one -like that. Shall I tell you what _I_ think about Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh yes, please." - -"I think he is like the river where we jumped in to-day--ripples on the -top, kindness and smiles, you know--but somewhere in his heart a big -hole--a hole with stones and weeds in it." Katherine was quoting from -her journal, but Hilda might as well think the simile improvised: -Katherine felt some pride in it; it certainly justified, she thought, -the conventionally illicit act of the candle. - -Hilda lay in silent admiration. - -"Oh, Katherine, I never know how I feel things till you tell me like -that," she said at last. "How beautiful! Yes, I am sure he has a hole in -his heart." And tears came into Hilda's eyes and into her mind the -line:-- - - "Allone, withouten any companye." - -"As for Mrs. Odd," Katherine continued, pleased with the success of her -psychology, "she has no heart to make a hole in." - -"Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful!" - -"She is a thorough egotist. She doesn't know much either, Hilda, for -when Darwin came in she laughed a lot at the name and said she wouldn't -be paid to read him--the real Darwin." - -"Perhaps she likes other things best." - -"Herself," said Katherine decisively. "Miss Odd of course we have had -time to make up our minds about." - -"I like her; don't you? She has such a clear, trustful face." - -"She is rather rigid; about as hard on other people as she would be on -herself. She could never do anything wrong." - -"I don't quite like _that_; being hard on other people, I mean. One -could be quite sure about one's own wrongness, but how can one about -other people's? It is rather uncharitable, isn't it, Katherine?" - -"She isn't very charitable, but she is very just. As for Lord Allan, he -is a sort of type, and, therefore, not very entertaining." - -"A type of what?" - -"Oh, just the eldest son type; very handsome, very honest, very good, -with a strong sense of responsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him, -which is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the younger -son--more interest." - -Katharine went to sleep with a warmly comfortable sense of competence. -She doubted whether many people saw things as clearly as she did. - -She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming scream from Hilda. - -"What is the matter, Hilda?" She spoke crossly. "How you startled me." - -"Oh, such a horrid dream!" Hilda half sobbed. "How glad I am that it -isn't so!" - -"What was it?" Katherine asked, still crossly; severity she thought the -best attitude towards Hilda's fright. - -"About the river, down in the hole; I was choking, and my legs and arms -were all tangled in roots." - -"Well, go to sleep now," Katherine advised. - -Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, supplicating voice -was heard. - -"Katherine--I'm so sorry--don't be angry--might I come to you? I'm so -frightened." - -"Come along," said Katherine, still severely, but she put her arms very -fondly around her shivering sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed -her. - -"Silly little Hilda," she said. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Three days before the arrival of Gladys le Breton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord -Calverly, and Sir John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia's -invitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother. - -She came into the library early one morning before breakfast. Odd was -there, writing. - -"Peter," she said, "last night, before going to bed, I wrote to Mr. -Apswith and accepted him." - -Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled round his chair in -amazement. - -"Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary?" - -"Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I felt that the time had -come." - -Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with -Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, -and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love when she first came -out twelve years ago. Mr. Apswith's patience, perseverance, and fidelity -were certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had thought that -as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty in maintaining her severe -independence, it would, in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith's -ardor. - -Mary, however, was a person to keep her own counsel. During her father's -lifetime, when much responsibility and many duties had claimed her, she -had certainly doubted more than once the possibility of Mr. Apswith's -ultimate success; there was a touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great -deal of the Minerva. But, since her father's death, since Peter's bridal -home-coming, Mary often found herself thinking of Mr. Apswith, her -fundamental sympathy with him on all things, her real loneliness and his -devotion. They had corresponded for years, and often saw one another. -Familiarity had not bred contempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust -and dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary's letters had called -forth from Mr. Apswith a most domineering and determined love-letter. -Mary had yielded to it--gladly, as she now realized. Yet her heart -yearned over Peter. He got up now, and kissed her. - -"Mary, my dear girl"--he could hardly find words--"may you be very, very -happy. You deserve it; so does he." - -Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful decision, on the fact -that by it Peter would be left to the solitary companionship of his -wife; it was not a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her arms -around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her happiness made his missing -it so apparent, but she shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge. - -"We must ask Apswith down at once," said Odd. "It's a busy session, but -he can manage a few days." - -"Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within -the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. -She stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get -my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks' time. -Delay would be rather silly--he has waited so long." - -"You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don't like to -lose you." - -"It isn't losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I -shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the -Mainwarings." - -When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for -a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one -does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to -himself that Mary's prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even -character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a -sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia's influence was a very air-pump. Poor -Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather -unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green -stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and -his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two -months ago, just after the baby's death and just before Alicia's -departure for the Riviera. - -Alicia was lying on the sofa--Peter staring at the distant trees, did -not see them but that scene--her magnificent health had made lying on -sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort -of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin -white cheek. His heart was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not -said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in -any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how -keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal -pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the -baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of -longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers -about it, was that of his child--dead. - -On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover's -tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all -tenderness out of it. - -"My dear girl, my poor, dear girl," he said, kissing her; and he sat -down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up -at him with those wonderful eyes--looked up with a smile. - -"Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter." - -Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her--her beauty -entranced him as it had done from the beginning. - -"Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?" His earnestness pleased her; she felt -in it her own power. - -"What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever imagine I didn't?" - -"Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of our child? Will you -feel for my sorrow as I feel for yours, my poor darling?" - -"Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It is especially hard on you, -too, losing your heir." - -Her look, her words crushed all the sudden impulse of resolve, hope, -love even. - -"My heir?" Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone. "That has nothing to do -with it. I wasn't thinking of that." - -"Weren't you?" said Alicia, rather wearily. She felt her weakness, it -irked her, and her next words were more fretfully uttered-- - -"Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot to go through, too, and -for nothing." She saw the pain setting her husband's lips sternly. "I -suppose now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing about baby," -she remarked. - -"I hope I am not a brute," said Peter gloomily. - -"You hope _I'm_ not, too, no doubt." - -"Don't, don't, Alicia." - -"I felt awfully about it; simply awfully," Alicia declared. - -Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library -windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an -epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia -could disappoint him no longer. - -In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness -had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a -nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points -with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a -thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia's -perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all -consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He -was carefully just to Alicia. - -Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia's guests had arrived. Mrs. -Marchant, an ugly, "smart," vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and -good singer; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to -head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and -supposed to be clever. - -"Clever, I suppose," Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, "because she has the -reputation of doing foolish things badly--dancing on dinner-tables and -thoroughly _bête_ things like that. She has not danced on Peter's table -as yet." - -Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily, -and Peter's placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le -Breton's coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a -charitable point of view. - -"Poor little girl," said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with -some severity; "it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is -to make a fool of herself," and with this rather unexpected piece of -opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially -hated the big man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. His -cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of -protecting partisanship in Mary's breast, and his looks at Alicia made -her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly -more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a -reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent -good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter's -good-humor might fail. - -The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peter -_dans cette galère_. - -Peter, however, did not much mind the _galère_. His duties as host lay -lightly on him. He did not mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at -the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and -pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs -and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary -tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John -and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite -falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced -definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter. - -Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show -that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less -gayety than when Mary was there. - -She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard--who -had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his -horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at -odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir -John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight -effects in the drawing-room. - -Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day -Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked -to bring his girls to tea. - -Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the -drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory -introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while -he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain -followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two -children. Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the -hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at -Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a -white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right -about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed -gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their -dogs-- - -"I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day." - -"We didn't know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to -bring them," said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like -effect: "We _should_ have liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully." - -That Palamon's despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen. - -"Hey! What's that?" Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard -the faint ejaculation; "what is your dog called?" - -"Palamon." Hilda's voice was reserved; she had already thought that she -did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, -she was sure of it. - -"What funny names you give your dogs," said Alicia. "The other is called -Darwin," she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; "but Palamon -is pretty--prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him -that?" - -"It is out of 'The Knight's Tale,'" said Katherine; "Hilda is very fond -of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite." - -Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of -his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby's, -hugely amused him. - -"So you like Chaucer?" Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very -uncomfortable. "Strong meat that for babes," Lord Calverly added, -looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant -vagueness. - -"Never read it," she replied briskly; "not to remember. If I had had -literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books -without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently." - -Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did -not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as -"improper" showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm -and wonder. Alicia's expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her -even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly's appreciative monocle--the -monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with -abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man -who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a -child's quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if -Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up -with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a -half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two -little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them -hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda's glad face. - -"I'm sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?" - -He shook hands, smiling at them. - -"Don't, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring," -called the Captain; "they can find their way to the garden without an -escort." - -"But it won't put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if -I couldn't," and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious -and hesitating. - -Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for -strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of -unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, -and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out -with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention -between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not -interest her, but she found Alicia's low, musical laughter, and the -enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly's half-muffled -utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well -in her journal. - -"He is probably flattering her," thought Katherine; "that is what she -likes best." - -Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly's stare and Alicia's -frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He -took her first to the picture gallery--having noticed as they went -through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with -evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the -Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from -picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle -smile, so that, after the half-hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure -that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was -singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in -answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw. - -"All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!" she said; "almost -everything would be beautiful, wouldn't it, if one were great enough?" - -The strawberry beds were visited, and-- - -"Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first -acquaintance?" asked Peter; "we have plenty of time before tea." But, -seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda's eyes, "Well, not there, -then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our -boating-house is a mile from yours, and I'll give you a paddle in my -Canadian canoe,--such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, -or you'll spill us both into the river." - -"I shouldn't mind, as you would be there," laughed Hilda; and so they -went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made -the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that -she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the -best and oldest of friends. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with -an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation -deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind. - -The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the -acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and -kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the -shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable -mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and -self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence. - -Mary's wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone -for two months' cruising in a friend's yacht about the North Sea, Peter -set to work with vigor. "The Sonnet" was in a year's time to make him -famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went -to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found -a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were -thoroughly irreproachable--a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty -but very sensible wife. - -Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her own fashion, felt no -weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, -and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd -when the news reached him at his sister's, was as unjust as it was -poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd's death had -broken her husband's heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false -premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia's -death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was -a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures -haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which -she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away -from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of -the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came -the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death -more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks, -seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive -suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married -there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must -have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of -the wisdom of the decision. - -At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way--the -dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of -helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she -heard that her friend was going away. - -The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her -capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to -her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense -of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity -for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly -bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the -hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she -never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had -seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession. - -"Odd goes to-morrow," the Captain announced one evening in the -drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather -cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she -was not reading, and her father's words seemed to stop her heart in its -heavy beating. - -"I met Thompson"--Mr. Thompson was Peter's land-agent--"and everything -is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he's badly broken up." - -"How futile to mourn over death," Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa. -"Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and -circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great -illusion?" Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely -yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking "rot" before -the children. - -"Move this lamp away, Hilda," said Mrs. Archinard. "I think I can take a -nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal." - -It was a warm autumn night, and the windows were open. Hilda slipped -out when she had moved the lamp away. - -She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge, -but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the -lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness -her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came -to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda's heart -stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at -night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage, -and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only -mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree -trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were -all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an -indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all -the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without -stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance -she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the -lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her -breath. Yes, _he_ was there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet -of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of -the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and -Hilda pushed it open and went in. - -At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half -incredulous stupefaction. Hilda's white face, tossed hair, the -lamentable condition of her muslin frock, made of her indeed a -startling apparition. - -"My dear Hilda!" he exclaimed. - -Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared silently at him. Mr. Odd's -face looked so much older; its gravity made her heart stand still with -an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood helplessly before him, -tears brimming to her eyes. - -"My dear child, what is the matter? You positively frightened me." - -"I came to say 'Good-bye,'" said Hilda brokenly. - -Peter's gravity was mere astonishment and sympathetic dismay. The -tear-brimmed eyes, after his weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with -a most exquisite rush of pity and tenderness. - -"Come here, you dear child," he said, holding out his arms to her; "you -came to say 'Good-bye?' I am very grateful to you." - -Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and wept. After the frozen -nightmare moment, the old kindness was a delicious contrast; she almost -forgot the purport of her journey, though she knew that she was crying. -Odd stroked her long hair; her tears slightly amused and slightly -alarmed him, even while the pathos of the affection they revealed -touched him deeply. - -"Did you come alone?" he asked. - -Hilda nodded. - -"That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank you for it. There, can't -you smile at me? Don't cry." - -"Oh, I love you _so_ much, I can hardly bear it." Peter felt -uncomfortable. The capacity for suffering revealed in these words gave -him a sense of responsibility. Poor child! Would her lot in life be to -cry over people who were not worth it? - -"I shall come back some day, Hilda." Hilda stopped crying, and Peter was -relieved by the sobs' cessation. "I have a wandering fit on me just now; -you understand that, don't you?" - -She held his hand tightly. She could not speak; her heart swelled so at -his tone of mutual understanding. - -"I am going to see my sister. I haven't seen her for five years; but -long before another five years are passed I shall be here again, and the -thing I shall most want to see when I get back will be your little -face." - -"But you will be different then, I will be different, we will both be -changed." Hilda put her hands before her face and sobbed again. Peter -was silent for a moment, rather aghast at the child's apprehension of -the world's deepest tragedy. He could not tell her that they would be -unchanged--he the man of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor -little Hilda! Her grief was but too well founded, and his thoughts -wandered for a moment with Hilda's words far away from Hilda herself. -Hilda wiped her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He had a keen -sense of the unconventional in beauty, and her tears had not disfigured -her small face--had only made it strange. He patted her cheek and smiled -at her. - -"Cheer up, little one!" She evidently tried to smile back. - -"I am afraid you have idealized me, my child--it's a dangerous faculty. -I am a very ordinary sort of person, Hilda; you must not imagine fine -things about me nor care so much. I'm not worth one of those tears, poor -little girl!" - -It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn gaze; a sage prophecy -of inevitable recovery would be brutal; to show too much sympathy -equally cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her grief, and -he found himself looking gravely into her large eyes. - -"You're not worth it?" she repeated. - -"No, really." - -"I don't imagine things about you." - -"Well, I am glad of that," said Peter, feeling rather at a loss. - -"I love you dearly," said Hilda, with a certain air of dreary dignity; -"you are you. I don't have to imagine anything." - -Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. - -"Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and certainly I don't have to -imagine anything." - -Hilda's eyes, with their effect of wide, almost unseeing expansion, -rested on his for a moment longer. She drew herself up, and a look of -resolution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young face. Odd -still felt somewhat disconcerted, somewhat at a loss. - -"I must go now; they don't know that I am here." - -"They didn't know that you were coming, I suppose?" - -"No; they wouldn't have let me come if I had told them before, but I -will tell them now." - -"Well, we will tell them together." - -"Are you going to take me home?" - -"Did you imagine that I would let you go alone?" - -"You are very kind." - -"And what are you, then? Your shoes are wringing wet, my child. Your -dress is thin, too, for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine around -you. There! and put on this hat." - -Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat that came down over -her ears; she looked charming and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda -responded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering together the -wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd lit a cigar, put on his own hat, -took her hand, and they sallied forth. - -"You came across, I suppose?" - -"Yes, by the woods." - -"And you weren't frightened?" - -He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as she replied-- - -"You know already that I am a coward." - -"I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly courageous. The flesh -may be weak, but the spirit is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda?" - -"Yes," said Hilda vaguely. - -They walked in silence through the woods. Clouds hid the moon, and the -wind had risen. - -Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost in the ghost-like -unreality of existence. The walk through the melancholy dimness seemed -symbolical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of Hilda Archinard's -little hand in his was comforting. When they had passed through the -Priory shrubbery and were nearing the house, Hilda's step beside him -paused. - -"Will you kiss me 'Good-bye' here, not before them all?" - -"What beastly things 'Good-byes' are," Odd said, looking down at the -glimmering oval of her uplifted face; "what thoroughly beastly things." -He took the little face between his hands and kissed her: "Good-bye, -dear little Hilda." - -"Thank you so much--for everything," she said. - -"Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you." - -"Don't be different. _Try_ not to change." - -"Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -That she, not he, would change was the inevitable thing. He stooped and -kissed again the child beside him. - - - - -Part I - -KATHERINE - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Odd knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysées in a -rattling, closed _fiacre_. He and Besseint had talked so late into the -evening that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in the -Marboeuf quarter and dress. - -Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers of the day; he and -Peter had battled royally and delightfully over the art of writing, and -as Besseint was certainly more interesting than would be the dinner at -the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable. - -Lady---- welcomed him unresentfully-- - -"Just, only just in time. I am going to send you down with Miss -Archinard--over there talking to my husband--she is such a clever girl." - -Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise; a shock so strong that -Lady---- saw a really striking change come over his face. Peter himself -was startled by his own pleasure and eagerness. - -"Evidently you know her; and evidently you _were_ going to be bored and -are _not_ going to be now! Your change of expression is really -unflattering!" Lady---- laughed good humoredly. - -"I haven't seen her for ten years; we were the greatest chums. Oh! it -isn't Hilda, then!" Odd caught sight of the young lady. - -"I am _very_ sorry it isn't 'Hilda.' Hilda is the beauty; she is, -unfortunately, almost an unknown quantity; but Katherine will be a -stepping-stone, and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on her -own account." - -Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone; that atoned somewhat for the -disappointment that Odd felt as he followed his hostess across the room. - -"Miss Archinard--an old friend. Mr. Odd tells me he has not seen you for -ten years." - -"Mr. Odd!" cried Miss Archinard. She was evidently very glad to see him. - -"It is astonishing, isn't it?" said Peter. "Ten years does mean -something, doesn't it?" - -"So much and yet so little. It hasn't changed you a bit," said -Katherine. "And here is papa. Papa, isn't this nice? Mr. Odd, do you -remember the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor Hilda! And her -romantic farewell escapade?" - -Captain Archinard was changed; his hair had become very white, and his -good looks well worn, but his greeting had the cordiality of old -friendship. - -"And Hilda?" Peter questioned, as he and Katherine went into the -dining-room together. "Hilda is well? And as lovely as ever?" - -"Well, and as lovely as ever," Katherine assured him. "She is not here -because she rarely goes out. Papa and I are the frivolous members of the -family. Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art." Peter had a good -look at her as they sat side by side. - -Katherine was no more beautiful than in childhood, but she was -distinctly interesting and--yes--distinctly charming. Her black eyes, -deeply set under broad eyebrows, held the same dominant significance; -humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her white teeth gave a brilliant gayety -to her smile. There was distinction in her coiffure--the thick deeply -rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled smoothly from crown to neck; -and Peter recognized in her dress a personal taste as distinctive--the -long unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were untinged by any -hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, and yet the dress wrinkled about -her waist as she moved with a daring elegance far removed from the -moulded conventionality of the other women's bodices. This glowing gown -was cut off the shoulders; Katherine's shoulders were beautiful, and -they were triumphantly displayed. - -"And now, please tell me," said Peter, "how it comes that I haven't seen -you for ten years?" - -"How comes it that we have not seen _you_? You have been everywhere, and -so have we; really it is odd that we should never have met. Of course -you know that we left the Priory only a year after you went to India?" - -Peter nodded. - -"I was dismayed to find you gone when I got back. I heard vague rumors -of Florence, and when I went there one winter you had disappeared." - -"We must have been in Dresden. How I hated it! All the shabby -second-rate culture of the world seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had -to let the Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor." - -Katherine's smiling assertion was not carried out in her appearance, yet -the statement put a bond of familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as -to an old friend who had a right to know. - -"Then we had a year or two at Dinard--loathsome place I think it! Then -Florence again, and at last Paris, and here we have been for over three -years, and here we shall probably stick for who knows how long! Hilda's -painting gives us a reasonable background; at least as reasonable as -such exiles can hope for." - -"But you don't mean to say that your exile is indefinite?" - -Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a suggestion of shrug in the -creamy expanse of shoulder. - -"And Hilda paints? Well?" - -"Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, and her work is -really individual, unaffectedly individual, and that's the rare thing, -you know. Over four years of atelier work didn't scotch Hilda's -originality, and she has a studio of her own now, and is never happy out -of it." - -"What kind of work does she go in for?" Peter was conscious of a vague -uneasiness about Hilda. "Portraits?" - -"No; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her things are very -decorative--not Japanese either--except in their air of choice and -selection; well, you must see them, they really are original, and, in -their own little way, quite delightful; they are, perhaps, a wee bit -like baby Whistlers--not that I intimate any real resemblance--but the -sense of color, the harmony; but you must see them," Katherine repeated. - -"And Mrs. Archinard?" Peter felt some remorse at having forgotten that -rather effaced personality. - -"Mamma is just the same, only stronger than she used to be in England. -I think the Continent suits her better. And now _you_, Mr. Odd. The idea -of talking about such nobodies as we are when you have become such a -personage! You have become rather cynical too, haven't you? As a child -you did not make a cynical impression on me, and your 'Dialogues' did. I -think you are even more cynical than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to -me of a _rapport_ between your 'Dialogues' and his 'Dialogues -Philosophiques.' I don't imply that, except that you are both sceptical -and both smiling, only your smile is more bitter, your scepticism less -frivolous." - -"I'm sceptical as to people, not as to principles," said Peter, smiling -not bitterly. - -"Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate people." - -"I don't admire them." - -"You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The -Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And -then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn't -it? Why didn't you keep on?" - -"Because I didn't keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were -dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure." - -"I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren't -'practical,' and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we -should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring." - -"Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got back three weeks ago." - -"How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since -getting back?" - -"Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London." - -"We were with Lady Mainwaring." - -"Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my -having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has -been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?" - -"Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us." - -"And Hilda enjoyed herself?" - -Katherine smiled: "How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed -herself after a fashion, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn't -care much for that sort of thing really." - -Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful -complaint of Mrs. Archinard's weekly letter had cut short Hilda's -season, and brought her back to the little room in the little -_appartement, 3ième au dessus de l'entresol_, where Mrs. Archinard spent -her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at -Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard's -lace-frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long-suffering that -went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people's -deficiencies. - -"But Hilda's month meant more than other girls' years," Katherine went -on; "you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor -Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those -big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old -friend," and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, "Allan Hope." - -Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt -its concealment. - -"Allan Hope?" he repeated. "It is impossible for me to imagine little -Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!" - -"Allan Hope is very nice," Katherine said lightly. - -"Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a -child." - -Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine. - -"And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is." - -"That depends." Katherine laughed. "But regrets of that kind are -unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don't think little Hilda is -much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn't -imply that one is ready for them, and I don't think that Hilda is -ready." - -Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine's black eyes rested on -him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully -in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of -white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might -not constitute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear -glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all. - -There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years -ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet -mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look -of middle age. - -"His Parliamentary experience probably knocked the remaining illusions -out of him," Katherine reflected. "He was certainly very unsuccessful, -he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit -now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill -hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home -and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a -woman who would be nice to him." And it was characteristic of Katherine -that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether -it would be feasible, or rather desirable--for Katherine intended to -please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she -could make up her mind--to contemplate that rôle for herself. Miss -Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of -matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent -indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly -attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would -choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a -husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful; -and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of -every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss -Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd -would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was -excellent--not glittering--Katherine would have liked glitter, and the -more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, -that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of -modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit only to impress ignorance or -vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one -wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that -she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to -him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could -at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy -memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friendship; but -Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked -anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation. - -Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to -the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, -rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking. -Indeed his next words showed as much. - -"How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you -know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find -myself an uncle with a vengeance." - -"I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages -ago, that wedding." - -"Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently. - -"She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, -at Allersley?" - -"Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is -rather lonely." - -"Why don't you fill it with people?" - -"You forget that I don't like people," said Odd. - -"You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be -something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty -as landowner and country gentleman." - -"Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come -back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness." - -"The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I -think I prefer Paris to the Priory." - -"What do you do with yourself in Paris?" - -"Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very -well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one -must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good -fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed -round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with -which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. -He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him. - -"Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you -fight?" - -"The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the -pity." - -"And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral -crusade?" - -"I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of -conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine, -chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would -be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the -people I liked." - -"And all the others would be in cages!" - -"They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very -tolerant." - -"And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all -marching and caging." - -"I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but -not meanly so, I assure you." - -"No; not meanly so, I am sure." Odd's eyes were quietly scrutinizing, -as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and -looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic. - -"And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but, -meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?" - -"Meanwhile I study my _milieu_. I go out a good deal, if one can call it -going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-American _mélange_; I read a -bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like -sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in -papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!" - -"You rode so well, too, Mary told me." - -"Yes, I rode well, otherwise I shouldn't regret it." Katherine smiled -with even more assurance under the added intensity of the _pince-nez_. - -"You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the feeling." - -"That sounds vain; I certainly shouldn't feel pleasure if I were -conscious of playing second fiddle to anybody." - -"A very vain young lady," Odd's smile was quite alertly interested, "and -a self-conscious young lady, too." - -"Yes, rather, I think," Katherine owned; frankness became her, "but I am -very conscious of everything, myself included. I am merely one among the -many phenomena that come under my notice, and, as I am the nearest of -them all, naturally the most intimately interesting. Every one is -self-conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at all." - -"And you are clever," Peter pursued, in a tone of enumeration, his smile -becoming definitely humorous as he added: "And I am very impudent." - -Katherine was not sure that she had made just the effect she had aimed -for, but certainly Mr. Odd would give her credit for frankness. - -It was agreed that he should come for tea the next afternoon. - -"After five," Katherine said; "Hilda doesn't get in till so late; and I -know that Hilda is the _clou_ of the occasion." - -"Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all that?" - -"She doesn't care about anything, _anything_ else," Katherine said -gravely, adding, still gravely, "Hilda is very, very lovely." - -"I hope you weren't too much disappointed," Lady---- said to Odd, just -before he was going; "is she not a charming girl?" - -"She really is; the disappointment was only comparative. It was Hilda -whom I knew so well. The dearest little girl." - -"I have not seen much of her," Lady---- said, with some vagueness of -tone. "I have called on Mrs. Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever, -too; but the other girl was never there. I don't fancy she is much help -to her mother, you know, as Katherine is. Katherine goes about, brings -people to see her mother, makes a _milieu_ for her; such a sad invalid -she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in her work, I believe. Rather -a pity, don't you think, for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like -that? She paints very nicely, to be sure; I fancy it all goes into that, -you know." - -"What goes into that?" Odd asked, conscious of a little temper; all -seemed combined to push Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory -and very mysterious background. - -"Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Katherine can entertain a -roomful of people. Grace, tact, sympathy, the impalpable something that -makes success of the best kind, Katherine has it." - -Katherine's friendly, breezy frankness had certainly amused and -interested Odd at the dinner-table, but Lady ----'s remarks now produced -in him one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions of feeling -by which the judgments of a half-hour before are suddenly reversed. -Katherine's cleverness was that of the majority of the girls he took -down to dinner, rather _voulu_, banal, tiresome. Odd felt that he was -unjust, also that he was a little cross. - -"There are some clevernesses above entertaining a roomful of people. -After all, success isn't the test, is it?" - -Lady---- smiled, an unconvinced smile-- - -"You should be the last person to say that." - -"I?" Odd made no attempt to contradict the evident flattery of his -hostess' tones, but his ejaculation meant to himself a volume of -negatives. If success were the test, he was a sorry failure. - -He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped -him. - -"I have hardly had one word with you, Odd," said the Captain, whose -high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its -fundamental look of peevish pettiness. "Mrs. Brooke is going to take -Katherine home. It's a fine night, won't you walk?" - -Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never -found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke -and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men -turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré together. - -"We are not far from you, you know," the Captain said--"Rue Pierre -Charron; you said you were in the Marboeuf quarter, didn't you? We are -rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I'll leave you at the door of your -hotel." - -They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night -was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysées, as they turned into it, -almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights. - -"Ten years is a jolly long time," remarked Captain Archinard, "and a -jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we'd -left the Priory, of course?" - -"I was very sorry to hear it." - -"Devilish hard luck. It wasn't a choice of evils, though, if that is -any consolation; it was that or starvation." - -"As bad as that?" - -"Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations--safe -enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one -thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I -simply can't go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of -creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is -mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the -interest; and hard luck it is altogether," the Captain repeated. -"Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep -all worry from her; she doesn't know anything about my troubles; she -lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself -rather than deprive her of one luxury." The tone in which the Captain -alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. "And -the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have -of it. But what is my life, I ask you?" The Captain's voice was very -resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good -gentleman's unhappy situation. "What is my life, I ask you? I go -dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and -five o'clock tea in grass widows' drawing-rooms for all distraction. -Paris is full of grass widows," he added, with an even deepened -resentment of tone; "and I never cared much about the play, and French -actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared -about that sort of thing, which I never did--much," and the Captain -drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the -tip as they passed beneath a lamp. - -"I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer," he declared, "smokable -tobacco. Thought I'd economize on these, and they're beastly, like all -economical things!" And the Captain cast away the cigar with a look of -disgust. - -Peter offered him a substitute. - -"You are a lucky dog, Odd, to come to contrasts," the Captain paused to -shield his lighted match as he applied it to the fresh cigar; "I don't -see why things should be so deuced uneven in this world. One fellow born -with a silver spoon in his mouth--and you've got a turn for writing, -too; once one's popular, that's the best paying thing going, I -suppose--and the other hunted all over Europe, through no fault of his -own either. Rather hard, I think, that the man who doesn't need money -should be born with a talent for making it." - -"It certainly isn't just." - -"Damned unjust." - -Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and smiled as he smoked and -walked beside the rebellious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd -had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble futility pathetic, -especially as there was a certain amount of truth in the Captain's -diatribes, the old eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in -this badly managed world. It would be kinder to immediately offer the -loan for which the Captain was evidently paving the way to a request. -But he reflected that the display of such quickness of comprehension -might make the request too easy; and in the future the Captain might -profit by a discovered weakness a little too freely. He would let him -ask. And the Captain was not long in coming to the point. He was in a -devilish tight place, positively couldn't afford a pair of boots -(Peter's eyes involuntarily sought the Captain's feet, neatly shod in -social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one hundred pounds? (The -Captain was frank enough to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc. - -Peter cut short the explanation with a rather unwise manifestation of -sympathetic comprehension; the Captain went upstairs with him to his -room when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check for 3000 -francs in his pocket; the extra 500 francs were the price of Peter's -readiness. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -It rained next day, and Peter took a _fiacre_ from the Bibliothèque -Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove -through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just five -when he got there, and already almost dark. There were four flights to -be ascended before one reached the Archinards' apartment; four steep and -rather narrow flights, for the house was not one of the larger newer -ones, and there was no lift. Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley, -opened the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently not denuded -himself of a valet when he had parted with his horses; that sacrifice -had probably seemed too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether -Wilson's wages were ever paid, and thought it more probable that a -mistaken fidelity attached him to his master. In view of year-long -arrears, he might have found it safer to stay with a future possibility -of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever to even the hope of -compensation. - -The little entrance was very pretty, and the drawing-room, into which -Peter was immediately ushered, even prettier. Evidently the Archinards -had brought their own furniture, and the Archinards had very good taste. -The pale gray-greens of the room were charming. Peter noticed -appreciatively the Copenhagen vases filled with white flowers; he could -find time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archinard's sofa, for no -one else was in the room, a fact of which he was immediately and -disappointedly aware. Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband's -monetary embarrassments had made even less impression on her than upon -the surroundings, for though the little salon was very pretty, it was -not the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, if anything, -plumper and prettier than when Peter had last seen her. - -"This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!" -Mrs. Archinard's slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate -warmth. "Katherine told us this morning about the _rencontre_. I was -expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really -impossible!" Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad -and pretty smile. "I could hardly realize it, were it not that your -books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years." - -Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar -bindings. - -"I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them -again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links -before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!" Mrs. Archinard laid -her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the "Dialogues," which was -uppermost. "Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on -your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art -productions of our age. Pater is more _étincellant_--a style too -jewelled perhaps--one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty; -but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life--a chain of -flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very -sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic." - -Peter was conscious of being sorry for it. - -"I think we are both of us tired." Mrs. Archinard's smile grew even more -sadly sweet; "both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. -How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched, -do they not? Everything crumbles." Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter -found nothing to say ("How dull a man who writes quite clever books can -be!" thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone-- - -"And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She -told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely. -Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very -proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I -always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much." -The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard's voice irritated Odd to -such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own -pleasant as he replied-- - -"Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl." - -"Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is! -Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term -is flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical -woman of the world." - -Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass--very -unjustly--Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the -atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made -upon _ce type là_. She welcomed Katherine's entrance as a diversion from -looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in -dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high -collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points -were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly -set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a -well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the -pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and -shadows. - -"I _am_ glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little -diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there--a big bit!" - -"And you are a perfectly delightful condensation of everything -delightfully Parisian." - -"The heart is British. True oak!" laughed Katherine; "don't judge me by -the foliage." - -"Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to choose such foliage." - -"No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, to mamma. But thanks, -very much. I am glad you are appreciative." Katherine smiled so gayly, -and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, that Peter forgot for a -moment to wonder where Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget. - -"I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them to wait tea until she -comes, poor dear! 'Them' is Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose; Taylor, our -old maid; and the cook! The cook is French, otherwise our staff is -shrunken, but of the same elements. One doesn't mind having no servants -in a little box like this. Yes, mamma, I have paid _all_ the calls, and -only two people were out; so I deserve petting and tea. I hope Hilda -will hurry." Mrs. Archinard's face took on a look of ill-used -resignation. - -"We all pay dearly for Hilda's egotism," she remarked, and for a moment -there was a rather uncomfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation -and a queerer melancholy rising within him. - -The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than the Hilda of ten years -ago. They talked in a rather desultory fashion for some time. Mrs. -Archinard's presence was damping, and even Katherine's smile was like a -flower seen through rain. The little clock on the mantelpiece struck the -quarter. - -"Almost six!" exclaimed Katherine; "we must have tea." - -"Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not sacrifice Mr. Odd," -said Mrs. Archinard with distinct fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell, -and Peter, with a quickness of combination that surprised himself, -surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she become emancipated? Bohemian? -His melancholy grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of -daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint and delicate -design. - -"Hilda designed it in Florence," said Katherine, seeing him looking at -it; "an Italian friend had it made for her after her own model and -drawings. Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. People who -know about it have admired that teapot, as you do, I see." - -"It's a lovely thing," said Peter, as Katherine turned it before him; -"the simplicity of the outline and the delicate bas-relief"--he bent his -head to look more closely--"exquisite." And he thought it rather rough -on Hilda; to pour the tea from her own teapot without waiting for her. - -Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at fully half-past six, -that he might have been asking for too much patience. - -"There she is," said Katherine; "I must go and tell her that you are -here." Katherine went out, and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the -entrance. He was conscious of feeling excited, and unconsciously rose to -his feet and looked eagerly toward the door. But only Katherine came in. - -"I don't believe I shall ever see Hilda!" he exclaimed, with an -assumption of exasperation that hid some real nervousness. Katherine -laughed. - -"Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to wash her face and hands. -Artists are untidy people, you know," and Odd, with that same strange -acuteness of perception with which he seemed dowered this afternoon, -felt that Hilda had been coming in in all her artistic untidiness, and -that Katherine had seen to a more respectable _entrée_. - -It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that tactful young lady -probably guessed at his disappointment, for she went to the piano and -began to play a sad aria from one of Schumann's Sonatas that sighed and -pled and sobbed. She played very well, with the same perfect taste that -she showed in her gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond of -Schumann especially, not to listen to her. - -In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was over in a moment, the -meeting, as the most exciting things in life are. Peter had not realized -till the moment came how much it would excite him. - -Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put her hand in his with all the -pretty gravity he remembered in the child. Odd took the other hand too -and stared at her. He was conscious then of being very much excited, and -conscious that she was not. - -Her eyes were "big and vague," but they were the most beautiful eyes he -had ever seen, and the vagueness was only in a certain lack of -expression, for they looked straight into his. Carried along by that -first impulse of excitement, despite the little shock of half-felt -disappointment, Peter bent his head and kissed her on each cheek. - -"Bravo!" said Katherine, still striking soft chords at the piano, -"Bravo, Mr. Odd! considering your first meeting and your last parting, -you have a right to that!" And Katherine laughed pleasantly, though she -was a trifle displeased. - -"Yes, I have, haven't I?" said Peter, smiling. He still held Hilda's -hands. The little flush that had come to her cheeks when he had kissed -her was gone, and she looked very white. - -"Are you glad to see me, Hilda?" he asked; "I beg your pardon, but it -comes naturally to call you that." - -"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Odd," Hilda smiled. Her voice was very -like the child's voice saying, "I thank you very much," ten years ago. -The same voice, grave and gentle. Odd had expected some little warmth, -some little embarrassment even, in the girl, considering the parting -from the child. But Hilda did not show any warmth, neither did she seem -at all embarrassed, and Odd felt rather as one does when an unnecessary -downward stride reveals level ground where one expected another step. He -had stumbled a little, and now, half ruefully, half humorously, he -considered the child Hilda grown up. She sat down near her mother. - -"I am so sorry. I am afraid you waited for me," she said, bending -towards her; "I really couldn't help it, mamma." - -"No, I think it kindest to consider you irresponsible; there is -certainly an element of insanity in your exaggerated devotion to your -work." Mrs. Archinard smiled acidly, and Hilda, Odd thought, did look a -little embarrassed now. He had adjusted himself to the reality of the -present, and was able to study her. The same Botticelli Madonna mouth, -the same Gainsborough eyes; the skin of dazzling whiteness--an almost -unnatural white--but she was evidently tired. - -Certainly her black gown looked strangely beside Katherine's velvet, -Mrs. Archinard's silk and laces. Odd saw that there was mud on the -skirt, a very short skirt, and Hilda's legs were very long. She had -walked, then. His own paternal solicitude struck him as amusing, and -rather touching, as he glanced at her slim feet, to see with -satisfaction that wet boots had been replaced by patent-leather -shoes--heelless little shoes. - -"I am afraid you work too much, you tire yourself," he said, for after -her mother's rebuff she had sunk back in her chair with a weary -lassitude of pose. Hilda immediately sat up straightly, giving him an -almost frightened glance. How unchanged the little face, though the -cloud of her hair no longer framed it. Hilda's hair was as smooth as her -sister's, only it was brushed straight back, and the soft blue-black -coils were massed from ear to ear, and showed, in a coronet-like effect -above her head, almost too much hair; it emphasized the pale fragility -of her look. - -"Oh no, I am not tired," she said, "not particularly. I walked home, you -see. I am very fond of walking." - -"Hilda is fond of such funny things," said Katherine, coming from the -piano, "of walking in the mud and rain for instance. She is the most -persistently, consistently energetic person I ever knew." Katherine -paused pleasantly as though for Hilda to speak, but Hilda said nothing -and looked even more vague than before, almost dull in fact. - -"Well, she has had no tea," said Odd, "and after mud and rain that is -rather cruel, even as a punishment." - -Again Hilda gave him the alarmed quick glance; his eyes were humorously -kind, and she smiled a slight little smile. - -"Some tea!" Katherine cried; "my poor Hilda, I'm afraid it is -hard-boiled by this time"--she laid her hand on the teapot--"and -_almost_ cold. Shall I heat some more water, dear?" - -"Oh! don't think of it, Katherine, it is almost dinner-time." - -"Must I be off?" asked Odd, laughing. - -"How absurd; we don't dine till eight," Katherine said. - -"It wasn't a hint to me, then, Hilda?" Hilda looked helplessly -distressed. - -"A hint? Oh no, no. How could you think that?" - -"I was only joking. I didn't really believe you so anxious to get rid of -an old friend." Odd, with some determination, crossed the room and sat -down beside her. - -"I want to see a great deal of you if you will let me." - -"No one sees much of Hilda, not even her own mother," said Mrs. -Archinard from her sofa. "It is terrible indeed to feel oneself a -cumberer of the earth, unable to suffice to oneself, far less to others. -With my failing eyesight I simply cannot read by lamplight, and there -are three or four hours at this season when I am absolutely without -resources. Yet even those hours Hilda cannot give me." - -Hilda now looked so painfully embarrassed that Odd was perforce obliged, -for very pity's sake, to avert his eyes from her face. - -"Ah, Mr. Odd," Mrs. Archinard went on, "you do not know what that is. To -lie in the gray dusk and watch one's own gray, gray thoughts." - -"It must be very unpleasant," Odd owned unwillingly, feeling that his -character of old friend was being rather imposed upon; this degree of -intimacy was certainly unwarranted. - -"Now, mamma, you usually have friends every afternoon," said Katherine, -in her pleasant, even voice. She was preparing some fresh tea. "You make -me as well as Hilda feel a culprit." - -"No, my dear." Mrs. Archinard's deep sense of accumulated injury -evidently got quite the better of her manners. "No, my dear, you never -_could_ read aloud and never _did_. I never asked it of you. You are -really occupied as a girl should be. At all events you fulfil your -social duties. You see that people come to see me. As I cannot go out, -as Hilda will not, I really don't know what I should do were it not for -you. And, as it is, no one came this afternoon until Mr. Odd made his -welcome appearance." - -"But Mr. Odd came at five, and you always read till then." Katherine's -voice was gently playful. Hilda had not said one word, and her -expression seemed now absolutely dogged. - -"At this season, Katherine! You forget that it is night by four! And how -a girl with any regard for her mother's wishes can walk about the -streets of Paris alone after that hour it passes my comprehension to -understand." - -"Do you care about bicycling, Mr. Odd?" The change was abrupt but -welcome. "Because I am going to the Bois to-morrow morning, and alone -for once." Katherine smiled at him over the kettle which she was -lifting. "Papa has deserted me." - -"I should enjoy it immensely. And you," he looked at Hilda, "won't you -come?" - -"Oh, I can't," said Hilda, with a troubled look. "Thanks so much." - -"Oh no, Hilda can't," laughed Mrs. Archinard. - -"And where is the Captain off to?" queried Peter hastily. He felt that -he would like to shake Mrs. Archinard. Hilda's stubborn silence might -certainly be irritating, and Odd had sympathy for parental claims and -wishes, especially concerning the advisability of a beautiful girl -walking in the streets at night unescorted, sacrificed to youthful -conceit; but Mrs. Archinard's personality certainly weakened all claims, -and her taste was as certainly atrocious. - -"Papa," said Katherine, pouring out the tea, "is going to-morrow morning -to the Riviera. Lucky papa!" Odd thought with some amusement of the £120 -that constituted papa's "luck." "I have only been once to Monte Carlo, -and I won such a lot. Only imagine how forty pounds turned my head. I -revelled in hats and gloves for a whole year. Then we go to-morrow, Mr. -Odd? I have my own bicycle. I have kept it near the Porte Dauphine, and -you can hire a very nice one at the same place." - -"May I call for you here at ten, then? Will that suit you?" - -"Very well." Odd watched Katherine as she carried the tea and cake to -her sister. Hilda gave a little start. - -"O Katherine, how good of you! I didn't realize what you were doing." - -"It is you who are good, my pet," said Katherine in a low, gentle voice. -Peter thought it a pretty little scene. - -"A great deal of latitude must be granted to the young person who -invented that teapot," he said to Hilda. "One must work hard to do -anything in art, mustn't one? A most lovely teapot, Hilda." - -"I am glad you like it." Hilda smiled her thanks, but her eyes still -expressed that distance and reserve that showed no consciousness of the -past, no intention of admitting it as a link to the present. She did not -seem exactly shy, but her whole manner was passive--negative. Katherine -probably thought that Mr. Odd had by this time realized the futility of -an attempt to draw out the unresponsive artist, for she seated herself -between Odd and the sofa, thus protecting Hilda from Mrs. Archinard's -severities and Odd from the ineffectual necessity for talking to Hilda. -Odd thought that were Katherine and Mrs. Archinard not there he might -have "come at" Hilda, but the sense of ease Katherine brought with her -was undeniable. She was charmingly mistress of herself, made him talk, -appealed prettily to her mother, who even gave more than one melancholy -laugh, and, with a tactful give and take, yet kept the reins of -conversation well within her own hands. - -Odd found her a nice girl, but the undercurrent of his thought dwelt on -Hilda, and at every gayety of Katherine's, his eyes sought her sister's -face; Hilda's eyes were always fixed on Katherine, and she smiled a -certain dumbly admiring smile. As he sat near her, he could see that the -little black dress was very shabby. He could not have associated Hilda -with real untidiness, and indeed the dress with its white linen cuffs -and collar, its inevitable grace of severely simple outline, was neat to -an almost painful degree. Hilda's artistic proclivities perhaps showed -themselves in shiny seams and careful darns and patches. - -When he rose to go he took her hands again; he hoped that his -persistency did not make him appear rather foolish. - -"I am sorry you won't come to-morrow. May I hope for another day?" - -"I can't come to-morrow"--there was a touch of self-defence in Hilda's -smile--"but perhaps some other day. I should love to," she finished -rather abruptly. - -"But you will be different--I will be different. We will both be -changed," repeated itself in Odd's mind as he walked down the Rue Pierre -Charron. Poor little child-voice! how sadly it sounded. How true had -been the prophecy. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter Odd, at this epoch of his life, felt that he was resting on his -oars and drifting. He had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had -seen much, thought much, done much; yet he had made for no goal, and had -won no race; how should he, when he had not yet made up his mind that -racing for anything was worth while? - -Perhaps the two years in Parliament had most closely savored of -consciously applied contest, and in that contest Odd considered himself -beaten, and its efforts as though they had never been. Every one had -told him that to bring the student's ideals into the political arena was -to insure defeat; one's friends would consider a carefully -discriminating honesty and broad-mindedness mere disloyal luke-warmness, -foolish hair-splitting feebleness; one's enemies would rejoice and -triumph in the impartiality of an opponent. Certainly he had been -defeated, and he could not see that his example had in any way been -effectual. At all events, he had held to the ideals. - -His fine critical taste found even his own books but crude and partial -expressions of still groping thoughts. His unexpressed intention, good -indeed, if one might so call its indefiniteness, had been to make the -world better for having lived in it; better, or at least wiser. But he -doubted the saving power of his own sceptical utterances; the world -could not be saved by the balancings of a mind that saw the tolerant -point of view of every question, a mind itself so unassured of results. -A strong dash of fanaticism is necessary for success, and Odd had not -the slightest flavor of fanaticism. Perhaps he had given a little -pleasure in his more purely literary studies, and Peter thought that he -would stick to them in the future, but he had put the future away from -him just now. He had only returned from the great passivity of the -Orient a few weeks ago, and its example seemed to denote drifting as the -supreme wisdom. No effort, no desire; a peaceful receptivity, a peaceful -acceptance of the smiles or buffets of fate; that was Odd's ideal--for -the present. He was a little sick of everything. The Occidental's energy -for combat was lulled within him, and the Occidental's individualistic -tendencies seemed to stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an -amused and tolerant observation free from striving; and, for an -Occidental, this mood is dangerous. Odd also did a good deal of -listening to very modern and very clever French talk. He knew many -clever Frenchmen. He did not agree with all of them, but, as he was not -sure of his own grounds for disagreement, he held his peace and listened -smilingly. Certainly the exclusively artistic standpoint was a most -comforting and absorbing plaything to fall back on. - -Peter's friends talked of the amusing and touching spectacle of the -universe. The representation of each man's illusion on the subject, and -the manner of that representation, were never-ceasing sources of -interest. Peter also read a little at the Bibliothèque Nationale, paid a -few calls, dined out pretty constantly, and bicycled a great deal in the -mornings with Katherine Archinard. She understood things well, and her -taste was as sure and as delicate as even Odd could ask. Katherine had -absorbed a great deal of culture during her wanderings, and it would -have taken a long time for any one to find out that it was of a rather -second-hand quality, and sought more for attainment than for enjoyment. -Katherine talked with clever people and read clever reviews, and being -clever herself, with a very acute critical taste, she knew with the -utmost refinement of perception just what to like and just what to -dislike; and as she tolerated only the very best, her liking gave value. -Yet _au fond_ Katherine did not really care even for the very very best. -Her appreciation was negative. She excelled in a finely smiling, -superior scorn, and could pick flaws in almost any one's enjoyment, if -she chose to do so. Katherine, however, was kind-hearted and tactful, -and did not arouse dislike by displaying her cleverness except to people -who would like it. Enthusiasm was banal, and Katherine was not often -required to feign where she did not feel it; her very rigor and -exclusiveness of taste implied an appreciation too high for expression; -but Katherine had no enthusiasm. - -Her rebellious and iconoclastic young energy amused Odd. He thought her -rather pathetic in a way. There was a look of daring and revolt in her -eye that pleased his lazy spirit. Meanwhile Hilda troubled him. - -Would she never bicycle? Katherine, wheeling lightly erect beside him, -gave the little shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders -characteristic of her. She evidently found no fault with Hilda. Others -might do so--the shrug implied that, implied as well that Katherine -herself perhaps owned that her sister's impracticable unreason gave -grounds for fault-finding--but Hilda was near her heart. - -When could he see her? That, too, seemed wrapped in the general cloud of -vagueness, unaccountableness that surrounded Hilda. Odd called twice in -the evening; once to be received by Katherine alone, Hilda was already -in _dèshabille_ it seemed, and once to find not even Katherine; she was -dining out, and Miss Hilda in bed. In bed at nine! "Was she ill?" he -asked of Taylor. Wilson had evidently accompanied the Captain. - -"No wonder if she were, sir," Taylor had replied, with a touch of the -grievance in her tone that Hilda always seemed to arouse in those about -her; "but no, she's only that tired!" and Odd departed with a deepened -sense of Hilda's wilful immolation. Katherine brought him home to lunch -on several occasions after the bicycling, but Hilda was never there. She -lunched at her studio. - -On a third call Hilda appeared, but only as he was on the point of -going. She wore the same black dress, and the same look of unnatural -pallor. - -"Hilda," said Odd, for amid these unfamiliar conditions he still used -the familiar appellation, "I must see the cause of all this." - -"Of what?" Her smile was certainly the sweet smile he remembered. - -"Of this unearthly devotion; these white cheeks." - -"Hilda is naturally pale," put in Mrs Archinard; "she has my skin. But, -of course, now she is a ghost." - -"Well, I want to see the haunted studio. I want to see the -masterpieces." Odd spoke with a touch of gentle irony that did not seem -to offend Hilda. - -"You will see nothing either uncanny or unusual." - -"Well, at all events, when can I come to see you in your studio?" The -vague look crossed Hilda's smile. - -"You see--I work very hard;" she hesitated, seemed even to cast a -beseeching glance at Katherine, standing near. Katherine was watching -her. - -"She is getting ready her pictures for the Champs de Mars. But, Hilda, -Mr. Odd may come some morning." - -"Oh yes. Some morning. I thought you always bicycled in the morning. I -wish you _would_ come, it would be so nice to see you there!" she spoke -with a gay and sudden warmth; "only you must tell me when to expect you. -My studio must be looking nicely and my model presentable." - -"I will take Mr. Odd to-morrow," said Katherine, "he would never find -his way." - -"Thanks, that will be very jolly," said Odd, conscious that an -unescorted visit would have been more so, yet wondering whether Hilda -alone might not be more disconcerting than Hilda aided and abetted by -her sister. - -So the next morning he called for Katherine, and they walked to a -veritable nest of _ateliers_ near the Place des Ternes, where they -climbed interminable stairs to the very highest studio of all, and here, -in very bare and business-like surroundings, they found Hilda. She left -her easel to open the door to them. A red-haired woman was lying on a -sofa in a far, dim corner, a vase of white flowers at her head. There -was a big linen apron of butcher's blue over the black dress, and Hilda -looked very neat, less pallid, too, than Odd had seen her look as yet. -Her skin had blue shadows under the chin and nose, and a blue shadow -made a mystery beneath the long sweep of her eyebrows and about her -beautiful eyes. But when she turned her head to the light, Odd saw that -the lips were red and the cheeks freshly and faintly tinted. - -He was surprised by the picture on the big easel; the teapot had not -prepared him for it. A rather small picture, the figure flung to its -graceful, lazy length, only a fourth life-size. It was a picture of -elusive shadows, touched with warmer lights in its grays and greens. The -woman's half-hidden face was exquisite in color. The sweep of her pale -gown, half lost in demi-tint, lay over her like the folded wings of a -tired moth. The white flowers stood like dreams in the dreamy -atmosphere. - -"Hilda, I can almost forgive you." Odd stood staring before the canvas; -he had put on his eye-glass. "Really this atones." - -"Isn't it wonderfully simple, wonderfully decorative?" said Katherine, -"all those long, sleepy lines. My clever little Hilda!" - -"My clever, clever little Hilda!" Odd repeated, turning to look at the -young artist. Her eyes met his with their wide, sweet gaze that said -nothing. Hilda was evidently only capable of saying things on canvas. - -"It is lovely." - -"You like it really?" - -"I really think it is about as charming a picture as I have seen a woman -do. So womanly too." Odd turned to Katherine, it was difficult not to -merge Hilda in her art, not to talk about her talent as a thing apart -from her personality: "She expresses herself, she doesn't imitate." - -"Perhaps that is rather unwomanly," laughed Katherine: "a crawling -imitativeness seems unfortunately characteristic. Certainly Hilda has -none of it. She has inspired me with hopes for my sex." - -"Really cleverer than Madame Morisot," said Odd, looking back to the -canvas, "delightful as she is! She could touch a few notes surely, -gracefully; Hilda has got hold of a chord. Yes, Hilda, you are an -artist. Have you any others?" - -Hilda brought forward two. One was a small study of a branch of pink -blossoms in a white porcelain vase; the other a woman in white standing -at a window and looking out at the twilight. This last was, perhaps, the -cleverest of the three; the lines of the woman's back, shoulder, _profil -perdu_, astonishingly beautiful. - -"You are fond of dreams and shadows, aren't you?" - -"I haven't a very wide range, but one can only try to do the things one -is fitted for. I like all sorts of pictures, but I like to paint -demi-tints and twilights and soft lamplight effects." - - "'Car nous voulons la nuance encor-- - pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,'" - -chanted Katharine. "Hilda lives in dreams and shadows, I think, Mr. Odd, -so naturally she paints them. '_L'art c'est la nature, vue à travers un -temperament_.' Excuse my spouting." - -"So your temperament is a stuff that dreams are made of. Well, Hilda, -make as many as you can. Hello! is that another old friend I see?" On -turning to Hilda he had caught sight of a dachshund--rather white about -the muzzle, but very luminous and gentle of eye--stretching himself from -a nap behind the little stove in the corner. He came toward them with a -kindly wag of the tail. - -"Is this Palamon or Arcite?" - -A change came over Hilda's face. - -"That is Palamon; poor old Palamon. Arcite fulfilled his character by -dying first." - -"And Darwin and Spencer?" - -"Dead, too; Spencer was run over." - -"Poor old Palamon! Poor old dog!" Odd had lifted the dog in his arms, -and was scratching the silky smooth ears as only a dog-lover knows how. -Palamon's head slowly turned to one side in an ecstasy of appreciation. -Odd looked down at Hilda. Katherine was behind him. "Poor Palamon, -'allone, withouten any companye.'" Hilda's eyes met his in a sad, -startled look, then she dropped them to Palamon, who was now putting out -his tongue towards Odd's face with grateful emotion. - -"Yes," she said gently, putting her hand caressingly on the dog's head; -her slim, cold fingers just brushed Odd's; "yes, poor Palamon." She was -silent, and there was silence behind them, for Katherine, with her usual -good-humored tact, was examining the picture. The model on the sofa -stretched her arms and yawned a long, scraping yawn. Palamon gave a -short, brisk bark, and looked quickly and suspiciously round the studio. -Both Odd and Hilda laughed. - -"But not 'allone,' after all," said Odd. "Is he a great deal with you? -That is a different kind of company, but Palamon is the gainer." - -"We mustn't judge Palamon by our own standards," smiled Hilda, "though -highly civilized dogs like him don't show many social instincts towards -their own kind. He did miss Arcite though, at first, I am sure; but he -certainly is not lonely. I bring him here with me, and when I am at home -he is always in my room. I think all the walking he gets is good for -him. You see in what good condition he is." - -Palamon still showing signs of restlessness over the yawn, Odd put him -down. He was evidently on cordial terms with the model, for he trotted -affably toward her, standing with a lazy, smiling wave of the tail -before her, while she addressed him with discreetly low-toned, -whispering warmth as "_Mon chou! Mon bijou! Mon petit lapin à la sauce -blanche!_" - -"Don't you get very tired working here all day?" Odd asked. - -"Sometimes. But anything worth doing makes one tired, doesn't it?" - -"You take your art very seriously, Hilda?" - -"Sometimes--yes--I take it seriously." Hilda smiled her slight, reserved -smile. - -"Well, I can't blame you; you really have something to say." - -"Hilda, I am afraid we are becoming _de trop_. I must carry you off, Mr. -Odd. Hilda's moments are golden." - -"That is a sisterly exaggeration," said Hilda. Had all her personality -gone into her pictures? was she a self-centred little egotist? Odd -wondered, as he and Katherine walked away together. Katherine's warmly -human qualities seemed particularly consoling after the chill of the -abstract one felt in Hilda's studio. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -"Peter, she is a nice, a clever, a delightful girl," said Mary Apswith. - -Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlooking the Rue de la -Paix. For her holiday week of shopping Peter's hotel was not central -enough, but Peter himself was at her command from morning till night. He -stood before her now, his back to the flaming logs in the fireplace, -looking alternately down at his boots and up at his sister. Peter's face -wore an amused but pleasant smile. Katherine must certainly be nice, -clever, and delightful, to have won Mary, usually so slow in friendship. - -"Whether she is deep--deeply good, I mean--I don't know; one can't tell. -But, at all events, she is sincere to the core." Mary had called on the -Archinards some days ago, and had seen Katherine every day since then. - -Mary's stateliness had not become buxom. The fine lines of her face had -lost their former touch of heaviness. Her gray hair--grayer than -Peter's--and fresh skin gave her a look of merely perfected maturity. -Life had gone well with her; everybody said that; yet Mary knew the -sadness of life. She had lost two of her babies, and sorrow had -softened, ripened her. The Mary of ten years ago had not had that tender -look in her eyes, those lines of sympathetic sensibility about the -lips. Her decisively friendly sentence was followed by a little sigh of -disapprobation. - -"As for Hilda!" - -"As for Hilda?" - -"I am disappointed, Peter. Yes; we went to her studio this morning; -Katherine took me there; Katherine's pride in her is pretty. Yes; I -suppose the pictures are very clever, if one likes those rather misty -things. They look as though they were painted in the back drawing-room -behind the sofa!" Peter laughed. "I don't pretend to know. I suppose _au -fond_ I am a Philistine, with a craving for a story on the canvas. I -don't really appreciate Whistler, so of course I haven't a right to an -opinion at all. But however clever they may be, I don't think those -pictures should fill her life to the exclusion of _everything_. The girl -owes a duty to herself; I don't speak of her duty to others. I have no -patience with Mrs. Archinard, she is simply insufferable! Katherine's -patience with her is admirable; but Hilda is completely one-sided, and -she is not great enough for that. But she will fancy herself great -before long. Lady---- told me that she was never seen with her -sister--there is that cut off, you see--how natural that they should go -out together! Of course she will grow morbidly egotistic, people who -never meet other people always do; they fancy themselves grandly -misunderstood. So unhealthy, too! She looked like a ghost." - -"Poor little Hilda! She probably fancies an artist's mission the -highest. Perhaps it is, Mary." - -"Not in a woman's case"--Mrs. Apswith spoke with a vigorous decision -that would have stamped her with ignominy in the eyes of the perhaps -mythical New Woman; "woman's art is never serious enough for heroics." - -"Perhaps it would be, if they would show a consistent heroism for it." -Peter opposed Mary for the sake of the argument, and for the sake of an -old loyalty. _Au fond_ he agreed with her. - -"A female Palissy would revolutionize our ideas of woman's art." - -"A pleasant creature she would be! Tearing up the flooring and breaking -the chairs for firewood! An abominable desecration of the housewifely -instincts! I don't know what Allan Hope will do about it," Mary pursued. - -"Ah! That is an accepted fact, then?" - -"Dear me, yes. Lady Mainwaring is very anxious for it. It shows what -Allan's steady persistency has accomplished. The child hasn't a penny, -you know." - -"You think she'd have him?" - -"Of course she will have him. And a lucky girl she is for the chance! -But, before the definite acceptance, she will, of course, lead him the -usual dance; it's quite the thing now among girls of that type. -Individuality; their own life to be lived, their Art--in capitals--to be -lived for; home, husband, children, degrading impediments. Such tiresome -rubbish! I am very sorry for poor Allan." Peter studied his boots. - -"Allan probably accounts for that general absent-mindedness I observed -in her; perhaps Allan accounts for more than we give her credit for; -this desperate devotion to her painting, her last struggle to hold to -her ideal. Really the theory that she is badly in love explains -everything. Poor child!" - -"Why poor, Peter? Allan Hope is certainly the very nicest man I know, -barring yourself and Jack. He has done more than creditably in the -House, and now that he is already on the Treasury Bench, has only to -wait for indefinite promotion. He is clever, kind, honest as the day. He -will be an earl when the dear old earl dies, and that that is a pretty -frame to the picture no one can deny. What more can a girl ask?" - -"This girl probably asks some impossible dream. I'm sorry for people who -haven't done dreaming." - -"Between you and me, Peter, I don't think Hilda is really clever enough -to do much dreaming--of the pathetic sort. Her eyes are clever; she sees -things prettily, and puts them down prettily; but there is nothing more. -She struck me as a trifle stupid--really dull, you know." - -Odd shifted his position uncomfortably. - -"That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self-expression." He leaned -his arm on the mantelpiece and studied the fire with a puzzled frown. -"That exquisite face must _mean_ something." - -"I don't know. By the law of compensation Katherine has the brains, the -heart, and Hilda the beauty. _I_ didn't find her shy. She seemed -perfectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of absorption in her -love affair, as you say. I am not sure that he has asked her yet. He is -a most modest lover." - -Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her stay, and her first -impression was strengthened. - -Katherine shopped with her; they considered gowns together. Katherine's -taste was exquisite, and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming -Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not above liking pretty -things--that was already nice in her--for the girl was clever enough to -pose indifference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. Katherine was -very independent, but very attentive. Her sincerity was charmingly gay, -and not priggish. She said just what she thought; but she thought things -that were worth saying. She made little display of learning, but one -felt it--like the silk lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk -too much; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. Mary took her twice -to the play with Peter and herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd -sat in the back of the box and watched for the effect on her face of the -clever play interpreted by the best talent of the Théâtre Français. The -quiet absorption of her look might imply much intelligent appreciation; -but Katherine's little ripples of glad enjoyment, clever little thrusts -of criticism, made Hilda's silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while -between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke a scintillating sense -of intellectual enjoyment about her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda -sat listening with that same smile of admiration that almost irritated -Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability--inferiority. - -The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, was rather -touching; and Mary owned that Hilda was "sweet," but the adjective did -not mitigate the former severity of judgment--that was definite. - -When Mary went, she begged Katherine to accept the prettiest gown Doucet -could make her, and Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness. -The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine Braun photograph, -which Hilda received with surprised delight, for she had done nothing to -make Mrs. Apswith's stay in Paris pleasant. She thought such kindness -touching, and Katherine's gown the loveliest she had ever seen. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Mary gone, the bicycling tête-à-têtes were resumed, and Odd, too, began -to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were -bon camarades in the best sense of the term, and Peter found it a very -pleasant sense. He realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in -his present désoeuvrée condition would have been intolerable. The -melancholy of laziness could not creep to him while this girl laughed -beside him. The frank, sympathetic relation--almost that of man to -man--was untouched by the faintest infusion of sentiment; delicious -breeziness and freedom of intercourse was the result. Peter listened to -Katherine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to laugh at him. He -told her a good many of his thoughts; she criticised them, approved of -them, encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present -contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any affirmation. He had -never felt so little sure of anything nor so conscious of everything in -general. Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he continued to drift. -He still read in an objectless way at the Bibliothèque, hunting out old -references, pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of view of -all times. Katherine offered to help him, and in the morning he would -bring her his notes to look over; her quick comprehension formed -another link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She had no taste for -drifting. In her eye he read a dissatisfaction, a thirst for wider -vision, wider action, a restless impatience with the narrowness, the -ineffectiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her probable future -with a sense of pathos. Hilda's wide gaze showed no such rebellion with -the actual; her art had filled it with a distant content that shut -strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was it merely the placid -consciousness of Allan Hope--a future assured and fully satisfactory? -Under Katherine's gayety there was a fierce beating of caged wings, and -Odd fancied at times that, freed, the imprisoned birds might be strong -and beautiful. He fancied this especially when she played to him; she -played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, as the winter came -and it grew too cold for bicycling, Peter often spent the morning in -listening to her. Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon in -the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually met her dining out or -at some reception; their intimacy once noticed, they were invited -together. Lady---- was especially anxious that Odd should have every -opportunity for meeting her favorite. - -But with all this intimacy, to Peter's consciousness thoroughly, -paternally platonic, under all its daily interests and quiet pleasure -lay a half-felt hurt, a sense of injury and loss. The little voice, -seldom thought of during the last ten years, now repeated often: "But -you will be different; I will be different; we will both be changed." - -Captain Archinard returned from the Riviera in a temper that could mean -but one thing; he had gambled at Monte Carlo, and he had lost. He did -not mention the fact in the family circle; indeed, by a tacit agreement, -money matters were never alluded to before Mrs. Archinard. Her years of -successful invalidism had compelled even her husband's acquiescence in -the decision early arrived at by Hilda and Katherine: mamma must be -spared the torments to which they had grown accustomed. But to Katherine -the Captain freed his querulous soul, never to Hilda. There was a look -in Hilda's eyes that made the Captain very uncomfortable, very angry; -conscious of those cases of wonderful champagne, the races, the clubs, -the boxes at the play, and all the infinite array of his wardrobe--a -sad, wondering look. Katherine's scoldings were far preferable, for -Katherine was not so devilish superior to human weaknesses; she had -plenty of unpaid bills on her own conscience, and understood the -necessities of an aristocratic taste. He and Katherine had their little -secrets, and were mutually on the defensive. Hilda never criticised, to -be sure, but her very difference was a daily criticism. The Captain -thought his younger daughter rather dull; Katherine, of finer calibre -than her father, admired such dulness, and found some difficulty in -stilling self-reproachful comparisons; temperament, circumstance, made a -comforting philosophy. And then Hilda's art made things easy for Hilda; -with such a refuge, would she, Katherine, ask for more? Katherine rather -wondered now, after her father's exasperated recountal of ill-luck, -where papa had got the money to lose; but papa on this point was -prudently reticent, and borrowed two one-hundred-franc notes from Peter -while the latter waited in the drawing-room for Katherine one morning. - -Katherine and her father were making a round of calls one day, and the -Captain stopped at his bank to cash a check. Katherine stood beside him, -and, although he manoeuvred concealment with hand and shoulder, her -keen eyes read the name. - -Her mouth was stern as they walked away--the Captain had folded the -notes and put them in his pocket. - -"A good deal of money that, papa." - -"I suppose I owe twice as much to my tailor," Captain Archinard replied, -with irritation. - -"Has Mr. Odd lent you money before this?" - -"I really don't know that Mr. Odd's affairs--or mine--are any business -of yours, Katherine." - -"Yours certainly are, papa. When a father puts his daughter in a false -position, his affairs decidedly become her business." - -"What rubbish, Katherine. Better men than Odd have been glad to give me -a lift. I can't see that Odd has been ill-used. He is rolling in money." - -"I don't quite believe that, papa. Allersley is not such a rich -property. But it is not of Mr. Odd's ill-usage I complain, it is of -mine; for if this borrowing goes on, I hardly think I can continue my -relations with Mr. Odd. It would rather look like--decoying." - -The Captain stopped and fixed a look of futile dignity on his daughter. - -"That's a strange word for you to use, Katherine. I would horsewhip the -man who would suggest it. Odd is a gentleman." - -"Decidedly. I did not speak of his point of view but of mine. All -frankness of intercourse between us is impossible if you are going to -sponge on him." - -"Katherine! I can't allow such impertinence! Outrageous! It really is! -Sponge! Can't a man borrow a few paltry hundreds from another without -exposing himself to such insulting language?--especially as Odd is to -become my son-in-law, I suppose. He is always hanging about you." - -"That is what I meant, papa." Katherine's tone was icy. "Your -suppositions were apparent to me, you drain Mr. Odd on the strength of -them. Borrow from any one else you like as much as you can get, but, if -you have any self-respect, you won't borrow from Mr. Odd in the hope -that I will marry him." - -"Devilish impertinent! Upon my word, devilish impertinent!" the Captain -muttered. He drew out his cigar-case with a hand that trembled. -Katherine's bitter look was very unpleasant. - -Katherine expected Odd the next morning; he was reading a manuscript to -her, and would come early. - -She was waiting for him at ten. She had put on her oldest dress. The -severe black lines, a silk sash, knotted at the side, suggested a -soutane--the slim buckled shoes with their square tips carried out the -monastic effect, and Katherine's strong young face was cold and stern. - -"Shall we put off our work for a little while? I want to speak to you," -she said, after Odd had come, and greetings had passed between them. - -"Shall we? You have been too patient all along, Miss Archinard." Odd -smiled down at her as he held her hand. "You make me feel that I have -been driving you--arrantly egotistic." - -"No; I like our work immensely, as you know." Katherine remained -standing by the fireplace. She leaned her arm on the mantelpiece, and -turned her head to look directly at him. "I am not at all happy this -morning, Mr. Odd." Odd's kind eyes showed an almost boyish dismay. - -"What is it? Can I help you?" His tone was all sympathetic anxiety and -friendly warmth. - -"No; just the contrary. Mr. Odd, I am ashamed that you should have seen -the depths of our poverty. It is not a poverty one can be proud of. -Poverty to be honorable must work, and must not borrow." - -Odd flushed. - -"You exaggerate," he said, but he liked her for the exaggeration. - -"I did not know till yesterday that papa owed to you his Riviera trip." - -"Really, Katherine"--he had not used her name before, it came now most -naturally with this new sense of intimacy--"you mustn't misunderstand, -misjudge your father. He couldn't work; his life has unfitted him for -it; it would be a false pride that would make him hesitate to ask an old -friend for a loan; an old friend so well able to lend as I am. You women -judge these things far too loftily." And Peter liked her for the -loftiness. - -"Would you mind telling me how much you lent him last time? I was with -him when he cashed the check. I saw the name, not the amount." - -"It was nothing of any importance," said Odd shortly. He exaggerated -now. The Captain had told him that the furniture would be seized unless -some creditors were satisfied, and, with a very decided hint as to the -inadvisability of another trip for retrievement to the Riviera, Peter -had given him the money, ten thousand francs; a sum certainly of -importance, for Odd was no millionaire. - -Katherine looked hard at him. - -"You won't tell me because you want to spare me." - -"My dear Katherine, I certainly want to spare you anything that would -add a straw's weight to your distress; you have no need, no right to -shoulder this. It is your father's affair--and mine. You must not give -it another thought." - -"That is so easy!" Katherine clenched her hand on the mantelpiece. She -was not given to vehemence of demonstration; the little gesture showed a -concentration of bitter rebellion. Odd, standing beside her, put his own -hand over hers; patted it soothingly. - -"It's rather hard on me, you know, a slur on my friendship, that you -should take a merely conventional obligation so to heart." - -Katherine now looked down into the fire. - -"Take it to heart? What else have I had on my heart for years and years? -It is a mere variation on the same theme, a little more poignantly -painful than usual, that is all! What a life to lead. What a future to -look forward to. I wonder what else I shall have to endure." Odd had -never seen her before in this mood of fierce hopelessness. - -"Our poverty has poisoned everything, everything. I have had no youth, -no happiness. Every moment of forgetfulness means redoubled keenness of -gnawing anxiety. Debts! Duns! harassing, sordid cares that drag one -down. Mr. Odd, I have had to coax butchers and bakers; I have had to -plead with horrible men with documents of all varieties! I have had to -pawn my trinkets, and all with surface gayety; everything must be kept -from mamma, and papa's extravagance is incorrigible." - -Odd was all grave amazement, grave pity, and admiration. - -"You are a brave woman, Katherine." - -"No, no; I am not brave. I am frightened--frightened to death sometimes. -I see before me either a hideous struggle with want or--a _mariage de -convenance_. I have none of the classified, pigeon-holed knowledge one -needs nowadays to become a teaching drudge, and I can't make up my mind -to sell myself, though, in spite of my lack of beauty and lack of money, -that means of escape has often presented itself. I have had many offers -of marriage. Only I _can't_." - -Odd was silent under the stress of a new thought, an entirely new -thought. - -"For Hilda I have no fear," Katherine continued, still speaking with the -same steady quiet voice, still looking into the fire. "In the past her -art has absorbed and protected her, and her future is assured. She will -marry a good husband." A flash as of Hilda's beauty crossed the growing -definiteness of Peter's new thought. That old undoing, that mirage of -beauty; he put it aside with some self-disgust, feeling, as he did so, -a queer sense of impersonality as though putting away himself as he put -away his weakness. He seemed to contemplate himself from an outside -aloofness of observation. The trance-like feeling of the illusion of all -things which he had felt more than once of late made him hold more -firmly to the tonic thought of a fine common-sense. - -"Of course, mamma will be safe when Hilda is Lady Hope," Katherine said; -"perhaps I shall be forced to accept the same charity." Her voice broke -a little, and she turned the sombre revolt of her look on Peter; her -eyes were full of tears. - -"Katherine," he said, "will you marry me?" - -Odd, five minutes before, had not had the remotest idea that he would -ask Katherine Archinard to be his wife. Yet one could hardly call the -sudden decision that had brought the words to his lips, impulsive. While -Katherine spoke, the bitter struggle of the fine young life, surely -meant for highest things; the courage of the cheerfulness she never -before had failed in; the pride of that repulsion for the often offered -solution to her difficulties--a solution many women would have accepted -with a sense of the inevitable--became admirably apparent to Odd. Their -mutual sympathy and good-fellowship and, almost unconsciously, Hilda's -assured future--Allan Hope--had defined the thought. He felt none of -that passion which, now that he looked back on it, made of the miserable -year of married life that followed but the logical retribution of its -reckless and wilful blindness. The very lack of passion now seemed an -added surety of better things. His life with Katherine could count on -all that his life with Alicia had failed in. He did not reason on that -unexcited sense of impersonality and detachment. He would like her to -accept him. He would like to help this fine, proud young creature; he -would like sympathetic companionship. He was sure of that. He had not -surprised Katherine; she had seen, as clearly as he now saw, what Peter -Odd would do. She had not exactly intended to bring him to a realization -of this by the morning's confession, for on the whole Katherine had been -perfectly sincere in all that she had said, but she felt that she could -rely on no better opportunity. Now she only turned her head towards him, -without moving from her position before the fireplace. Katherine never -took the trouble to act. She merely aimed at the most advantageous line -of conduct and let taste and instinct lead her. Her taste now told her -that quiet sincerity was very suitable; she felt, too, a most sincere -little dash of proud hesitation. - -"Are you generously offering me another form of charity, Mr. Odd? My -distress was not conscious of an appeal." - -"You know your own value too well, Katherine, to ask me that. _I_ -appeal." - -"Yet the apropos of your offer makes me smart. Another joy of poverty. -One can't trust." - -"It was apropos because a man who loves you would not see you suffer -needlessly." Peter, too, was sincere; he did not say "loved." - -"Shall I let you suffer needlessly?" asked Katherine, smiling a little. -"I sha'n't, if that implies that you love me." - -"Suppose I do. And suppose I stand on my dignity. Pretend to distrust -your motives. Refuse to be married out of pity?" - -"That sort of false dignity wouldn't suit you; you have too much of the -real." - -"Would you be good to me, Mr. Odd?" - -"Very, very good, Katherine." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it, and Katherine's smile shone out in all -its frank gayety. "I think I can make you happy, dear." - -"I think you can, Mr. Odd." - -"You must manage 'Peter' now." - -"I think you can, Peter," Katherine said obediently. - -"And Katherine--I would not have dared say this before, you would have -flung it back at me as bribery--but I can give you weapons." - -"Yes, I shall be able to fight now." She looked up at him with her -charming smile. "And you will help me, you must fight too. You must be -great, Peter, great, _great!_" - -"With such a fiery little engine throbbing beside my laggard bulk, I -shall probably be towed into all sorts of combats and come off -victorious." - -They sat down side by side on the sofa. Katherine was a delightfully -comfortable person; no change, but a pleasant development of relation -seemed to have occurred. - -"You won't expect any flaming protestations, will you, Katherine," said -Peter; "I was never good at that sort of thing." - -"Did you never flame, then?" - -"I fancy I flamed out in about two months--a long time ago; that is -about the natural life of the feeling." - -"And you bring me ashes," said Katherine, rallying him with her smile. - -"You mustn't tease me, Katherine," said Peter. He found her very dear, -and kissed her hand again. - - - - -Part II - -HILDA. - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -"Well, Hilda, we have some news for you!" With these words, spoken in -the triumphant tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his -daughter as she came into the drawing-room at half-past six. Odd had -been paying his respects to his future parents-in-law, and was sitting -near Mrs. Archinard's sofa. He rose to his feet as Hilda entered and -looked at her, smiling a trifle nervously. - -"Guess what has happened, my dear," said the Captain, whose good humor -was apparent, while Mrs. Archinard murmured, "_She_ would never guess. -Hilda, only look at your hat in the mirror." It was windy, and Hilda's -shabby little hat was on the back of her head. - -"What must I guess? Is it about you?" she asked, turning her sweet -bewildered eyes from Odd to her father, to her mother, and back to Odd -again. - -"Yes, about me and another person." - -"You are going to marry Katherine!" Her eyes dilated and their sweetness -deepened to a smile; "you are going to marry Katherine, that _must_ be -it." - -"That is it, Hilda. Congratulate me." He took her hands in his and -kissed her. "Welcome me, and tell me you are glad." - -"Oh! I am very glad. I welcome you. I congratulate you!" - -"You will like your brother?" - -"A brother is dearer than a friend, and you have always been a friend, -haven't you, Mr. Odd?" - -"Always, always, Hilda; I didn't know that you realized it." - -"Did _you_ realize it?" - -"_Did_ I, my dear Hilda! I did, I do, I always will." Hilda's face -seemed subtly irradiated. Her listless look of pallor had brightened -wonderfully. No one could have said that the lovely face was dull with -this sudden change upon it. Peter felt that he himself was grave in -comparison. - -"And I am going to claim all a brother's rights immediately, Hilda." - -"What are a brother's rights?" - -"I am going to look after you, to scold you, to see you don't overwork -yourself." - -"I give you leave, but you mustn't presume _too_ much on the new -rights." - -"Ah! but I have old ones as well." - -"You mustn't be tyrannical!" she still laughed gently as she withdrew -her hands; "I must go and see Katherine." - -"Yes, go and dress now, Hilda." Mrs. Archinard spoke from the sofa, -having watched the scene with a slight air of injury; Hilda's unwonted -gayety constituted a certain grievance. "Mr. Odd dines with us, and I -really can't bear to see you in that costume. The skirt especially is -really ludicrous, my dear. I am glad that I don't see you walking -through the streets in it." - -"Hilda knows that her feet bear showing," remarked the Captain, crossing -his own with complacency; "she has her mother's foot in size and mine -in make--the Archinard foot; narrow, arched instep, and small heel. - -"Really, Charles, I think the Maxwells will bear the comparison!" Mrs. -Archinard, though she smiled, looked distinctly distressed. - -Hilda found her sister before the long mirror in her room, Taylor -fastening the nasturtium velvet. Katherine always had a commanding air, -and it was quite regally apparent to-night; all things seemed made to -serve her, and Taylor's crouching attitude symbolic. - -Hilda put her arms around her neck. - -"My dear, dear Kathy, I am so glad! To think that good things _do_ come -true!" - -"You like my choice, pet?" - -"_No_ one else would have done," cried Hilda; "he is the only man I ever -saw whom I could have thought of for you. Why, Katherine, from that -first day when you told me you had met him at the dinner, I _knew_ it -would happen." - -"Yes, I certainly felt a prophetic sense of proprietorship from the -first," Katherine owned musingly. She looked over her sister's shoulder -at the fine outline of her own head and neck in the glass. - -"Aren't you rather splashed and muddy, pet? Poor people can't afford an -affection that puts their velvet gowns in danger. There, I mustn't -rumple my lace." - -"I haven't hurt, have I?" Hilda stood back hastily. "I forgot, I _am_ -rather muddy. And, Katherine, you will help one another so much; that -makes it so ideal." - -"Idealistic little Hilda!" - -"But that is evident, isn't it? You with all your energy and cleverness -and general _sanity_, and he so widely sympathetic that he is a bit -impersonal. I mean that he doubts himself because he doubts everything -rather; he sees how relative everything is; he probably thinks too much; -I am sure that is dangerous. You will make him act." - -"I am to be the concrete to his abstract. He certainly does lack energy. -I wonder if even I shall be able to prod him into initiative." - -Katherine patted down the fine old lace that edged her bodice, and -looked a smiling question from her own reflection in the mirror to her -sister. "Suppose I fail to arouse him." - -"You will understand him. He will have something to live for; that is -what he needs. He won't be able to say, 'Is it worth while?' about -_your_ happiness. As for initiative, you will probably have to have that -for both. After all, he has made his name and place. He has the nicest -kind of fame; the more apparent sort made up by the admiration of -mediocrities isn't half as nice." - -"Ah, pet, you are an intellectual aristocrat. My _pâte_ is coarser. I -like the real thing; the donkey's brayings make a noise, and one must -take the whole world with all its donkeys conscious of one, to be -famous. I like noise." Katherine smiled as she spoke, and Hilda smiled, -too, a little smile of humorous comprehension, for she did not take -Katherine in this mood at all seriously. She was as stanch in her belief -of Katherine's ideals as she was in sticking to her own. - -"We will be married in March," said Katherine, pausing before her -dressing-table to put on her rings--a fine antique engraved gem and a -splendid opal. "You may go, Taylor; and Taylor, you may put out my -opera-cloak after dinner. I think, Hilda, I will go to the opera; papa -has a box. He and I and Peter might care about dropping in for the last -two acts. You don't care to come, do you?" - -"Well, mamma expects me to read to her; it's a charming book, too," -added Hilda, with tactful delicacy. - -"Well, I shall envy you your quiet evening. I can't ask Peter to spend -his here in the bosom of my family. Yes, March, I think, unless I decide -on making that round of visits in England; that would put it off for a -month. I hope the ravens will fetch me a trousseau--for I don't know who -else will." - -"I shall have quite a lot by that time, Katherine. I haven't heard from -the dealer in London yet, but those two pictures will sell, I hope. And, -at all events, with the other things, you know, I shall have about a -hundred pounds." - -Katherine flushed a little when Hilda spoke of "other things," and -looked round at her sister. - -"I _hate_ to think of taking the money, Hilda." - -"My dear, why should you? Except, of course--the debts," Hilda sighed -deeply: "but I think on _this_ occasion you have a right to forget -them." Katherine's flush perhaps showed a consciousness of having -forgotten the debts on many occasions less pressing. - -"I meant, in particular, taking the money from you." - -Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest. - -"Kathy! as if it were not my pleasure! my joy! I am lucky to be able to -get it for you. _Can_ you get a trousseau for that much, Kathy?" - -"Well, linen, yes. I don't care how little I get, but it must be -good--good lace. I shall manage; I don't care about gowns, I can get -them afterwards. Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband." A -pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine's lips. "He _is_ a -dear! I only hope, pet, that you will be able to hold on to the money. -Don't let the duns worry it out of you!" The weary, pallid look came to -Hilda's face. - -"I'll try, Kathy dear. I'll do my very best." - -"My precious Hilda! You need not tell me _that!_ Run quickly and dress, -dear, it must be almost dinner-time. What _have_ you to wear? Shall I -lend you anything?" - -"Why, you forgot my gray silk! My fichu! Insulting Kathy!" - -"So I did! And you look deliciously pretty in that dress, though she -_did_ make a fiasco of the back; let the fichu come well down over it. -You really shouldn't indulge your passion for _petites couturières_, -child. It doesn't pay." - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Odd climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Hilda's studio. The -concièrge below at the entrance to the court had looked at him with the -sourness common to her class, as she stood spaciously in her door. The -gentleman had, evidently, definite intentions, for he had asked her no -questions, and Madame Prinet felt his independence as a slur upon her -Cerberus qualifications. - -Odd was putting into practice his brotherly principles. He had spent the -morning with Katherine--the fifth morning since their engagement--and -time hanging unemployed and heavy on his hands this afternoon, a visit -to Hilda seemed altogether desirable. It really behoved him to solve -Hilda's dubious position and, if possible, help her to a more normal -outlook; he felt the task far more feasible since that glimpse of gayety -and confidence. Indeed he was quite unconscious of Madame Prinet's -suspicious observation as he crossed the court, and the absorption in -his pleasant duty held his mind while he wound up the interminable -staircase. - -His knock at Hilda's door--there was no mistaking it, for a card bearing -her name was neatly nailed thereon--was promptly answered, and Odd found -himself face to face with a middle-aged maiden of the artistic type -with which Paris swarms; thin, gray-haired, energetic eyes behind -eyeglasses, and a huge palette on her arm, so huge that it gave Odd the -impression of a misshapen table and blocked the distance out with its -brave array of color. Over the lady's shoulder, Odd caught sight of a -canvas of heroic proportions. - -"Oh! I thought it was the concièrge," said the artist, evidently -disappointed; "have you come to the right door? I don't think I know -you." - -"No; I don't know you," Odd replied, smiling and casting a futile glance -around the studio, now fully revealed by the shifting of the palette to -a horizontal position. - -"I expected to find Miss Archinard. Are you working with her? Will she -be back presently?" - -The gray-haired lady smiled an answering and explanatory smile. - -"Miss Archinard rents me her studio in the afternoon. She only uses it -in the morning; she is never here in the afternoon." - -Odd felt a huge astonishment. - -"Never here?" - -"No; can I give her any message? I shall probably see her tomorrow if I -come early enough." - -"Oh no, thanks. Thanks very much." He realized that to reveal his dismay -would stamp Hilda with an unpleasantly mysterious character. - -"I shall see her this evening--at her mother's. I am sorry to have -interrupted you." - -"Oh! Don't mention it!" The gray-haired lady still smiled kindly; Peter -touched his hat and descended the stairs. Perhaps she worked in a large -atelier in the afternoon; strange that she had never mentioned it. - -Madame Prinet, who had followed the visitor to the foot of the staircase -and had located his errand, now stood in her door and surveyed his -retreat with a fine air of impartiality; people who consulted her need -not mount staircases for nothing. - -"Monsieur did not find Mademoiselle." - -Odd paused; he certainly would ask no questions of the concièrge, but -she might, of her own accord, throw some light on Hilda's devious ways. - -"No; I had hoped to find her. Mademoiselle was in when I last called -with her sister. I did not know that she went out every afternoon." - -Odd thought this tactful, implying, as it did, that Miss Archinard's -friends were not in ignorance of her habits. - -"Every afternoon, monsieur; _elle et son chien_." - -"Ah, indeed!" Odd wished her good day and walked off. He had stumbled -upon a mystery only Hilda herself might divulge: it might be very -simple, and yet a sense of anxiety weighed upon him. - -At five he went to call on a pleasant and pretty woman, an American, who -lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He was to dine with the Archinards, -and Katherine had said she might meet him at Mrs. Pope's; if she were -not there by five he need not wait for her. She was not there, and Mr. -Pope took possession of him on his entrance and led him into the library -to show him some new acquisitions in bindings. Mrs. Pope was not a grass -widow, and her husband, a desultory dilettante, was always in evidence -in her graceful, crowded salon. He was a very tall, thin man, with -white hair and a mild, almost timid manner, dashed with the collector's -eagerness. - -"Now, Mr. Odd, I have a treasure here; really a perfect treasure. A -genuine Grolier; I captured it at the La Hire sale. Just look here, -please; come to the light. Isn't that a beauty?" - -Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter; she did not approve of -the hiding of her lion in the library. She took him into the -drawing-room, where a great many people were drinking tea and talking, -and he was passed dexterously from group to group; Mrs. Pope, gay and -stout, shuffling the pack and generously giving every one a glimpse of -her trump. It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find himself -at last in Mrs. Pope's undivided possession. He was sitting on a sofa -beside her, talking and drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a -picture on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He put down the -cup of tea and put up his eyeglasses to look at it. A woman in a dress -of Japanese blue, holding a paper fan; pink azaleas in the foreground. -The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality made it unmistakable. -He got up to look more closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing -signature: "Hilda Archinard." - -He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise. - -"I didn't know that Hilda had reached this degree of popularity. You are -very lucky. Did she give it to you?" - -Katherine's engagement was generally known, and Mrs. Pope reproached -herself for having failed to draw Mr. Odd's attention before this to the -work of his future sister. - -"Oh no; she is altogether too distinguished a little person to give away -her pictures. That was in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The -two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of her things; for -high prices, too. Always the way, you know; a starving genius is allowed -to starve, but material success comes to a pretty girl who doesn't need -it. Katherine is so well known in Paris that Hilda's public was already -made for her; there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her due. -Her work is certainly charming." - -Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could not share Mrs. Pope's -feeling of easy pleasantness. Hilda _did_ need it. Certainly there was -nothing pathetic in doing what she liked best and making money at it. -Yet he wondered just how far Hilda's earnings helped the family; kept -the butcher and baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture he -thought of the black serge dress; somewhere about Hilda's artistic -indifference there might well lurk a tragic element. Did she not really -care to wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings perhaps went to -provide? The vague distress that had never left him since his first -disappointment at the Embassy dinner, that the afternoon's discovery at -the atelier had sharpened, now became acute. - -"I always think it such a pretty compensation of Providence," said Mrs. -Pope, gracefully anxious to please, "that all the talent that Hilda -Archinard expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in Katherine; -is part of herself as it were, like a perfume about her." - -"Yes," said Odd rather dully, not particularly pleased with the -comparison. - -"She is such a brilliant girl," Mrs. Pope added, "such a splendid -character. I can't tell you how it delighted me to hear that Katherine -had at last found the rare some one who could really appreciate her. It -strengthened my pet theory of the fundamental fitness of things." - -"Yes," Odd repeated, so vaguely that Mrs. Pope hurriedly wondered if she -had been guilty of bad taste, and changed the subject. - -When Peter reached the Archinards' at half-past six that evening, he -found the Captain and Mrs. Archinard alone in the drawing-room. - -"Hilda not in yet?" he asked. His anxiety was so oppressive that he -really could not forbear opening the old subject of grievance. Indeed, -Odd fancied that in Mrs. Archinard's jeremiads there was an element of -maternal solicitude. That Hilda should voluntarily immolate herself, -have no pretty dresses, show herself nowhere--these facts perhaps moved -Mrs. Archinard as much as her own neglected condition. At least, so -Peter charitably hoped, feeling almost cruel as he deliberately broached -the painful subject. - -Mrs. Archinard now gave a dismal sigh, and the Captain shook his head -impatiently as he put down _Le Temps_. - -Odd went on quite doggedly-- - -"I didn't know that Hilda sold her pictures. I saw one of them at Mrs. -Pope's this afternoon." - -There could certainly be no indiscretion in the statement, for Mrs. -Pope herself had mentioned the fact of Hilda's success as well known. -Indeed, although the Captain's face showed an uneasy little change, Mrs. -Archinard's retained its undisturbed pathos. - -"Yes," she said, "oh yes, Hilda has sold several things, I believe. She -certainly needs the money. We are not _rich_ people, Peter." Mrs. -Archinard had immediately adopted the affectionate intimacy of the -Christian name. "And we could hardly indulge Hilda in her artistic -career if, to some extent, she did not help herself. I fancy that Hilda -makes few demands on her papa's purse, and she must have many expenses. -Models are expensive things, I hear. I cannot say that I rejoice in her -success. It seems to justify her obstinacy--makes her independent of our -desires--our requests." - -Odd felt that there was a depth of selfish ignorance in these remarks. -The Captain's purse he knew by experience to be very nearly mythical, -and the Captain's expression at this moment showed to Peter's sharpened -apprehension an uncomfortable consciousness. Peter was convinced that, -far from making demands on papa's purse, Hilda had replenished it, and -further conjectures as to Hilda's egotistic one-sidedness began to shape -themselves. - -"And a very lucky girl she is to be able to make money so easily," the -Captain remarked, after a pause. "By Jove! I wish that doing what -pleased me most would give me a large income!" and the Captain, who -certainly had made most conscientious efforts to fulfil his nature, and -had, at least, tried to do what most pleased him all his life long, and -with the utmost energy, looked resentfully at his narrow well-kept -finger-nails. - -"Does she work all day long at her studio?" Peter asked, conscious of a -certain hesitation in his voice. The mystery of Hilda's afternoon -absences would now be either solved or determined. It was -determined--definitely. There was no shade of suspicion in Mrs. -Archinard's sighing, "Dear me, yes!" or in the Captain's, "From morning -till night. Wears herself out." - -Hilda, all too evidently, had a secret. - -"She ought to go to two studios, it would tire her less. Her own half -the day, and a large atelier the other." Assurance might as well be made -doubly sure. - -"Hilda left Julian's a long time ago. She has lived in her own place -since then, really lived there. I haven't seen it; of course I could not -attempt the stairs. Katherine tells me there are terrible stairs. Most -shockingly unhealthy life she leads, I think, and most, _most_ -inconsiderate." - -At the dinner-table Odd knew that Hilda had only him to thank for the -thorough "heckling" she received at the hands of both her parents. Her -silence, with its element of vacant dulness, now admitted many -interpretations. It hedged round a secret unknown to either father or -mother. Unknown to Katherine? Her grave air of aloofness might imply as -much, or might mean only a natural disapproval of the scolding process -carried on before her lover, a loyalty to Hilda that would ask no -question and make no reproach. - -"Any one would tell you, Hilda, that it is positively not _decent_ in -Paris for a young girl to be out alone after dusk," said the Captain. -"Odd will tell you so; he was speaking about it only this evening. You -must come home earlier; I insist upon it." - -Odd sat opposite to her, and Hilda raised her eyes and met his. - -He smiled gravely at her, and shook his head. - -"Naughty little Hilda!" but his voice expressed all the tender sympathy -the very sight of her roused in him, and Hilda smiled back faintly. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter brought Katherine the engagement ring a few days afterward. The -drifting had ceased abruptly, and he felt the new sense of reality as -most salutary. His personality and hers now filled the horizon; their -relations demanded a healthy condensation of thoughts before expanded in -wandering infinity, and he was thankful for the consciousness of -definite duty and responsibility that made past years seem the -refinement of egotism. - -Katherine looked almost roguishly gay that afternoon, and, even after -the ring was exclaimed over, put on, and Peter duly kissed for it, he -felt that there was still an expression of happy knowingness not yet -accounted for. - -"The ring wasn't a surprise, but you have one for me, Katherine." - -Katherine laughed out at his acuteness. - -"The ring is lovely; clever, sensitive Peter!" - -"You have quite convinced me of your pleasure and my own good taste. -What is the news?" - -"Well, Peter, a delightful thing has happened, or is _going_ to happen, -rather. Allan Hope is coming to Paris next week! Peter, we may have a -double wedding!" - -"Hilda has accepted him?" - -"Oh, we have not openly discussed it, you know. Mamma got his letter -this morning; very short. He hoped to see us all by Wednesday. Of -course, mamma is charmed. Hilda said nothing, and went off to the studio -as usual; but Hilda never _does_ say anything if she is really feeling." - -"Doesn't she?" There was a musing quality in Odd's voice. - -"_I_ think the child is in love with him; I thought so from the first. -Wednesday! A week from to-morrow! Oh, of course she will have him!" -Katherine said jubilantly. - -"Allan isn't the man to fail in anything. He has a great deal of -determination." - -"Yes, he seems the very embodiment of success, doesn't he? That is -because he doesn't try to see everything at once, like some people I -know." And Katherine nodded her head laughingly at her _fiancé_. -"Intellectual epicureanism is fatal. Allan Hope has no unmanageable -opinions. His party can always count on him. He is always there, -unchanged--unless they change! He pins his faith to his party, and -verily he shall have his reward! By mere force of honest mediocrity he -will mount to the highest places!" - -"Venomous little Katherine! What are you trying to insinuate?" - -"Why, that Lord Allan isn't particularly clever, nor particularly -anything, except particularly useful to men who can be clever for him. -He is the bricks they build with." - -"Allan is as honest as the day," said Peter, a little shortly. - -"Honest? Who's a denygin' of it, pray? His honesty is part of his -supreme utility. My simile holds good; he is a brick; a dishonest man is -a mere tool, fit only to be cast away, once used." - -"How rhetorical we are!" said Odd, smiling at her with a touch of -friendly mockery. - -"Lord Allan most devoutly believes that in his party lies the salvation -of his country," Katherine pursued. "Oh, I have talked to him!" - -"You have, have you? Poor chap!" ejaculated Peter. "Will you ever serve -me up in this neatly dissected way, as a result of our confidential -conversations?" - -"Willingly! but only to yourself. Don't be afraid, Peter. I could -dissect myself far more neatly, far more unpleasantly. I have a genius -for the scalpel! And I have said nothing in the least derogatory to -Allan Hope. He couldn't disagree with his party, any more than a pious -Catholic could disagree with his church. It is a matter of faith, and of -shutting the eyes." - -If Hilda was so soon to pass to the supreme authority of an accepted -lover, Peter felt that for his own satisfaction he must make the most of -the time left him, and solve the riddle of her occupations. That -delicate sense of loyal reticence had held him from a hinted question to -even Katherine. If Katherine were as ignorant as he, a question would -arouse and imply suspicion. Odd could suspect Hilda of nothing worse -than a silly disobedience founded on a foolish idea of her own artistic -worth; a dull self-absorption, unsaved by a touch of humor. Yet this -very suspicion irritated Odd profoundly; it seemed logical and yet -impossible. He felt, in his very revulsion from it, a justification for -a storming of her barriers. - -That very evening, while Katherine played Schumann, the Captain having -gone out and Mrs. Archinard dozing on the sofa, he determined to have -the truth if possible. - -Hilda stood behind her sister, listening. Her tall slenderness looked -well in anything that fell in long lines, even if made by the most -_petite_ of _petite couturières_, as the gray silk had been. The white -fichu covered deficiencies of fit, and left free the exquisite line of -her throat. Her head, in its attitude of quiet listening, struck Odd -with the old sense of a beauty significant, not the lovely mask of -emptiness. - -"Come and sit by me, Hilda," he said from his place on the sofa, "you -can hear better at this distance." - -The quick turn of her head, her pretty look of willingness were -charming, he thought. - -"I like to see you in that dress," he said, as she sat down beside him -on the sofa, "there isn't a whiff of paint or palette about it, except -that, in it, you look like a picture, and a prettier one than even you -could paint." - -"That is a very subtle insult!" Hilda's smile showed a most encouraging -continuation of the pretty willingness. - -"You see," said Odd, "you are not fair to your friends. You should paint -fewer pictures, and be more constantly a picture in yourself." She -showed a little uneasy doubtfulness of look. - -"I am afraid I don't understand you. I am afraid I am stupid." - -"You should _be_ a little more, and _act_ a little less." - -"But to act is to be," said Hilda, with a sudden laugh. "We are not -listening to Schumann," she added, a trifle maliciously. Her face turned -toward him in a soft shadow, a line of light just defining the cheek's -young oval, the lovely slimness of the throat affected Odd with a really -rapturously artistic appreciation. The shape of her small head, too, -with its high curves of hair, was elegant with an intimate elegance -peculiarly characteristic. An inner gentle dignity, a voluntary -submission to exterior facts of existence resulting in a higher freedom, -a more perfect self-possession, seemed to emanate from her; the very -poise of her head suggested it, and so strong and so sudden was the -suggestion that Odd felt his curiosity intolerable, and those groping -suspicions outrageously at sea. - -"Hilda," he said abruptly, "I went to your studio the other afternoon. -You were not there." - -Her finger flashed warningly to her lip, and her glance towards her -mother turned again to him, pained and beseeching. - -"She--they can't hear," said Odd, in a still lower voice. - -"No, I was not there," Hilda repeated. - -"And your father, your mother, Katherine, think you are there when you -are not. Is that wise? Don't be angry with me, my dear Hilda. You may -have confidence in me. Tell me, do you work somewhere else?" - -"_No._ I am not angry. You startled me." Her look was indeed shaken, -but sweet, touched even. "Yes, I work somewhere else." - -"And you keep it a secret?" - -She nodded. - -"Is it safe to keep secrets from your father and mother? Or is it a -secret kept for their sakes, Hilda?" Peter had made mental combinations, -yet he suspected that in this one he was shooting rather far from the -mark. No matter. Hilda looked away, and seemed revolving some inner -doubt. Her hesitation surprised him; he was more surprised when, half -unwillingly, she whispered, "Yes," still not looking at him. - -"For their sakes," repeated Odd, his curiosity redoubled. "Come, Hilda, -please tell me all about it. For _their_ sakes?" - -"In one way." Hilda spoke with the same air of half-unwilling -confidence. But that she should confide, that she should not lock -herself in stubborn silence, was much. - -"And as you need not keep it for my sake, you may tell me," he urged; "I -may be able to help you." - -"Oh! I don't need help." She turned a slightly challenging look upon -him. "It is no hardship to me, no trouble to keep my little secret." - -"You are really unkind now, Hilda." - -"No,"--her smile dwelt on him meditatively; "but I see no reason, no -necessity for telling you. I have nothing naughty to confess!" and there -was a touch of pride in her laugh. - -"Yes, you are unkind, for you turn my real anxiety to a jest." - -"You must not be anxious." Her eyes still rested on his, sweetly and -gently. - -"Not when I see you surrounded by an atmosphere of carping criticism? -When I see you coming home, night after night, worn out, too fatigued to -speak? When I see that you are thin and white and sad?" - -Hilda drew herself up a little. - -"Oh, you are mistaken. But--how _kind_ of you!" and again the irradiated -look lit up her face. - -"Does _that_ surprise you? Hilda, Katherine is in the dark about this -too?" - -"Katherine knows; but please don't ask her about it." - -"She doesn't approve, then?" - -"Not exactly. Besides, it might hurt her. Please don't ask me either. It -really isn't worth any mystery, and yet I must keep it a secret." - -Odd was silent for a moment, a baffling sense of pitfalls and -hiding-places upon him. - -"But Katherine ought to tell me," he said at last, smiling. - -"Now you are pushing an unfair advantage. She thinks, probably, that it -might hurt _me_. Really, _really_," she added urgently, "it isn't so -serious as all this seems to make it. The one serious thing is that it -_would_ hurt mamma, and that is why I make such a mountain out of my -mole-hill. How mystery does magnify the tiniest things!" - -"Tell me, at least, where you go in the afternoon. I mean to what part -of Paris, to what street." - -"I go to several streets," said Hilda, smiling resignedly, "since you -_will_ be so curious." - -"Where are you going to-morrow? Give me just an idea of your prowess." - -"I go to-morrow to the Rue d'Assas." - -"Near the Luxembourg Gardens?" - -"Yes." - -"I fancied you were walking yourself to death. And next day?" - -"Next day--the Rue Poulletier." - -"And where may that be? I fancied I knew my Paris well." - -"It is a little street in the Île St. Louis. That is my favorite walk; -home along the quays. I get the view of Notre Dame from the back, with -all the flying buttresses, and the sunset beyond." - -"No wonder you are tired every night. You always walk?" - -"Usually. I have Palamon with me, and they would not take him in a 'bus. -But from the Île St. Louis I often take the boat, and that is one of the -treats of Paris, I think, especially when the lights are lit. And on -some days I go to the Boulevard St. Germain. There; now you shall ask me -no more questions." - -Odd made no further comment on the information he had received, but he -resolved to be in the Rue d'Assas to-morrow. He did not intend to spy, -but he did intend to walk home with Hilda, and to make her understand -that one of the brotherly offices he claimed was the right to protecting -companionship. He revolved the _rôle_ and its possibilities, as he lay -back in the sofa watching Hilda's profile, and listening to Schumann--a -_rôle_ that could, at all events, not last long, since Allan Hope -arrived on Wednesday. Allan's arrival would put an end to mysteries, to -a need for brotherly protection. Odd felt a certain curiosity on this -point; indeed his attitude towards Hilda was one of continual curiosity. - -"So Allan Hope turns up Wednesday week," he said. "I shall be glad to -see Allan again." - -Hilda's silence might imply displeasure, but Odd, in an attitude of -manly laziness, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding an -ankle, thought a little gentle teasing quite allowable. - -"Will you go bicycling with him, unkind Hilda?" He was not prepared for -the startled look she turned on him. - -"When I would not go with _you_?" Her own vehemence seemed to embarrass -her. "I hardly know how to bicycle at all," she added lamely; "I would -have gone with you if I had had time." She looked away again, and then, -taking a book from the table beside her-- - -"Have you seen the last volume of _décadent_ poetry? Isn't the binding -nice?" Odd felt himself justly, but rather severely, reproved; yet the -gentle candor of her eyes was kind and soothing. Katherine was playing -the "Chopin" from Schumann's "Carnaval," and Peter, still holding his -ankle and feeling rather like a naughty little boy forgiven, did not -look at the fantastic volume she held, but at Hilda herself. How blue -the shadows were on the milky whiteness of her skin. Odd's eyes followed -the thick, soft eddies of hair about her forehead. - -"Aren't the margins generous?" said Hilda, turning the pages; "a mere -trickle of print through the whiteness. Some of the verses are really -very pretty," and she talked gayly, in her gentle way, as they went -through the pages together. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -It was just past four when Peter walked up the Rue Bonaparte and -stationed himself at the corner of the Rue Vavin and the Rue d'Assas, -opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. - -From this point of vantage he could look up and down the street, and -there would be no chance of missing her. She rarely reached home till -past six, and, even allowing for very slow walking, he was if anything -too early. - -He felt, as he opened his umbrella--it had begun to rain--that his -present position might look foolish, but was certainly justifiable. He -would ask Hilda no questions, force in no way her confidence, but really -on the gray dreariness of such a day she ought not to reject but rather -to be glad for his proffered and unexpected companionship. The combined -dreariness of the afternoon with its cold rain, the gray street, the -desolate-looking branches of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, -inspired him with a painful sympathy for Hilda's pursuits. She was, -probably, working in one of these tall, severe houses; perhaps with some -atelier chum fallen beneath the ban of Mrs. Archinard's disapproval, and -clung to with a girl's enthusiasm. Disobedient of Hilda, very. The chum -might be masculine. This was a new and disagreeable supposition; a Marie -Bashkirtseff, Bastien Lepage affair; Bohemia gloried in such -audacities; it was difficult to associate Hilda with such feats of -independence. There was a mystery somewhere, however, and if not -mountainous, it must be more than mere mole-hill. It was very windy, and -the rain blew slantingly. Katherine would find the situation amusing. A -vision of the sympathetic amusement was followed by the realization that -to betray his Quixotism might be to betray Hilda's confidence. Yet Hilda -had made no confidence. Peter rebelled at the mere suggestion of -concealment. Knowing all, Katherine could surely know that he had been -admitted into the outer courts of the mystery. He had ample time for -every variety of reflection, for he had been standing in the rain for -over an hour, when Hilda appeared not far from him, stepping from the -door of one of the largest and most dignified of the gray houses. She -paused on the wet pavement to open her umbrella, and Peter had a glimpse -of the wide red lips and small black beard of an unpleasant-looking -French youth, who seemed to loiter behind her with a certain air of -expectancy. It was impossible to connect his commonplace vulgarity of -aspect with Bohemian friendships or with Hilda, and, indeed, she gave -him a mere nod, not looking at him at all, and came walking up the -street, her skirt raised in one hand, showing slim feet and ankles. Odd, -as he contemplated her advance, was reminded of the light poise of a -Jean Goujon nymph. Her umbrella, lowered against the wind, hid him from -her. - -"Well, Hilda," he said amicably, when she was almost beside him--the -umbrella tilted back over her shoulder, and the rain fell on her -startled face--"Here I am." - -Her stare of utmost amazement was very amusing, but she looked white and -tired. - -"I must get a _fiacre_, I haven't your taste for plodding through rain -and mud, and you'll be kind enough to forgo the enjoyment for one day, -won't you?" Her stupefaction at last resolved itself into one word: -"Well!" she exclaimed with emphasis, and then she laughed outright. - -"By Jove, child, you look done up. I'm glad you're not angry, though. -You wouldn't laugh if you were angry, would you? Here is a _fiacre_." He -hailed the approaching vehicle; the _cocher's_ hat and cape, the roof of -the cab, the horse's waterproof covering glistened with rain in the -dying light. - -"You are very, very kind," Hilda said, rather gravely now, as they stood -side by side on the curb while the _fiacre_ rattled up to them. - -"I always intend to be kind, Hilda, if you will let me. Jump in." He -followed her, slamming the door with relief, and depositing the two -dripping umbrellas in a corner. - -"You must be drenched," said Hilda solemnly. - -"Imitation is the sincerest flattery, I believe; your fondness for -drenchings inspired me. You are not one bit angry, then? You see I ask -you no questions." - -"Angry? It was too good of you!" Her voice was still meditative. - -"I am much relieved that you should say so. I was only conscious of -guilt." - -"How long did you wait?" - -"About an hour." - -"And it was _pouring_!" - -"Oh no, not pouring. I have suffered far worse drenchings for far less -pleasure. One has no umbrella in Scotland on the moors." - -"One has, at least, the scenery." Hilda smiled. - -"Yes; the Rue d'Assas isn't particularly inspiring. I don't disclaim -honor; that corner was most wearing. Only the irritation of waiting for -my mysterious little truant kept me from finding it dreary." - -"Don't call me mysterious, please." - -"But you are mysterious, Hilda; very. However, I promised myself, and I -promise you, to say no more about it, to ask no questions." - -"You are so kind, so good." There was deep feeling in her voice; she -looked at him with a certain wistful eagerness. "You really do care, -don't you? Shall I tell you? I should like to. It seems silly not to -tell you, and I think you have a right to know--after to-day." - -"I really care a great deal, Hilda; but--I don't want to take an unfair -advantage, you know; I really have no right whatsoever. Wait till this -impulse of unmerited gratitude has passed." - -"But it is nothing to tell, really nothing. You see--I make money. I -have to--I teach. There; that is all." - -Peter looked at her, at the white oval of her face, at the unfashionable -little hat, at the shabby coat and skirt. A lily of the field who toiled -and spun. And a hot resentment rose within him as he thought of the -father, the mother, the sister. - -"Why _have_ you to?" he asked, in a hard voice. - -"We are so dreadfully poor, and we are so dreadfully in debt." - -"But why you alone? What can _you_ do?" - -"I can do a good deal. I have been very lucky. I love my work too, and I -make money by it, so it is natural. Mamma, of course, would think it -terrible, degrading even; but I can't agree with mamma's point of view; -I think it is quite wrong. I see nothing terrible or degrading." - -"No; nothing terrible or degrading, I grant you." - -"You think I am right, don't you?" - -"Yes; quite right, dear, quite right." - -Odd paused before adding: "It is the incongruity that is shocking." - -"The incongruity?" Hilda's voice was vague. - -"Between your life and theirs; yes." - -"Oh, you don't understand. I love my work; it is my pleasure. Besides, -they don't know; they don't realize the necessity either." - -"Why the teaching? I thought your pictures sold well." - -"And so they do, often; but I took up the teaching some years ago, -before I had any hope of selling my pictures; it is very _sure_, very -well paid, and I really find it a rest after five hours of studio work; -after five hours I don't feel a picture any longer." - -"Yet they must know that the money comes from somewhere?" - -Hilda's voice in replying held a pained quality; this attack on her -family very evidently perplexed her. - -"Mamma thinks it comes from papa, and papa, I suppose, doesn't think -about it at all; he knows, too, that I sell my pictures. You mustn't -imagine," she added, with a touch of pride and resentment, "that they -would let me teach if they knew; you mustn't imagine that for one -moment. And I don't mean to let them know, for then I couldn't help -them; as it is, my help is limited. The money goes, for the most part, -towards _guarding_ mamma. She could not bear shocks and anxiety." - -Odd said nothing for some moments. - -"How did it begin? how did you come to think of it?" he asked. - -"It began some years ago, at the studio where I worked when I first came -to Paris. There was a kind, dull French girl there; she had no talent, -and she was very rich. She heard my work praised a good deal, and one -day, after I had got a picture into the Salon for the first time, she -came and asked me if I would give her lessons. Fifteen francs an hour." -Hilda paused in a way which showed Odd that the recollection was painful -to her. - -"It seemed a _very_ strange thing to me at first, that she should ask -me. I had, I'm afraid, rather silly ideas about Katherine and myself; as -though we were very elevated young persons, above all the unpleasant -realities of life. But my common sense soon got the better of my pride; -or rather, I should say, the false pride made way for the honest. We -were _awfully_ poor just then. Papa, of course, never could, never even -tried to make money; but that winter he went in for exasperated -speculation, and really Katherine and I did not know what was to become -of us. To keep it from mamma was the great thing. Katherine was just -beginning to go out, and no money for gowns and cabs; no money, even, -for mamma's books. Keeping up with current literature is expensive, you -know, and mamma has a horror of circulating libraries. The thought of -poor mamma's empty life soon decided me. I remember she had asked one -day for John Addington Symonds's last book, and Katherine and I looked -at one another, knowing that it could not be bought. I realized then, -that at all events I could make enough to keep mamma in books and -Katherine in gloves. You can't think how nasty, how egotistic my vulgar -hesitation seemed to me. My life so full, so happy, and theirs on the -verge of ruin. There is something very selfish about art, you know; it -shuts one off so much from real life, makes one so indifferent to -scrapings and pinchings. I realized that, with my shabby clothes and -apparent talent, it was most natural for the French girl to think I -should be glad of her offer; and indeed I was. It was soothing, too, to -have her so eager. She wanted me very much, so I yielded gracefully." -Hilda gave a little smile of self-mockery. "I have taught her ever -since. She lives in that house in the Rue d'Assas; rich, bourgeois -people, common, but kind. She has no talent"--Hilda's matter-of-fact -manner of knowledge was really impressive--"but I don't feel unfair in -going on with her, for she really does see things now, and that is the -greatest pleasure next to seeing and accomplishing; and, indeed, how -rarely one accomplishes. Through her I have a great many pupils, for -other girls at the studio heard of her progress with me, and wanted -private lessons too. All my afternoons are taken up, and, with fifteen -francs an hour, you can see what a lot I make. It rather annoys me to -think of people far cleverer than I am who can make nothing, and I, just -because I have had luck, making so much. But among my pupils, I really -have quite a _vogue_; and I _am_ a good teacher, I really think I am." - -"I am sure your pupils are very lucky. You have a great many, you say?" - -"Yes, quite a lot. Sometimes I give three lessons in an afternoon. With -Mademoiselle Lebon, my first pupil, I spend all the afternoon twice a -week. She has a gorgeous studio." Hilda smiled again. "It is very nice -working there. To-morrow I go for two hours to an old lady; she lives in -the Boulevard St. Germain; she is a dear, and a great deal of talent -too; she does flowers exquisitely; not the dreadful feminine vulgarities -one usually associates with women's flower-painting; why all the -incompetents should fall back on those loveliest and most difficult -things, I never could understand. But my pupil really sees and selects. -Only think how funny! Katherine met her son at a dance one night--the -Comte de Chalons--insignificant but nice, she said; how little he could -have connected Katherine with his mother's teacher! Indeed, he never saw -me," and Hilda's smile became decidedly clever. "I suppose the -comtesse--she really is a dear, too--thinks that for a penniless young -teacher I am too pretty. Well, I make on an average thirty francs an -afternoon. I give Mademoiselle Lebon and Madame de Chalons double time -for their money, as old pupils. It would be easier to have a class in -my studio, of course, but I would lose many of my most interesting -pupils, who don't care about going out; then, too, it would be almost -impossible to keep my misdoings undiscovered. And there is all the -mystery!" She leaned forward in the dusk of the cab to smile at him -playfully. "I am glad to get it off my mind; glad, too, that you should -know why I am so often cross and dull; by the time I reach home I am -tired. I always bring Palamon, unless it is as rainy as to-day, and of -course he puts omnibuses out of the question; omnibuses mount up, too, -when one takes them every day. Excuse these sordid details." - -"I should think that a young lady who earns thirty francs an afternoon -might afford a cab." Odd found it rather difficult to speak. She was -mercifully unaware of the aspect in which her drudging, crushed young -life appeared to him. - -"And then, what would Palamon and I do for exercise!" said Hilda -lightly; "it is the walking that keeps me well, I am sure." - -His silence seemed to depress her gayety, for after a moment she added: -"And really you don't know how poor we are. I have no right to cabs, -really. As it is, it often seems wrong to me spending the money as I do -when we owe so much, so terribly much. Thirty francs is a lot, but we -need every penny of it, for mere everyday life. I have paid off some of -the smaller debts by instalments, but the weekly bills seem to swallow -up everything." - -His realization of this silent struggle--the whole weight of her -selfish family on her frail shoulders--made Odd afraid of his own -indignation. The remembrance of Mrs. Archinard's whines, the Captain's -taunts, yes, and worst of all, Katherine's gowns and gayety, almost -overcame him. He took her hand in his and held it as they rolled along -through the wetly shining streets. His continued silence rather alarmed -Hilda. The relief of full confidence was so great that she could not -bear it impaired by any misinterpretation. - -"You do understand," she said; "you do think I am right? My success -seems unmerited to you, perhaps? But I try to give my best. I seem very -selfish and unkind to mamma, I know, but I really am kind--don't you -think so?--in keeping the truth from her and letting her misjudge me. I -know you have thought of me that I was one of those selfish idiots who -neglect their real duties for their art; but I can do more for mamma -outside our home. And I read to her in the evening. Oh, how conceited, -egotistic, all that sounds! But I do want you to believe that I try to -do what seems best and wisest." - -"Hilda! Hilda!" he put her hand to his lips and kissed the worn glove. - -"You simply astound me," he said, after a moment; "your little life -facing this great Paris." - -"Oh, I am very careful, very wise," Hilda said quickly. - -"Careful? You mean that if you were not you might encounter -unpleasantnesses?" - -She looked at him with a look of knowledge that went strangely with her -delicate face. - -"Of course one must be careful. I am young--and pretty. I have learned -that." - -"My child, what other things have you learned?" And Odd's hold tightened -on her hand. - -"That terrifying things might happen if one were not brave. Don't -exaggerate, please. I really have found so few lions in my path, and a -girl of dignity cannot be really annoyed beyond a certain point. Lions -are very much magnified in popular and conventional estimation. A girl -can, practically, do anything she likes here in Paris if she is quiet -and self-reliant." - -Odd stared at her. - -"Of course I have always been a coward, after a fashion; I was -frightened at first," said Hilda. He understood now the look of moral -courage that had haunted him; natural timidity steeled to endurance. -"The greatest trouble with me is that I am too noticeable, too pretty." -She spoke of her beauty in a tone of matter-of-fact experience; "it is a -pity for a working woman." - -"My child," Odd repeated. He felt dazed. - -"Please don't exaggerate," Hilda reiterated. - -"Exaggerate? Tell me about these lions. How have you vanquished them?" - -"I have merely walked past them." - -His evident dismay gave her a merry little moment of superior wisdom. - -"They frightened me and that was all. One was the husband of a person I -taught. He used to lie in wait for me in the dining-room." Hilda gave -Odd a rather meditative glance. "You won't be angry? Angry with _me_ -for keeping on in my path of independence?" - -"No; I won't be angry with you." Odd felt that his very lips were white. - -"Well, he gave me a letter one day." Hilda paused. "What a despicable -man!" she said reflectively; "I taught his wife! I tore the letter in -two, gave it back to him, and walked out. Naturally, I never went back -again." Her voice suddenly broke. "Oh! it was horrible! I felt--" - -"What did you feel?" - -"I felt as though I were for evermore set apart from _my_ kind of girl, -from girls like Katherine. I felt smirched, as though some one had -thrown mud at me. That was morbid. I got over it." - -"Heavens!" Odd ejaculated. "Katherine knows this too?" he asked -bitingly. - -"Oh no, no! Mr. Odd, you are the only person. Never speak of it, will -you? Never, never! Poor Kathy! It would drive her mad!" - -"And she knows of your work?" - -"Yes; I had to tell her of that. She felt dreadfully about it. She -wanted me to go out with her, and have pretty dresses, and meet the -clever people she meets. You should have seen how happy she was in -London last spring! To have me with her! Wrenched away from my paint! Of -course I could not give up my work, even if there had been money enough. -I made her see that, and I can't say I made her agree, but I made her -yield. She takes a false view of it still, and worries over it. She -wants me to give up the teaching and paint pictures only; but that would -be too risky, they don't sell so surely. I have several on my hands. -But Katherine knows nothing of lions and unpleasantness. I must keep -such things secret, or I should not be allowed to go on." - -"You think I am safe. I must allow you, I suppose?" - -"Yes, you must." She smiled a very decided little smile, adding gravely, -"I have confided in you." - -"Trust me." There was silence in the cab for some moments. The tall -trees of the Cours la Reine dripped in a misty mass on one side; on the -other was the Seine with its lights. - -"And the young man I saw at the door as you came out to-day?" said Odd. - -"Oh, that is nothing, I hope. He is Mademoiselle Lebon's brother. A -harmlessly disagreeable creature, I fancy." Odd resumed his brooding -silence. "What are you thinking of so solemnly?" she asked. - -"Of you." - -"Why so solemnly? I am afraid you are laboring under all sorts of false -impressions. I have told my story stupidly." - -"The true impression has stupefied me. Good heavens! Theoretically I -believe in the development of character at all costs, and you have -certainly developed a _rara avis_ in the line; but practically, -practically, my dear little girl, I would have you taken care of in -cotton-wool, guarded, protected; you would always be lovely, and you -would have been happy. You have been very unhappy." - -Hilda was looking at him with that rather vague look of impersonal -contemplation characteristic of her. - -"How you exaggerate things," she said, smiling; "I have not been -unhappy." - -"The pity of it! The pathos!" Odd pursued, not heeding her comment. -Hilda looked at him rather sadly. - -"You mean that I should have lost my ignorance? Yes, that made me feel -badly," she assented. "That is the worst of it. One becomes so -suspicious. But, Mr. Odd, that is merely a sentimental regret. I have -not lost my self-respect. I am not ignorant of things I should like to -ignore; but one may know a great many things, and be unharmed." - -"My dear child, you are probably innocent of things familiar to many -modern girls. No knowledge could harm you. You have a right to more than -self-respect. You are a little heroine. Your unrewarded, unrecognized -fight fills me with amazement and reverence. I did not know that such -self-forgetful devotion existed." - -"Oh, please don't talk like that! It is quite ridiculous! We must have -money, and I can make it easily. I would be quite a monster if I sat -idly at home, and saw mamma in squalid misery. I merely do my duty." -Hilda spoke quite sharply and decisively. - -"Merely!" Odd ejaculated. - -A thought of the near future, of Allan Hope, kept him silent, otherwise -he might have indulged in reckless invective. He still held her hand, -and again he raised it to his lips. - -"That is a very stubborn and unconvinced salute, I am afraid," Hilda -said good-humoredly. - -"May I come and get you now and then?" he asked. - -"You think it would be wise?" - -"How do you mean wise, Hilda?" - -"I might be found out. I have given you my secret. You must help me to -keep it." - -"I may speak of it to Katharine--since she knows?" - -"Oh, of course, to Katherine. But don't _egg_ her on to worry me!" -laughed Hilda; "and speak to her with _reservations_--there are things -she must not know." - -Peter wondered if the child-friendship, the brotherly relations, -entitled him to seal the compact with a kiss upon her lips. He looked at -her with a sudden quickening of breath. Her dimly seen face was very -beautiful. This realization of her beauty's attraction at that moment -struck him with a sense of abasement before her. Surely no such poor tie -held him to this lovely soul. And, at the turn of his own thoughts, Odd -felt a vague stir of fear. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Odd was to take a walk in the Bois with Katherine the next morning, and -he found her waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delightfully -smart and wintry little figure. Katherine never failed in elegance, in -well-groomed finish--her low-heeled little boots, her irreproachable -snowy gloves, bore the same unmistakable stamp of the _cachet_ that -costs, that is not to be procured ready made. Odd, as a rich man, had -given very little thought to the power of money, and little thought to -Katherine's garments except as charmingly characteristic symbols of good -taste; but to-day his eye noted the black fur that fell about her -shoulders and trailed lustrous ends to her very feet, more for its -richness than its becomingness. - -Her bright though slightly grave smile failed to restore him to his -usual attitude of _bon camaraderie_. He smiled and kissed her, but he -was conscious of underlying soreness, conscious, too, that he might lose -his temper with Katherine; he had never lost it with Alicia. Katherine's -very superiority made it imperative to have things out with her. Kindly -resignation was an impossibility. He realized that not to admire -Katherine would make life with her intolerable. She would immediately -perceive reservations and she would revolt against them. He wondered -whether he should be the one to broach the subject of Hilda's -ill-treatment, and was amazed at a certain embarrassed shrinking, as -from a feeling too deep for words, that kept him silent as they walked -along, taking a short cut to the Place de l'Etoile, where the Arc stood -in almost cardboard clearness on the pale cold sky. It was Katherine who -spoke-- - -"Hilda told me of your kindness yesterday. It touched her very much." - -In some subtle way it irritated Odd to hear Katherine vouch for Hilda's -feeling. - -"And Hilda told you that I had been admitted into the mystery of the -Archinard family?" His voice was even enough, but it held a certain -keenness that Katherine was quick to recognize. - -"You don't think their mystery creditable, do you? Nor do I, Peter. But -mamma knows nothing of it, nor papa; and I have tried to dissuade Hilda -from the first." - -"My dear Katherine, the child has worked like a galley-slave for you -all! Your necessities were more potent facts than your dissuasions, I -fancy!" - -Katherine gave a look at the fine severity of the profile beside her. -She felt herself arraigned, and her impulse was towards rebellion. -However, her voice was gentle, submissive even, as she answered him-- - -"I know it must look badly to you--cruel even. But, Peter, don't you -know--you do know--how things _grow_ around one? One can hardly tell -where the definite wrongdoing comes in, or rather the definite -submission to a wrong situation." This was so true, that Katherine felt -immediately the mollified quality of his voice as he answered-- - -"I know. I know submission was forced upon you, no doubt. But I had -rather you had not submitted when once the situation grew definite. And -I wish, Katherine, that you had helped her in making the situation -easier. Granting that you could give her no material aid--granting that -her faculty is good luck--still the actual burden might have been -lightened." - -Odd paused; he could not say his thoughts outright--tell her that the -comparative luxury of her life and her mother's was outrageous, shocking -to him now that he understood its source. - -"It is part of Hilda's good luck that her pleasures are not costly, or -rather that she can herself defray their cost," said Katherine quietly. -"She has always lived in her art--seemed to care for nothing else. My -life would indeed have been dreadful had I not accepted the interests -that came into it. I have always felt, too, that in following the -natural bent of my own character, I was laying foundations that might -some day repay Hilda for everything. If she has friends--a public--it is -owing to me. It was I who persuaded her to come to London last spring. -I, therefore, who assured her future, in a sense, for there Allan Hope -fell in love with her. I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my -own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it nevertheless. I make -a circle for mamma; I brighten her life and my own and Hilda's, as far -as she will let me. Certain _tools_ are necessary--Hilda needs brushes -and canvases and studios; I, a few gowns, a few cabs, and a supply of -neat boots and gloves. Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I -own; but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I entreated her to give -up the idea--I said we would all starve together rather. She insisted, -and how can I interfere?" - -"I can understand, Katherine, that everything you say is most convincing -to yourself; I see the perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, -my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda denies herself -the commonest comforts of life, not only to give you the luxuries, but -because her high sense of honor rebels against spending on herself money -that is owed to others. Don't misunderstand me; I don't ask any such -perhaps overstrained sense of responsibility from you. You have, no -doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; but could it not -have been lived with a little less elegance? I am sure that you would be -welcomed everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and fewer gloves." - -Katherine flushed lightly; her flushes were never deep, and always -becoming. It certainly cut her now to hear his almost unconscious -implication--that from her he expected a less perfect sense of honor -than from her sister. She swallowed a certain wrathful mortification -that welled up, and answered with some apparent cheerfulness-- - -"You don't know your world, Peter, if you fancy that even Katherine -Archinard would be welcome in darned and dirty gloves!" - -Odd walked on silently. - -"And might she not be forced into taking some girlish distraction?" he -said presently. "It came out yesterday, with that astounding air of -_excusing_ herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the evening! -Could not you do that, Katherine, and let Hilda profit now and then by -the _entourage_ you have created for her?" - -Katherine's flush deepened. - -"Mamma doesn't care for my reading, and Hilda won't go out; she goes to -bed too early." - -"And then," Odd continued, ignoring her comment in a way most irritating -to Katherine's smarting susceptibility, "you might have gone with her -now and again to these houses where she teaches. You would have stood -for protection. You would have seen for yourself if, in this drudgery, -there lurked any unpleasantness, any danger. A girl of her extreme -beauty is--exposed to insult." - -Katherine gave him a stare of frank astonishment. - -"Oh, you must not give way to unpleasant romancing of that sort! Things -like that only happen in novels of the silliest sort--even to beauties! -And Hilda would have told _me_. She tells me _everything_. Really, -Peter, she must have given you a wrong impression; she enjoys her life!" - -"So she tried to convince me," said Odd, with a good deal of sharpness; -"there was no hint of complaint, regret, reproach, in Hilda's recountal; -don't imagine it, Katherine." - -Katherine was telling herself that never in all her life had she -experienced so many rebuffs. She contemplated her own good temper with -some amazement; she also wondered how long it would last. By this time -they were half-way down the Avenue du Bois; the day was fine and clear, -and the wintry trees were sharply definite against the sky. - -"I have never even seen her in a well-made gown," said Odd. - -"Hilda scorns the fashion-plate garment, as I do. We are both original -in that respect." - -"Your originality takes different forms." - -"Because it must adapt itself to different conditions, Peter. I won't be -scolded about my dresses. Men like you imagine that, because a woman -looks well, she must spend a lot. It isn't so with me. My dresses last -forever, and, to go into details, Hilda by no means clothes me. Papa has -money--now and then. Even Hilda could not support the family, and her -money mainly goes for mamma's books and oysters and hot-house grapes. If -she will not spend it on herself, and if, now and then, I accept some of -it, I cannot consent to feel unduly humiliated." - -There was a decisiveness in Katherine's tone that warned Peter to -self-control. Indeed the situation had been created for her. She had -owned up frankly to her distaste for it, her realization of its wrong. - -"I am not going to ask undue humiliation of you, my dear Katherine. -Don't think me such a priggish brute; but I am going to ask you to help -me to put an end to this." Katherine's smiles had returned. - -"Allan Hope will." - -Peter walked on, looking gloomy. - -"You won't realize that Hilda's life is the one that gives her the -greatest enjoyment. I have always envied Hilda till _you_ came; and even -now"--Katherine's smile was playful--"Allan Hope is very nice! Take -patience, Peter, till Wednesday." - -"Yes; we must wait." - -"I have waited for so long! Hilda could not have minded what you call -the 'drudgery.' She had only to lift her finger to end it." - -"Hilda would not be the girl to lift her finger." - -"You appreciate my Hilda, Peter; I am glad." Katherine gave his -abstracted countenance another of her bright contemplative glances. -There was nothing sly in Katherine's glances, and yet underlying this -one was a world of kindly, though very keen analysis; disappointment, -rebellion, and level-headed tolerance. This was decidedly not the man to -be fitted to her frame. He could not be moulded to a clever woman's -liking, for all his indefiniteness. On certain points of the conduct of -life, Katherine felt that she would meet an opposition sharply definite. -Katherine understood and was perfectly tolerant of criticism, but she -did not like it; nor did she like being put in the wrong. That Peter now -considered her very much in the wrong was evident. She was also aware -that the sophistry of her explanation had deceived herself even less -than it had deceived him. That Hilda spent her life in drudgery, and -that she spent hers in pleasure-seeking, were facts most palpable to -Katherine's very impartial vision. She knew she was wrong, and she knew -that only frank avowal would meet Peter's severity and touch his -tenderness and humor. If she heaped shame on her own head, he would be -the first to cry out against the injustice. - -Yet Katherine hesitated to own herself wrong. She was not sure that she -cared to place her lover in the sheltering and leading attitude of the -Love in the "Love and Life." The meek, trembling look of Life had -always irritated her in the picture. Katherine felt herself quite strong -enough to stand alone, and felt that she would like to lead in all -things. It was with a deep inner sense of humiliation that she said-- - -"Please don't be cross with me, Peter. Please don't scold me. I have -been naughty--far naughtier than I dreamed of--you have made me realize -it, though you are not quite just. But you must comfort me for my own -misdoings." - -As Katherine went on she felt an artistic impulsiveness, almost real, -and which sounded so real that Peter met the sweet pleading of her eyes -with a start of self-disgust. - -Peter was very tender-hearted, very sympathetic, very prone to -self-doubt. Katherine's look made him feel a very prig of pompous -righteousness. - -"Why, Katherine!" he said, pausing in his walk. "My dear Katherine! as -if I could not appreciate the slow growth of necessity! I only hope you -may never have to comfort me for far worse sins!" - -This was satisfactory. But Katherine's pride still squirmed. - -Odd went to meet Hilda on Thursday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The -distances were always great, and he insisted on cabs for the return -trip. Palamon must be tired, even if Hilda were not. He was too old for -such journeyings; and Hilda had smilingly to submit. Wednesday would end -it all definitely; Peter thought that he saw the end with unmixed -satisfaction, and yet when Allan Hope walked into his rooms early on -Wednesday morning, this Perseus of Hilda's womanhood gave the Perseus -of her childhood a really unpleasant turn of the blood. There was -something irritating in Allan Hope's absolute fitness for the _rôle_, -emphasizing, as it did, Peter's own unfitness, his forty years, and his -desultory life. - -Active energy, the go-ahead perseverance that knows no doubts, the -honest and loyal convictions which were all arranged for him from his -cradle, and which he would bequeath to his children unaltered, all -things that make for order and well-being, looked at one from Lord -Allan's clear, light eyes. Odd suddenly felt himself to be an uncertain -cumberer of the earth; failure personified beside the other's air of -inevitable success. He was fond of Hope and Hope fond of him, and they -talked as old friends talk, with the intimacy that time brings; an -intimacy far removed from the strong knittings of sympathy that an hour -may accomplish; for, though Odd understood Allan very well, Allan did -not muddle his direct views of things by a comprehension that implied -condonation. He thought it rather a pity that Odd had not made more of -his life. Odd's books weren't much good that he could see; better do -something than write about the things other men have done. Odd felt that -Allan was probably quite right. They hardly spoke of Hilda, but in -Hope's congratulations on Peter's engagement there was a ring of -heartfelt brotherly warmth that implied much, and left Peter in a gloomy -rage with himself for feeling miserable. Peter had not analyzed the -darks and glooms of the last few days. - -Growth does not admit of much self-contemplation. One wakes suddenly to -the accomplished change. If Peter was conscious of developments, he -defined them as morbid enlargements of that self-doubt which would -naturally thrill under the stress of new responsibilities. - -Only from the force of newly formed habit did he go to the Rue -Poulletier that afternoon, hardly expecting to meet Hilda. But Hilda -had, as yet, not interrupted her usual avocations. She emerged from the -gloomy portals of one of the old dismantled-looking _hôtels_ that line -the Rue Poulletier with a certain dignity, and she looked toward the -corner where he stood with a confident glance. It was the second time he -had met her there, twice in the Rue d'Assas too. - -"It is so kind of you," she said, as she joined him and they turned into -the _quai_; "only you mustn't think that you _must_, you know." - -"_May_ I think that I _must_? Give me the assurance of necessity. I am -always a little afraid of seeming officious." - -Hilda smiled round at him. - -"Who is fishing? You know I love to have you come. You can't think how I -look forward to it." She was walking beside him along the _quai_. The -unobtrusive squareness of the "Doric little Morgue" was on their left, -as they faced the keen wind and the dying sunset. Notre Dame stood gray -upon a chilly evening sky of palest yellow. "I know now that I _was_ -lonely." - -"That implies the kindest compliment." - -"More than _implies_, I hope." - -"You really like to have me come?" - -"You know I do. I am only afraid that you will rob yourself--of other -things for me." - -The candor of her eyes was childlike. - -"My little friend." Odd felt that he could not quite trust himself, and -took refuge in the convenient assertion. - -The cold, clear wind blew against their faces; it ruffled the water, and -the gray waves showed sharp steely lights. The leafless trees made an -arabesque of tracery on the river and the sky. Hilda looked up at the -kind, melancholy face beside her, a faint touch of cynicism in her sad -smile; but the cynicism was all for herself, and it was not excessive. -She accepted this renaissance gratefully, though the disillusions of the -past were unforgettable. - -"Tell me, Hilda, that you will be my friend whatever happens--to you or -to me." - -"I have always been your friend, have I not?" - -"Have you, Hilda, always?" - -"I am dully faithful." Hilda's smile was a little baffling; it gave no -warrant for the sudden quickening of the breath that he had experienced -more than once of late. - -"I feel as if I had _found_ you, Hilda." - -"Did you _look_ for me, then?" - -The smile was now decidedly baffling and yet very sweet. - -"You know," she added, "I liked you from that first moment when you -fished me out of the river. It seems that you are fated to act always -the chivalrous part toward me." - -"I would ask no better fate. Hilda, you have seen Allan Hope? Not yet?" - -"No; not yet." Hilda's face grew serious. "He is coming to tea this -afternoon." - -"But you must be there." - -"Yes, I suppose I must." This affectation of girlish indifference seemed -to Odd more significant than noticeable shyness. - -"We must take a cab," he said, trying to keep his voice level. - -"Oh, it makes no difference. Cabs, you see, are never reckoned with in -my arrivals. I am warranted to be late." - -"But you must not be late." - -"But if I want to?" There was certainly a touch of roguery in her eyes. - -"If you want to and if I want you to, it shows that you are cruel and I -conscienceless. Here is a cab. Away with you, Hilda. _Au revoir_." - -"Aren't you coming too?" asked Hilda, pausing in the act of lifting -Palamon. - -"Not to-day; I can't." Odd knew that he was cowardly. "I shall see you -to-morrow? I suppose not." - -"Why, yes, if you come to the Boulevard St. Germain." Hilda had -deposited Palamon on the floor of the cab and still stood by the open -door looking rather dismayed. - -"Really!" - -"I shall go there." - -"I too, then. Remember our vow of friendship, Hilda. I wish you -everything that is good and happy." - -There was seemingly a slightly hurt look on Hilda's face as she drove -away. In spite of the vow, Peter feared that this was the last of Hilda, -of even this rather shadowy second edition of friendship. - -He had done his duty; to hurt oneself badly seems a surety of having -done one's duty thoroughly. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Hilda drove home, with Palamon leaning his warm body against her feet as -he sat on the floor of the cab. She put out her hand now and then and -laid it on his head, but absently. She leaned back presently and closed -her eyes, only rousing herself with a little start when the cab drew up -with a jerk in the Rue Pierre Charron. Palamon stood dully on the -pavement while she spoke to the cabman--but the _monsieur_ had paid him, -as Hilda had forgotten for the moment. Palamon was evidently tired too, -and with a little turn of dread she wondered if the time would come when -she must leave Palamon to a lonely day in the apartment. Mrs. Archinard -did not like dogs near her. Katherine was always out, and although -Rosalie the cook was devoted to the _tou-tou_, Hilda would miss him -terribly and he would miss her. - -She said to herself that if it came to that she would allow herself a -daily cab-fare rather than leave Palamon, and she toiled up the steep -stairs carrying him. Taylor opened the door to her. - -"Give me the dog, Miss Hilda; you do look that tired. You are to go at -once into the drawing-room, Miss. Lord Allan Hope has been waiting for -some time." - -Hilda was surprised to find that she had been thinking of Palamon -rather than of the ordeal before her. She felt calm now, perfectly, as -she walked into the drawing-room, a little taken aback, however, to find -Lord Allan there waiting for her and alone. - -Katherine was in the next room, her own pretty room, a rather perplexed -smile of expectancy on her face. Taylor brought in Palamon, and -Katherine gave him a drink and patted him kindly. Palamon would go with -Hilda to her new home--dear old Palamon! The thought of Hilda's new home -and homes--of the castle in Somersetshire and the shooting-lodge in -Scotland, and the big house in Grosvenor Square, deepened the look of -perplexity on Katherine's brow. - -While Palamon lapped the water, she watched him with an expression of -absent-minded concentration. She could hear nothing in the drawing-room, -except now and then the slightly raised quiet of Allan Hope's fine -voice. Presently there was a long silence, and Katherine paused near the -door. - -The quizzical lift of her eyebrows spoke her amused inquiry. She could -hardly imagine Hilda allowing herself to be kissed, and as the silence -continued, Katherine felt a touch of impatience color her sisterly -sympathy. Lord Allan's voice, pitched on a deep note of pain, startled -her. There followed quite a burst of ardent eloquence. With a little -_moue_ of self-disapproval Katherine bent her ear to the door. She heard -Lord Allan quite distinctly. He was pleading in more desperate accents -than she could have imagined possible from him, and Katherine caught, -too, the half frightened reiteration of Hilda's voice: "I can't, I -can't; really I can't. I am so--_so_ sorry, so sorry--" The -childishness of this helpless repetition brought a quick frown to -Katherine's brow. - -"Little idiot! Baby!" - -She straightened herself and stood staring at the gray houses across the -way. Then, at renewed silence in the drawing-room, she walked to the -mirror and looked at her amethyst-robed reflection. - -Her eyes lingered on the contour of her waist, the supple elegance of -the line that fell gleaming from her hip. She met the half-shamed, -half-daring glance of her deeply set eyes. The silence continued, and -Katherine walked out through the entrance and into the drawing-room. - -Hilda was sitting upright on a tall chair, looking at the floor with an -expression of painful endurance, and Lord Allan stood looking at her. - -He turned his eyes almost unseeingly on Katherine and remained silent, -while Hilda rose and put out her hand to him. Hilda had no variety of -metaphor; "I am so sorry," she repeated. - -She left her hand in his for one moment and then passed swiftly out of -the room. Katherine was left facing the unfortunate lover. Katherine -showed great tact. - -"Lord Allan, don't mind me. Sit down for a moment. Perhaps then you may -be able to tell me. Perhaps I can help you." - -"No good, Miss Archinard; it's all up with me." - -Her gentle voice evidently turned aside the current of his frank -despair. Instead of rushing out, he dropped on the sofa and looked at -the carpet over his locked hands. - -"I am not going to talk to you for a little while." - -The lamps were lighted and the tea-things all in readiness on the little -table. Katherine lit the kettle and turned a log on the fire. Lord -Allan's silence implied a dull acquiescence. He did not move until -Katherine came and sat down on the chair beside him. - -"_I_ am so sorry, too," she said, with a sad little smile. "Lord Allan, -I thought she cared for you." - -"I hoped so." - -"And have you no more hope?" - -"None--absolutely none. I tell you it's rough on a fellow, Miss -Archinard. I--I _adore_ that child." - -"Poor Lord Allan," Katherine gently breathed. She stretched out her slim -hand and laid it almost tenderly on his. Katherine was rather surprised -at herself, and to herself her motives were rather confused. "I should -have liked you as a brother, Lord Allan." - -"You are awfully kind." He lifted his dreary eyes and surveyed her -absently, but with some gratitude. "I suppose I had best be going," he -added suddenly, as if struck by the anti-climax of his position. - -"No, no; not unless you feel you must." Katherine put out her hand again -and detained his rising. "I can't bear to think of you going out alone -like that into the cold. Just wait. You are bruised. Get back your -breath. I am not going to be tiresome." - -Lord Allan leaned back in the sofa with a long sigh, relapsing into the -same half stunned silence, while Katherine moved about the tea-table, -measuring out the tea from the caddy to the teapot, pouring on the -boiling water, and pausing to wait for the tea to steep. Presently Lord -Allan was startled by a proffered steaming cup. - -"Will you?" she said. "I made it for you. It is such a chilly evening." - -"Oh, how awfully kind of you," he started from his crushed recumbency of -attitude, "but you know I really _can't!_" But at the grieved gentleness -of Katherine's eyes he took the cup. "It is too awfully kind of you. I -do feel abominably chilly." He gulped down the tea, and gave a half -shame-faced smile as she took the cup for replenishment. - -"No, don't get up," she urged, as he made an effort to collect his -courtesy; "let me wait on you," and she returned with a discreetly -tempting plate of the thinnest bread and butter. She sat down beside him -again, looking into the fire with kind, sad eyes as she stirred her tea. -She asked him presently, in the same quietly gentle voice, some little -question about the most recent debate in the House. Lord Allan had -rather distinguished himself in that debate; it was on the crest of that -wave of triumph that he had come to Hilda. From monosyllabic replies he -was led on to a rather doleful recitation of his own prowess; it seemed -that Katherine had followed it all in the newspapers, so tactfully -intelligent were her comments. He found himself sipping his third cup of -tea, enjoying in a dreary way the expounding of his favorite political -theories to the quiet, purple-robed figure beside him. He remembered -that Miss Archinard had always been interested in his career; she, of -course, was the intellectual one, though Hilda's beauty sent a sharp -stab of pain through him as he made the comparison; he appreciated now -Miss Archinard's kindness and sympathy with a brotherly warmth of -gratitude. When he at last rose to go, he was dejected; but no longer -the crushed individual of an hour before. - -"You have been too good to a beaten man," he said, taking her hand. - -"Oh, Lord Allan, by the laws of compensation you must lose _sometimes_. -Hilda, poor child, doesn't know what she has done; she cannot know. Her -little achievements bound the world for her. She doesn't see outside her -studio walls. _Your_ great world of action, true beneficent action, -would stun her. Do you leave Paris directly, Lord Allan? Yes! Then won't -you write to me now and then? I am interested in you. I won't relinquish -the claim of 'it might have been.' May I keep in touch with you--as a -sister would?" - -"You are too good, Miss Archinard." - -"To an old friend? A man I have followed and admired as I have you? Lord -Allan, I respect you from the bottom of my heart for the way in which -you have borne this knock-down from fate. You are strong, it won't hurt -you in the end. Let me know how you get on." - -Katherine's eyes were compelling in their candid kindness. Lord Allan -said that he would, with emphasis. As he went down the long staircase, -the purple-robed figure filled his thoughts with a reviving -beneficence. He felt that the blow was perhaps not so bad as he had -imagined--might even be for the best; better for him, for his career. -Katherine's words enveloped him in an atmosphere that was soothing. - -Left alone, Katherine finished her second cup of tea, and made, as she -looked thoughtfully into the fire, a second little _moue_ of -self-disapprobation. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next -morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of -illusions of late; for the regularity of his daily routine--the morning -spent with Katherine, and the afternoon with Hilda--excluded the hours -of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the discovered immunity. - -Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim sole tilted towards the -blaze, and she looked round at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd's -face wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, seemed -thinner, older than usual. He looked even haggard, Katherine thought. -She liked his thin face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as -Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pretences of any kind for -mockery to fasten on. The clever feminine eye is quick to remark the -subtlest signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine's eye was very -clever, and this morning, in looking at Odd, she was conscious of a -little inner sigh. Katherine had asked herself more than once of late -whether a husband, not only too superior for success, but morally her -superior, might not make life a little wearing. Some such thought -crossed her mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized that through -Allan Hope's discomfiture she herself was as wrongly placed as ever, and -Hilda's drudgery as binding. - -Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that general sense of _malaise_. - -One was that Allan Hope's smooth, handsome face was rather fatuous; the -face that knows no doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a -Katherine. - -Another thought held a keen conjecture on Peter's haggard looks. - -She put out her hand to him, and, stooping over her, he kissed her with -more tenderness than he always showed. Their engagement had left almost -untouched the easy unsentimental attitude of earlier days. - -"Well," he said, and Katherine understood and resented somewhat the -quick attack of the absorbing subject. She shook her head. - -"Bad news, Peter. Bad and very unexpected." - -Odd stood upright and looked at her. - -"Bad!" he repeated. - -"She refused him," Katherine said tersely, and her glance turned once -more from the fire to Peter's face. He looked at her silently. - -"She is a foolish baby," added Katherine. - -"She refused him--definitely?" - -"Quite. She had to face the music last night, of course. Mamma and papa -were rather--shabby--let us say, in their disinterested disappointment." -Odd flushed a little at the cool cynicism of Katherine's tone. "She told -me, when I removed her from the battlefield, that she doesn't love him -and never will. So, of course, from every high and mighty point of view -she is right, quite right." - -Katherine's eyes returned contemplatively to the fire. Odd was still -silent. - -"She ought to love him, of course; that is where she is so foolish. I am -afraid she has ruined her life. I love you, Peter, and he is every bit -as good-looking as you are." Katherine glanced at him with a sad and -whimsical smile. Peter, certainly, was looking rather dazed. He stooped -once more and kissed her. - -"Thank you for loving me, Katherine." - -"You are welcome. It _is_ a pity, isn't it?" - -"Yes, it is"--Peter seated himself on the sofa, where Allan had sat the -night before--"an awful pity," he added. "I am astonished. I thought she -cared for him." - -"So did I." - -"She cares for some one else, perhaps." Odd locked his hands behind his -head, and he too stared at the fire. - -"There is no one else she could care for. I know Hilda's outlook too -well." - -"And she refused him," he repeated musingly. - -"Really, Peter, that sounds a little dull--not like you." Katherine -smiled at him. - -"I feel dulled. I am awfully sorry. It would have been so satisfactory. -And what's to be done now?" - -"That is for you to suggest, Peter. My power over Hilda is very limited. -You may have more influence." - -"She might come and live with us." - -"That would be very nice," Katherine assented, "and it is very dear of -you to suggest it." - -Peter was conscious of sudden terrors that prompted him to add with -self-scorn-- - -"What would your mother do?" - -"Without her? I don't know." - -"Of course," Peter hastened to add, "as far as money goes, you know; you -understand, dear, that your mother shall want nothing. But to rob her of -the companionship of both daughters?" Peter rose and walked to the -window. It needed some heroism, he thought, to put aside the idea of -Hilda living with them; he tried to pride himself on the renunciation, -while under the poor crust of self-approbation lurked jibing depths of -consciousness. Heroism would not lie in renunciation, but in living with -her. The cowardice of his own retreat left him horribly shaken. - -Katherine watched him from her chair, calmly. - -"But Hilda's work must cease at once," he said presently, finding a -certain relief in decisive measures. "She won't show any false pride, I -hope, about allowing me to put an end to it." - -"It would be like her," said Katherine, sliding a sympathetic gloom of -voice over the hard reality of her conclusions; conclusions half angry, -half sarcastic. Peter was dull after all. Katherine felt alarmed, -humiliated, and amused, but she steeled herself inwardly to a calm -contemplation of facts. She joined him at the window. "What a burden you -have taken on your poor shoulders, Peter." Peter immediately put his arm -around her waist, and, though Katherine felt a deeper humiliation, she -saw that alarm was needless; a proof of Peter's superiority, a proof, -too, of his stupidity; as her own most original and clever superiority -was proved by the fact of her calm under humiliation. Could she accept -that humiliation as the bitter drop in the cup of good things Peter had -to offer her? Katherine asked herself the question; it was answered by -another. Just how far did the humiliation go? Peter's infidelity might -be mere shallow passion, _passagère;_ the fine part might be to feign -blindness and help him out of it. _Attendons_ summed up Katherine's -mental attitude at the moment. - -"Don't talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine," said Peter. "Don't try to -spoil my humble little pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, -what more can I ask?" He looked at her with kind, tired eyes. - -"I won't thwart you, but Hilda will." - -"Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. That must be soon, -Katherine." - -Katherine looked pensively out of the window. - -"We will see," she replied, with a pretty evasiveness. - -It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the Boulevard St. Germain that -afternoon. He walked at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to -cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did not think much, and -was convinced that his mind was a comparatively happy blank as he paused -before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her avocations. If he -made any definite reflections while he walked up and down between the -doorway and the next corner, they were on his last few conversations -with Hilda; and then on rather abstract points merely. He had drawn the -child out. He had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired for -enjoyment, not for display. He had found out that Hilda knew Italian -literature, from Dante to Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, -and loved it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandinavia was -deeply appreciated by her, and the essayists of France. Her tastes were -as delicately discriminative as Katherine's, but lacked that metallic -assurance of which lately Peter had become rather uncomfortably aware. -As for the English tongue, from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they -could range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson's sweet radiance. - -Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey and evaded any -trespassing beyond its limits. His reticence was not put to a prolonged -test. Hilda met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were -accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious guilt, though Peter was -not sure that she was not a "foolish baby." - -"Let us walk," she said, "it is such a lovely day." - -"We will walk at least till the sun goes. We will just have time to -catch the sunset on the Seine." - -"Yes; what a _lovely_ day! I wish I were ten, with short skirts, and a -hoop, that I could run and roll." - -"You would like a bicycle ride. Come to-morrow with Katherine and me." - -"I can't. Don't think me a prig, but my model is due and I am finishing -my picture. Thanks so much; and this walk is almost as good." - -"If Palamon is tired I will carry him, Hilda." - -"Oh, he isn't tired. See how he pulls at his cord. The sunlight is -getting into his veins. What delicious air." - -"The sunlight is getting into your veins too, Hilda. You are looking a -little as you should look." - -Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It was an original -characteristic of Hilda's that she did not seem at all anxious to talk -about herself, and Odd continued, looking down at her profile-- - -"That's what you ought to have--sunlight. You are a little white flower -that has grown in a shadow." Hilda did not glance up at him; she smiled -rather distantly. - -"What a sad simile!" - -"Is it a true one, Hilda?" - -"I don't think so. I never thought of myself in that sentimental light. -I suppose to friendly eyes every life has a certain pathos." - -"No; some lives are too evidently and merely flaunting in the sunlight -for even friendly eyes to poetize--to sentimentalize, as you rather -unkindly said." - -"Sunlight is poetic, too." - -"Success and selfishness, and all the commonplaces that make up a happy -life, are not poetic." - -"That is rather morbid, you know--_décadent_." - -"I don't imply a fondness for illness and wrongness. Rather the -contrary. It is a very beautiful rightness that keeps in the shade to -give others the sunshine." - -Hilda's eyes were downcast, and in her look a certain pale reserve that -implied no liking for these personalities--personalities that glanced -from her to others, as Odd realized. - -He paused, and it was only after quite a little silence that Hilda said, -with all her gentle quiet-- - -"You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or that my life has been an -unhappy life. It is very good of you to trouble about it, but I can't -claim the rather self-righteously heroic _rôle_ you give me. I think it -is others who live in the shadow. I think that any work, however feebly -done, is a happy thing. I find so much pleasure in things other people -don't care about." - -"A very nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You couldn't have told me -to mind my own business more kindly." Odd's humorous look met her glance -of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, "Will you try to find -pleasure in a thing most girls _do_ care for? Will you go to the -Meltons' dance on Monday? Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and -I said I would try to persuade you." - -"I _didn't_ mean to snub you." - -"Very well; convince me of it by saying you will come to the dance." - -The girlish pleasure of her face was evident. - -"Do you really want me to?" - -"It would make me very happy." - -"It is against my rules, you know. I can't get up at six and go out in -the evening besides. But I will make an exception for this once, to show -you I wasn't snubbing you! And, besides, I should love to." The gayety -of her look suddenly fell to hesitation. "Only I am afraid I can't. I -remember I haven't any dress." - -"_Any_ dress will do, Hilda." - -"But I haven't any dress. The gray silk is impossible." - -Peter's mind made a most unmasculine excursion into the position. - -"But you were in London last year. You went to court. You must have had -dresses." - -"Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came back. I had no need for -them. Her own wore out, and mine fit her very well--a little too long -and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps the white satin would -do, if it wasn't cut at the bottom; it could be let down again, if it -was only turned up. It is trimmed with _mousseline de soie_, and the -flounce would hide the line." - -Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; he found it horribly -touching. "It might do." - -"It must do. If it doesn't, another of Katherine's can be -metamorphosized." - -"And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don't know many -people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I -should like to _depend_ on you; and if I am left sitting alone in a -corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?" Her -smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look. - -"Hilda, you are quite frivolous." Terms of reckless endearment were on -his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. "How shall I manoeuvre -that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle -occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no." - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - - -Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for -several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he -would see her at the Meltons' on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had -been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a -witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that -might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine -had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety. - -The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton's -apartment--one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the -Avenue du Bois de Boulogne--and after greeting his hostess, he waited -for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully -apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine's -smooth dark head, the Captain's correctly impassive good looks, and -Hilda's loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter -thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility -as acute as a fond mother's, he saw--felt, even--the stir, the ripple of -inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of -a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious -of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a -bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the -very air with sudden perfume. "Her dear little head," "Her lovely little -head," he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally -spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, -which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. -Then, turning to Hilda-- - -"The white satin _does_," he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did -not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her -sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen -people already. - -"See that Hilda, in her _embarras de choix_, doesn't become too much -embarrassed," she said to Peter. "Exercise for her a brotherly -discretion." - -The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton--a pretty little woman with -languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself -there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her -exclusiveness, which she took _au grand serieux_, highly amused -Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton's. -She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself -at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as -tolerant of a millionaire _parvenu_ as might be a duchess with a -political _entourage_ to manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton's anxious -social self-satisfaction humorous--a fact of which Mrs. Melton was -unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly -impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull too, and a few grievances -whispered behind her fan in Katherine's ear _en passant_--for subject, -the unfortunate and eternal _nouveau riche_--made pleasant gravity -difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her -dull and funny. - -Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the -opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes. - -"I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, -led by your father and Mrs. Melton." - -He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced -it--charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, -surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, -with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else's hair -was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was -a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and -floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz -came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his -felicity carry him too far into conjecture. - -"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked, as they joined the eddy circling -around Mrs. Melton's ballroom. - -"So much; thanks to you." Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at -the joy of dancing. "I had almost forgotten how delicious it was." - -"More delicious than the studio, isn't it?" - -"You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche -could do it--all light and movement and color. I should like to come -out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows -everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls' throats. There is -the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly -heads! Isn't that worth while?" - -Odd's eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda's throat. - -"Everything you do is worth while--from painting to dancing. You dance -very well." - -The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display -of which he recognized the gown's quondam possessor, gave him a little -pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of -cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the -happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue--the long fatigue of a -weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge -of the aloofness--the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night -Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago. - -"You dance well, too, Mr. Odd," she said. - -"I very seldom waltz." - -"In _my_ honor then?" - -"Solely in your honor. I haven't waltzed five times in one evening with -one young woman--for ages!" - -"You haven't waltzed five times with me yet. I may wear you out!" - -"What an implied reflection on my forty years! Do I seem so old to you, -Hilda?" - -"No; I don't think of you as old." - -"But I think of you as young, very young, deliciously young." - -"Deliciously?" she repeated. "That is a fallacy, I think. Youth is sad; -doesn't see things in _value_; everything is blacker or whiter than -reality, so that one is disappointed or desperate all the time." - -"And you, Hilda?" - -Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful defiance. - -"Don't be personal." - -"But you were. And, after the other day--your declaration of -contentment." - -"Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. I hate people who talk -about themselves," Hilda added; "it's the worst kind of immodesty. -Material and mental braggarts are far more endurable than the people who -go round telling about their souls." - -"Severe, rigid child!" Odd laughed, and, after a little pause, laughed -again. "You are horribly reserved, Hilda." - -"Very sage when one has nothing to show. Silence covers such a multitude -of sins. If one is consistently silent, people may even imagine that one -isn't dull," said Hilda maliciously. - -"You are dull and silent, then?" - -"I have few opinions; that is, perhaps, dulness." - -"It may be a very wide cleverness." - -"Yes; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz is yours too, you know. -You have quite a cluster here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an -ice." - -Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on a small sofa in a corner -of the ballroom. Katherine passed, dancing; her dark eyes flashed upon -them a glance that might have been one of amusement. Odd was conscious -of a painful effort in his answering smile. - -Hilda's eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her sister with a fond -contemplation. - -"Isn't that dress becoming to her? The shade of deepening, changing -rose." - -"Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely." - -"Do you notice dresses, care about them?" - -"I think I do, sometimes; not in detail as a woman would, but in the -blended effect of dress and wearer." - -"I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you -noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? -I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has -visions of crushed ribs, don't you think?" - -Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile -that he still felt to be painful. "And is not this lace gathered around -the shoulders pretty too?" Hilda turned to him for inspection. - -"You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, -Hilda." Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her -gown. - -"The lace is mamma's. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem -hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has -Meredith's last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing -all the talking. _You_ talk now." - -"About Meredith, your dress, or you?" - -"About yourself, if you please." - -"It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me -than you were in yourself." - -Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers -with a force which almost compelled her-- - -"No; I am very much interested in you." Odd was silent, studying her -face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown--the -expression of painfully controlled emotion. - -"There is nothing comparably interesting in me," he said; "I have had my -story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story." - -"What do you mean?" - -"Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn't." - -"And your books?" - -"They are as negative as I am." - -"Yet they have helped me to live." Hilda looked hard at him while she -spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the -emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white. - -"Helped you to live, Hilda!" he almost stammered; "my gropings!" - -"You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like -Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and -lit my path!" She smiled, adding: "I suppose you think you have failed -because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you -yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success." - -"I didn't even know you read my books." - -"I know your books very well; much better than I know you." - -"Don't say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them." - -"One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. -Perhaps you _do_ even better than you write." - -"Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison." His voice -stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile-- - -"Shall we dance?" - -In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the -dance's circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of -desire; he must hear from Hilda's lips why she had refused Allan Hope. - -An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed his mind once and again -with a dull ache of self-reproach, all the more insistent from his -realization that its cause was not so much the infidelity to Katherine -as that Hilda would think him a sorry villain. - -Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying herself. She knew that his -energy this evening was on Hilda's account; he had claimed the -responsibility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider herself -neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, with perhaps a display of -the dulness she had discovered in him, upon her confidence and common -sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray that confidence; there -was some rather dislocated consolation in that. - -Hilda was a little breathless when he came to claim her for the second -cluster of waltzes. It was near the end of the evening. - -"I have been dancing _steadily_," she announced, "and twice down to -supper! Did you try any of the narrow little sandwiches? So good!" - -"And you still don't grudge me my waltzes?" - -"I like yours _best_!" she said, smiling at him as she laid her hand on -his shoulder. They took a few turns around the room and then Hilda owned -that she was a little tired. They sat down again on the sofa. - -"Hilda!" said Odd suddenly, "will you think me very rude if I ask you -why you refused Allan Hope?" - -Hilda turned a startled glance upon him. - -"No; perhaps not," she answered, though the voice was rather frigid. - -"You don't think I have a right to ask, do you?" - -"Well, the answer is so evident." - -"Is it?" Hilda had looked away at the dancers; she turned her head now -half unwillingly and glanced at him, smiling. - -"I would not have refused him if I had loved him, would I? You know -that. It doesn't seem quite fair, quite kind, to talk of, does it?" - -"Not to me even? I have been interested in it for a long time. Katherine -told me, and Mary." - -"I don't know why they should have been so sure," said Hilda, with some -hardness of tone. "I never encouraged him. I avoided him." She looked at -Odd again. "But I am not angry with you; if any one has a right, you -have." - -"Thanks; thanks, dear. You understand, you know my interest, my -anxiety. It seemed so--happy for both. And you care for no one else?" - -"No one else." Hilda's eyes rested on his with clear sincerity. - -"Don't you ever intend to marry, Hilda?" Odd was leaning forward, his -elbows on his knees, and looking at the floor. There was certainly a -tension in his voice, and he felt that Hilda was scanning him with some -wonder. - -"Does a refusal to take one person imply that? I have made no vows." - -"I don't see--" Odd paused; "I don't see why you shouldn't care for -Hope." - -"Are you going to plead his cause?" she asked lightly. - -"Would it not be for your happiness?" Odd sat upright now, putting on -his eyeglasses and looking at her with a certain air of resolution. - -"I don't love him." Hilda returned the look sweetly and frankly. - -"What do you know of love, you child? Why not have given him a chance, -put him on trial? Nothing wins a woman like wooing." - -"How didactic we are becoming. I am afraid I should really get to loathe -poor Lord Allan if I had given him leave to woo me." - -"I suppose you think him too unindividual, too much of a pattern with -other healthy and hearty young men. Don't you know, foolish child, that -a good man, a man who would love you as he would, make you the husband -he would, is a rarity and very individual?" - -Odd found a perverse pleasure in his own paternally admonishing -attitude. Hilda's lightly amused but touched look implied a confidence -so charming that he found the attitude sublimely courageous. - -"I suppose so," she said, and she added, "I haven't one word to say -against Lord Allan, except--" She paused meditatively. - -"Except what?" Odd asked rather breathlessly. - -"He doesn't really _need_ me." - -"Doesn't _need_ you! Why, the man is desperately in love with you!" - -"He needs a wife, but he doesn't need _me_." - -"You are subtle, Hilda." - -"I don't think I am _that_." - -"You are waiting, then, for some one who can satisfy you as to his -_need_ of you?" - -"I shall only marry that person." - -Hilda jumped up. "But I'm not waiting at all, you know. _Dansons -maintenant!_ Your task is nearly over!" - -It was very late when Odd gave Hilda up to her last partner, and joined -Katherine in a small antechamber, where she was sitting among flowers, -talking to an appreciative Frenchman. This gentleman, with the -ceremonious bow of his race, made away when Miss Archinard's _fiancé_ -appeared, and Odd dropped into the vacated seat with a horrible sinking -of the heart. The dull self-reproach was now acute, he felt meanly -guilty. Katherine looked at him funnily--very good-humoredly. - -"I didn't know you had it in you to dance so well and so persistently, -Peter. You have done honor to Hilda's ball." - -"I hope I wasn't too selfishly monopolizing." - -"Oh, you had a right to a certain monopoly since, owing to you only, she -came," and Katherine added, smiling still more good-humoredly, "I am -_not_ jealous, Peter." - -He turned to look at her. The words, the playful tone in which they were -uttered, struck him like a blow. His guilty consciousness of his own -feeling gave them a supreme nobility. She was _not_ jealous. What a cur -he would be if ever he gave her apparent cause for jealousy. The cause -was there; his task must be to keep it hidden. - -"But suppose _I_ am?" he said; "you haven't given me a single dance." - -Katherine's smile was placid; she did not say that he had not asked for -one. Indeed they had rarely danced together. - -"I think of going to England in a day or two, Peter," she observed. "The -Devreuxs have asked me to spend a month with them." - -Peter sat very still. - -"A sudden decision, Kathy?" - -"No, not so sudden. Our _tête-à-tête_ can't be prolonged forever." - -"Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the wedding day must be fixed -before you go." - -"I yield. The first part of May." - -"Three months! Let it be April at least, Kathy." - -"No, I am for May." - -"It's an unlucky month." - -"Oh, _we_ can defy bad luck, can't we?" Katherine smiled. - -"If you go away, I shall," said Odd, after a moment's silence. - -"Why, I thought you would stay here and look after mamma--and Hilda," -said Katherine slowly, and with a wondering thought for this revealment -of poor Peter's folly. Peter then intended to heroically sacrifice his -infidelity. That he should think she did not see it! - -"I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip through Provence would set -me right. I should come back through Touraine just at the season of -lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in Paris. I see so little -of your mother--and Hilda. Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after -her lessons." - -"I am afraid that mamma can't spare Taylor." - -Peter moved impatiently. - -"Katherine, may I give you some money? She would take it from you. -Persuade her to give up that work. You could do it delicately." - -"As I have told you, you exaggerate my influence. She would suspect the -donor. She would not take the money." - -"I could speak to your father; lend him a sum." - -Katherine flushed. - -"It would make him very angry with her if he knew. And the lessons are a -fixed sum; only a steady income would be the equivalent." - -"Oh dear!" sighed Peter. He suddenly realized that of late he had talked -of little else but Hilda in his conversations with Katherine. - -"When do you go to London, dear?" he asked. - -"The day after to-morrow." Katherine, above the waving of her fan, -smiled slightly at his change of tone. "Will you miss me, Peter?" - -"All the more for being cross with you. It is very wrong of you to play -truant like this." - -"It will be good for both of us." Katherine's voice was playful, and -showed no trace of the bitterness she was feeling. "I might get tired of -you, Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence is the best fuel -to appreciation. I shall come back realizing more fully than ever your -perfection." - -"What a sage little person it is! Sarcastic as well! May I write to you -very often?" - -"As often as you feel like it; but don't force feeling." - -"May I describe châteaux and churches? And will you read my descriptions -if I do?" - -"With pleasure--and profit. Let me know, too, how the book gets on. Can -I do anything for you at the British Museum?" - -It struck Katherine that the change in their relation which she now -contemplated as very probably definite might well allow of a return to -the first phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan Hope which -she had received that morning, though satisfactory in many respects, was -not quite so from an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friendship -with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for any woman, and Katherine -perhaps, with an excusable malice, rather anticipated the time when -Peter might have regrets, and find in that friendship the solace of -certain disappointments from which Katherine had almost decided not to -withhold him. - -"I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, even in London, shall -I?" said Odd, in reply to an offer more generous than he could have -divined. "Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. Don't -be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the Elgin Marbles if you like. I -shall set you no heavier task." - -"They are so profoundly melancholy in their cellared respectable abode, -poor dears! I know they would have preferred dropping to pieces under a -Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in an insulting -immortality. The frieze especially, stretched round the ugly wall like a -butterfly under a glass case!" Odd laughed with more light-heartedness -than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced him to feel that he still -found Katherine charming. There must certainly be safety in that -affectionate admiration. - -"I won't even ask you to harrow your susceptibility by a look at the -insulted frieze, then; you must know it well, to enter with such -sympathy into its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I shall be -lonely down there. A daily letter would be none too many." - -"I can't quite see why you are exiling yourself. Of course, the weather -here is nasty just now. I have noticed your cough all the evening. Come -and say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so fix your hour." - -"Our usual hour? In the morning?" - -"You will not see Hilda then." - -"Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. You will kiss her _au -revoir_ for me." - -Odd felt a certain triumph. - -Katherine's departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for -makeshift flight. After a month or two of solitary wrestling and -wandering, he might find that the dubiously directed forces of -Providence were willing to help one who helped himself. - -His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly -entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him. -The disclosure of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how -face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight -the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest -emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too -late? A love as far removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as it -was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; -and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and -kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more -fearful shipwreck. - -Hilda's selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave -her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be -dreaded than any hurt to himself. - -And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - - -An April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd's return. A rather -prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs. - -He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had -announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied -some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard's. -Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the -Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she -knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter -had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the -Captain's projected jaunt. He surmised that her father's absence would -lighten Hilda's load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain's -hands--on the understanding that most of it was to be given to -Hilda--but _from_ her father, would relieve her from the necessity for -teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, -but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking -individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told -him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed -"_toujours souffrante_," and "Mademoiselle 'Ilda"--Odd had hesitated -uncomfortably before asking for her--was out. "_Pas bien non plus, -celle-là_," she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still -more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; "_Elle -s'éreinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle_." With a sick -sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she -might be found. All the morning, it seemed "_Il faut bien qu'elle soigne -madame, et puis elle m'aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop -lourde_," and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that "_Madame est -très, mais très exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une -damê comme celle-là_." - -Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her -days he should probably find her in the Rue d'Assas, and, with the -angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda -excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in -fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he -caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. -The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half -dazed her evidently. - -"You? I can hardly believe it!" she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that -plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was -wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips -a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had -reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the -slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable -little hat symbolized a biting poverty. - -"Hilda! Hilda!" was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He -was aghast. - -"I _am_ glad to see you," she said, and her voice had a forced gayety -over its real weakness; "I haven't seen any of my people for so long, -except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn't it? -Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I -could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and -Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and -mamma is much, _much_ better. As for papa, the last time I heard from -him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that -he hasn't been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last -letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you -are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking." - -Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be -over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control. - -"If I had known I would have come sooner," he said; "you would have let -me help you, wouldn't you?" - -"I am afraid you couldn't have _helped_ me. That is the worst of -illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up." - -"My poor child!" Odd inwardly cursed himself. "If I had known! What have -you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look--" - -"Fagged, don't I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since -you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We'll all go -to the _vernissage_ together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer -have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for -mamma." - -"Taylor helped you, I suppose?" - -"Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and -indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that -she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, -of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed -her." There was an explanatory note in Hilda's voice; indeed Odd's -silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. "It made double -duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not -minded." - -"And Wilson?" - -"He went with papa. I don't think papa could live without Wilson." - -"Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of your ghastly little face. -You have been housemaid, _garde-malade_, and bread-winner. Had you no -money at all?" Hilda flushed--the quick flush of physical weakness. - -"Yes, at first," she replied; "papa gave me quite a lot before going, -and that has paid part of the doctor's bills, and my lessons brought in -the usual amount." - -"Could you not have given up the lessons for the time being?" - -"I know you think it dreadful in me to have left mamma for all those -afternoons." Her acceptation of a blame infinitely removed from his -thoughts stupefied Odd. "And mamma has thought it heartless, most -naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy and kind. The doctor came three -times a day and I can explain to _you_"--Hilda hesitated--"the money -papa gave me went almost immediately--some unpaid bills." - -"What bills?" Odd spoke sternly. - -"Why, we owe bills right and left!" said Hilda. - -"But what bills were these?" - -"There was the rent of the apartment for one thing; we should have had -to go had that not been paid; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker; they -threatened to seize the furniture." - -"Katherine's dressmaker?" - -"Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that she would be so impatient; -but I suppose, on hearing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman -became frightened." Peter controlled himself to silence. The very -fulness of Hilda's confidence showed the strain that had been put upon -her. "And then," she went on, as he did not speak, "some of the money -had to go to Katherine in England. Poor Kathy! To be pinched like that! -She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling to tip the -servants and get her railway ticket to Surrey." - -"Why did she not write to me? Considering all things--" - -"Oh!" said Hilda--her tone needed no comment--"we have not quite come to -that." She added presently and gently, "I had money for her." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it; the glove was loose upon it. - -"And now," said Hilda, leaning forward and smiling at him, "you have -heard me _filer mon chapelet_. Tell me what you have been doing." - -"My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too grossly egotistic after -your story." - -"Has my story sounded so dismal? _I_ have been egotistic, then. I had -hoped that perhaps you would write to me," she added, and a delicately -malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard at her, with a -half-dreamy stare. - -"I thought of you," he said; "I should have liked to write." - -"Well, in the future do, please, when you feel like it." - -Mrs. Archinard was extended on the sofa in the drawing-room when they -reached the Rue Pierre Charron. The crisp daintiness of -pseudo-invalidism had withered to a look of sickly convalescence. She -was much faded, and her little air of melancholy affectation pitifully -fretful. - -"You come before my own daughter, Peter," she said; "I don't _blame_ -Katherine, since Hilda tells me that she did not let her know of my -dangerous condition." - -"Not _dangerous_, mamma," Hilda said, with a patient firmness not -untouched by resentment, a touch to Odd most new and pleasing. "The -doctor had perfect confidence in me, and would have told me. I should -have sent for papa and Katherine the moment he thought it advisable. -Under the circumstances they could have done nothing for you that I did -not do." Hilda had, indeed, rather distorted facts to shield Katherine. -What would Mrs. Archinard have said had she known that Katherine, in -answer to a letter begging her to return, had replied that she _could_ -not? Even in Hilda's charitable heart that "_could_ not" had rankled. -Odd's despairing gloom discerned something of this truth, as he realized -that the uncharacteristic self-justification was prompted by a rebellion -against misinterpretation before _him_. Mrs. Archinard showed some -nervous surprise. - -"Very well, very well, Hilda," she said, "I am sure I ask no sacrifices -on _my_ account. One may die alone as one has lived--alone. My life has -trained me in stoicism. You had better wash your face, Hilda. There is a -great smudge of charcoal on your cheek," and, as Hilda turned and walked -out, "I have looked on the face of the King of Terrors, Peter. Peter! -dear old homely name! the faithful ring in it! It is easy for Hilda to -talk! I make no complaint. She has nursed me excellently well--as far as -her nursing went. But she has a _hard_ soul! no tenderness! no sympathy! -To leave her dying mother every afternoon! To sacrifice me to her -_painting_! At such a time! Ah me!" Large tears rolled down Mrs. -Archinard's cheeks, and her voice trembled with weakness and self-pity. -Odd, in his raging resentment, could have exploded the truth upon her; -the tears arrested his impulse, and he sat moodily gazing at the floor. -Mrs. Archinard raised her lace-edged handkerchief and delicately touched -away the tears. - -"I have given my whole life, my whole life, Peter, for my girls! I have -borne this long exile from my home for their sakes!" At Allersley Mrs. -Archinard had never ceased complaining of her restricted lot, and had -characterized her neighbors as "yokels and Philistines." Speaking with -her handkerchief pressed by her finger-tips upon her eyelids, she -continued, "I have asked nothing of them but sympathy; _that_ I have -craved! And in my hour of need--" Mrs. Archinard's _point de Venise_ -bosom heaved once more. Odd took her hand with the unwilling yet pitying -kindness one would show towards a silly and unpleasant child. - -"I don't think you are quite fair," he said; "Hilda looks as badly as -you do. She has had a heavy load to carry." - -"I told her again and again to get a _garde-malade_, two if necessary." -Mrs. Archinard's voice rose to a higher key. "She has chosen to ruin her -appearance by sitting up to all hours of the night, and by working all -day in that futile studio." - -"_Garde-malades_ are expensive." Odd could not restrain his voice's -edge. - -"Expensive! For a dying mother! And with all that is lavished on her -studio--canvases, paints, models!" - -The depths of misconception were too hopelessly great, and, as Mrs. -Archinard's voice had now become shrilly emphatic, he kept silence, his -heart shaken with misery and with pity, despairing pity for Hilda. She -re-entered presently, wearing on her face too evident signs of -contrition. She spoke to her mother in tones of gentle entreaty, humored -her sweetly, gayly even, while she made tea. - -"You know I cannot touch cake, Hilda." - -"There are buttered _brioches_, mamma, piping hot." - -"Properly buttered, I hope. Rosalie usually places a great clot in the -centre, leaving the edges uneatable." - -"Mamma is like the princess who felt the pea through all the dozens of -mattresses, isn't she?" said Hilda, smiling at Odd. "But _I_ buttered -these with scientific exactitude." - -"Exactitude! Ah! the mirage of science! More milk, more milk!" Mrs. -Archinard raised herself on one elbow to watch with expectant -disapproval the concoction of her tea, and, relapsing on her cushions as -the tea was brought to her, "I suppose it _is_ milk, though I prefer -cream." - -"No, it's cream." Hilda should know, as she had herself just darted -round the corner to the _crêmerie_. Odd sprang up to take his cup from -her. He thought she looked in danger of falling to the ground. - -"Do sit down," he said in a low voice; "you look very, very badly." - -"Have you read Meredith's last?" asked Mrs. Archinard from the sofa. -"Hilda is reading it to me in the evenings. We began it, ah! long, long -ago. I have sympathy for Meredith, an _intimité!_ It is so I feel, see -things--super-subtly. Strange how coarsely objective some minds are! Did -you order the oysters for my dinner, Hilda, and the ice from -Gagé's--_pistache?_ I hope you impressed _pistache_. You will dine with -Hilda, of course, Peter; I have my dinner here; I am not yet strong -enough to sit through a meal. And then you must talk to me about -Meredith. I always find you most suggestive--such new lights on old -things. And Verhaeren, too; do you care for Verhaeren? Morbid? Yes, -perhaps, but that is a truism--not like you, Peter. '_Les apparus dans -mes chemins_,' poor, modern, broken, bleeding soul! We must talk of -Verhaeren. Just now I feel very sleepy. You will excuse me if I simply -_sans gêne_ turn over and take a nap? I can often sleep at this hour. -Hilda, show Peter the Burne-Jones Chaucer over there. Hilda doesn't find -him limpid, sweet, healthy enough for Chaucer; but _nous sommes tous les -enfants malades_ nowadays. There is a beauty, you know, in that. Talk it -over." - -Hilda and Peter sat down obediently side by side on the distant little -_canapé_ before the Burne-Jones Chaucer. They went over the pages, not -paying much attention to the woodcuts, but looking down favorite -passages together. The description of "my swete" in "The Book of the -Duchess," the complaint of poor Troilus, and, once more, Arcite's death. -The quiet room was very quiet, and they looked up from the pages now and -then to smile, perhaps a little sadly, at one another. When the dinner -was announced Hilda said, as they went into the dining-room-- - -"If your courage fails you, just say so frankly. I have very childish -tastes and childish fare." - -Indeed, half a cold chicken and a dish of rice constituted the repast. A -bottle of claret stood by Odd's place, and there was a white jar filled -with buttercups on the table; but even Rosalie seemed depressed by the -air of meagreness, and gave them a rather _effaré_ glance as they sat -down. Odd suspected that the cold chicken was in his honor. He had come -to the conclusion that Hilda was capable of dining off rice alone. - -"Delightful!" he said. The chicken and rice were indeed very good, but -Hilda saw that he ate very little. - -"I make no further apologies," she said, smiling at him over the -buttercups; "your hunger be upon your own head." - -"I am not hungry, dear." - -Hilda had to do most of the talking, but they were both rather silent. -It was a happy silence to Hilda, full of a loving trust. - -When he spoke, it was in a voice of the same gentle fatigue that his -eyes showed; but as the eyes rested upon her she felt that the past and -the present had surely joined hands. - - - - -CHAPTER X - - -Odd went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the -next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he -could hardly have told. - -He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d'Assas and go home to tea and dinner -with her. His love for Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that -his late flight seemed degrading. - -So loving her, he could not be base. - -The Rue d'Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling rain. In the Luxembourg -Gardens the first young green made a mist upon the trees. - -It was only half-past four when Odd reached his accustomed post, but -hardly had he taken a turn up and down the street when he saw Hilda come -quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half-an-hour early, but Odd -had merely time to note the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was -in trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him; and he met her -half-way with outstretched hands. - -"O Peter!" It was the first time she had used his name, and Odd's heart -leaped as her hands caught his with a sort of desperate relief. "Come, -come," she said, taking his arm. "Let us go quickly." Peter's heart -after its leap began to thump fast. The white distress of her face gave -him a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had distressed her? He asked the -question as they crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears now -streamed down her face. - -He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and as she hung shaken with -sobs on his arm, the past child, the present Hilda merged into one; his -one, his only love. - -"Let us walk here, dear," he said; "you will be quieter." - -The little path down which they turned was empty, and the fine rain -enveloped but hardly wet them. They came to a bench under a tree, -circled by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the weeping girl to it -and they sat down. She still held his arm tightly. - -"Now, what is it?" - -"O Peter! I can hardly tell you! The brother, the horrible brother." - -"Yes?" Peter felt the accumulations of rage that had been gathering for -months hurrying forward to spring upon, to pulverize "the brother." - -"He made love to me, said awful things!" Odd whitened to the lips. - -"Tell me all you can." - -"I wish I were dead!" sobbed Hilda, "I am so unhappy." - -Peter did not trust himself to speak; he took her hand and held it to -his lips. - -"Yes; you care," said Hilda. She drew herself up and wiped her eyes. "I -never thought he would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he came a -good deal into the studio where we worked and, behind his sister's -back, looked silly. But he never really annoyed me. I thought myself -unkindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon was called away and he -came in. I went on painting. I did not dream--! When, suddenly he put -his arms around me--and tried to kiss me!" Hilda gave an hysterical -laugh. "Do you know, I had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great -blow with it! You should have seen his head! Oh, to think that I can -find that funny now! His ear was covered with cobalt!" Hilda sobbed -again, even while she laughed. "He was very angry and horrible. I said I -would call his mother and sister if he did not leave me at once, and -then--and then"--Hilda dropped her face into her hands--"he jeered at -me; 'You mustn't play the prude,' he said." - -Odd clenched his teeth. - -"Hilda, dear," he said, in a voice cold to severity, "you must go home; -I will put you in a cab. I will come to you as soon as I have punished -that dog." - -"Peter, don't! I beg of you to come _with_ me. You can do nothing. I -must bury it, forget it." She had risen as he rose. - -"Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall never forget it." - -Odd's fixed look as he led her into the street forced her to helpless -silence. - -"Peter, _please!_" she breathed, clasping her hands together and gazing -at him as he hailed a _fiacre_. - -"I will come to you soon. Good-bye." - -And so Hilda was driven away. - -It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened -the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is -lying down. She seemed ill. "_Et bien malade même,_" and had said that -she wanted no dinner. - -"I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I -think," said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost -immediately. - -She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had -cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine -fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the -disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked -ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness -of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as -the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, -beyond all wish for it. The afternoon's unpleasantness had been merely -the last straw. The long endurance of the past month--the past months -indeed--that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on -pity--was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a -quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the -one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and -loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence -of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes. - -He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her -face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden -horrible weakness almost overcame him. - -"Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the -fiery _jeune premier_ to such an extent this afternoon that dramatic -restlessness is in keeping." - -Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns -up and down the room. - -"You look so badly," he said, pausing before her; "how do you feel?" - -"Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself." Hilda tried to smile, -stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. "I feel weak and -foolish," she added, clasping her hands on her knee. - -"It is all right, you know. He apologized profusely." - -"How did you make him do that?" - -"I told him the truth, including the fact of his own despicableness." - -"And he believed it?" - -"I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough thrashing." - -"Oh!" cried Hilda. - -"He deserved it, dear." - -"But--I had exposed myself to it; he thought himself justified." - -"I had to disabuse him of that thought. He bawled out something like a -challenge under the salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the -suggestion--insisted on the extreme satisfaction it would give me to -have a shot at him--the bourgeois strain came out. He fairly whined. I -was disappointed. I had bloodthirsty desires." - -"Oh, I am very glad he whined then! Don't speak of such horrors. You -know I am hysterical." - -Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her hand. - -"How can I thank you?" He put her hand to his lips, not looking at her -but down at the heavy folds of her white dress; it had a shroud-like -look that gave him a shudder. Hilda's life seemed shroud-like, shutting -her out from all brightness, from all love--love hers by right, and only -hers. - -"You know, you know that I would do anything for you," he said. - -The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, hardly consciously, and he -yielded to the longing he felt in her for comforting kindness and -nearness; yielded, too, to his own growing weakness; but he still held -the hand to his lips, not daring to look at her. This childlike trust, -this dependence, were dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled -soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on him when he raised his -own. - -"I never thought it would come true--in this way," she said. - -"What come true?" - -"That you would really care for me." - -Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold peaceful wings on his -breast; its very contentment constituted a caress. The child was still a -child, and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant revelation. A -shock of possibilities made Odd dizzy, and the certain strain of -weakness in him made it impossible for him to warn and protect her -ignorance. - -He was conscious of a quick grasp at the transcendental friendship of -which alone she was aware. - -"My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly." But with the words, -his hold on the transcendental friendship slipped, fundamental truths -surged up; he took both her hands, and clasping them on his breast, -said, hardly conscious of his words-- - -"Sweetest, noblest--dearest," with an emotion only too contagious, for -Hilda's eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, -the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, -to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his -arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him. - -"I understand, Hilda, I understand it all--all you have suffered; the -loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know -that you have been unhappy." - -"Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!" The tears rolled down her -cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd's hands clasping hers. "No one ever -cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn't it -cruel, cruel?" This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did -the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless -terror. "That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be -my fault." The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: "I have been -so lonely." - -"My child! My poor, poor child!" - -"Let me tell you everything. I _must_ tell you now since you care for -me. I have been so fond of you--always. You remember when I was a -child?" Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; -they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling -shipwreck. "Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it -weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what -they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me -that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them -take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It -sounds morbid, doesn't it? But it isn't, for my loneliness was almost -unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things -were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn't you? Only I -don't think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to -you." Hilda's tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled -now at Odd, a quivering smile. - -"And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can't tell you -what I suffered." - -Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his. - -"But how could you have known?" said Hilda tenderly; "I was really very -silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come back _because_ I -needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the -shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was -waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that." -She paused a moment: "It all ended in Florence," she went on sadly; -"such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I see -the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where -I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know -those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for -something that could never come; that you had never really understood, -and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a -pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. -I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be -misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love perhaps. A sort of -cold shame crept through me, and I felt really alone then. Do you know -what that feeling is?" Her hand under his forehead lifted his head a -little as though to question his face, but putting both her hands over -his eyes he would not look at her. - -"You are so sorry?" Odd nodded. "But you have had that feeling? -Imprisoned in oneself; looking, longing for a voice, a smile,--and -silence, always, always silence. A thing quite apart from the surface -intercourse of everyday life, not touched by it. You have so many -friends, so many windows in your prison, you can't know." - -"I know." - -"Really?" - -"Yes, yes." - -"And you call out for help and no one hears. Oh, I can't explain -properly; do you understand?" - -"I understand, dear." - -"Well, after that day in Florence, the last cranny of my prison seemed -walled up. And--oh, then our troubles came, worse and worse. -Responsibilities braced me up--far healthier, of course. And your -books! Their strength; their philosophy--don't tell me I might find it -all in Marcus Aurelius; your way of saying it went more deeply in me. -Just to do one's duty; to love people and be sorry for them, and not -snivel over oneself. Ah! if you knew all your books had been to me! -Would you like it, I wonder?" Again the tenderness, almost playful, in -her voice. Odd raised his head and looked at her. - -"And when I came at last, what did you think?" - -The loving candor of her eyes dwelt on him. - -"When you came?" she repeated. "Then I saw at once that you were -Katherine's friend, and that your books were the nearest I should ever -get to you." Hilda's voice hesitated a little; a doubt of the exactitude -of her perceptions from this point showed itself in a certain perplexity -of tone. "And--I don't quite understand myself, for I didn't plan -anything--but just because I felt so much I was afraid that you would -imagine I made claims on you. I was resolved that you should see that I -had reached your standpoint--that I had forgotten--that the present had -no connection with the past." - -"But I had not forgotten," Odd groaned. - -"No?" Hilda smiled rather lightly; "it would have been very strange if -you hadn't. Besides, as I say, I saw at once that you were Katherine's, -and that it was right and natural. Your books taught me, too, the true -peace of renunciation, you see! Not that this called for renunciation -exactly," and again Hilda paused with the faint look of perplexity. -"There was nothing to renounce since you were hers, except I must have -felt a certain disappointment. I felt a little frozen. Such dull -egotism!" She turned her eyes away, looking vaguely out into the dusky -room. "But even on that first day I meant that you should see, and that -she should see, that I knew that the past made no bond: in my heart it -might, not in yours, I knew, for all your kindness." - -"Go on, Hilda," said Odd, as she paused. - -"Well, you know all the rest. When you were engaged and she more than -friend, I had hoped for it, and I saw that my turn might come; that I -might step into Kathy's vacated shoes, so to speak; that we might be -friends, and all my dreams be fulfilled after all. I began then to let -myself know that I did care, for I had tried to help myself before by -pretending that I didn't. I wouldn't do anything to make you like me. If -you were to like me, you would of yourself; all the joy of having you -care for me would be in having made no effort. And the dream did come -true. I saw more and more that you cared. To-day I feel it, like -sunshine." Odd still stared at her, and again through sudden tears she -smiled at him. "Only--isn't it strange?--things are always so; it must -be, too, that I am weak, overwrought, for I feel so sad, as though I -were at the bottom of the sea, and looking up through it at the sun." - -"Great heavens!" muttered Odd. He looked at her for a silent moment, -then suddenly putting his arm around her neck, he drew her to him. - -He did not kiss her, but he said, leaning his head against hers-- - -"And I--so unworthy!" - -"No, no," said Hilda, and with a little sigh, "not unworthy, dear -Peter." - -"I, dully stumbling about your exquisite soul," Peter went on, pressing -her head more closely to his. "Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -"What, dear friend?" - -"I cannot tell you." - -"Unkind; I tell you everything." - -"You can tell me everything. You can tell me how much you have cared for -me, how much you care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot tell -you how infinitely dear you are to me." He had spoken, her face hidden -from him in its nearness; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and -frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. Hilda drew back -and rose to her feet. A subtle change, perplexity deepened, crossed her -face, but, standing before him, she looked down at him and he saw that -her trust rose as to a test. She put her hands out as though from an -impulse to lay them on his shoulders; then, as an instinct within the -impulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear look untouched, she -clasped them together and said gravely-- - -"You may tell me. You are infinitely dear to _me_." - -Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave him a sense of helpless -baseness. - -"I may tell you how much I love you?" and he too rose and stood before -her. - -"I have always loved you," said Hilda, with her grave look. "I love you -now as much as I did when I was a child." - -The impossible height where she placed him beside her made Odd's head -swim. He felt himself caught up for a moment into the purity of her -eyes, and looking into them he came close to her. - -"My angel! My angel!" he hardly breathed. - -"Dear Peter," and the tears came into the pure eyes. And, at the sight, -the heaven brimmed with loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious -but all revealed, Odd was conscious only of a dizzy descent from -impossibility, the crash of the inevitable. - -One step and he had taken her into his arms, seeing as he did so, in a -flash, the white wonder of her face; he could almost have smiled at -it--divinely dull creature! Holding her closely, the white folds of the -shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, his cheek upon her hair, -he could not kiss her and he could not speak, and in a silence as -unmistakable as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the past and -defied the future. - -The painful image of a bird he had once seen, wings broken, dying of a -shot and feebly fluttering, came to him as he felt her stir; her hands -pushing him away. - -"Dearest--dearest--dearest." - -Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness. - -Stooping his head he looked at her face; it wore an almost tranquil, a -corpse-like look. Her eyes were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a -little in a faint, fixed frown; but the childlike line of her mouth had -all the sad passivity of death. Odd tremblingly kissed the gentle -sternness of the lips. - -She loved him, but how cruel he was. - -"Oh, my precious," he said, "look at me. Forgive me; I love you." - -He had freed her hands, and she raised them and bent her face upon them. - -"You don't hate me for telling you the truth?" And as she made no sign: -"No, no, you don't hate me; you love me and I love you. I have loved you -from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why did you let me think you -did not care? Look at me, dearest." - -"What have I done?" said Hilda. She still kept her face hidden in her -hands. - -"You have done nothing; it is I, I who have done it!" - -"I never could have believed it of you," she said, and he felt it to be -the simple statement of a fact. - -"O Hilda--I have only told you the truth, that is my crime." - -"You told me because of what I said? You love me because of what I -said?" - -"Good God! I have been madly in love with you for months!" - -"For months?" she repeated dully. - -"For years, perhaps, who knows!" - -"I did not know that I--that you--" - -"You knew nothing, my poor angel." - -He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to stumble and grope for an -entreaty; her very powerlessness in the grasp of her realized love -enchanted him. - -"How base! how base!" she moaned. - -"Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, and I cannot help myself." - -"No--you cannot help yourself. I love you and I told you so." - -"You did not mean _this_." - -"I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did not doubt myself. I am -wicked." The strange revulsion from her long selflessness had reached -its height in poor Hilda; but, in her eyes, the discovered self was -indeed wicked, a terrible revelation. - -Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder. - -"O Peter, Peter!" - -"What, my darling child?" - -"That we should be so base!" - -"Not _we_, Hilda. Not _you_!" - -"Yes, I--for I am happy--think of it, happy! Peter, I love you so much." -She wept, her head upon his shoulder. "Keep me for a moment, only a -moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the good of it. I am glad -that you love me. No; don't kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved -me for a long time." - -"From the moment I saw you again, I think. I knew it when I began -meeting you after your lessons. Do you remember that first day in the -rain? I do; and your little hat with the bow on it, the hole in your -little glove, your white little face. I went away to the South because I -could not trust myself with you. I did not dream that you loved me, but -I felt--ah! I felt--that I could have made you love me!" - -"And yet--you loved Katherine!" - -The anguish of the broken words pierced him. - -"Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find myself. I did not love -her." - -"Peter! Peter!" - -"Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you that you are the only -one--my only love!" - -"O Peter!" - -"I never thought that I loved Katherine, but I had no fear of injustice -to her, for I never thought that love would come into my life; and, -hardly was the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth crept upon -me. Friendly comradeship on the one hand, and on the other--O Hilda!--a -passion that has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you like a -thunderbolt; my love for you crashed in upon your heavenly dreaming; but -you see--be brave enough to acknowledge what it all means, your dream -and my love that needed no thunderbolt to wake it,--be brave enough to -own that it is inevitable, that from the time that you put your hand in -mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest thing, a love, a -sympathy infinite. Dear child, be brave enough to own that before it, -mistakes may be put aside without dishonor." - -"Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor! We are both already -dishonorable, and oh! it is that that breaks my heart; that you, that -you who should have helped me, protected me from the folly of my -ignorance, that you should be dishonorable!" - -"O Hilda!" - -"Yes," she said wildly, "yes, yes, Peter; and I am wicked--wicked, for I -love you. Yes--kiss me; there, now I am thoroughly wicked. Now let me -go." - -Odd, white and shaken, still locked his arms about her. - -"I was base if you will, too base for your loveliness; but you, my -darling, have not a shadow on you; you were impossibly noble. Remember, -that if there is dishonor, I am dishonored, not you; remember that _I_ -have done this!" - -As he spoke, holding Hilda in his arms, the door opened and Katherine -entered. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - - -Katherine closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not -with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened -look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a wrap on her arm, and the -thumping of her boxes was heard outside on the stairs. - -Katherine had schemed and success was hers, but this unlooked-for -achievement struck her like a dagger and made triumph bitter. - -Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was the heroine. Katherine -felt herself struck down from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced -to a miserable position, a tool with the other tools--Peter and Hilda. - -To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shattering of ideals and pierced -even her own humiliation, for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked -up to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with her, but for Hilda's -own advantage; she, not Fate, was to put her in Peter's arms, unspotted -and innocent of the combinations that had led her there. All Katherine's -plans in England had prospered and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited -her. Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous perception of his -love for Hilda--a brave, manlike part--to which she had looked forward -as to an atonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine had almost -persuaded herself that there would be little acting needed. Had she not -seen, guessed, the truth? Had the truth not pained her, humiliated her? -Had she not risen finely above her pain and wished them happiness? In -moments of self-scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look -before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorchings, and Katherine -could scorch herself as well as others in the pitiless flame of -clear-sighted analysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome -standards of a higher nature--a rebellion that had carried her into such -opposition as to fall below herself to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, -touched with a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment,--was that -rebellion, that ambition, so base, so pitiful? - -Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes sophistical if carried too -far, and Katherine found excuses that explained for herself. But now all -was base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda's fall, had -risen. On this lowered platform, the advantage was hers, terribly hers, -and it was good, good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them. - -She laid down her wrap on a table and began to slowly draw off her -gloves. - -"My return was inopportune." The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her -own sense of fitness. "Or opportune?" She directed her eyes upon Odd, -and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He -welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he -prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his arm around -Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt -that Hilda's look of frozen horror gave him the advantage. - -"Opportune, Katherine," he said; "now at least I shall not have to lie -to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness." - -"Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?" - -It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel -his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, -for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "I can only beg you to believe that I have -struggled--for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought -that neither of you would ever know the truth." - -This bracketing of Hilda's injury with hers stank in Katherine's -nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, -speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself-- - -"I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so -chivalrously preparing for me," she said. "Marriage with an unloving -man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from -you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?" The -white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their -sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter's futile efforts to -withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his -stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the -retrospect grew lurid. - -"Katherine," said Odd gloomily, "I would not so have insulted you after -this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult." - -"I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have -waited, Peter." - -Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had -been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most -painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew -for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon -her sister. - -"So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda," she said. - -Hilda's wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the -stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds -at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long -resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to -cruelty. - -"Katherine, say anything--anything you will to me," and Odd's voice -broke a little as he spoke, "but not one word to her! Not one word! It -comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire -with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life." He -held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man -driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and -Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight -eyebrows, breathing quickly. - -"Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this -evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this -past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your -mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with -you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life--you and your -father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and -once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard -I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon -her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us." - -"Yes; as I see you." Katharine's very lips were white. - -Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the -terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd -remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the -extremity of self-control. - -"Katherine," she said, "he is trying to shield me. It did not happen -like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always -loved him." - -"Oh! did you?" said Katherine, with a withered little laugh. - -"My child!" cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this -assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him--"my child, -what are you saying? What madness!" - -"I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you." - -"In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love you misunderstood. You -know, as I knew when you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, -so nobly, so purely, was the child's love, the love of the loyal sister -for her friend, the love of an angel." - -"I am not sure," said Hilda. - -"Oh!" cried Odd, looking at her with savage tenderness, "this is -unbearable." - -It was as if they had forgotten, each in the mutual justification of the -other, Katherine standing there a silent spectator. - -But Odd was conscious of that outraging contemplation. - -"Hilda," he said appealingly and yet sternly, "at the very height of -your trust in me I betrayed it. Your nobility had reached its climax. I -had kissed you and you retreated, but without a shadow of doubt; and I, -from the base wish to try your trust to the utmost, said that I loved -you. You never faltered from your innocent outlook in replying; it was I -who saw the truth, not you." - -"Katherine," Hilda repeated, "he is trying to shield me. We are both -base, yes; but I forced him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, -and when he took me in his arms, I was glad." - -"Good God!" cried Peter. - -Katherine averted her eyes from her sister's face. - -"I must own, Peter," she said, "that your position was difficult. Hilda -evidently painted the pathos of her life to you in most touching -colors--she herself very white on the background of our black depravity. -That in itself is enough to shake a rather emotional heart like yours. -And then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a Galahad I fear, she -confesses her love for you, retreating delicately before your kisses. Of -course those kisses she received as platonic pledges--from the man -engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, very; I quite recognize it. -Under such tempting circumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor -must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve the difficulty, she -solved it for you, very effectually, very courageously. When you took -her in your arms--how often we repeat that phrase--the 'truth' at last -flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship could hardly account for such -yielding unconventionality, and Hilda's hidden love won the day." - -During these remarks, Odd felt himself shaking with rage. If Katherine -had been a man he would have knocked her down; as it was, his voice was -the equivalent of a blow as he said, clenching his hand on the back of a -chair-- - -"You despicable creature!" - -He and Katherine glared at one another. - -"Only the higher nature can put itself so hideously in the power of the -lower," Odd went on; "and you dare!" - -"No, no; all she says may be true!" moaned Hilda. She dropped upon the -sofa and hid her face in her hands, adding brokenly: "And how can you be -so cruel? so cruel to her? She loves you too!" - -Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and then, impulse nipped by -quick reflection-- - -"You need not allow for a woman's jealousy, Mr. Odd. Don't, no indeed -you must not, flatter yourself with my broken heart. I don't like -humiliation for myself or for others. I don't like to scorn my sister -whom I trusted, whom I loved. I could have killed the person who had -told me this of her! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too bitter for -charity. But I give you back your word without one regret for myself. -You have killed my love very effectually." - -"Was there ever much to kill, Katherine?" - -"That is ignoble, quite as ignoble as I could predict of you. Hilda's -lesson must necessarily make the past look pale." - -"I can only hope that you do yourself an injustice by such base -speeches, Katherine." - -"Your example has been contagious." - -"Let me think so by proving yourself more worthy than you seem. Ask your -sister's forgiveness--as I ask yours--humbly. She has not feared -humiliation." - -"I do not find myself in a position to fear or accept it. I found Hilda -in the dust, and I cannot forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor -confession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I make an exit more -apropos than my entrance, and leave you with her." Katherine took up her -wrap and walked out without looking again at Hilda. - -"And I have done this," said Odd. Hilda lay motionless, her face upon -her arms, and he approached her. There was a strange effect of no Hilda -at all under the heavy folds of the gown; in the dark it glimmered with -a vacant whiteness; it was as though the cruel words had beaten away her -body and her soul. - -"Hilda!" said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating as he paused beside her, -not daring to touch the still figure. "Hilda!" he repeated; "if only you -will forgive me; if only you will own that it is I, I only who need -forgiveness, and unsay those mad words that gave her the power! Oh! that -she should have had the power! She has made remorse impossible!" Odd -added, addressing himself rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no -hint of sympathy. - -"Why did you put yourself under her feet and make me powerless?" he -asked; "you know that your gentle reticence had for months kept my love -in check; you knew that had I kept at your level, you would have never -realized that you loved me." He bent above her and kissed her hand. -"Precious one! Dearest, dearest child." - -"Oh, don't!" said Hilda. She drew her hand away, not lifting her head. -"Her heart is broken. I am all that she said." - -"Her heart is not broken!" cried Odd, in rather desperate accents. "I -could swear to it! She is a cruel, heartless girl!" - -"What would you have asked of her? You were cruel to her." - -"I am glad of it." And as Hilda made no reply to this statement, he -stooped to her again, imploring: "Will you not look at me? Look up, -dearest; tell me again that you love me." - -"I am already in the dust," said Hilda, after a pause. - -"You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!" cried Odd; he -took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. "Sit -up. Listen to me," he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken -face, his hands on her shoulders. "I have loved you passionately for -months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have -fumbled with that fatally misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved -me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn -out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, -of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, -wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!" Odd added, sitting -down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda -repeated-- - -"Don't." - -"You felt my pity, my sympathy," Odd went on, holding her hands. "You -felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the -child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation--for -love--you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found -more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too -high for the hearer." - -"Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that I _loved_ -you!" Hilda wailed suddenly. - -"Thank God that you own to that!" Odd ejaculated. - -"That does not clear me," she retorted. "No, no; I was a fool. You, the -man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty -of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to -you--it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly -whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all! -I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are -usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are -crimes, and I am wicked. I hate myself!" she sobbed, bending again her -face upon her hands. - -"Hilda," said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, "you could not -have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for -months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold -little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for -you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step--you -retreating before me--to the final realizations; and final they are not, -I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the -real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all -that you have suffered." Hilda interrupted him with an "Oh!" from -between clenched teeth. - -"Katherine was right," she said, "I have painted myself in pathetic -colors. What a prig! What an egotist!" Her voice trembled on its low -note of passionate self-scorn. - -"An egotist!" Odd burst into a loud laugh. "That caps the climax. Come, -Hilda," he added, "don't be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, -still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I -say, I haven't yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as -I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, -unconscious little child." Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but -Hilda's swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision. - -"You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to -speak of some day? There will never be any day for us--together." - -"I say there will be, Hilda." - -"You think that I could ever forget my sister's misery; my shame and -yours?" - -"You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the -day." - -"That is a placid term for such degradation." - -"I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake." - -"You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can't -mend a broken heart by marching over it." - -"One may avoid breaking another." - -"You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the -bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing -that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean." - -"You, Hilda, are only cruel--unutterably cruel," said Odd brokenly. - -"I never wish to see you again." Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his -eyes of pitiful appeal. "You have robbed my life of the little it had; -you have robbed me of self-respect." - -"Shall I leave you, Hilda?" - -"You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me." - -"Good-bye," said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to -the heart, and half-unconscious. - -"Peter!" cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was -standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed -and dilated eyes. - -"What is it, my child?" Odd asked gently. - -"Kiss me good-bye!" - -He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another. - -"Must I leave you?" he asked, in a stammering voice. - -"Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me." - -He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved -away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a -characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, -he said-- - -"I will wait." - -And turning away, he walked out of the room. - - - - -CHAPTER XII - - -For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda -stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant -devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for -Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she -announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine -had returned to England, she added with emphasis-- - -"But I don't go this time, Miss Hilda. It's your turn to have a maid -now." - -The news took a weight of dread from Hilda's heart. She shrank from -again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine's tragic eyes. -She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half -delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, -of everlasting responsibility for her sister's misery. With all the -capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered -natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting -hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored -her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: "I love -you, too!" Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with -cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of -analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so -swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral -visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of -relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine's -ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness. - -Hilda's love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been -growing from the child's devotion, and, with the new torture of a -hopeless longing upon her--for which she despised herself--she saw in -the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart. - -Only a few days after Katherine's departure, the Captain returned. - -Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that -weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked -carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the -door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her -behalf. - -He hardly mentioned Katherine's broken engagement, and, for once in her -life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. -Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit -plaintively beside her daughter's bed; and it was from her that Hilda -learned that they were going back to Allersley. - -Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and -Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities -and to probabilities. The Captain's good fortune showed to her in a -dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at -its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, -and who it was that shielded her from even a feather's weight of -gratitude--for the Captain made no mention of his good luck. - -"Yes, we are going back to the Priory," Mrs. Archinard said, her -melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter's wasted -face. "It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to -compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. -Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I -predicted it rather. You have killed yourself _tout simplement_; I -consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks -it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, -'_Docteur, elle s'est tuée._' I said it frankly." - -Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so -long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones -of pathos and pity on Hilda's behalf, hardly realizing their objective -nature. - -By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like -returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker -chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the -meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and -felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood. - -Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her -sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, -too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa -existence; without the background of Hilda's quiet servitude, it became -flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and -for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in -pensive contemplation of tenants' havoc. She sighed over the Priory and -said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not -think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain -vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a -little--the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as -fishing--and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at -political follies. - -When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, her father often walked -aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed -glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted -passively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only -vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as -her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his -fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing-basket, and showing -evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a -sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a -sudden sense of method underlying the Captain's manoeuvres. - -"Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will -be glad of a respite. Isn't it a little sunny to-day for first-class -fishing?" Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up -to her with shy alacrity. - -"Even first-class fishing is a bore, _I_ think," he observed, not -taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his -daughter and then at the river. - -"Feeling better to-day, aren't you? You might take a stroll with me, -perhaps; but no, you're not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, -isn't it?" - -Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the -Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of -weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and -the absent-minded smile on her face reassured him as to immediate -issues. - -"How are _you_ feeling?" she asked; "I have been looking at the trees -and grass for so long that I had almost forgotten that there are human -beings in the world." - -"Oh, I'm very well; very well indeed." The Captain was again feeling -uncomfortable. An inner coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just -because speaking was not really imperative at the moment. A little glow -of self-approbation suddenly prompted him to add: "You know, I know -about it now. That is to say, I wasn't exactly to speak of it, if it -might pain you; but I don't see why it should do _that_. Upon my word," -said the Captain, feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was -broken, "it's more likely to pain me, isn't it? Rather to my discredit, -you know; though, intrinsically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of -course you helped me over a tight place now and then, but I thought the -money came to you with a mere turn of the hand, so to speak; and, as for -your teaching--wearing yourself out--well, I don't know which I was -angrier with first, you or myself. I never dreamed of it, it never -entered into my head. And then, _my_ daughter and low French cads! Well, -_he_ saw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too; thought it best, -you know; for, naturally, Odd couldn't have my weight and authority. I -was simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me over when he told -me. Odd told me--" - -The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, and then switched its -limber length tentatively through the air. It was embarrassing, after -all, this recognition of his daughter's life. - -"Now your mother doesn't know," he pursued; "Odd seemed rather anxious -that she should; rather unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no -necessity for that, was there? It would have quite killed her, wouldn't -it? Quite." - -"You need neither of you have known." All she was wondering about, -trying to grasp, made Hilda pale. "It came about most naturally; and, if -mamma's illness and that other unpleasant episode had not broken me -down, my modest business might have come to an end--no one the wiser for -it. Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt." - -"Well, I don't know." The Captain now sat down on the chair with a sigh -of some relief. "It's off my mind at all events. I wanted to express -my--pain, you know, and my gratitude--and to say what a jolly trump I -thought you; that kind of thing." - -"Dear papa, I don't deserve it." - -"Ah, well, Odd isn't the man to make misstatements, you know. A bit of -dreamer, unpractical, no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, -you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cutting, to tell you the -truth. Of course he's very fond of you; that's natural. This sad affair -of Katherine's; if it hadn't been for that, you and he would be brother -and sister by this time." - -It was Hilda's turn now to draw in a little breath of relief. At all -events her father was no ally. No other secret had been told, and she -saw, now that the dread had gone, that any cause for it would have -involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of which she knew Odd to be -incapable. - -"Where is he--Mr. Odd?" she asked, steeling herself to the question. - -The look of gloom which touched the Captain's face anew, confirmed Hilda -in her certainty of infinite pecuniary obligation. - -"Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A man can't sit down quietly -under a blow like that." - -A flush came over Hilda's face. Part of her punishment was evident. She -must hear Katherine spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, -guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered and crowned with -praises. Yet Katherine herself--any woman--would choose the part Odd had -given her--the part of jilt rather than jilted; and she, Hilda, was -helpless. - -"Papa," she asked, driving in the dagger up to the hilt--she could at -least punish herself, if no one else could punish her--"where is -Katherine? Is she not coming to stay with us?" The Captain swung one leg -over the other with impatience. - -"I've hardly heard from her; she is with the Leonards in London. Odd -spoke very highly of her; seemed to think she had acted honorably; but, -naturally, Katherine must feel that she has behaved badly." - -"I am sure she has not done that, papa. She found that she would not be -happy with him." - -"Pshaw! That's all feminine folly, you know. She probably saw some one -she liked better, some bigger match. Katherine isn't the girl to throw -over a man like Odd for a whim." - -Hilda's flush was now as much for her father as for herself. She felt -her cheeks burning as she said, her voice trembling-- - -"Papa, papa! How can you say such a thing of Katherine! How can you! I -know it is not true. I know it!" - -"Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well -though, and it's not unimaginable. I don't imply anything vulgar." The -Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; "that's not -conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine's ambitious, very ambitious. -As for you, Hilda--and all that, you know--I am awfully sorry, you -understand." The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased -his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, -and the Captain's conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible. - -Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond -the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery -that her father's cool suppositions on Katherine's conduct had seemed -to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that -shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She -looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside -it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous -droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; -the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too -dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned -her head away from the river and closed her eyes. - -"Allone, withouten any companye," that was the fated motto of her life. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - - -By the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to -seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with -something--with anything--and experienced the odd sensation of a person -upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for -duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, -unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of -labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission -to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with -artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she -told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in -her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks -and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like -crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms. - -Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active _rôle_ in life most -confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard -drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little -_côterie_ of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard's little _Causeries -de Mardi_, her society for little weekly dinners--only six chosen -members--_les Élites_--stirred Allersley to the quick with æsthetic -thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly -at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its -Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations. - -Hilda was not one of _les Élites_. "Just for us old people, trying to -amuse ourselves," Mrs. Archinard said, and at the _Causeries_ Hilda was -an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the _Causeries_ were quite -Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard _causant_ and -Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a -revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the _élites_ -and the _mardis_, and devoted himself to more commonplace -individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn't required to -strain one's temper by listening to fine talk. - -Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she -came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows -of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on -her arm. Mary's mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture -since Peter's flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and -yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary -was generous, and the sight of Hilda's white sunlit face completed -Peter's work. She found that she had kissed Hilda--she, so -undemonstrative--and standing with her arms around the girl's slight -shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the -slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter-- - -"You will see _me_, won't you?" - -Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut--palest -pink and palest purple, "on tiptoe for a flight." - -"How kind of you to come," she said. - -"Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy's camp. That -reckless brother of mine!" - -"Did he send you?" Hilda asked, fright in her eyes. - -"Send me? Oh no, he didn't send me; but after what he has told me, I -came naturally of my own free will." Hilda smiled faintly in reply to -Mary's smile. - -"What has he told you?" - -"Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he -proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really -Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving -him!" - -Hilda winced at the humorous tone. - -"That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in -upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel--natural, though, wasn't -it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been -badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and -that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and--oh, a great -many things." - -"Did he tell you that I loved him?" Hilda asked, looking down at her -sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if -it was demanded of her that she should humiliate herself before Peter's -sister--tell her that she had made love to him. - -"My dear child," Mary's voice dropped to a graver key, "Peter trusts me, -you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to -you, you and he together found out that fact." - -Even Hilda's morbid self-doubt could not deny the essential truth of -this point of view. - -"And now you won't marry him," Mary added, but in a matter-of-fact -manner, and as if the subject were folded up and put away by that -conclusive statement. - -"Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. What a delightful garden -this is. I must have a pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, -why have you always so persistently and doggedly effaced yourself? Why -did you never let anybody know you, and subside passively into the -background _rôle_? I never knew you, I am sure, and if it hadn't been -for Peter I shouldn't have known you now. He made me see things very -clearly. The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, and holding -up a whole edifice on its shoulders." - -"How could he! Why will he always see things so? It makes me miserable." - -"Well, well; perhaps Peter's point of view would seem to you -exaggerated. But, as I say, why did you never let me get a glimpse of -you?" - -"I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me apart. I loved my work." - -"Yes; it must have been charming work, in all its branches." Mary gave -her a gravely gay glance. "When you did emerge from your shadows, why -did you never talk--make an effect, like Katherine?" - -"Katherine makes effects without trying. She is effective, and people -like her for herself. I was fitted for the dark corner. That is why I -stayed there." - -"No, my dear, one can't explain the injustices of fortune by that -comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatalistic philosophy. Noble natures get -oddly jumped on in this world," Mary added reflectively. "The tragedy, -of course, lies in being too noble for one's milieu, for then, not only -does one renounce, but one is expected to, as a matter of course. -Forgive me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am speaking, for -the moment, with gloves off; I know the truth, and you may as well face -it. It's a pity to be too noble; one should have just a spice of -egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one's corner." - -"Peter found me," said Hilda, with a sad smile that evaded the "coarse" -frankness. - -They walked silently along the little path under the sunlit shade of the -fruit-trees. Mary stopped at a turning. - -"Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of Emerson and optimism. Peter -did find you." Her large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda's. -"Peter found you, my dear child; let Peter keep you, then." - -"He always will keep--what he found," said Hilda, trembling. "I love -him. I shall always love him." - -"My dear Hilda!" - -"But I cannot marry him. I cannot." - -"You are a foolish little Hilda." - -"We made Katherine miserable." - -"And therefore all three must be miserable. For Peter to have kept faith -with Katherine--loving you--might have called down a far worse tragedy." - -Hilda gazed widely at her-- - -"Yes; I deserve that suspicion." - -"Oh, you foolish, foolish child!" cried Mary, laughing; and she kissed -her. "Come, come; say that you will be good to my poor brother?" - -"I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness on a wrong." - -"Your happiness would be grounded on a right; the wrong was a mere -incidental. Peter must wait, I see. Perhaps you will own some day that -that was ample expiation." - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - - -One October day Hilda received a queer little note from Katherine. That -Katherine had spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht with a -party of friends, Hilda knew, and the note was dated from Amalfi. - -"Why don't you marry Peter, you little goose?" was all it said. - -Hilda trembled as she read. Katherine's scorn and Katherine's nobility -seemed to breathe from it. - -"I am not as base as you think," was her answer. - -Katherine received this answer in Amalfi. She had come in from a walk -with Allan Hope along the road that runs above the sea between Amalfi -and Sorrento, and one of the yachting party, a girl who much admired -Katherine, was waiting for her before the hotel holding the letter, an -excuse for the excited whisper with which she gave it to her. - -"Dear Miss Archinard, _he_ is here!" - -"What 'he,' Nelly?" asked Katherine; she looked down at the writing on -the envelope of her letter, and the becoming flush that her walk through -the warm evening had brought to her cheeks faded a little. - -Allan Hope had gone on into the hotel, and Nelly's excited eyes followed -him till he was safely out of sight. - -"Mr. Odd," she said with dramatic emphasis. "Of course he didn't know." - -"Oh, he is here!" Katherine's eyes were still on the writing. "No, of -course he didn't know." - -"You aren't afraid of his meeting Allan?" Nelly was Allan Hope's cousin. -"Is there no danger, Miss Archinard? He must be feeling so--dreadfully!" - -"What a romantic little pate it is! I really believe you were looking -forward to a duel. No, no, Nelly, there is nothing of an exciting nature -to hope for!" - -"But won't it be terrible for you to meet him? The first time, you know! -And engaged to Allan!" said Nelly. - -"We are not at all afraid of one another. Don't tremble, Nelly." - -Katherine read her letter standing on the terrace before the hotel. The -dying evening seemed to throb softly in the southern sky, arching -solemnly to the horizon line. Katherine looked out at the sea--it was -characteristic of her deeply set eyes to look straight out and seldom -up. She stood still, holding the letter quietly; Katherine had none of -the weakness that seeks an outlet for the stress of resolution in -nervous gesture. She did not even walk up and down; indeed the -resolution was made and meditation needless. Turning after a moment, she -went into the hotel and asked at the office whether Mr. Odd were to be -found. - -"Yes, he was in his room; he had only arrived an hour ago." - -Katherine requested the man to tell Mr. Odd that Miss Archinard was on -the terrace and would like to see him. In two minutes Peter was walking -out to meet her. - -Peter's eyes, as they shook hands, were rather sternly steady; -Katherine's steady, but more humorous. - -"_Sans rancune?_" she inquired, with some lightness, and then, sparing -him the necessity for a reply that might be embarrassing for both of -them-- - -"I want to ask you a question; pardon abruptness; why don't you marry -Hilda? Won't she? There are two questions!" - -"I don't marry her because she won't. And there is the evident reply, -Katherine." - -"Do you despair?" she asked. - -"I can't say that. Time may wear out her resistance." - -"I know Hilda better than you do--perhaps. You see I have got over my -jealousy." Katherine's smile had all its charm. "She won't if she said -she wouldn't; if she has ideals on the subject." - -"Then I must resign myself to hopeless wretchedness." - -"No; you must not. _I_ am going to help you. Don't look so gloomily -unimpressed. I am going to help you. I am going to do penance, and I -don't believe you will consider it an expiation either! Just encourage -me by a little appreciation of my dubious nobility." Odd looked -questioningly at her. - -"Peter, when I came back that night I was engaged to Allan Hope." - -"Oh!" said Peter. They looked at one another through the almost palpable -dusk of the evening. - -"I'll give you the facts--draw your own conclusions. I'll give you -facts, but don't ask self-abasement put into words. You really haven't -the right, have you, Peter?" - -"No; I suppose not. No, _I_ haven't the right." - -"You put yourself in the wrong, you see. You must allow me to flaunt -that ragged superiority. Peter, very soon after our engagement you began -to dissatisfy me because I realized that I should never satisfy you. The -more you knew me the more you would disapprove, and your nature could -never understand mine to the extent of pardoning. Once I'd seen that, -everything was up. It wouldn't do; and the knowledge grew upon me that -the impossibility was emphasized by the fact that Hilda _would_ do. _I_ -saw that you loved her, Peter; stupid, stupid Peter! And poor little -Hilda! She was ground between two stones, wasn't she? your ignorance and -my knowledge. I give you leave to offer me up as a burnt sacrifice at -her altar, only don't let me hear myself crackling. Yes; I saw that you -were in love with her, and that she would be in love with you if it -could come--as it should have come--as I intended it to come--foolish, -hasty Peter! No; no comments, please! I know everything you can say. I -took precious good care of myself, no doubt; my generosity wasn't very -spontaneous; perhaps I thought you'd get over it; perhaps I wanted you -to get over it; perhaps even while seeing that Allan Hope would do--for -I satisfy him most thoroughly--I kept a tiny indefinite corner in my -motives for possible reactions; I give you leave to draw your -inferences, but don't ask me to dot my i's and cross my t's too -cold-bloodedly. I accepted Allan Hope on the understanding that the -engagement was to be kept secret for a few months. I told Allan that you -did not love me; that I did not love you; that our engagement was -broken. I told him that when I saw his love for me struggling with his -loyalty to you. It was the truth from my point of view; but from his, -from yours, it was a lie--and own that at least I am generous in telling -you! Too generous perhaps. I came back to Paris to tell you that I had -discovered it wouldn't do, and to make you and Hilda happy. And, when I -saw you together, both as bad as I was--at least I thought so at the -time--both disloyal--I forgot my own self-scorn; I felt a right to a -position I had repudiated. I _had_ to be cruel, for, Peter, I was -jealous; I hated her for being the one who would satisfy you thoroughly -and forever." - -There was silence between them. If she had satisfied him as only Hilda -could satisfy him, she would not have gone to Allan perhaps. Odd with a -quick throb of sympathy understood the intimation, understood both her -courage and her reticence. He had seen her at her noblest, yet there was -much not touched upon, far from noble. - -The half avowal of a disappointed love flawed her loyalty to Allan. Such -love deserved disappointment and was of a doubtful quality. Peter -respected her frankness but was not deceived by it. His manliness was -touched by the possibility she had hinted at. He understood Katherine -and he forgave her--with reservations. - -There seemed to be nothing to say, and he did not seek words. He and -Katherine walked slowly to the end of the terrace. - -Then Katherine told him of her note to Hilda and handed him Hilda's -reply. - -"I shall go to England to-morrow, Katherine," said Odd, when he had read -it. - -"You will have to fight, you know. She will say that my wrong did not -excuse hers. She will say that nothing excused you. She _is_ a little -goose." - -"I'll fight." - -They had walked back to the entrance of the hotel and here they paused; -there was a fitness in farewell. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "it would have been very base in you to have kept -silence, and yet, in spite of that, you have been very courageous this -evening." - -"You are a hideously truthful person, Peter. Why put in that damaging -clause? Have I merely escaped baseness?" - -"No, for you have never been finer." - -"That is true. I'll never reach the same heights again," and Katherine -laughed. - -"Understand that _I_ understand. Your story has not absolved _me_." - -"There is the danger with Hilda. You must make my holocaust avail." - -"I hope that a good thing is never lost," Peter replied. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - - -The October day was deliciously warm at Allersley, a fragrant autumnal -warmth, limpid with sunshine, and the woods all golden. - -Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine of home and hope in his -blood, his mood of resolute success tempered by no more than just a -touch of trembling. - -In the distance lay the river, a glitter here and there beyond the tree -trunks; the little landing-wharf where he had first seen Hilda was no -doubt still unchanged and worth a pilgrimage on some later day, but now -he must take the most direct way to the Priory; he had only arrived an -hour before, but a minute's further delay would be unbearable. This day -must atone for all the past failure of his life, and make his autumn -golden. He walked quickly, following, he remembered, almost the same -path among the trees that he and Hilda had gone by that night, ten years -ago; the memory emphasized the touch of trembling. To dwell on her -dearness made fear tread closely. The gray stone wall wound among the -woods, Peter caught sight of it, and, at the same moment, of the -fluttering white of a dress beyond it that made his heart stand still. - -He could not have hoped to find Hilda here with no teasing -preliminaries, no languid mother or sulky father to mar the fine rush of -his onslaught. - -Such good luck augured well, for--yes, it was Hilda walking slowly among -the trees--and at the clear sight of her, Peter wondered if the -breathing space of a conventional preliminary would not have been -better, and felt that he had exaggerated his own courage in picturing -that conquering impetuosity. - -She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an air of patient sadness. -Her hands clasped behind her, she walked aimlessly over the falling -leaves and seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness as her -footsteps passed through them. There was a black bow in the ruffled -bodice, and with her black hair she made on the gold and gray a -colorless silhouette. - -Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached her, the rustling leaves -under his feet, their falling patter from the trees, seemed to fill the -air with loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of her own -footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled at the weary unexpectancy of -her look transformed to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in -a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous comprehension -conceded, Katherine's confession had been cruelly tardy and Hilda's face -was pitiful. She stood silent and motionless looking at him, and Odd, as -he joined her, said the first words that came to his lips. - -"My child! How ill you look!" - -The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across -her face, but Odd, seeing only its frozen pain, remembered those -stabbing words: "You are cruel and weak and mean," which she had spoken -with just such a look, and any lingering thought of a fine onslaught was -nipped in the bud. - -"I may speak to you?" he asked. - -Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impossible to speak; she wanted -to throw herself on his breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, -all the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight of him gave -her such joy that everything was already half forgotten--even Katherine; -even Katherine--she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold -faintness-- - -"Oh, yes;" adding, "you startled me." - -"So thin, so pale, such woful eyes!" He stood staring at her. - -"You--don't look well either," she said, still in the soft cold voice. - -"I should be very sorry to look well." - -Peter was adapting himself to reality; but if the impetuous dream was -abandoned, the courage of humbler methods was growing, and he could -smile a little at her. - -"Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will you walk with me for a -little while? It is a lovely day for walking. How beautiful the woods -are looking." - -"Beautiful. I walk here a great deal." She looked away from him and into -the golden distance. - -"And you will walk here now with me?" he asked, adding, as the pale -hesitation of her face again turned to him, "Don't be frightened, dear, -I am not going to force any solution upon you; I am not going to try to -make you think well of me in spite of your conscience." - -Think well of him! As if, good or bad, he was not everything to her, and -the rest of the world nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves. - -"And here is Palamon," said Peter, as that delightful beast came at a -sort of abrupt and ploughing gallop, necessitated by the extreme -shortness of his crumpled legs, through the heaped and fallen foliage. -"He remembers me, too, the dear old boy," and Palamon, whose very -absorbed and business-like manner gave way to sudden and smiling -demonstration, was patted and rubbed cordially in answer to his cordial -welcome. - -"It must seem strange to you being here again after such a time," said -Odd, when he and Hilda turned towards the river, Palamon, with an air of -happy sympathy, at their heels. The river was invisible, a good -half-mile away, and the whispering hush of the woods surrounded them. - -"It doesn't seem strange, no," Hilda replied; "it seems very peaceful." - -"And are you peaceful with it?" All the implied reserves of her tone -made Peter wonder, as he had often wondered, at the strength of this -fragile creature; for, although that conviction of having wronged -another was accountable for her haggard young face, the crushed anguish -of her love for him was no less apparent in the very aloofness of her -glance. - -"I feel merely very useless," she said with a vague smile. - -"I have seen Katherine, Hilda." Odd waited during a few moments of -silent walking before making the announcement, and Hilda stopped short -and turned wondering eyes on him. - -"It was at Amalfi. She had just received your letter, and she sent for -me; she had something to say to me." Hilda kept silence, and Odd added, -"You knew that she was on a yachting trip?" Hilda bowed assent. "And -that Allan Hope is of the party?" - -"I heard that; yes." - -"And that he and Katherine are to be married?" - -Here Hilda gave a little gasp. - -"She doesn't love him," she cried. Odd considered her with a disturbed -look. - -"You mustn't say that, you know. I fancy she does--love him." - -"She did it desperately after you had failed her; after I had robbed -her." - -Odd was too conscious of the possibility of a subtle half-truth in this -to assert the bold unvarnished whole truth of a negative. - -Hilda's loyalty lent a dignity to Katharine's most doubtful motives, a -dignity that Katherine would probably contemplate with surprise, but -accept with philosophic pleasure. - -Had Hilda indeed robbed her unwittingly? Had he failed her long before -her deliberate breach of faith? He had, she said, shown his love for -Hilda, and would she have turned to Lord Allan's more facile contentment -had she been sure of Peter's? - -Delicate problem, without doubt. His mind dwelt on its vexatious -tragic-comic aspect, while he stared almost absently at Hilda. - -Certainly his disloyalty had been unintentional, guiltless of plot or -falsehood; and Katherine's was intentional, deceitful, ignoble. It would -be possible to shock every chord of honor in Hilda with the bold -announcement that Katherine had been engaged when she came to Paris, and -that her cruel triumph had been won under a lying standard. - -And that shock might shatter forever, not the sense of personal -wrong-doing, but all responsibility towards one so base, all that -brooding consciousness of having spoiled another's life. Katherine had -abandoned the position, and poor Hilda had merely stumbled on its vacant -lie. - -Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble self-interest in showing -the ugly fact with no softening circumstances; circumstances might -indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to -despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of -the circumstances than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to -think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that the irksomeness of -his growing disapproval, rather than the loss of his love, had led -Katherine to seek a more amenable substitute; but with a sense of honor -so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put aside his own advantageous -surmises, and prepared to give Katherine's story from a most delicate -and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Katherine's words, and yet -such artistic chivalry in their setting that even Katherine would find -her sacrifice at Hilda's altar painless. - -"You shall have her own words," he said, after a long pause. He felt -that the inner trembling had grown to a great terror. He became pale -before the compelling necessity for exaggerated magnanimity. - -To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine's loomed a black -probability, yet in his very defeat he would prove himself not unworthy -of Hilda's love; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah! piercing words! At -least he could now draw them from their rankling. And as they walked -together he told Katherine's story, lending to it every charitable -possibility with which she herself could not honestly have invested it. - -When he had done, taking off his hat, for his temples were throbbing -with the stress of the recital, and looking at Hilda with an almost -pitifully boyish look, he had emphasized his own unconscious revelation -of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of broken-hearted generosity -in Katherine, he had hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the -glaring fact that she had made sure of him before giving Peter his -freedom. The soreness that the revelation of Katherine's selfishness had -made between them so soon after their engagement, he had not mentioned. - -Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once or twice during the -story she had clutched her clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice -her step had faltered and she had paused as though to listen more -intently, but the white profile with its framing eddies of hair crossed -the pale gold background, its attitude of intense quiet unchanged. - -The silence that followed his last words seemed cruelly long to Odd, but -at last she lifted her eyes, and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish -look, her own look broke suddenly into passionate sympathy and emotion. - -"Peter," she said, standing still before him, "she didn't love you." - -"I don't think she did." Odd's voice was shaken but non-committal. - -"Perhaps she loved you more than she could love any one else," said -Hilda. - -"Yes; perhaps." - -Hilda's hands were still clasped behind her, and she looked hard into -his face as she added with a certain stern deliberateness-- - -"I don't believe she ever loved anybody." - -Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for such a clear perception. - -"She was very cruel to me," said Hilda, after a little pause, and her -eyes, turning from his, looked far away as if following the fading of a -lost illusion. - -"I don't think she ever cared much for me either," she added. - -"Not much; not as you interpret caring." - -Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over him rushed that -indignant realization of Katherine's intrinsic selfishness. - -"No; I could not have been so cruel to her, not even if she had robbed -me of you." It was the most self-assertive speech he had ever heard her -utter. - -"No; you could not have been so cruel to her," he repeated, "not even -loving me as you did and as she did not." - -There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed to Odd that the very trees -stretched out their branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said -slowly-- - -"But that doesn't make what I did less wrong. I was as weak, as -disloyal, as though Katherine had loved us both as much as I thought she -did." - -"And I as cruel, as weak, as mean?" Odd asked. - -"Ah, don't!" she said, with a look of pain. "You have redeemed -yourself," she added, "and have made me more ashamed." - -"Then I have made a miserable failure of my attempt." - -"No, no; you have not." - -The river was before them now, and the woods sloped down to its curving -band of silver. They both stood still and looked at it, and beyond it at -the gentle stretches of autumnal hill and meadow. - -"Dear Peter," said Hilda gently. He looked down at her and she up at -him, putting her hand in his, but so gravely and quietly that the tender -little action conveyed nothing but a reminiscence of the child of ten -years ago. - -So, holding hands, they were both still silent, and again they looked at -the river, the meadows, and the blue distance of the hills. Palamon, -after running here and there, with rather assumed interest, his nose to -the ground, came and sat down before them with an air of dignified -acquiescence and appreciative contemplation. In the woods the sudden, -sad-sweet twitter of a bird seemed to embroider the silence with -unconscious pathos. - -"O Peter!" said Hilda suddenly, on a note as impulsive and as -inevitable as the bird's. He looked at her and put his arms around her, -saying nothing. - -"Oh!" said Hilda, "I cannot help it. I love you too much, dear Peter. -Everything else may have been wrong, but it is right to love you." - -He took her face between his hands and looked at her. - -"Everything else would be wrong." - -"Then kiss me, Peter." - -He gave himself the joy of a delicious postponement. - -"Not till you tell me that you see that everything else would be wrong." -But the kiss was given before her answer. - -"I trust you, and you must know." - -THE END. - - * * * * * - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -you remem-him=> you remember him {pg 19} - -the coèncirge=> the concièrge {pg 139} - -to forego the enjoyment=> to forgo the enjoyment {pg 158} - -unforgetable=> unforgettable {pg 181} - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - -***** This file should be named 42109-8.txt or 42109-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/0/42109/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -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. 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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/old/42109-8.zip b/old/42109-8.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 8b3a93f..0000000 --- a/old/42109-8.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/42109.txt b/old/42109.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a3822aa..0000000 --- a/old/42109.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8688 +0,0 @@ -Project Gutenberg's The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -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/license - - -Title: The Dull Miss Archinard - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 16, 2013 [EBook #42109] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - -The - -Dull Miss Archinard - -By - -Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -New York -Charles Scribner's Sons -1898 - -Copyright, 1898, by -Charles Scribner's Sons - -_All rights reserved_ - -_TO_ - -MY GRANDMOTHER - -H. M. D. - - - - -Prologue - -PETER ODD - - - - -The Dull Miss Archinard - - - - -CHAPTER I. - - -Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream, -whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating -fly, his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisherman reverie, no -definite thought forming from the appreciative impressions of sunlit -meadows, cool stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming curves of -river. For a tired man, fishing is an occupation particularly soothing, -and Peter Odd was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, perhaps, -more that of the lover of nature than of the true sportsman, the -pastoral feast of the landscape with its blue distance of wooded hill, -more to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet-spotted beauty; -yet the attitude of receptive intentness was pleasant in all its phases, -no one weary thought could become dominant while the eyes rested on the -water, or were raised to such loveliness of quiet English country. So -much of what he saw his own too; the sense of proprietorship is, under -such circumstances, an intimately pleasant thing, and although, where -Odd stood at a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall -beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the confines of his -property just here, the woods and meadows before him were all his--to -the blue hills on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched widely -about Allersley Manor, and to the left the river ran for a very -respectable number of miles through woods and meadows as beautiful. The -sense of proprietorship was still new enough to give a little thrill, -for the old squire had died only two years before, and the sorrow of -loss had only recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed -responsibilities, to the realization that energies so called forth may -perhaps make of life a thing well worth living. A life of quiet utility; -to feel oneself of some earthly use; what more could one ask? The duties -of a landowner in our strenuous days may well fill a man's horizon, and -Odd was well content that they should do so; for the present at least; -and he did not look beyond the present. - -In his tweeds and waterproof knee-breeches and boots, a sun-burnt straw -hat shading his thin brown face, his hand steady and dexterous, as brown -and thin, he was a pleasing example of the English country-gentleman -type. He was tall, with the flavor of easy strength and elegance that an -athletic youth gives to the most awkwardly made man. His face was at -once humorous and sad; it is strange how a humorous character shows -itself through the saddest set of feature. Odd's long, rather acquiline -nose and Vandyke beard made a decidedly melancholy silhouette on the -sunlit water, yet all the lines of the face told of a kindly -contemplation of the world's pathetic follies; the mouth was sternly -cut yet very good-tempered, and its firm line held evident suggestions -of quiet smiling. - -Poor Peter Odd had himself committed a pathetic folly, and, as a result, -smiles might be tinged with bitterness. - -A captured trout presently demanded concentrated attention. The vigorous -fish required long playing until worn out, when he was deftly secured in -the landing-net and despatched with merciful promptitude; indeed, a -little look of nervous distaste might have roused in an unsympathetic -looker-on conjectures as to a rather weak strain--a foolish width of -pity in Peter Odd's character. - -"A beauty," he mentally ejaculated. He sat down in the shade. It was -hot; the long, thick grass invited a lolling rest. - -On the other side of the hedge was a rustic bathing-cabin, and from it -Odd heard the laughing chatter of young voices. The adjoining property -was a small one belonging to a Captain Archinard. Odd had seen little of -him; his wife was understood to be something of an invalid, and he had -two girls--these their voices, no doubt. Odd took off his hat and mopped -his forehead, looking at the little landing-wharf which he could just -see beyond the hedge, and where one could moor boats or dive off into -the deepness of the water. The latter form of aquatic exercise was -probably about to take place, for Odd heard-- - -"I can swim beautifully already, papa," in a confident young voice--a -gay voice, quiet, and yet excited too by the prospect of a display of -prowess. - -A tall, thin girl of about fourteen stepped out on to the landing. A -bathing-dress is not as a rule a very graceful thing, yet this child, -her skirt to her knee, a black silk sash knotted around her waist, with -her slim white legs and charming feet, was as graceful as a young Amazon -on a Grecian frieze. A heavy mass of braids, coiled up to avoid a -wetting, crowned her small head. She was not pretty; Odd saw that -immediately, even while admiring the well-poised figure, its gallantly -held little torso and light energy. Her profile showed a short nose and -prominent chin, inharmoniously accentuated. She seemed really ugly when -her sister joined her; the sister was beautiful. Odd roused himself a -little from his half recumbency to look at the sister appreciatively. -Her slimness was exaggerated to an extreme--an almost fluttering -lightness; her long arms and legs seemed to flash their whiteness on the -green; she had an exquisite profile, and her soft black hair swept up -into the same coronet of coils. Captain Archinard joined them as they -stood side by side. - -"You had better race," he said, looking down into the water, and then -away to the next band of shadow. "Dive in, and race to that clump of -aspens. This is a jolly bit for diving." - -"But, papa, we shall wet our hair fearfully," said the elder girl--the -ugly one--for so Odd already ungallantly designated her. "We usually get -in on this shallower side and swim off. We have never tried diving, for -it takes so long to dry our hair. Taylor would not like it at all." - -"It is so deep, too," said the beauty in rather a faltering -voice--unfortunately faltering, for her father turned sharply on her. - -"Afraid, hey? You mustn't be a coward, Hilda." - -"I am not afraid," said the elder girl; "but I never tried it. What must -I do? Put my arms so, and jump head first?" - -"There is nothing to do at all," said the Captain, with some acidity of -tone. "Keep your mouth shut and strike out as you come up. You'll do it, -Katherine, first try. Hilda is in a funk, I see." - -"Poor Hilda," Odd ejaculated mentally. She was evidently in a funk. -Standing on the edge of the landing, one slim foot advanced in a -tentative effort, she looked down shrinking into the water--very deeply -black at this spot--and then, half entreatingly, half helplessly, at her -father. - -"Oh, papa, it is so deep," she repeated. - -The Captain's neatly made face showed signs of peevish irritation. - -"Well, deep or not, in you go. I must break you of that craven spirit. -What are you afraid of? What could happen to you?" - -"I--don't like water over my head--I might strike--on something." - -Tears were near the surface. - -What asses people made of themselves, thought Odd, with their silly -shows of authority. The more the father insisted, the more frightened -the child became; couldn't the idiot see that? The tear-filled eyes and -looks that showed a struggle between fear of her father's anger and fear -of the deep, black pool, moved Odd to a sudden though half-amused -resentment, for the little girl was certainly somewhat of a coward. - -"Let me go in first, papa, and show her. Hilda, dear, it's nothing; -being frightened will make it something, though, so don't be frightened, -and watch me." - -"Yes, go in first, Katherine; show her that I have a girl who isn't a -coward--and how one of my daughters came to be a coward I don't -understand. I am ashamed of you, Hilda." - -Hilda evidently only controlled her sobs by a violent effort; her -caught-in under-lip, wide eyes, and heaving little chest affected Odd -painfully. He frowned, sat up, put his hat on, and watched Miss -Katherine with a lack of sympathy that was certainly unfair, for the -plucky little person went through the performance most creditably, -stretched out and up her thin pretty arms, curved forward her pretty -body, and made the plunge with a lithe elegance that left her father -gazing with complacent approval after the white flash of her feet. - -"Bravo! First-rate! There, Hilda, you see what can be done. Come on, -little white feather." He spoke more kindly; the elder sister's prowess -put him more in humor with his less creditable offspring. - -"Oh, papa!" The child shrank on the edge of the platform--she would go -bundling in, and hurt herself. "But, papa," and her voice held a sharp -accent of distress, "where is Katherine?" - -Indeed Katherine had not reappeared. Only a moment had passed, but a -moment under water is long. Captain Archinard's eyes searched the -surface of the river. - -"But she can swim?" - -"Papa! papa! She is drowned, _drowned_!" Hilda's voice rose to a scream. -With a wild look of resolve she sprang into the river just as Odd dashed -in, knee-deep, and as Katherine's head appeared at some distance down -the current--an angry little head, half choked, and gasping. Katherine -swam and waded to the shore, falling on her knees upon the bank, while -Odd dived into the hole--very bad hole, deep and weedy--after Hilda. - -He groped for the child among a tangle of roots, touched her hair, -grasped her round the waist, and came to the surface with some -difficulty, his strokes impeded by sinuous cord-like weeds. Captain -Archinard was too much astonished by the whole matter to do more than -exclaim, "Upon my word!" as his younger daughter was deposited at his -feet. - -"A nasty hole that. The weeds have probably grown since any one has -dived." - -Odd spoke shortly, having lost his breath, and severely; the child -looked half drowned, and Katherine was still gasping. - -"Why, Mr. Odd! Upon my word!"--the Captain recognized his neighbor--"I -don't know how to thank you." - -The Captain had not recovered from his astonishment, and repeated with -some vehemence: "Upon my word!" - -"Well, papa, you nearly drowned me!" Katherine was struggling between -pride and anger. She would not let the tears come, but they were near -the surface. "Those horrible snaky things got hold of me and I almost -screamed, only I remembered that I mustn't open my mouth, and I thought -I would _never_ come to the top." The self-pitying retrospect brought -the tears to her eyes, but she held up her head and looked and spoke her -resentment, "I think you might have gone in first yourself. And Hilda! -Why didn't you wait until I came to the surface before you made her do -it?" - -Captain Archinard looked more vague under these reproaches than one -would have expected after his exhibition of rather fretful autocracy. - -"Made her!" he repeated, seizing with a rather mean haste at the error; -"made her? She went in herself! Like a rocket, after you. By Jove! she -showed her blood after all." - -"Hilda! you tried to save my life!" - -Odd still held the younger girl on his arm, supporting her while she -choked and panted, for she had evidently had not shown her sister's -_aplomb_ and had opened her mouth. Katherine took her into her arms and -kissed her with a warmth quite dramatic. - -"Darling Hilda! And you were so frightened, too. I would have gone in -after _her_," she added, looking up at Odd with a bright, quick glance, -"but there would have been nothing to my credit in that." - -"And _I_ would have gone in after her, it goes without saying, Mr. Odd," -said the Captain, when Katherine had led away to the bathing-cabin her -still dazed sister, "but you seemed to drop from the clouds. Really, you -have put me under a great obligation." - -"Not at all. I have spent most of the day in the river. I merely went -in a bit deeper to fish out that plucky little girl." - -"I've dived off that spot a hundred times. I'd no idea there were weeds. -I've never known weeds to be there. I'll send down one of the men -directly after lunch and have it seen to. Really I feel a sense of -responsibility." The Captain went on with an air of added -self-justification, "Though, of course, I'm not responsible. I couldn't -have known about the weeds." - -Weeds or no weeds, Odd could not forgive him for the child's fright, -though he replied good-humoredly to the invitation to the house. - -"Mrs. Archinard would have called on Mrs. Odd before this, but my wife -is an invalid--never leaves the house or grounds. She sees a good deal -of Miss Odd. I knew your father myself as well as one may know such a -recluse; spent some pleasant hours in his library--magnificent library -you've got. Peculiarly satisfactory it must be, as you go in for that -sort of thing. Won't you come in to tea this afternoon? And Mrs. Odd? -Miss Odd? I was sorry to find them out when I called the other day. I -haven't seen Mrs. Odd. I don't see her at church." - -"No; we have hardly settled down to our duties yet, and my wife only got -back from the Riviera a few weeks ago." - -"Well, I hope we shall keep you at Allersley now that your _wanderjahre_ -are over, and that you are married. I was wandering myself during your -boyhood. My brother bought the place, you know; liked the country here -immensely. Poor old Jack! Only lived ten years to enjoy it--and died a -bachelor--luckily for me. But we've missed one another, haven't we? -Neighbors too. I have seen Mrs. Odd--at a dance in London, Lady -Bartlebury's, I remember; and I remember that she was the prettiest girl -in the room. Miss Castleton--the beautiful Alicia Castleton." - -Miss Castleton's fame had indeed been so wide that the title was quite -public property, and the Captain's reminiscent tone of admiration most -natural and allowable. Odd accepted the invitation to tea, waded back -round the hedge, gathered up his basket and rod, and made his way up -through the park to Allersley Manor. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Mrs. Odd and Miss Odd, Peter's eldest and unmarried sister, were having -an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes, -came into the morning-room just before lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open -French window cutting the leaves of a review. There were several more -reviews on the table beside her, and with her eyeglasses and fine, -severe profile, she gave one the impression of a woman who would pass -her mornings over reviews and disagree with most of them for reasons not -frivolous. - -Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was very remarkable looking. The -adjective is usually employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty -pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd's dominant characteristic was beauty, pure -and simple; beauty triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable in the -sense that no one could fail to notice her, as when one had noticed her -it was impossible not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness -that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion against an almost -tame conformity, a rash person might assert that to him her type did not -appeal; but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplendent; in this -extreme lay the only hope of escape from conformity. The long figure in -the uniform-like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was almost -too uncommonplace in elegance of outline; the white hand too slender, -too pink as to finger-tips and polished as to nails; the delicate -scarlet splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, too dazzling. - -Mrs. Odd's red-brown hair was a glory, a burnished, well-coiffed, -well-brushed glory; it rippled, coiled, and curved about her head. Her -profile was bewildering--lazily, sweetly petulant. "Is this the face?" a -man might murmur on first seeing Alicia. - -Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon his vision over a year -ago. He was still young and literary, and, as he was swept out of -himself, had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expression. - -Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room. - -"I don't really see, Mary, what duty has got to do with it." Without -turning her head, she turned her eyes on Odd: "How wet your hair is, -Peter!" - -Mary Odd looked up from the review she was cutting rather grimly, and -her cold face was irradiated with a sudden smile. - -"Well, Peter," she said quietly. - -"I fished a little girl out of the river," said Odd, taking a seat near -Alicia, and smiling responsively at his sister. "Captain Archinard's -little girl." He told the story. - -"An interesting contrast of physical and moral courage." - -"I have seen the children. They are noticeable children. They always -ride to hounds." Hunting had been Miss Odd's favorite diversion during -her father's lifetime. "But the pretty one, as I remember, has not the -pluck of her sister--physical, as you say, Peter, no doubt." - -"What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard?" - -"Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an American, and was rich, -I believe. Captain Archinard left the army when he married her, and -immediately spent her money. Luckily for him poor Mr. Archinard -died--Jack Archinard; you remember him, Peter? A nice man. I go to see -Mrs. Archinard now and then. I don't care for her." - -"You don't care much for any one, Mary," said Mrs. Odd, smiling. "Your -remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no -doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection." - -"Yet I have many friends, Alicia." - -"Not near Allersley?" - -"Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, -and Miss Hibbard among my friends." - -"Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn't she? What big caps -she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off -her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an -inveterate matchmaker." - -"She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to -mean." - -"But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when -events are marriageable young men, doesn't she?" - -"Does she?" - -"Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in -saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring." - -"And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect." - -During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look -men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests. - -"I am awfully hungry. Isn't it almost lunch-time?" he said, as they -paused. - -Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. "It only wants five minutes." - -Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its -lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory. - -"How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary," he said, looking down at -the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined -her husband, putting her arm through his. - -"Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter," she smiled at him; and -although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life -with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight -to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty--a rather sickly, pallid -pleasure--and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he -and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of -hurting her. - -After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the -sympathy that allows itself no words. - -There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia's lonely complacency--a -pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness. - -"Mary is so disagreeable to-day," said Alicia, as they walked slowly -across the lawn. "She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of -other people's worthlessness." - -Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen -to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman -he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the -revealment of Alicia's shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She -had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not -found it out--had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these -characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was -born so. - -"It will be dull enough here, at all events," Alicia went on, pressing -her slim patent-leather shoe into the turf with lazy emphasis as she -walked, for Alicia was not bad-tempered, and took things easily; "but if -Mary is going to be disagreeable--" - -"You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived here. It is in a truer -sense her home than mine, but she would go directly if either you or she -found it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially she would never -have stayed." - -"Don't imply extravagant things, Peter. Who thinks of her going?" - -"She would--if _you_ made it disagreeable." - -"I? I do nothing. Surely Mary won't want to go because she scolds me." - -"Come, Ally, surely you don't get scolded--more than is good for you." -Odd smiled down at her. Her burnished head was on a level with his -eyes. "Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, as Mary is -somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought to take her lectures in a humble -spirit, and be thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection than I -am." - -"I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter." Alicia left the subject of -Mary for a still more intimate grievance. - -"The art of not being bored requires patience, not to say genius. It can -be learned though. And there are worse things than being bored." - -"I think I could bear anything better." - -"What would you like, Ally?" Odd's voice held a certain hopefulness. -"I'll do anything I can, you know. I believe in a woman's individuality -and all that. Does your life down here crush your individuality, -Alicia?" - -Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an inward bitterness. - -"Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care for all that woman -business--rights and movements and individualities and all that; a silly -claiming of more duties that do no good when they're done. I am an -absolutely banal person, Peter; my mind to me isn't a kingdom. I like -outside things. I like gayety, change, diversion. I don't like days one -after the other--like sheep--and I don't like sheep!" - -They had passed through the shrubbery, and before them were meadows -dotted with the harmless animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd's simile. - -"Well, we won't look at the sheep. I own that they savor strongly of -bucolic immutability. You've had plenty of London for the past year, -Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are really the change." - -"You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, Peter." - -"Longings for a political salon, Ally? I have hardly time for my -scribbling and landlording as it is." - -"A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as being clever and keeping it -up. No, I like seeing people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I -am absolutely banal, as I tell you." - -"Well, you shall have London next year. We'll go up for the season." - -"You took me for what I was, Peter," Mrs. Odd remarked as they retraced -their steps towards the house. "I have never pretended, have I? You knew -that I was a society beauty and that only. I am a very shallow person, I -suppose, Peter; I certainly can't pretend to have depths--even to give -Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. Why did you fall in -love with me, Peter? It wasn't _en caractere_ a bit, you know." - -"Oh yes, it was, Ally. I fell in love with you because you were -beautiful. Why did you fall in love with me?" - -The mockery with which Alicia's smile was tinged deepened into a -good-humored laugh at her own expense. - -"Well, Peter, I don't think any one before made me feel that they -thought me so beautiful. I am vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was -awfully flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. I am sure -you idealized me. Shall we go in? Lunch must be ready, and you must be -hungrier than ever." - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -At four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary started for the -Archinards' house. Mary had offered to join her brother; the prospect of -the walk together was very pleasant. She could not object when Alicia, -at the last moment, announced her intention of going too. - -"I have never been to see her. I should like the walk, and Mary will -approve of the fulfilment of my duty towards my neighbor." - -Mary's prospects were decidedly nipped in the bud, as Alicia perhaps -intended that they should be; but Alicia's avowed motive was so -praiseworthy that Mary allowed herself only an inner discontent, and, -what with her good-humored demeanor, Odd's placid chat of crops and -tenantry, and Alicia's acquiescent beauty, the trio seemed to enjoy the -mile of beechwood and country road and the short sweep of prettily -wooded drive that led to Allersley Priory, a square stone house covered -with vines of magnolia and wisteria, and incorporating in its walls, -according to tradition, portions of the old Priory which once occupied -the site. From the back of the house sloped a wide expanse of lawn and -shrubberies, and past it ran the river that half a mile further on -flowed out of Captain Archinard's little property into Odd's. The -drawing-room was on the ground-floor, and its windows opened on this -view. - -Mrs. Archinard and the Captain were talking to young Lord Allan Hope, -eldest son of Lord Mainwaring. Mrs. Archinard's invalidism was evidently -not altogether fictitious. She had a look of at once extreme fragility -and fading beauty. One knew at the first glance that she was a woman to -have cushions behind her and her back to the light. There was no -character in the delicate head, unless one can call a passive -determination to do or feel nothing that required energy, character. - -The two little girls came in while Odd talked to their father. They were -dressed alike in white muslins. Katherine's gown reached her ankles; -Hilda's was still at the _mi-jambe_ stage. Their long hair fell about -their faces in childlike fashion. Katherine's was brown and strongly -rippled; Hilda's softly, duskily, almost bluely black; it grew in -charming curves and eddies about her forehead, and framed her little -face and long slim neck in straightly falling lines. - -Katherine gave Odd her hand with a little air that reminded him of a -Velasquez Infanta holding out a flower. - -"You were splendid this morning, Mr. Odd. That hole was no joke, and -Hilda swallowed lots of water as it was. She might easily have been -drowned." - -Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply set black eyes had a -dominant directness. She held her head up, and her smile was charming--a -little girl's smile, yet touched with the conscious power of a clever -woman. Odd felt that the child was clever, and that the woman would be -cleverer. He felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice -of fun as they looked into his as though she knew that he knew, and they -both knew together, that Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his -ducking had been only conventionally "splendid." - -"Hilda wants to thank you herself, don't you, Hilda? She had such a -horrid time altogether; you were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the -sea monster!" Then Katherine, having, as it were, introduced and paved -the way for her sister, went back across the room again, and stood by -young Allan Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd. - -Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. She was not shy, -though she evidently had not her sister's ready mastery of what to say, -and how to say it. Odd was rather glad of this; he had found Katherine's -_aplomb_ almost disconcerting. - -"I do thank you very much." She put her hand into Odd's as he spoke, and -left it there; the confiding little action emphasized her childlikeness. - -"What did you think of as you went down?" he asked her. - -"In the river?" A shade of retrospective terror crossed her face. - -"No, no! we won't talk about the river, will we?" Odd said quickly. -However funny Katherine's greater common sense had found the incident, -it had not been funny to Hilda. "Have you lived here long?" he asked. -Captain Archinard had joined Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either -side, Alicia was enjoying herself. "I have never seen you before, you -know." - -"We have lived here since my uncle died; about eight years ago, I -think." - -"Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley." - -"Didn't you like Allersley?" Hilda asked, with some wonder. - -"Oh, very much; and my father was here, so I often came back; but I -lived in London and Paris, where I could work at things that interested -me." - -"I have been twice in London; I went to the National Gallery." - -"You liked that?" - -"Oh, very much." She was a quiet little girl, and spoke quietly, her -wide gentle gaze on Odd. - -"And what else did you like in London?" - -Hilda smiled a little, as if conscious that she was being put through -the proper routine of questions, but a trustful smile, quite willing to -give all information asked for. - -"The Three Fates." - -"You mean the Elgin Marbles?" - -"Yes, with no heads; but one is rather glad they haven't." - -"Why?" asked Odd, as she paused. Hilda did not seem sure of her own -reason. - -"Perhaps they would be _too_ beautiful with heads," she suggested. "Do -you like dogs?" she added, suddenly turning the tables on him. - -"Yes, I love dogs," Odd replied, with sincere enthusiasm. - -"Three of our dogs are out there on the verandah, if you would care to -know them?" - -"I should very much. Perhaps you'll show me the garden too; it looks -very jolly." - -It was a pleasure to look at his extraordinarily pretty little -Andromeda, and he was quite willing to spend the rest of his visit with -her. They went out on the verandah, where, in the awning's shade, lay -two very nice fox terriers. A dachshund sat gazing out upon the sunlit -lawn in a dog's dignified reverie. - -"Jack and Vic," Hilda said, pointing out the two fox terriers. "They -just belong to the whole family, you know. And this dear old fellow is -Palamon; Arcite is somewhere about; they are mine." - -"Who named yours?" - -"I did--after I read it; they had other names when they were given to -me, but as I had never called them by them, I thought I had a right to -change them. I wanted names with associations, like Katherine's setters; -they are called Darwin and Spencer, because Katherine is very fond of -science." - -"Oh, is she?" said Odd, rather stupefied. "You seem to have a great many -dogs in couples." - -"The others are not; they are more general dogs, like Jack and Vic." - -Hilda still held Odd's hand: she stooped to stroke Arcite's pensive -head, giving the fox terriers a pat as they passed them. - -"So you are fond of Chaucer?" Odd said. They crossed the gravel path and -stepped on the lawn. - -"Yes, indeed, he is my favorite poet. I have not read all, you know, but -especially the Knight's Tale." - -"That's your favorite?" - -"Yes." - -"And what is your favorite part of the Knight's Tale?" - -"The part where Arcite dies." - -"You like that?" - -"Oh! so much; don't you?" - -"Very much; as much, perhaps, as anything ever written. There never was -a more perfect piece of pathos. Perhaps you remember it." He was rather -curious to know how deep was this love for Chaucer. - -"I learnt it by heart; I haven't a good memory, but I liked it so much." - -"Perhaps you would say it to me." - -Hilda looked up a little shyly. - -"Oh, I can't!" she exclaimed timidly. - -"_Can't_ you?" and Odd looked down at her a humorously pleading -interrogation. - -"I can't say things well; and it is too sad to say--one can just bear to -read it." - -"Just bear to say it--this once," Odd entreated. - -They had reached the edge of the lawn, and stood on the grassy brink of -the river. Hilda looked down into the clear running of the water. - -"Isn't it pretty? I don't like deep water, where one can't see the -bottom; here the grasses and the pebbles are as distinct as possible, -and the minnows--don't you like to see them?" - -"Yes, but Arcite. Don't make me tease you." - -Hilda evidently determined not to play the coward a second time. The -quiet pressure of Odd's hand was encouraging, and in a gentle, -monotonous little voice that, with the soft breeze, the quickly running -sunlit river, went into Odd's consciousness as a quaint, ineffaceable -impression of sweetness and sadness, she recited:-- - - "Allas the wo! allas the peynes stronge, - That I for you have suffered, and so longe! - Allas the deth! allas myn Emelye! - Allas departing of our companye! - Allas myn hertes quene! allas, my wyf! - Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf! - What is this world? What asketh man to have? - Now with his love, now in his colde grave - Allone, withouten any companye." - -Odd's artistic sensibilities were very keen. He felt that painfully -delicious constriction of the throat that the beautiful in art can give, -especially the beautiful in tragic art. The far-away tale; the far-away -tongue; the nearness of the pathos, poignant in its "white simplicity." -And how well the monotonous little voice suited its melancholy. - - "Allone, withouten any companye," - -he repeated. He looked down at Hilda; he had tactfully avoided looking -at her while she spoke, fearing to embarrass her; her eyes were full of -tears. - -"Thanks, Hilda," he said. It struck him that this highly strung little -girl had best not be allowed to dwell too long on Arcite and, after a -sympathetic pause (Odd was a very sympathetic person), he added: - -"Now are you going to take me into the garden?" - -"Yes." Hilda turned from the river. "You know he had just gained her, -that made it all the worse. If he had not loved her he would not have -minded dying so much, and being alone. One can hardly bear it," Hilda -repeated. - -"It is intensely sad. I don't think you ought to have learned it by -heart, Hilda. That's ungrateful of me, isn't it? But I am old enough to -take an impersonal pleasure in sad things; I am afraid they make you -sad." - -Hilda's half-wondering smile was reassuringly childlike. - -"Oh, but it's _nice_ being sad like that." - -Odd reflected, as they went into the garden, that she had put herself -into his category. - -After the shadow of the shrubberies through which they passed, the -fragrant sunlight was dazzling. Rows of sweet peas, their mauves and -pinks and whites like exquisite musical motives, ran across the -delicious old garden. A border of deep purple pansies struck a -beautifully meditative chord. Flowers always affected Odd musically; he -half closed his eyes to look at the sweeps of sun-flooded color. A -medley of Schumann and Beethoven sang through his head as he glanced -down, smiling at Hilda Archinard; her gently responsive little smile was -funnily comprehensive; one might imagine that tunes were going through -her head too. - -"Isn't it jolly, Hilda?" - -"Very jolly," she laughed, and, as they walked between the pansy borders -she kept her gentle smile and her gentle stare up at his appreciative -face. - -She thought his smile so nice; his teeth, which crowded forward a -little, lent it perhaps its peculiar sweetness; his eyelids, drooping at -the outer corners, gave the curious look of humorous sadness to the -expression of his brown eyes. His moustache was cut shortly on his upper -lip, and showed the rather quizzical line of his mouth. Hilda, -unconsciously, enumerated this catalogue of impressions. - -"What fine strawberries," said Odd. "I like the fragrance almost more -than the flavor." - -"But won't you taste them?" Hilda dropped his hand to skip lightly into -the strawberry bed. "They are ripe, lots of them," she announced, and -she came running back, her outstretched hands full of the summer fruit, -red, but for the tips, still untinted. The sunlit white frock, the long -curves of black hair, the white face, slim black legs, and the spots of -crimson color made a picture--a sunshiny Whistler. - -Odd accepted the strawberries gratefully; they were very fine. - -"I don't think you can have them better at Allersley Manor," said Hilda, -smiling. - -"I don't think mine are as good. Won't you come some day to Allersley -Manor and compare?" - -"I should like to very much." - -"Then you and Miss Katherine shall be formally invited to tea, with the -understanding that afterwards the strawberry beds are to be invaded." - -"I should like to very much," Hilda repeated. - -"Hullo! Don't make me feel a pig! Eat some yourself," said Odd, who had -finished one handful. - -"No, no, I picked them for you." - -Odd took her disengaged hand in his as they walked on again, Hilda -resisting at first. - -"It is so sticky." - -"I don't mind that: it is very generous." She laughed at the -extravagance. - -"And what do you do all day besides swimming?" Odd asked. - -"We have lessons with our governess. She is strict, but a splendid -teacher. Katherine is quite a first-rate Latin scholar." - -"Is Katherine fond of Chaucer?" - -"Katherine cares more for science and--and philosophy." Hilda spoke with -a respectful gravity. "That's why she called her dogs Darwin and -Spencer. She hasn't read any of Spencer yet, but of course he is a great -philosopher. She knows that, and she has read a good deal of a big book -by Darwin, 'The Origin of Species,' you know." - -"Yes, I know." Odd found Katherine even more startling than her sister. - -"I tried to read it, but it was so confusing--about selection and -cabbages--I don't see how cabbages _can_ select, do you?" Hilda's voice -held a reminiscent vagueness. "Katherine says that she did not care for -it _much_, but she thought she ought to look through it if she wanted a -foundation; she is very keen on foundations, and she says Darwin is the -foundation-key--or corner-stone--no, keystone to the arch of modern -science--at least she did not say so, but she read me that from her -journal." - -"Oh! Katherine wrote that, did she?" - -"Yes; but you mustn't think that Katherine is a blue-stocking." -Something in Odd's tone made Hilda fear misunderstanding. "She loves -sports of all kinds, and fun. She goes across country as well as any -woman--that is what Lord Mainwaring said of her last winter during -fox-hunting. She isn't afraid of anything." - -"And what else do you do besides lessons?" - -"Well, I read and walk; there are such famous walks all about here, -walks in woods and on hills. I don't care for roads, do you? And I stay -with mamma and read to her when she is tired." - -"And Katherine?" - -"She is more with papa." In her heart Hilda said: "He loves her best," -but of that she could not speak, even to this new friend who seemed -already so near; to no one could she hint of that ache in her heart of -which jealousy formed no part, for it was natural that papa should love -Katherine best, that every one should; she was so gay and courageous; -but though it was natural that Katherine should be loved best, it was -hard to be loved least. - -"You are by yourself a good deal, then?" said Odd. "Do you walk by -yourself, too?" - -"Yes, with the dogs. I used to have grandmamma, you know; she died a -year ago." - -"Oh, yes! Mrs. Archinard's mother." - -Hilda nodded; her grasp on Odd's hand tightened and they walked in -silence. Odd remembered the fine portrait of a lady in the drawing-room; -he had noticed its likeness and unlikeness to Mrs. Archinard; a delicate -face, but with an Emersonian expression of self-reliance, a puritan look -of stanchness and responsibility. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -On the way home, cool evening shadows slanting across the road, Alicia -declared that she had really enjoyed herself. - -"Captain Archinard is quite jolly. He has seen everybody and everything -under the sun. He is most entertaining, and Lord Allan is remarkably -uncallow." - -"He thinks of standing for Parliament next year. A nice, steady, honest -young fellow. How do you like the Archinards, Peter?" - -"The child--Hilda--is a dear child." - -"She is awfully pretty," said Alicia, who could afford to be generous; -"I like that colorless type." - -"She is delicate, I am afraid," said Mary. - -"She has the mouth of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a -Gainsborough; you know the portrait of Sheridan's wife at Dulwich?" - -Alicia had never been to Dulwich. Mary assented. - -"The other one--the ugly one--is very clever," Alicia went on; she was -in a good temper evidently. Not that Alicia was ever exactly -bad-tempered. "She said some very clever things and looked more." - -"She is too clever perhaps," Mary remarked. "As for Mrs. Archinard, I -should like to slap her. I think that my conventionality is of a -tolerant order, but Mrs. Archinard's efforts at aesthetic originality -make me feel grimly conventional." - -"Mary! Mary! how delightful to hear such uncharitable remarks from you. -_I_ should rather like to slap her too, though she struck me as awfully -conventional." - -"Oh, she is, practically. It is the artistic _argot_ that bores one so -much." - -"She is awfully self-satisfied too. Dear me, Peter, I wish we had driven -after all. I hate the next half-mile. It is just uphill enough to be -irritating--fatigue without realizing exactly the cause of it. Why -didn't we drive, Peter?" - -"I thought we all preferred walking. You are a very energetic young -person as a rule." - -"Not for tiresome country roads. They should be got over as quickly as -possible." - -"Well, we will cut through the beech-woods as we came." - -"Oh dear," Alicia yawned, "how tired I am already of those tiresome -beech-woods. I wish it were autumn and that the hunting had begun. -Captain Archinard gives me glowing accounts, and promises me a lead for -the first good run. We must fill the house with people then, Peter." - -"The house shall be filled to overflowing. Perhaps you would like some -one now. Mrs. Laughton and her girls; you like them, don't you?" - -Alicia wrinkled up her charming nose. - -"Can't say I do. I've stopped with them too much perhaps. They bore me. -I am afraid no one would come just now, everything is so gay in London. -I wish I were there." - -Alicia was not there because the doctor had strongly advised country air -and the simple inaction of country life. Alicia had lost her baby only -three weeks after its birth--two months ago--and had herself been very -ill. - -"But I think I shall write to some people and ask them to take pity on -me," she added, as they walked slowly through the woods. "Sir John, and -Mr. and Mrs. Damian, Gladys le Breton, and Lord Calverly." - -"Well!" Peter spoke in his usual tone of easy acquiescence. - -Mary walked on a little ahead. What good did it do to trouble her -brother uselessly by her impatient look? But how could Peter yield so -placidly? Mary respected him too much to allow herself an evil thought -of his wife; but Alicia was a person to be talked about. Mary did not -doubt that she had been talked about already, and would be more so if -she were not careful. - -Lord Calverly and Sir John dangling attendance would infallibly cause -comment on any woman--let alone the beautiful Mrs. Odd. Yet Peter said, -"Well!" - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -The evening did not pass pleasantly at the Priory. Captain Archinard's -jolliness did not extend to family relationships; he often found family -relationships a bore, and the contrasted stodginess of his own -surroundings seemed greater after Mrs. Odd's departure. - -He muttered and fumed about the drawing-room after dinner. - -He was confoundedly pinched for money, and upon his word he would not be -surprised if he should have to sell the horses. "And what my life will -be stuck down here without the hunting, I can't imagine. Damnable!" - -The Captain growled out the last word under his breath in consideration -of Katherine and Hilda, who had joined their father and mother after -their own tea and a game of lawn-tennis. But Mrs. Archinard was not the -woman to allow to pass unnoticed such a well-founded cause of grievance. - -With a look of delicate disgust she laid down the volume of Turgenieff -that she was reading. - -"Shall I send the children away, Charles? Either they or you had best -go, if you are going to talk like that." - -"Beg pardon," said the Captain shortly. "No, of course they don't go." - -"I am sure I have few enough enjoyments without being made to suffer -because you are to lose one of yours." - -"Who asks you to suffer, Kate? But you don't wait for the asking. You're -only too willing to offer yourself as a _souffre-douleur_ on all -occasions." - -Then Mrs. Archinard retired behind her book in scornful resignation and, -after twenty minutes of silence, the little girls were very glad to get -away to bed. - -Hilda was just undressed when Mrs. Archinard sent for her to come to her -room. Her head ached, and Hilda must brush her hair; it was early yet. -This was a customary task, and one that Hilda prided herself upon -accomplishing with sovereign beneficence. Taylor's touch irritated Mrs. -Archinard; Hilda only was soothing. - -In dressing-gown and slippers she ran to her mother's room. - -Mrs. Archinard's long hair--as black and as fine as Hilda's--fell over -the back of the large arm-chair in which she reclined. - -"Such a headache!" she sighed, as Hilda took up the brush and began to -pass it slowly and gently down the length of hair. "It is really brutal -of your father to forget my head as he does." - -Hilda's heart sank. The unideal attitude of her father and mother toward -one another was one of her great sorrows. Papa was certainly fond of his -pretty wife, but he was so fretful and impatient, and mamma so -continually grieved. It was all wrong. Hilda had already begun to pass -judgment, unconsciously, on her father; but her almost maternal -tenderness for her mother as yet knew no doubt. - -"It would be very dreadful if the horses had to go, wouldn't it?" she -said. Her father's bad temper might be touching if its cause were -suggested. - -"Of course it would; and so are most things dreadful. I am sure that -life is nothing but dreadfulness in every form." Yet Mrs. Archinard was -not at all an unhappy woman. Her life was delicately epicurean. She had -few wants, but those few were never thwarted. From the early cup of -exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all the day of dilettante -lounging over a clever book--a day relieved from monotony by pleasant -episodes--dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from acquaintances, -with whom she had a reputation for languid cynicism and quite awesome -literary and artistic cleverness--to this hour of hair-brushing, few of -her moments were not consciously appreciative of the most finely -flavored mental and physical enjoyment. But the causes for enjoyment -certainly seemed so slight that Mrs. Archinard's graceful pessimism -usually met with universal sympathy. Hilda was very sorry for her -mother. To lie all day reading dreary books; condemned to an inaction -that cut her off from all the delights of outdoor life, seemed to her -tragic. Mrs. Archinard did not undeceive her; indeed, perhaps, the most -fascinating of Mrs. Archinard's artistic occupations was to fancy -herself very tragic. Hilda went back to her room much depressed. - -The girls slept together, and Katherine was sitting up in her night-gown -writing her journal by candlelight and enjoying a sense of talent -flowing at all costs--for writing by candlelight was strictly -forbidden--as she dotted down what she felt to be a very original and -pungent account of the day and the people it had introduced. - -When, however, she heard the patter of Hilda's heedless slippers in the -corridor, she blew out the candle in a hurry, pinched the glowing wick, -and skipped into bed. She might take an artistic pleasure in braving -rules, but Katherine knew that Hilda would have shown an almost dull -amazement at her occupation; and although Katherine characterized it as -dull, she did not care to arouse it. She wished to stand well in Hilda's -eyes in all things. Hilda must find nothing to criticise in her either -mentally or morally. - -"What shall we do if the horses are sold?" she exclaimed, as Hilda got -into the little bed beside hers. "Only imagine! no hunting next winter! -at least, none for us!" - -"Poor papa," Hilda sighed. - -"Oh, you may be sure that he will keep one hunter at least, but of -course he will be dreadfully cut off from it with only one, and of -course our horses will have to go if the worst comes to the worst. You -won't miss it as much as I will, Hilda; the riding, yes, no doubt, but -not the hunting. Still Lord Mainwaring will give us a mount, and now -that Mr. Odd is here, he will be sure to have a lot of horses. The old -squire let everything of that sort run down so, Miss Odd had only two -hunters. Well, Hilda, and what do you think of Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh, I love him, Katherine!" Hilda lay looking with wide eyes into the -soft darkness of the room. The windows were open, and the drawn chintz -curtains flapped gently against the sills. - -"I wouldn't say that if I were you, Hilda," Katherine remarked, with -some disapproval. - -"Why not?" Hilda's voice held an alarmed note. Katherine was, to a great -extent, her mentor. - -"It doesn't sound very--dignified. Of course you are only a little girl, -but still--one doesn't say such things." - -"But I do love him; how can one help loving a person who treats one so -kindly. And then--anyway--even if he had not been kind to me I should -love him, I think." - -Hilda would have liked to be able properly to analyze her sensations and -win her sister's approval; but how explain clearly? - -"That would be rather foolish," Katherine said, in a tone of kind but -restraining wisdom; "one shouldn't let one's feelings run away with one -like that. Shall I tell you what _I_ think about Mr. Odd?" - -"Oh yes, please." - -"I think he is like the river where we jumped in to-day--ripples on the -top, kindness and smiles, you know--but somewhere in his heart a big -hole--a hole with stones and weeds in it." Katherine was quoting from -her journal, but Hilda might as well think the simile improvised: -Katherine felt some pride in it; it certainly justified, she thought, -the conventionally illicit act of the candle. - -Hilda lay in silent admiration. - -"Oh, Katherine, I never know how I feel things till you tell me like -that," she said at last. "How beautiful! Yes, I am sure he has a hole in -his heart." And tears came into Hilda's eyes and into her mind the -line:-- - - "Allone, withouten any companye." - -"As for Mrs. Odd," Katherine continued, pleased with the success of her -psychology, "she has no heart to make a hole in." - -"Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful!" - -"She is a thorough egotist. She doesn't know much either, Hilda, for -when Darwin came in she laughed a lot at the name and said she wouldn't -be paid to read him--the real Darwin." - -"Perhaps she likes other things best." - -"Herself," said Katherine decisively. "Miss Odd of course we have had -time to make up our minds about." - -"I like her; don't you? She has such a clear, trustful face." - -"She is rather rigid; about as hard on other people as she would be on -herself. She could never do anything wrong." - -"I don't quite like _that_; being hard on other people, I mean. One -could be quite sure about one's own wrongness, but how can one about -other people's? It is rather uncharitable, isn't it, Katherine?" - -"She isn't very charitable, but she is very just. As for Lord Allan, he -is a sort of type, and, therefore, not very entertaining." - -"A type of what?" - -"Oh, just the eldest son type; very handsome, very honest, very good, -with a strong sense of responsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him, -which is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the younger -son--more interest." - -Katharine went to sleep with a warmly comfortable sense of competence. -She doubted whether many people saw things as clearly as she did. - -She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming scream from Hilda. - -"What is the matter, Hilda?" She spoke crossly. "How you startled me." - -"Oh, such a horrid dream!" Hilda half sobbed. "How glad I am that it -isn't so!" - -"What was it?" Katherine asked, still crossly; severity she thought the -best attitude towards Hilda's fright. - -"About the river, down in the hole; I was choking, and my legs and arms -were all tangled in roots." - -"Well, go to sleep now," Katherine advised. - -Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, supplicating voice -was heard. - -"Katherine--I'm so sorry--don't be angry--might I come to you? I'm so -frightened." - -"Come along," said Katherine, still severely, but she put her arms very -fondly around her shivering sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed -her. - -"Silly little Hilda," she said. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Three days before the arrival of Gladys le Breton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord -Calverly, and Sir John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia's -invitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother. - -She came into the library early one morning before breakfast. Odd was -there, writing. - -"Peter," she said, "last night, before going to bed, I wrote to Mr. -Apswith and accepted him." - -Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled round his chair in -amazement. - -"Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary?" - -"Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I felt that the time had -come." - -Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with -Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, -and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love when she first came -out twelve years ago. Mr. Apswith's patience, perseverance, and fidelity -were certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had thought that -as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty in maintaining her severe -independence, it would, in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith's -ardor. - -Mary, however, was a person to keep her own counsel. During her father's -lifetime, when much responsibility and many duties had claimed her, she -had certainly doubted more than once the possibility of Mr. Apswith's -ultimate success; there was a touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great -deal of the Minerva. But, since her father's death, since Peter's bridal -home-coming, Mary often found herself thinking of Mr. Apswith, her -fundamental sympathy with him on all things, her real loneliness and his -devotion. They had corresponded for years, and often saw one another. -Familiarity had not bred contempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust -and dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary's letters had called -forth from Mr. Apswith a most domineering and determined love-letter. -Mary had yielded to it--gladly, as she now realized. Yet her heart -yearned over Peter. He got up now, and kissed her. - -"Mary, my dear girl"--he could hardly find words--"may you be very, very -happy. You deserve it; so does he." - -Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful decision, on the fact -that by it Peter would be left to the solitary companionship of his -wife; it was not a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her arms -around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her happiness made his missing -it so apparent, but she shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge. - -"We must ask Apswith down at once," said Odd. "It's a busy session, but -he can manage a few days." - -"Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within -the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. -She stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get -my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks' time. -Delay would be rather silly--he has waited so long." - -"You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don't like to -lose you." - -"It isn't losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I -shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the -Mainwarings." - -When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for -a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one -does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to -himself that Mary's prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even -character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a -sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia's influence was a very air-pump. Poor -Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather -unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green -stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and -his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two -months ago, just after the baby's death and just before Alicia's -departure for the Riviera. - -Alicia was lying on the sofa--Peter staring at the distant trees, did -not see them but that scene--her magnificent health had made lying on -sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort -of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin -white cheek. His heart was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not -said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in -any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how -keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal -pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the -baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of -longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers -about it, was that of his child--dead. - -On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover's -tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all -tenderness out of it. - -"My dear girl, my poor, dear girl," he said, kissing her; and he sat -down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up -at him with those wonderful eyes--looked up with a smile. - -"Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter." - -Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her--her beauty -entranced him as it had done from the beginning. - -"Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?" His earnestness pleased her; she felt -in it her own power. - -"What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever imagine I didn't?" - -"Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of our child? Will you -feel for my sorrow as I feel for yours, my poor darling?" - -"Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It is especially hard on you, -too, losing your heir." - -Her look, her words crushed all the sudden impulse of resolve, hope, -love even. - -"My heir?" Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone. "That has nothing to do -with it. I wasn't thinking of that." - -"Weren't you?" said Alicia, rather wearily. She felt her weakness, it -irked her, and her next words were more fretfully uttered-- - -"Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot to go through, too, and -for nothing." She saw the pain setting her husband's lips sternly. "I -suppose now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing about baby," -she remarked. - -"I hope I am not a brute," said Peter gloomily. - -"You hope _I'm_ not, too, no doubt." - -"Don't, don't, Alicia." - -"I felt awfully about it; simply awfully," Alicia declared. - -Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library -windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an -epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia -could disappoint him no longer. - -In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness -had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a -nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points -with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a -thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia's -perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all -consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He -was carefully just to Alicia. - -Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia's guests had arrived. Mrs. -Marchant, an ugly, "smart," vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and -good singer; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to -head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and -supposed to be clever. - -"Clever, I suppose," Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, "because she has the -reputation of doing foolish things badly--dancing on dinner-tables and -thoroughly _bete_ things like that. She has not danced on Peter's table -as yet." - -Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily, -and Peter's placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le -Breton's coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a -charitable point of view. - -"Poor little girl," said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with -some severity; "it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is -to make a fool of herself," and with this rather unexpected piece of -opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially -hated the big man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. His -cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of -protecting partisanship in Mary's breast, and his looks at Alicia made -her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly -more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a -reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent -good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter's -good-humor might fail. - -The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peter -_dans cette galere_. - -Peter, however, did not much mind the _galere_. His duties as host lay -lightly on him. He did not mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at -the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and -pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs -and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary -tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John -and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite -falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced -definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter. - -Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show -that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less -gayety than when Mary was there. - -She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard--who -had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his -horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at -odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir -John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight -effects in the drawing-room. - -Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day -Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked -to bring his girls to tea. - -Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the -drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory -introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while -he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain -followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two -children. Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the -hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at -Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a -white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right -about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed -gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their -dogs-- - -"I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day." - -"We didn't know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to -bring them," said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like -effect: "We _should_ have liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully." - -That Palamon's despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen. - -"Hey! What's that?" Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard -the faint ejaculation; "what is your dog called?" - -"Palamon." Hilda's voice was reserved; she had already thought that she -did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, -she was sure of it. - -"What funny names you give your dogs," said Alicia. "The other is called -Darwin," she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; "but Palamon -is pretty--prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him -that?" - -"It is out of 'The Knight's Tale,'" said Katherine; "Hilda is very fond -of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite." - -Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of -his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby's, -hugely amused him. - -"So you like Chaucer?" Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very -uncomfortable. "Strong meat that for babes," Lord Calverly added, -looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant -vagueness. - -"Never read it," she replied briskly; "not to remember. If I had had -literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books -without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently." - -Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did -not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as -"improper" showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm -and wonder. Alicia's expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her -even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly's appreciative monocle--the -monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with -abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man -who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a -child's quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if -Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up -with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a -half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two -little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them -hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda's glad face. - -"I'm sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?" - -He shook hands, smiling at them. - -"Don't, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring," -called the Captain; "they can find their way to the garden without an -escort." - -"But it won't put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if -I couldn't," and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious -and hesitating. - -Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for -strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of -unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her, -and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out -with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention -between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not -interest her, but she found Alicia's low, musical laughter, and the -enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly's half-muffled -utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well -in her journal. - -"He is probably flattering her," thought Katherine; "that is what she -likes best." - -Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly's stare and Alicia's -frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He -took her first to the picture gallery--having noticed as they went -through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with -evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the -Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from -picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle -smile, so that, after the half-hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure -that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was -singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in -answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw. - -"All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!" she said; "almost -everything would be beautiful, wouldn't it, if one were great enough?" - -The strawberry beds were visited, and-- - -"Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first -acquaintance?" asked Peter; "we have plenty of time before tea." But, -seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda's eyes, "Well, not there, -then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our -boating-house is a mile from yours, and I'll give you a paddle in my -Canadian canoe,--such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, -or you'll spill us both into the river." - -"I shouldn't mind, as you would be there," laughed Hilda; and so they -went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made -the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that -she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the -best and oldest of friends. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with -an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation -deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind. - -The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the -acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and -kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the -shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable -mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and -self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence. - -Mary's wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone -for two months' cruising in a friend's yacht about the North Sea, Peter -set to work with vigor. "The Sonnet" was in a year's time to make him -famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went -to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found -a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were -thoroughly irreproachable--a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty -but very sensible wife. - -Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her own fashion, felt no -weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, -and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd -when the news reached him at his sister's, was as unjust as it was -poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd's death had -broken her husband's heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false -premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia's -death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was -a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures -haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which -she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away -from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of -the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came -the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death -more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks, -seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive -suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married -there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must -have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of -the wisdom of the decision. - -At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way--the -dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of -helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she -heard that her friend was going away. - -The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her -capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to -her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense -of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity -for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly -bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the -hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she -never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had -seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession. - -"Odd goes to-morrow," the Captain announced one evening in the -drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather -cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she -was not reading, and her father's words seemed to stop her heart in its -heavy beating. - -"I met Thompson"--Mr. Thompson was Peter's land-agent--"and everything -is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he's badly broken up." - -"How futile to mourn over death," Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa. -"Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and -circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great -illusion?" Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely -yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking "rot" before -the children. - -"Move this lamp away, Hilda," said Mrs. Archinard. "I think I can take a -nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal." - -It was a warm autumn night, and the windows were open. Hilda slipped -out when she had moved the lamp away. - -She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge, -but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the -lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness -her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came -to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda's heart -stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at -night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage, -and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only -mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree -trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were -all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an -indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all -the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without -stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance -she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the -lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her -breath. Yes, _he_ was there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet -of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of -the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and -Hilda pushed it open and went in. - -At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half -incredulous stupefaction. Hilda's white face, tossed hair, the -lamentable condition of her muslin frock, made of her indeed a -startling apparition. - -"My dear Hilda!" he exclaimed. - -Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared silently at him. Mr. Odd's -face looked so much older; its gravity made her heart stand still with -an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood helplessly before him, -tears brimming to her eyes. - -"My dear child, what is the matter? You positively frightened me." - -"I came to say 'Good-bye,'" said Hilda brokenly. - -Peter's gravity was mere astonishment and sympathetic dismay. The -tear-brimmed eyes, after his weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with -a most exquisite rush of pity and tenderness. - -"Come here, you dear child," he said, holding out his arms to her; "you -came to say 'Good-bye?' I am very grateful to you." - -Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and wept. After the frozen -nightmare moment, the old kindness was a delicious contrast; she almost -forgot the purport of her journey, though she knew that she was crying. -Odd stroked her long hair; her tears slightly amused and slightly -alarmed him, even while the pathos of the affection they revealed -touched him deeply. - -"Did you come alone?" he asked. - -Hilda nodded. - -"That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank you for it. There, can't -you smile at me? Don't cry." - -"Oh, I love you _so_ much, I can hardly bear it." Peter felt -uncomfortable. The capacity for suffering revealed in these words gave -him a sense of responsibility. Poor child! Would her lot in life be to -cry over people who were not worth it? - -"I shall come back some day, Hilda." Hilda stopped crying, and Peter was -relieved by the sobs' cessation. "I have a wandering fit on me just now; -you understand that, don't you?" - -She held his hand tightly. She could not speak; her heart swelled so at -his tone of mutual understanding. - -"I am going to see my sister. I haven't seen her for five years; but -long before another five years are passed I shall be here again, and the -thing I shall most want to see when I get back will be your little -face." - -"But you will be different then, I will be different, we will both be -changed." Hilda put her hands before her face and sobbed again. Peter -was silent for a moment, rather aghast at the child's apprehension of -the world's deepest tragedy. He could not tell her that they would be -unchanged--he the man of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor -little Hilda! Her grief was but too well founded, and his thoughts -wandered for a moment with Hilda's words far away from Hilda herself. -Hilda wiped her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He had a keen -sense of the unconventional in beauty, and her tears had not disfigured -her small face--had only made it strange. He patted her cheek and smiled -at her. - -"Cheer up, little one!" She evidently tried to smile back. - -"I am afraid you have idealized me, my child--it's a dangerous faculty. -I am a very ordinary sort of person, Hilda; you must not imagine fine -things about me nor care so much. I'm not worth one of those tears, poor -little girl!" - -It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn gaze; a sage prophecy -of inevitable recovery would be brutal; to show too much sympathy -equally cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her grief, and -he found himself looking gravely into her large eyes. - -"You're not worth it?" she repeated. - -"No, really." - -"I don't imagine things about you." - -"Well, I am glad of that," said Peter, feeling rather at a loss. - -"I love you dearly," said Hilda, with a certain air of dreary dignity; -"you are you. I don't have to imagine anything." - -Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. - -"Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and certainly I don't have to -imagine anything." - -Hilda's eyes, with their effect of wide, almost unseeing expansion, -rested on his for a moment longer. She drew herself up, and a look of -resolution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young face. Odd -still felt somewhat disconcerted, somewhat at a loss. - -"I must go now; they don't know that I am here." - -"They didn't know that you were coming, I suppose?" - -"No; they wouldn't have let me come if I had told them before, but I -will tell them now." - -"Well, we will tell them together." - -"Are you going to take me home?" - -"Did you imagine that I would let you go alone?" - -"You are very kind." - -"And what are you, then? Your shoes are wringing wet, my child. Your -dress is thin, too, for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine around -you. There! and put on this hat." - -Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat that came down over -her ears; she looked charming and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda -responded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering together the -wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd lit a cigar, put on his own hat, -took her hand, and they sallied forth. - -"You came across, I suppose?" - -"Yes, by the woods." - -"And you weren't frightened?" - -He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as she replied-- - -"You know already that I am a coward." - -"I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly courageous. The flesh -may be weak, but the spirit is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda?" - -"Yes," said Hilda vaguely. - -They walked in silence through the woods. Clouds hid the moon, and the -wind had risen. - -Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost in the ghost-like -unreality of existence. The walk through the melancholy dimness seemed -symbolical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of Hilda Archinard's -little hand in his was comforting. When they had passed through the -Priory shrubbery and were nearing the house, Hilda's step beside him -paused. - -"Will you kiss me 'Good-bye' here, not before them all?" - -"What beastly things 'Good-byes' are," Odd said, looking down at the -glimmering oval of her uplifted face; "what thoroughly beastly things." -He took the little face between his hands and kissed her: "Good-bye, -dear little Hilda." - -"Thank you so much--for everything," she said. - -"Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you." - -"Don't be different. _Try_ not to change." - -"Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -That she, not he, would change was the inevitable thing. He stooped and -kissed again the child beside him. - - - - -Part I - -KATHERINE - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Odd knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysees in a -rattling, closed _fiacre_. He and Besseint had talked so late into the -evening that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in the -Marboeuf quarter and dress. - -Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers of the day; he and -Peter had battled royally and delightfully over the art of writing, and -as Besseint was certainly more interesting than would be the dinner at -the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable. - -Lady---- welcomed him unresentfully-- - -"Just, only just in time. I am going to send you down with Miss -Archinard--over there talking to my husband--she is such a clever girl." - -Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise; a shock so strong that -Lady---- saw a really striking change come over his face. Peter himself -was startled by his own pleasure and eagerness. - -"Evidently you know her; and evidently you _were_ going to be bored and -are _not_ going to be now! Your change of expression is really -unflattering!" Lady---- laughed good humoredly. - -"I haven't seen her for ten years; we were the greatest chums. Oh! it -isn't Hilda, then!" Odd caught sight of the young lady. - -"I am _very_ sorry it isn't 'Hilda.' Hilda is the beauty; she is, -unfortunately, almost an unknown quantity; but Katherine will be a -stepping-stone, and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on her -own account." - -Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone; that atoned somewhat for the -disappointment that Odd felt as he followed his hostess across the room. - -"Miss Archinard--an old friend. Mr. Odd tells me he has not seen you for -ten years." - -"Mr. Odd!" cried Miss Archinard. She was evidently very glad to see him. - -"It is astonishing, isn't it?" said Peter. "Ten years does mean -something, doesn't it?" - -"So much and yet so little. It hasn't changed you a bit," said -Katherine. "And here is papa. Papa, isn't this nice? Mr. Odd, do you -remember the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor Hilda! And her -romantic farewell escapade?" - -Captain Archinard was changed; his hair had become very white, and his -good looks well worn, but his greeting had the cordiality of old -friendship. - -"And Hilda?" Peter questioned, as he and Katherine went into the -dining-room together. "Hilda is well? And as lovely as ever?" - -"Well, and as lovely as ever," Katherine assured him. "She is not here -because she rarely goes out. Papa and I are the frivolous members of the -family. Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art." Peter had a good -look at her as they sat side by side. - -Katherine was no more beautiful than in childhood, but she was -distinctly interesting and--yes--distinctly charming. Her black eyes, -deeply set under broad eyebrows, held the same dominant significance; -humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her white teeth gave a brilliant gayety -to her smile. There was distinction in her coiffure--the thick deeply -rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled smoothly from crown to neck; -and Peter recognized in her dress a personal taste as distinctive--the -long unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were untinged by any -hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, and yet the dress wrinkled about -her waist as she moved with a daring elegance far removed from the -moulded conventionality of the other women's bodices. This glowing gown -was cut off the shoulders; Katherine's shoulders were beautiful, and -they were triumphantly displayed. - -"And now, please tell me," said Peter, "how it comes that I haven't seen -you for ten years?" - -"How comes it that we have not seen _you_? You have been everywhere, and -so have we; really it is odd that we should never have met. Of course -you know that we left the Priory only a year after you went to India?" - -Peter nodded. - -"I was dismayed to find you gone when I got back. I heard vague rumors -of Florence, and when I went there one winter you had disappeared." - -"We must have been in Dresden. How I hated it! All the shabby -second-rate culture of the world seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had -to let the Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor." - -Katherine's smiling assertion was not carried out in her appearance, yet -the statement put a bond of familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as -to an old friend who had a right to know. - -"Then we had a year or two at Dinard--loathsome place I think it! Then -Florence again, and at last Paris, and here we have been for over three -years, and here we shall probably stick for who knows how long! Hilda's -painting gives us a reasonable background; at least as reasonable as -such exiles can hope for." - -"But you don't mean to say that your exile is indefinite?" - -Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a suggestion of shrug in the -creamy expanse of shoulder. - -"And Hilda paints? Well?" - -"Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, and her work is -really individual, unaffectedly individual, and that's the rare thing, -you know. Over four years of atelier work didn't scotch Hilda's -originality, and she has a studio of her own now, and is never happy out -of it." - -"What kind of work does she go in for?" Peter was conscious of a vague -uneasiness about Hilda. "Portraits?" - -"No; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her things are very -decorative--not Japanese either--except in their air of choice and -selection; well, you must see them, they really are original, and, in -their own little way, quite delightful; they are, perhaps, a wee bit -like baby Whistlers--not that I intimate any real resemblance--but the -sense of color, the harmony; but you must see them," Katherine repeated. - -"And Mrs. Archinard?" Peter felt some remorse at having forgotten that -rather effaced personality. - -"Mamma is just the same, only stronger than she used to be in England. -I think the Continent suits her better. And now _you_, Mr. Odd. The idea -of talking about such nobodies as we are when you have become such a -personage! You have become rather cynical too, haven't you? As a child -you did not make a cynical impression on me, and your 'Dialogues' did. I -think you are even more cynical than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to -me of a _rapport_ between your 'Dialogues' and his 'Dialogues -Philosophiques.' I don't imply that, except that you are both sceptical -and both smiling, only your smile is more bitter, your scepticism less -frivolous." - -"I'm sceptical as to people, not as to principles," said Peter, smiling -not bitterly. - -"Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate people." - -"I don't admire them." - -"You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The -Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And -then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn't -it? Why didn't you keep on?" - -"Because I didn't keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were -dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure." - -"I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren't -'practical,' and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we -should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring." - -"Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got back three weeks ago." - -"How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since -getting back?" - -"Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London." - -"We were with Lady Mainwaring." - -"Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my -having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has -been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?" - -"Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us." - -"And Hilda enjoyed herself?" - -Katherine smiled: "How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed -herself after a fashion, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn't -care much for that sort of thing really." - -Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful -complaint of Mrs. Archinard's weekly letter had cut short Hilda's -season, and brought her back to the little room in the little -_appartement, 3ieme au dessus de l'entresol_, where Mrs. Archinard spent -her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at -Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard's -lace-frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long-suffering that -went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people's -deficiencies. - -"But Hilda's month meant more than other girls' years," Katherine went -on; "you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor -Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those -big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old -friend," and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, "Allan Hope." - -Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt -its concealment. - -"Allan Hope?" he repeated. "It is impossible for me to imagine little -Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!" - -"Allan Hope is very nice," Katherine said lightly. - -"Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a -child." - -Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine. - -"And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is." - -"That depends." Katherine laughed. "But regrets of that kind are -unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don't think little Hilda is -much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn't -imply that one is ready for them, and I don't think that Hilda is -ready." - -Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine's black eyes rested on -him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully -in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of -white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might -not constitute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear -glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all. - -There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years -ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet -mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look -of middle age. - -"His Parliamentary experience probably knocked the remaining illusions -out of him," Katherine reflected. "He was certainly very unsuccessful, -he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit -now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill -hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home -and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a -woman who would be nice to him." And it was characteristic of Katherine -that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether -it would be feasible, or rather desirable--for Katherine intended to -please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she -could make up her mind--to contemplate that role for herself. Miss -Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of -matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent -indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly -attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would -choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a -husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful; -and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of -every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss -Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd -would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was -excellent--not glittering--Katherine would have liked glitter, and the -more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, -that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of -modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit only to impress ignorance or -vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one -wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that -she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to -him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could -at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy -memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friendship; but -Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked -anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation. - -Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to -the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, -rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking. -Indeed his next words showed as much. - -"How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you -know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find -myself an uncle with a vengeance." - -"I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages -ago, that wedding." - -"Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently. - -"She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, -at Allersley?" - -"Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is -rather lonely." - -"Why don't you fill it with people?" - -"You forget that I don't like people," said Odd. - -"You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be -something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty -as landowner and country gentleman." - -"Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come -back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness." - -"The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I -think I prefer Paris to the Priory." - -"What do you do with yourself in Paris?" - -"Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very -well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one -must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good -fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed -round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with -which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. -He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him. - -"Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you -fight?" - -"The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the -pity." - -"And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral -crusade?" - -"I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of -conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine, -chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would -be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the -people I liked." - -"And all the others would be in cages!" - -"They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very -tolerant." - -"And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all -marching and caging." - -"I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but -not meanly so, I assure you." - -"No; not meanly so, I am sure." Odd's eyes were quietly scrutinizing, -as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and -looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic. - -"And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but, -meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?" - -"Meanwhile I study my _milieu_. I go out a good deal, if one can call it -going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-American _melange_; I read a -bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like -sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in -papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!" - -"You rode so well, too, Mary told me." - -"Yes, I rode well, otherwise I shouldn't regret it." Katherine smiled -with even more assurance under the added intensity of the _pince-nez_. - -"You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the feeling." - -"That sounds vain; I certainly shouldn't feel pleasure if I were -conscious of playing second fiddle to anybody." - -"A very vain young lady," Odd's smile was quite alertly interested, "and -a self-conscious young lady, too." - -"Yes, rather, I think," Katherine owned; frankness became her, "but I am -very conscious of everything, myself included. I am merely one among the -many phenomena that come under my notice, and, as I am the nearest of -them all, naturally the most intimately interesting. Every one is -self-conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at all." - -"And you are clever," Peter pursued, in a tone of enumeration, his smile -becoming definitely humorous as he added: "And I am very impudent." - -Katherine was not sure that she had made just the effect she had aimed -for, but certainly Mr. Odd would give her credit for frankness. - -It was agreed that he should come for tea the next afternoon. - -"After five," Katherine said; "Hilda doesn't get in till so late; and I -know that Hilda is the _clou_ of the occasion." - -"Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all that?" - -"She doesn't care about anything, _anything_ else," Katherine said -gravely, adding, still gravely, "Hilda is very, very lovely." - -"I hope you weren't too much disappointed," Lady---- said to Odd, just -before he was going; "is she not a charming girl?" - -"She really is; the disappointment was only comparative. It was Hilda -whom I knew so well. The dearest little girl." - -"I have not seen much of her," Lady---- said, with some vagueness of -tone. "I have called on Mrs. Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever, -too; but the other girl was never there. I don't fancy she is much help -to her mother, you know, as Katherine is. Katherine goes about, brings -people to see her mother, makes a _milieu_ for her; such a sad invalid -she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in her work, I believe. Rather -a pity, don't you think, for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like -that? She paints very nicely, to be sure; I fancy it all goes into that, -you know." - -"What goes into that?" Odd asked, conscious of a little temper; all -seemed combined to push Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory -and very mysterious background. - -"Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Katherine can entertain a -roomful of people. Grace, tact, sympathy, the impalpable something that -makes success of the best kind, Katherine has it." - -Katherine's friendly, breezy frankness had certainly amused and -interested Odd at the dinner-table, but Lady ----'s remarks now produced -in him one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions of feeling -by which the judgments of a half-hour before are suddenly reversed. -Katherine's cleverness was that of the majority of the girls he took -down to dinner, rather _voulu_, banal, tiresome. Odd felt that he was -unjust, also that he was a little cross. - -"There are some clevernesses above entertaining a roomful of people. -After all, success isn't the test, is it?" - -Lady---- smiled, an unconvinced smile-- - -"You should be the last person to say that." - -"I?" Odd made no attempt to contradict the evident flattery of his -hostess' tones, but his ejaculation meant to himself a volume of -negatives. If success were the test, he was a sorry failure. - -He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped -him. - -"I have hardly had one word with you, Odd," said the Captain, whose -high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its -fundamental look of peevish pettiness. "Mrs. Brooke is going to take -Katherine home. It's a fine night, won't you walk?" - -Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never -found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke -and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men -turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore together. - -"We are not far from you, you know," the Captain said--"Rue Pierre -Charron; you said you were in the Marboeuf quarter, didn't you? We are -rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I'll leave you at the door of your -hotel." - -They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night -was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysees, as they turned into it, -almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights. - -"Ten years is a jolly long time," remarked Captain Archinard, "and a -jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we'd -left the Priory, of course?" - -"I was very sorry to hear it." - -"Devilish hard luck. It wasn't a choice of evils, though, if that is -any consolation; it was that or starvation." - -"As bad as that?" - -"Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations--safe -enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one -thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I -simply can't go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of -creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is -mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the -interest; and hard luck it is altogether," the Captain repeated. -"Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep -all worry from her; she doesn't know anything about my troubles; she -lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself -rather than deprive her of one luxury." The tone in which the Captain -alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. "And -the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have -of it. But what is my life, I ask you?" The Captain's voice was very -resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good -gentleman's unhappy situation. "What is my life, I ask you? I go -dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and -five o'clock tea in grass widows' drawing-rooms for all distraction. -Paris is full of grass widows," he added, with an even deepened -resentment of tone; "and I never cared much about the play, and French -actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared -about that sort of thing, which I never did--much," and the Captain -drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the -tip as they passed beneath a lamp. - -"I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer," he declared, "smokable -tobacco. Thought I'd economize on these, and they're beastly, like all -economical things!" And the Captain cast away the cigar with a look of -disgust. - -Peter offered him a substitute. - -"You are a lucky dog, Odd, to come to contrasts," the Captain paused to -shield his lighted match as he applied it to the fresh cigar; "I don't -see why things should be so deuced uneven in this world. One fellow born -with a silver spoon in his mouth--and you've got a turn for writing, -too; once one's popular, that's the best paying thing going, I -suppose--and the other hunted all over Europe, through no fault of his -own either. Rather hard, I think, that the man who doesn't need money -should be born with a talent for making it." - -"It certainly isn't just." - -"Damned unjust." - -Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and smiled as he smoked and -walked beside the rebellious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd -had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble futility pathetic, -especially as there was a certain amount of truth in the Captain's -diatribes, the old eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in -this badly managed world. It would be kinder to immediately offer the -loan for which the Captain was evidently paving the way to a request. -But he reflected that the display of such quickness of comprehension -might make the request too easy; and in the future the Captain might -profit by a discovered weakness a little too freely. He would let him -ask. And the Captain was not long in coming to the point. He was in a -devilish tight place, positively couldn't afford a pair of boots -(Peter's eyes involuntarily sought the Captain's feet, neatly shod in -social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one hundred pounds? (The -Captain was frank enough to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc. - -Peter cut short the explanation with a rather unwise manifestation of -sympathetic comprehension; the Captain went upstairs with him to his -room when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check for 3000 -francs in his pocket; the extra 500 francs were the price of Peter's -readiness. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -It rained next day, and Peter took a _fiacre_ from the Bibliotheque -Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove -through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just five -when he got there, and already almost dark. There were four flights to -be ascended before one reached the Archinards' apartment; four steep and -rather narrow flights, for the house was not one of the larger newer -ones, and there was no lift. Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley, -opened the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently not denuded -himself of a valet when he had parted with his horses; that sacrifice -had probably seemed too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether -Wilson's wages were ever paid, and thought it more probable that a -mistaken fidelity attached him to his master. In view of year-long -arrears, he might have found it safer to stay with a future possibility -of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever to even the hope of -compensation. - -The little entrance was very pretty, and the drawing-room, into which -Peter was immediately ushered, even prettier. Evidently the Archinards -had brought their own furniture, and the Archinards had very good taste. -The pale gray-greens of the room were charming. Peter noticed -appreciatively the Copenhagen vases filled with white flowers; he could -find time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archinard's sofa, for no -one else was in the room, a fact of which he was immediately and -disappointedly aware. Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband's -monetary embarrassments had made even less impression on her than upon -the surroundings, for though the little salon was very pretty, it was -not the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, if anything, -plumper and prettier than when Peter had last seen her. - -"This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!" -Mrs. Archinard's slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate -warmth. "Katherine told us this morning about the _rencontre_. I was -expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really -impossible!" Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad -and pretty smile. "I could hardly realize it, were it not that your -books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years." - -Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar -bindings. - -"I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them -again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links -before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!" Mrs. Archinard laid -her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the "Dialogues," which was -uppermost. "Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on -your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art -productions of our age. Pater is more _etincellant_--a style too -jewelled perhaps--one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty; -but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life--a chain of -flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very -sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic." - -Peter was conscious of being sorry for it. - -"I think we are both of us tired." Mrs. Archinard's smile grew even more -sadly sweet; "both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. -How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched, -do they not? Everything crumbles." Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter -found nothing to say ("How dull a man who writes quite clever books can -be!" thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone-- - -"And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She -told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely. -Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very -proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I -always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much." -The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard's voice irritated Odd to -such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own -pleasant as he replied-- - -"Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl." - -"Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is! -Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term -is flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical -woman of the world." - -Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass--very -unjustly--Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the -atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made -upon _ce type la_. She welcomed Katherine's entrance as a diversion from -looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in -dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high -collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points -were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly -set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a -well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the -pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and -shadows. - -"I _am_ glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little -diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there--a big bit!" - -"And you are a perfectly delightful condensation of everything -delightfully Parisian." - -"The heart is British. True oak!" laughed Katherine; "don't judge me by -the foliage." - -"Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to choose such foliage." - -"No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, to mamma. But thanks, -very much. I am glad you are appreciative." Katherine smiled so gayly, -and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, that Peter forgot for a -moment to wonder where Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget. - -"I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them to wait tea until she -comes, poor dear! 'Them' is Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose; Taylor, our -old maid; and the cook! The cook is French, otherwise our staff is -shrunken, but of the same elements. One doesn't mind having no servants -in a little box like this. Yes, mamma, I have paid _all_ the calls, and -only two people were out; so I deserve petting and tea. I hope Hilda -will hurry." Mrs. Archinard's face took on a look of ill-used -resignation. - -"We all pay dearly for Hilda's egotism," she remarked, and for a moment -there was a rather uncomfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation -and a queerer melancholy rising within him. - -The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than the Hilda of ten years -ago. They talked in a rather desultory fashion for some time. Mrs. -Archinard's presence was damping, and even Katherine's smile was like a -flower seen through rain. The little clock on the mantelpiece struck the -quarter. - -"Almost six!" exclaimed Katherine; "we must have tea." - -"Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not sacrifice Mr. Odd," -said Mrs. Archinard with distinct fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell, -and Peter, with a quickness of combination that surprised himself, -surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she become emancipated? Bohemian? -His melancholy grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of -daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint and delicate -design. - -"Hilda designed it in Florence," said Katherine, seeing him looking at -it; "an Italian friend had it made for her after her own model and -drawings. Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. People who -know about it have admired that teapot, as you do, I see." - -"It's a lovely thing," said Peter, as Katherine turned it before him; -"the simplicity of the outline and the delicate bas-relief"--he bent his -head to look more closely--"exquisite." And he thought it rather rough -on Hilda; to pour the tea from her own teapot without waiting for her. - -Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at fully half-past six, -that he might have been asking for too much patience. - -"There she is," said Katherine; "I must go and tell her that you are -here." Katherine went out, and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the -entrance. He was conscious of feeling excited, and unconsciously rose to -his feet and looked eagerly toward the door. But only Katherine came in. - -"I don't believe I shall ever see Hilda!" he exclaimed, with an -assumption of exasperation that hid some real nervousness. Katherine -laughed. - -"Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to wash her face and hands. -Artists are untidy people, you know," and Odd, with that same strange -acuteness of perception with which he seemed dowered this afternoon, -felt that Hilda had been coming in in all her artistic untidiness, and -that Katherine had seen to a more respectable _entree_. - -It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that tactful young lady -probably guessed at his disappointment, for she went to the piano and -began to play a sad aria from one of Schumann's Sonatas that sighed and -pled and sobbed. She played very well, with the same perfect taste that -she showed in her gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond of -Schumann especially, not to listen to her. - -In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was over in a moment, the -meeting, as the most exciting things in life are. Peter had not realized -till the moment came how much it would excite him. - -Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put her hand in his with all the -pretty gravity he remembered in the child. Odd took the other hand too -and stared at her. He was conscious then of being very much excited, and -conscious that she was not. - -Her eyes were "big and vague," but they were the most beautiful eyes he -had ever seen, and the vagueness was only in a certain lack of -expression, for they looked straight into his. Carried along by that -first impulse of excitement, despite the little shock of half-felt -disappointment, Peter bent his head and kissed her on each cheek. - -"Bravo!" said Katherine, still striking soft chords at the piano, -"Bravo, Mr. Odd! considering your first meeting and your last parting, -you have a right to that!" And Katherine laughed pleasantly, though she -was a trifle displeased. - -"Yes, I have, haven't I?" said Peter, smiling. He still held Hilda's -hands. The little flush that had come to her cheeks when he had kissed -her was gone, and she looked very white. - -"Are you glad to see me, Hilda?" he asked; "I beg your pardon, but it -comes naturally to call you that." - -"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Odd," Hilda smiled. Her voice was very -like the child's voice saying, "I thank you very much," ten years ago. -The same voice, grave and gentle. Odd had expected some little warmth, -some little embarrassment even, in the girl, considering the parting -from the child. But Hilda did not show any warmth, neither did she seem -at all embarrassed, and Odd felt rather as one does when an unnecessary -downward stride reveals level ground where one expected another step. He -had stumbled a little, and now, half ruefully, half humorously, he -considered the child Hilda grown up. She sat down near her mother. - -"I am so sorry. I am afraid you waited for me," she said, bending -towards her; "I really couldn't help it, mamma." - -"No, I think it kindest to consider you irresponsible; there is -certainly an element of insanity in your exaggerated devotion to your -work." Mrs. Archinard smiled acidly, and Hilda, Odd thought, did look a -little embarrassed now. He had adjusted himself to the reality of the -present, and was able to study her. The same Botticelli Madonna mouth, -the same Gainsborough eyes; the skin of dazzling whiteness--an almost -unnatural white--but she was evidently tired. - -Certainly her black gown looked strangely beside Katherine's velvet, -Mrs. Archinard's silk and laces. Odd saw that there was mud on the -skirt, a very short skirt, and Hilda's legs were very long. She had -walked, then. His own paternal solicitude struck him as amusing, and -rather touching, as he glanced at her slim feet, to see with -satisfaction that wet boots had been replaced by patent-leather -shoes--heelless little shoes. - -"I am afraid you work too much, you tire yourself," he said, for after -her mother's rebuff she had sunk back in her chair with a weary -lassitude of pose. Hilda immediately sat up straightly, giving him an -almost frightened glance. How unchanged the little face, though the -cloud of her hair no longer framed it. Hilda's hair was as smooth as her -sister's, only it was brushed straight back, and the soft blue-black -coils were massed from ear to ear, and showed, in a coronet-like effect -above her head, almost too much hair; it emphasized the pale fragility -of her look. - -"Oh no, I am not tired," she said, "not particularly. I walked home, you -see. I am very fond of walking." - -"Hilda is fond of such funny things," said Katherine, coming from the -piano, "of walking in the mud and rain for instance. She is the most -persistently, consistently energetic person I ever knew." Katherine -paused pleasantly as though for Hilda to speak, but Hilda said nothing -and looked even more vague than before, almost dull in fact. - -"Well, she has had no tea," said Odd, "and after mud and rain that is -rather cruel, even as a punishment." - -Again Hilda gave him the alarmed quick glance; his eyes were humorously -kind, and she smiled a slight little smile. - -"Some tea!" Katherine cried; "my poor Hilda, I'm afraid it is -hard-boiled by this time"--she laid her hand on the teapot--"and -_almost_ cold. Shall I heat some more water, dear?" - -"Oh! don't think of it, Katherine, it is almost dinner-time." - -"Must I be off?" asked Odd, laughing. - -"How absurd; we don't dine till eight," Katherine said. - -"It wasn't a hint to me, then, Hilda?" Hilda looked helplessly -distressed. - -"A hint? Oh no, no. How could you think that?" - -"I was only joking. I didn't really believe you so anxious to get rid of -an old friend." Odd, with some determination, crossed the room and sat -down beside her. - -"I want to see a great deal of you if you will let me." - -"No one sees much of Hilda, not even her own mother," said Mrs. -Archinard from her sofa. "It is terrible indeed to feel oneself a -cumberer of the earth, unable to suffice to oneself, far less to others. -With my failing eyesight I simply cannot read by lamplight, and there -are three or four hours at this season when I am absolutely without -resources. Yet even those hours Hilda cannot give me." - -Hilda now looked so painfully embarrassed that Odd was perforce obliged, -for very pity's sake, to avert his eyes from her face. - -"Ah, Mr. Odd," Mrs. Archinard went on, "you do not know what that is. To -lie in the gray dusk and watch one's own gray, gray thoughts." - -"It must be very unpleasant," Odd owned unwillingly, feeling that his -character of old friend was being rather imposed upon; this degree of -intimacy was certainly unwarranted. - -"Now, mamma, you usually have friends every afternoon," said Katherine, -in her pleasant, even voice. She was preparing some fresh tea. "You make -me as well as Hilda feel a culprit." - -"No, my dear." Mrs. Archinard's deep sense of accumulated injury -evidently got quite the better of her manners. "No, my dear, you never -_could_ read aloud and never _did_. I never asked it of you. You are -really occupied as a girl should be. At all events you fulfil your -social duties. You see that people come to see me. As I cannot go out, -as Hilda will not, I really don't know what I should do were it not for -you. And, as it is, no one came this afternoon until Mr. Odd made his -welcome appearance." - -"But Mr. Odd came at five, and you always read till then." Katherine's -voice was gently playful. Hilda had not said one word, and her -expression seemed now absolutely dogged. - -"At this season, Katherine! You forget that it is night by four! And how -a girl with any regard for her mother's wishes can walk about the -streets of Paris alone after that hour it passes my comprehension to -understand." - -"Do you care about bicycling, Mr. Odd?" The change was abrupt but -welcome. "Because I am going to the Bois to-morrow morning, and alone -for once." Katherine smiled at him over the kettle which she was -lifting. "Papa has deserted me." - -"I should enjoy it immensely. And you," he looked at Hilda, "won't you -come?" - -"Oh, I can't," said Hilda, with a troubled look. "Thanks so much." - -"Oh no, Hilda can't," laughed Mrs. Archinard. - -"And where is the Captain off to?" queried Peter hastily. He felt that -he would like to shake Mrs. Archinard. Hilda's stubborn silence might -certainly be irritating, and Odd had sympathy for parental claims and -wishes, especially concerning the advisability of a beautiful girl -walking in the streets at night unescorted, sacrificed to youthful -conceit; but Mrs. Archinard's personality certainly weakened all claims, -and her taste was as certainly atrocious. - -"Papa," said Katherine, pouring out the tea, "is going to-morrow morning -to the Riviera. Lucky papa!" Odd thought with some amusement of the L120 -that constituted papa's "luck." "I have only been once to Monte Carlo, -and I won such a lot. Only imagine how forty pounds turned my head. I -revelled in hats and gloves for a whole year. Then we go to-morrow, Mr. -Odd? I have my own bicycle. I have kept it near the Porte Dauphine, and -you can hire a very nice one at the same place." - -"May I call for you here at ten, then? Will that suit you?" - -"Very well." Odd watched Katherine as she carried the tea and cake to -her sister. Hilda gave a little start. - -"O Katherine, how good of you! I didn't realize what you were doing." - -"It is you who are good, my pet," said Katherine in a low, gentle voice. -Peter thought it a pretty little scene. - -"A great deal of latitude must be granted to the young person who -invented that teapot," he said to Hilda. "One must work hard to do -anything in art, mustn't one? A most lovely teapot, Hilda." - -"I am glad you like it." Hilda smiled her thanks, but her eyes still -expressed that distance and reserve that showed no consciousness of the -past, no intention of admitting it as a link to the present. She did not -seem exactly shy, but her whole manner was passive--negative. Katherine -probably thought that Mr. Odd had by this time realized the futility of -an attempt to draw out the unresponsive artist, for she seated herself -between Odd and the sofa, thus protecting Hilda from Mrs. Archinard's -severities and Odd from the ineffectual necessity for talking to Hilda. -Odd thought that were Katherine and Mrs. Archinard not there he might -have "come at" Hilda, but the sense of ease Katherine brought with her -was undeniable. She was charmingly mistress of herself, made him talk, -appealed prettily to her mother, who even gave more than one melancholy -laugh, and, with a tactful give and take, yet kept the reins of -conversation well within her own hands. - -Odd found her a nice girl, but the undercurrent of his thought dwelt on -Hilda, and at every gayety of Katherine's, his eyes sought her sister's -face; Hilda's eyes were always fixed on Katherine, and she smiled a -certain dumbly admiring smile. As he sat near her, he could see that the -little black dress was very shabby. He could not have associated Hilda -with real untidiness, and indeed the dress with its white linen cuffs -and collar, its inevitable grace of severely simple outline, was neat to -an almost painful degree. Hilda's artistic proclivities perhaps showed -themselves in shiny seams and careful darns and patches. - -When he rose to go he took her hands again; he hoped that his -persistency did not make him appear rather foolish. - -"I am sorry you won't come to-morrow. May I hope for another day?" - -"I can't come to-morrow"--there was a touch of self-defence in Hilda's -smile--"but perhaps some other day. I should love to," she finished -rather abruptly. - -"But you will be different--I will be different. We will both be -changed," repeated itself in Odd's mind as he walked down the Rue Pierre -Charron. Poor little child-voice! how sadly it sounded. How true had -been the prophecy. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter Odd, at this epoch of his life, felt that he was resting on his -oars and drifting. He had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had -seen much, thought much, done much; yet he had made for no goal, and had -won no race; how should he, when he had not yet made up his mind that -racing for anything was worth while? - -Perhaps the two years in Parliament had most closely savored of -consciously applied contest, and in that contest Odd considered himself -beaten, and its efforts as though they had never been. Every one had -told him that to bring the student's ideals into the political arena was -to insure defeat; one's friends would consider a carefully -discriminating honesty and broad-mindedness mere disloyal luke-warmness, -foolish hair-splitting feebleness; one's enemies would rejoice and -triumph in the impartiality of an opponent. Certainly he had been -defeated, and he could not see that his example had in any way been -effectual. At all events, he had held to the ideals. - -His fine critical taste found even his own books but crude and partial -expressions of still groping thoughts. His unexpressed intention, good -indeed, if one might so call its indefiniteness, had been to make the -world better for having lived in it; better, or at least wiser. But he -doubted the saving power of his own sceptical utterances; the world -could not be saved by the balancings of a mind that saw the tolerant -point of view of every question, a mind itself so unassured of results. -A strong dash of fanaticism is necessary for success, and Odd had not -the slightest flavor of fanaticism. Perhaps he had given a little -pleasure in his more purely literary studies, and Peter thought that he -would stick to them in the future, but he had put the future away from -him just now. He had only returned from the great passivity of the -Orient a few weeks ago, and its example seemed to denote drifting as the -supreme wisdom. No effort, no desire; a peaceful receptivity, a peaceful -acceptance of the smiles or buffets of fate; that was Odd's ideal--for -the present. He was a little sick of everything. The Occidental's energy -for combat was lulled within him, and the Occidental's individualistic -tendencies seemed to stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an -amused and tolerant observation free from striving; and, for an -Occidental, this mood is dangerous. Odd also did a good deal of -listening to very modern and very clever French talk. He knew many -clever Frenchmen. He did not agree with all of them, but, as he was not -sure of his own grounds for disagreement, he held his peace and listened -smilingly. Certainly the exclusively artistic standpoint was a most -comforting and absorbing plaything to fall back on. - -Peter's friends talked of the amusing and touching spectacle of the -universe. The representation of each man's illusion on the subject, and -the manner of that representation, were never-ceasing sources of -interest. Peter also read a little at the Bibliotheque Nationale, paid a -few calls, dined out pretty constantly, and bicycled a great deal in the -mornings with Katherine Archinard. She understood things well, and her -taste was as sure and as delicate as even Odd could ask. Katherine had -absorbed a great deal of culture during her wanderings, and it would -have taken a long time for any one to find out that it was of a rather -second-hand quality, and sought more for attainment than for enjoyment. -Katherine talked with clever people and read clever reviews, and being -clever herself, with a very acute critical taste, she knew with the -utmost refinement of perception just what to like and just what to -dislike; and as she tolerated only the very best, her liking gave value. -Yet _au fond_ Katherine did not really care even for the very very best. -Her appreciation was negative. She excelled in a finely smiling, -superior scorn, and could pick flaws in almost any one's enjoyment, if -she chose to do so. Katherine, however, was kind-hearted and tactful, -and did not arouse dislike by displaying her cleverness except to people -who would like it. Enthusiasm was banal, and Katherine was not often -required to feign where she did not feel it; her very rigor and -exclusiveness of taste implied an appreciation too high for expression; -but Katherine had no enthusiasm. - -Her rebellious and iconoclastic young energy amused Odd. He thought her -rather pathetic in a way. There was a look of daring and revolt in her -eye that pleased his lazy spirit. Meanwhile Hilda troubled him. - -Would she never bicycle? Katherine, wheeling lightly erect beside him, -gave the little shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders -characteristic of her. She evidently found no fault with Hilda. Others -might do so--the shrug implied that, implied as well that Katherine -herself perhaps owned that her sister's impracticable unreason gave -grounds for fault-finding--but Hilda was near her heart. - -When could he see her? That, too, seemed wrapped in the general cloud of -vagueness, unaccountableness that surrounded Hilda. Odd called twice in -the evening; once to be received by Katherine alone, Hilda was already -in _deshabille_ it seemed, and once to find not even Katherine; she was -dining out, and Miss Hilda in bed. In bed at nine! "Was she ill?" he -asked of Taylor. Wilson had evidently accompanied the Captain. - -"No wonder if she were, sir," Taylor had replied, with a touch of the -grievance in her tone that Hilda always seemed to arouse in those about -her; "but no, she's only that tired!" and Odd departed with a deepened -sense of Hilda's wilful immolation. Katherine brought him home to lunch -on several occasions after the bicycling, but Hilda was never there. She -lunched at her studio. - -On a third call Hilda appeared, but only as he was on the point of -going. She wore the same black dress, and the same look of unnatural -pallor. - -"Hilda," said Odd, for amid these unfamiliar conditions he still used -the familiar appellation, "I must see the cause of all this." - -"Of what?" Her smile was certainly the sweet smile he remembered. - -"Of this unearthly devotion; these white cheeks." - -"Hilda is naturally pale," put in Mrs Archinard; "she has my skin. But, -of course, now she is a ghost." - -"Well, I want to see the haunted studio. I want to see the -masterpieces." Odd spoke with a touch of gentle irony that did not seem -to offend Hilda. - -"You will see nothing either uncanny or unusual." - -"Well, at all events, when can I come to see you in your studio?" The -vague look crossed Hilda's smile. - -"You see--I work very hard;" she hesitated, seemed even to cast a -beseeching glance at Katherine, standing near. Katherine was watching -her. - -"She is getting ready her pictures for the Champs de Mars. But, Hilda, -Mr. Odd may come some morning." - -"Oh yes. Some morning. I thought you always bicycled in the morning. I -wish you _would_ come, it would be so nice to see you there!" she spoke -with a gay and sudden warmth; "only you must tell me when to expect you. -My studio must be looking nicely and my model presentable." - -"I will take Mr. Odd to-morrow," said Katherine, "he would never find -his way." - -"Thanks, that will be very jolly," said Odd, conscious that an -unescorted visit would have been more so, yet wondering whether Hilda -alone might not be more disconcerting than Hilda aided and abetted by -her sister. - -So the next morning he called for Katherine, and they walked to a -veritable nest of _ateliers_ near the Place des Ternes, where they -climbed interminable stairs to the very highest studio of all, and here, -in very bare and business-like surroundings, they found Hilda. She left -her easel to open the door to them. A red-haired woman was lying on a -sofa in a far, dim corner, a vase of white flowers at her head. There -was a big linen apron of butcher's blue over the black dress, and Hilda -looked very neat, less pallid, too, than Odd had seen her look as yet. -Her skin had blue shadows under the chin and nose, and a blue shadow -made a mystery beneath the long sweep of her eyebrows and about her -beautiful eyes. But when she turned her head to the light, Odd saw that -the lips were red and the cheeks freshly and faintly tinted. - -He was surprised by the picture on the big easel; the teapot had not -prepared him for it. A rather small picture, the figure flung to its -graceful, lazy length, only a fourth life-size. It was a picture of -elusive shadows, touched with warmer lights in its grays and greens. The -woman's half-hidden face was exquisite in color. The sweep of her pale -gown, half lost in demi-tint, lay over her like the folded wings of a -tired moth. The white flowers stood like dreams in the dreamy -atmosphere. - -"Hilda, I can almost forgive you." Odd stood staring before the canvas; -he had put on his eye-glass. "Really this atones." - -"Isn't it wonderfully simple, wonderfully decorative?" said Katherine, -"all those long, sleepy lines. My clever little Hilda!" - -"My clever, clever little Hilda!" Odd repeated, turning to look at the -young artist. Her eyes met his with their wide, sweet gaze that said -nothing. Hilda was evidently only capable of saying things on canvas. - -"It is lovely." - -"You like it really?" - -"I really think it is about as charming a picture as I have seen a woman -do. So womanly too." Odd turned to Katherine, it was difficult not to -merge Hilda in her art, not to talk about her talent as a thing apart -from her personality: "She expresses herself, she doesn't imitate." - -"Perhaps that is rather unwomanly," laughed Katherine: "a crawling -imitativeness seems unfortunately characteristic. Certainly Hilda has -none of it. She has inspired me with hopes for my sex." - -"Really cleverer than Madame Morisot," said Odd, looking back to the -canvas, "delightful as she is! She could touch a few notes surely, -gracefully; Hilda has got hold of a chord. Yes, Hilda, you are an -artist. Have you any others?" - -Hilda brought forward two. One was a small study of a branch of pink -blossoms in a white porcelain vase; the other a woman in white standing -at a window and looking out at the twilight. This last was, perhaps, the -cleverest of the three; the lines of the woman's back, shoulder, _profil -perdu_, astonishingly beautiful. - -"You are fond of dreams and shadows, aren't you?" - -"I haven't a very wide range, but one can only try to do the things one -is fitted for. I like all sorts of pictures, but I like to paint -demi-tints and twilights and soft lamplight effects." - - "'Car nous voulons la nuance encor-- - pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,'" - -chanted Katharine. "Hilda lives in dreams and shadows, I think, Mr. Odd, -so naturally she paints them. '_L'art c'est la nature, vue a travers un -temperament_.' Excuse my spouting." - -"So your temperament is a stuff that dreams are made of. Well, Hilda, -make as many as you can. Hello! is that another old friend I see?" On -turning to Hilda he had caught sight of a dachshund--rather white about -the muzzle, but very luminous and gentle of eye--stretching himself from -a nap behind the little stove in the corner. He came toward them with a -kindly wag of the tail. - -"Is this Palamon or Arcite?" - -A change came over Hilda's face. - -"That is Palamon; poor old Palamon. Arcite fulfilled his character by -dying first." - -"And Darwin and Spencer?" - -"Dead, too; Spencer was run over." - -"Poor old Palamon! Poor old dog!" Odd had lifted the dog in his arms, -and was scratching the silky smooth ears as only a dog-lover knows how. -Palamon's head slowly turned to one side in an ecstasy of appreciation. -Odd looked down at Hilda. Katherine was behind him. "Poor Palamon, -'allone, withouten any companye.'" Hilda's eyes met his in a sad, -startled look, then she dropped them to Palamon, who was now putting out -his tongue towards Odd's face with grateful emotion. - -"Yes," she said gently, putting her hand caressingly on the dog's head; -her slim, cold fingers just brushed Odd's; "yes, poor Palamon." She was -silent, and there was silence behind them, for Katherine, with her usual -good-humored tact, was examining the picture. The model on the sofa -stretched her arms and yawned a long, scraping yawn. Palamon gave a -short, brisk bark, and looked quickly and suspiciously round the studio. -Both Odd and Hilda laughed. - -"But not 'allone,' after all," said Odd. "Is he a great deal with you? -That is a different kind of company, but Palamon is the gainer." - -"We mustn't judge Palamon by our own standards," smiled Hilda, "though -highly civilized dogs like him don't show many social instincts towards -their own kind. He did miss Arcite though, at first, I am sure; but he -certainly is not lonely. I bring him here with me, and when I am at home -he is always in my room. I think all the walking he gets is good for -him. You see in what good condition he is." - -Palamon still showing signs of restlessness over the yawn, Odd put him -down. He was evidently on cordial terms with the model, for he trotted -affably toward her, standing with a lazy, smiling wave of the tail -before her, while she addressed him with discreetly low-toned, -whispering warmth as "_Mon chou! Mon bijou! Mon petit lapin a la sauce -blanche!_" - -"Don't you get very tired working here all day?" Odd asked. - -"Sometimes. But anything worth doing makes one tired, doesn't it?" - -"You take your art very seriously, Hilda?" - -"Sometimes--yes--I take it seriously." Hilda smiled her slight, reserved -smile. - -"Well, I can't blame you; you really have something to say." - -"Hilda, I am afraid we are becoming _de trop_. I must carry you off, Mr. -Odd. Hilda's moments are golden." - -"That is a sisterly exaggeration," said Hilda. Had all her personality -gone into her pictures? was she a self-centred little egotist? Odd -wondered, as he and Katherine walked away together. Katherine's warmly -human qualities seemed particularly consoling after the chill of the -abstract one felt in Hilda's studio. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -"Peter, she is a nice, a clever, a delightful girl," said Mary Apswith. - -Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlooking the Rue de la -Paix. For her holiday week of shopping Peter's hotel was not central -enough, but Peter himself was at her command from morning till night. He -stood before her now, his back to the flaming logs in the fireplace, -looking alternately down at his boots and up at his sister. Peter's face -wore an amused but pleasant smile. Katherine must certainly be nice, -clever, and delightful, to have won Mary, usually so slow in friendship. - -"Whether she is deep--deeply good, I mean--I don't know; one can't tell. -But, at all events, she is sincere to the core." Mary had called on the -Archinards some days ago, and had seen Katherine every day since then. - -Mary's stateliness had not become buxom. The fine lines of her face had -lost their former touch of heaviness. Her gray hair--grayer than -Peter's--and fresh skin gave her a look of merely perfected maturity. -Life had gone well with her; everybody said that; yet Mary knew the -sadness of life. She had lost two of her babies, and sorrow had -softened, ripened her. The Mary of ten years ago had not had that tender -look in her eyes, those lines of sympathetic sensibility about the -lips. Her decisively friendly sentence was followed by a little sigh of -disapprobation. - -"As for Hilda!" - -"As for Hilda?" - -"I am disappointed, Peter. Yes; we went to her studio this morning; -Katherine took me there; Katherine's pride in her is pretty. Yes; I -suppose the pictures are very clever, if one likes those rather misty -things. They look as though they were painted in the back drawing-room -behind the sofa!" Peter laughed. "I don't pretend to know. I suppose _au -fond_ I am a Philistine, with a craving for a story on the canvas. I -don't really appreciate Whistler, so of course I haven't a right to an -opinion at all. But however clever they may be, I don't think those -pictures should fill her life to the exclusion of _everything_. The girl -owes a duty to herself; I don't speak of her duty to others. I have no -patience with Mrs. Archinard, she is simply insufferable! Katherine's -patience with her is admirable; but Hilda is completely one-sided, and -she is not great enough for that. But she will fancy herself great -before long. Lady---- told me that she was never seen with her -sister--there is that cut off, you see--how natural that they should go -out together! Of course she will grow morbidly egotistic, people who -never meet other people always do; they fancy themselves grandly -misunderstood. So unhealthy, too! She looked like a ghost." - -"Poor little Hilda! She probably fancies an artist's mission the -highest. Perhaps it is, Mary." - -"Not in a woman's case"--Mrs. Apswith spoke with a vigorous decision -that would have stamped her with ignominy in the eyes of the perhaps -mythical New Woman; "woman's art is never serious enough for heroics." - -"Perhaps it would be, if they would show a consistent heroism for it." -Peter opposed Mary for the sake of the argument, and for the sake of an -old loyalty. _Au fond_ he agreed with her. - -"A female Palissy would revolutionize our ideas of woman's art." - -"A pleasant creature she would be! Tearing up the flooring and breaking -the chairs for firewood! An abominable desecration of the housewifely -instincts! I don't know what Allan Hope will do about it," Mary pursued. - -"Ah! That is an accepted fact, then?" - -"Dear me, yes. Lady Mainwaring is very anxious for it. It shows what -Allan's steady persistency has accomplished. The child hasn't a penny, -you know." - -"You think she'd have him?" - -"Of course she will have him. And a lucky girl she is for the chance! -But, before the definite acceptance, she will, of course, lead him the -usual dance; it's quite the thing now among girls of that type. -Individuality; their own life to be lived, their Art--in capitals--to be -lived for; home, husband, children, degrading impediments. Such tiresome -rubbish! I am very sorry for poor Allan." Peter studied his boots. - -"Allan probably accounts for that general absent-mindedness I observed -in her; perhaps Allan accounts for more than we give her credit for; -this desperate devotion to her painting, her last struggle to hold to -her ideal. Really the theory that she is badly in love explains -everything. Poor child!" - -"Why poor, Peter? Allan Hope is certainly the very nicest man I know, -barring yourself and Jack. He has done more than creditably in the -House, and now that he is already on the Treasury Bench, has only to -wait for indefinite promotion. He is clever, kind, honest as the day. He -will be an earl when the dear old earl dies, and that that is a pretty -frame to the picture no one can deny. What more can a girl ask?" - -"This girl probably asks some impossible dream. I'm sorry for people who -haven't done dreaming." - -"Between you and me, Peter, I don't think Hilda is really clever enough -to do much dreaming--of the pathetic sort. Her eyes are clever; she sees -things prettily, and puts them down prettily; but there is nothing more. -She struck me as a trifle stupid--really dull, you know." - -Odd shifted his position uncomfortably. - -"That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self-expression." He leaned -his arm on the mantelpiece and studied the fire with a puzzled frown. -"That exquisite face must _mean_ something." - -"I don't know. By the law of compensation Katherine has the brains, the -heart, and Hilda the beauty. _I_ didn't find her shy. She seemed -perfectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of absorption in her -love affair, as you say. I am not sure that he has asked her yet. He is -a most modest lover." - -Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her stay, and her first -impression was strengthened. - -Katherine shopped with her; they considered gowns together. Katherine's -taste was exquisite, and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming -Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not above liking pretty -things--that was already nice in her--for the girl was clever enough to -pose indifference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. Katherine was -very independent, but very attentive. Her sincerity was charmingly gay, -and not priggish. She said just what she thought; but she thought things -that were worth saying. She made little display of learning, but one -felt it--like the silk lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk -too much; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. Mary took her twice -to the play with Peter and herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd -sat in the back of the box and watched for the effect on her face of the -clever play interpreted by the best talent of the Theatre Francais. The -quiet absorption of her look might imply much intelligent appreciation; -but Katherine's little ripples of glad enjoyment, clever little thrusts -of criticism, made Hilda's silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while -between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke a scintillating sense -of intellectual enjoyment about her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda -sat listening with that same smile of admiration that almost irritated -Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability--inferiority. - -The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, was rather -touching; and Mary owned that Hilda was "sweet," but the adjective did -not mitigate the former severity of judgment--that was definite. - -When Mary went, she begged Katherine to accept the prettiest gown Doucet -could make her, and Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness. -The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine Braun photograph, -which Hilda received with surprised delight, for she had done nothing to -make Mrs. Apswith's stay in Paris pleasant. She thought such kindness -touching, and Katherine's gown the loveliest she had ever seen. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Mary gone, the bicycling tete-a-tetes were resumed, and Odd, too, began -to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were -bon camarades in the best sense of the term, and Peter found it a very -pleasant sense. He realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in -his present desoeuvree condition would have been intolerable. The -melancholy of laziness could not creep to him while this girl laughed -beside him. The frank, sympathetic relation--almost that of man to -man--was untouched by the faintest infusion of sentiment; delicious -breeziness and freedom of intercourse was the result. Peter listened to -Katherine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to laugh at him. He -told her a good many of his thoughts; she criticised them, approved of -them, encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present -contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any affirmation. He had -never felt so little sure of anything nor so conscious of everything in -general. Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he continued to drift. -He still read in an objectless way at the Bibliotheque, hunting out old -references, pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of view of -all times. Katherine offered to help him, and in the morning he would -bring her his notes to look over; her quick comprehension formed -another link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She had no taste for -drifting. In her eye he read a dissatisfaction, a thirst for wider -vision, wider action, a restless impatience with the narrowness, the -ineffectiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her probable future -with a sense of pathos. Hilda's wide gaze showed no such rebellion with -the actual; her art had filled it with a distant content that shut -strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was it merely the placid -consciousness of Allan Hope--a future assured and fully satisfactory? -Under Katherine's gayety there was a fierce beating of caged wings, and -Odd fancied at times that, freed, the imprisoned birds might be strong -and beautiful. He fancied this especially when she played to him; she -played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, as the winter came -and it grew too cold for bicycling, Peter often spent the morning in -listening to her. Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon in -the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually met her dining out or -at some reception; their intimacy once noticed, they were invited -together. Lady---- was especially anxious that Odd should have every -opportunity for meeting her favorite. - -But with all this intimacy, to Peter's consciousness thoroughly, -paternally platonic, under all its daily interests and quiet pleasure -lay a half-felt hurt, a sense of injury and loss. The little voice, -seldom thought of during the last ten years, now repeated often: "But -you will be different; I will be different; we will both be changed." - -Captain Archinard returned from the Riviera in a temper that could mean -but one thing; he had gambled at Monte Carlo, and he had lost. He did -not mention the fact in the family circle; indeed, by a tacit agreement, -money matters were never alluded to before Mrs. Archinard. Her years of -successful invalidism had compelled even her husband's acquiescence in -the decision early arrived at by Hilda and Katherine: mamma must be -spared the torments to which they had grown accustomed. But to Katherine -the Captain freed his querulous soul, never to Hilda. There was a look -in Hilda's eyes that made the Captain very uncomfortable, very angry; -conscious of those cases of wonderful champagne, the races, the clubs, -the boxes at the play, and all the infinite array of his wardrobe--a -sad, wondering look. Katherine's scoldings were far preferable, for -Katherine was not so devilish superior to human weaknesses; she had -plenty of unpaid bills on her own conscience, and understood the -necessities of an aristocratic taste. He and Katherine had their little -secrets, and were mutually on the defensive. Hilda never criticised, to -be sure, but her very difference was a daily criticism. The Captain -thought his younger daughter rather dull; Katherine, of finer calibre -than her father, admired such dulness, and found some difficulty in -stilling self-reproachful comparisons; temperament, circumstance, made a -comforting philosophy. And then Hilda's art made things easy for Hilda; -with such a refuge, would she, Katherine, ask for more? Katherine rather -wondered now, after her father's exasperated recountal of ill-luck, -where papa had got the money to lose; but papa on this point was -prudently reticent, and borrowed two one-hundred-franc notes from Peter -while the latter waited in the drawing-room for Katherine one morning. - -Katherine and her father were making a round of calls one day, and the -Captain stopped at his bank to cash a check. Katherine stood beside him, -and, although he manoeuvred concealment with hand and shoulder, her -keen eyes read the name. - -Her mouth was stern as they walked away--the Captain had folded the -notes and put them in his pocket. - -"A good deal of money that, papa." - -"I suppose I owe twice as much to my tailor," Captain Archinard replied, -with irritation. - -"Has Mr. Odd lent you money before this?" - -"I really don't know that Mr. Odd's affairs--or mine--are any business -of yours, Katherine." - -"Yours certainly are, papa. When a father puts his daughter in a false -position, his affairs decidedly become her business." - -"What rubbish, Katherine. Better men than Odd have been glad to give me -a lift. I can't see that Odd has been ill-used. He is rolling in money." - -"I don't quite believe that, papa. Allersley is not such a rich -property. But it is not of Mr. Odd's ill-usage I complain, it is of -mine; for if this borrowing goes on, I hardly think I can continue my -relations with Mr. Odd. It would rather look like--decoying." - -The Captain stopped and fixed a look of futile dignity on his daughter. - -"That's a strange word for you to use, Katherine. I would horsewhip the -man who would suggest it. Odd is a gentleman." - -"Decidedly. I did not speak of his point of view but of mine. All -frankness of intercourse between us is impossible if you are going to -sponge on him." - -"Katherine! I can't allow such impertinence! Outrageous! It really is! -Sponge! Can't a man borrow a few paltry hundreds from another without -exposing himself to such insulting language?--especially as Odd is to -become my son-in-law, I suppose. He is always hanging about you." - -"That is what I meant, papa." Katherine's tone was icy. "Your -suppositions were apparent to me, you drain Mr. Odd on the strength of -them. Borrow from any one else you like as much as you can get, but, if -you have any self-respect, you won't borrow from Mr. Odd in the hope -that I will marry him." - -"Devilish impertinent! Upon my word, devilish impertinent!" the Captain -muttered. He drew out his cigar-case with a hand that trembled. -Katherine's bitter look was very unpleasant. - -Katherine expected Odd the next morning; he was reading a manuscript to -her, and would come early. - -She was waiting for him at ten. She had put on her oldest dress. The -severe black lines, a silk sash, knotted at the side, suggested a -soutane--the slim buckled shoes with their square tips carried out the -monastic effect, and Katherine's strong young face was cold and stern. - -"Shall we put off our work for a little while? I want to speak to you," -she said, after Odd had come, and greetings had passed between them. - -"Shall we? You have been too patient all along, Miss Archinard." Odd -smiled down at her as he held her hand. "You make me feel that I have -been driving you--arrantly egotistic." - -"No; I like our work immensely, as you know." Katherine remained -standing by the fireplace. She leaned her arm on the mantelpiece, and -turned her head to look directly at him. "I am not at all happy this -morning, Mr. Odd." Odd's kind eyes showed an almost boyish dismay. - -"What is it? Can I help you?" His tone was all sympathetic anxiety and -friendly warmth. - -"No; just the contrary. Mr. Odd, I am ashamed that you should have seen -the depths of our poverty. It is not a poverty one can be proud of. -Poverty to be honorable must work, and must not borrow." - -Odd flushed. - -"You exaggerate," he said, but he liked her for the exaggeration. - -"I did not know till yesterday that papa owed to you his Riviera trip." - -"Really, Katherine"--he had not used her name before, it came now most -naturally with this new sense of intimacy--"you mustn't misunderstand, -misjudge your father. He couldn't work; his life has unfitted him for -it; it would be a false pride that would make him hesitate to ask an old -friend for a loan; an old friend so well able to lend as I am. You women -judge these things far too loftily." And Peter liked her for the -loftiness. - -"Would you mind telling me how much you lent him last time? I was with -him when he cashed the check. I saw the name, not the amount." - -"It was nothing of any importance," said Odd shortly. He exaggerated -now. The Captain had told him that the furniture would be seized unless -some creditors were satisfied, and, with a very decided hint as to the -inadvisability of another trip for retrievement to the Riviera, Peter -had given him the money, ten thousand francs; a sum certainly of -importance, for Odd was no millionaire. - -Katherine looked hard at him. - -"You won't tell me because you want to spare me." - -"My dear Katherine, I certainly want to spare you anything that would -add a straw's weight to your distress; you have no need, no right to -shoulder this. It is your father's affair--and mine. You must not give -it another thought." - -"That is so easy!" Katherine clenched her hand on the mantelpiece. She -was not given to vehemence of demonstration; the little gesture showed a -concentration of bitter rebellion. Odd, standing beside her, put his own -hand over hers; patted it soothingly. - -"It's rather hard on me, you know, a slur on my friendship, that you -should take a merely conventional obligation so to heart." - -Katherine now looked down into the fire. - -"Take it to heart? What else have I had on my heart for years and years? -It is a mere variation on the same theme, a little more poignantly -painful than usual, that is all! What a life to lead. What a future to -look forward to. I wonder what else I shall have to endure." Odd had -never seen her before in this mood of fierce hopelessness. - -"Our poverty has poisoned everything, everything. I have had no youth, -no happiness. Every moment of forgetfulness means redoubled keenness of -gnawing anxiety. Debts! Duns! harassing, sordid cares that drag one -down. Mr. Odd, I have had to coax butchers and bakers; I have had to -plead with horrible men with documents of all varieties! I have had to -pawn my trinkets, and all with surface gayety; everything must be kept -from mamma, and papa's extravagance is incorrigible." - -Odd was all grave amazement, grave pity, and admiration. - -"You are a brave woman, Katherine." - -"No, no; I am not brave. I am frightened--frightened to death sometimes. -I see before me either a hideous struggle with want or--a _mariage de -convenance_. I have none of the classified, pigeon-holed knowledge one -needs nowadays to become a teaching drudge, and I can't make up my mind -to sell myself, though, in spite of my lack of beauty and lack of money, -that means of escape has often presented itself. I have had many offers -of marriage. Only I _can't_." - -Odd was silent under the stress of a new thought, an entirely new -thought. - -"For Hilda I have no fear," Katherine continued, still speaking with the -same steady quiet voice, still looking into the fire. "In the past her -art has absorbed and protected her, and her future is assured. She will -marry a good husband." A flash as of Hilda's beauty crossed the growing -definiteness of Peter's new thought. That old undoing, that mirage of -beauty; he put it aside with some self-disgust, feeling, as he did so, -a queer sense of impersonality as though putting away himself as he put -away his weakness. He seemed to contemplate himself from an outside -aloofness of observation. The trance-like feeling of the illusion of all -things which he had felt more than once of late made him hold more -firmly to the tonic thought of a fine common-sense. - -"Of course, mamma will be safe when Hilda is Lady Hope," Katherine said; -"perhaps I shall be forced to accept the same charity." Her voice broke -a little, and she turned the sombre revolt of her look on Peter; her -eyes were full of tears. - -"Katherine," he said, "will you marry me?" - -Odd, five minutes before, had not had the remotest idea that he would -ask Katherine Archinard to be his wife. Yet one could hardly call the -sudden decision that had brought the words to his lips, impulsive. While -Katherine spoke, the bitter struggle of the fine young life, surely -meant for highest things; the courage of the cheerfulness she never -before had failed in; the pride of that repulsion for the often offered -solution to her difficulties--a solution many women would have accepted -with a sense of the inevitable--became admirably apparent to Odd. Their -mutual sympathy and good-fellowship and, almost unconsciously, Hilda's -assured future--Allan Hope--had defined the thought. He felt none of -that passion which, now that he looked back on it, made of the miserable -year of married life that followed but the logical retribution of its -reckless and wilful blindness. The very lack of passion now seemed an -added surety of better things. His life with Katherine could count on -all that his life with Alicia had failed in. He did not reason on that -unexcited sense of impersonality and detachment. He would like her to -accept him. He would like to help this fine, proud young creature; he -would like sympathetic companionship. He was sure of that. He had not -surprised Katherine; she had seen, as clearly as he now saw, what Peter -Odd would do. She had not exactly intended to bring him to a realization -of this by the morning's confession, for on the whole Katherine had been -perfectly sincere in all that she had said, but she felt that she could -rely on no better opportunity. Now she only turned her head towards him, -without moving from her position before the fireplace. Katherine never -took the trouble to act. She merely aimed at the most advantageous line -of conduct and let taste and instinct lead her. Her taste now told her -that quiet sincerity was very suitable; she felt, too, a most sincere -little dash of proud hesitation. - -"Are you generously offering me another form of charity, Mr. Odd? My -distress was not conscious of an appeal." - -"You know your own value too well, Katherine, to ask me that. _I_ -appeal." - -"Yet the apropos of your offer makes me smart. Another joy of poverty. -One can't trust." - -"It was apropos because a man who loves you would not see you suffer -needlessly." Peter, too, was sincere; he did not say "loved." - -"Shall I let you suffer needlessly?" asked Katherine, smiling a little. -"I sha'n't, if that implies that you love me." - -"Suppose I do. And suppose I stand on my dignity. Pretend to distrust -your motives. Refuse to be married out of pity?" - -"That sort of false dignity wouldn't suit you; you have too much of the -real." - -"Would you be good to me, Mr. Odd?" - -"Very, very good, Katherine." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it, and Katherine's smile shone out in all -its frank gayety. "I think I can make you happy, dear." - -"I think you can, Mr. Odd." - -"You must manage 'Peter' now." - -"I think you can, Peter," Katherine said obediently. - -"And Katherine--I would not have dared say this before, you would have -flung it back at me as bribery--but I can give you weapons." - -"Yes, I shall be able to fight now." She looked up at him with her -charming smile. "And you will help me, you must fight too. You must be -great, Peter, great, _great!_" - -"With such a fiery little engine throbbing beside my laggard bulk, I -shall probably be towed into all sorts of combats and come off -victorious." - -They sat down side by side on the sofa. Katherine was a delightfully -comfortable person; no change, but a pleasant development of relation -seemed to have occurred. - -"You won't expect any flaming protestations, will you, Katherine," said -Peter; "I was never good at that sort of thing." - -"Did you never flame, then?" - -"I fancy I flamed out in about two months--a long time ago; that is -about the natural life of the feeling." - -"And you bring me ashes," said Katherine, rallying him with her smile. - -"You mustn't tease me, Katherine," said Peter. He found her very dear, -and kissed her hand again. - - - - -Part II - -HILDA. - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -"Well, Hilda, we have some news for you!" With these words, spoken in -the triumphant tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his -daughter as she came into the drawing-room at half-past six. Odd had -been paying his respects to his future parents-in-law, and was sitting -near Mrs. Archinard's sofa. He rose to his feet as Hilda entered and -looked at her, smiling a trifle nervously. - -"Guess what has happened, my dear," said the Captain, whose good humor -was apparent, while Mrs. Archinard murmured, "_She_ would never guess. -Hilda, only look at your hat in the mirror." It was windy, and Hilda's -shabby little hat was on the back of her head. - -"What must I guess? Is it about you?" she asked, turning her sweet -bewildered eyes from Odd to her father, to her mother, and back to Odd -again. - -"Yes, about me and another person." - -"You are going to marry Katherine!" Her eyes dilated and their sweetness -deepened to a smile; "you are going to marry Katherine, that _must_ be -it." - -"That is it, Hilda. Congratulate me." He took her hands in his and -kissed her. "Welcome me, and tell me you are glad." - -"Oh! I am very glad. I welcome you. I congratulate you!" - -"You will like your brother?" - -"A brother is dearer than a friend, and you have always been a friend, -haven't you, Mr. Odd?" - -"Always, always, Hilda; I didn't know that you realized it." - -"Did _you_ realize it?" - -"_Did_ I, my dear Hilda! I did, I do, I always will." Hilda's face -seemed subtly irradiated. Her listless look of pallor had brightened -wonderfully. No one could have said that the lovely face was dull with -this sudden change upon it. Peter felt that he himself was grave in -comparison. - -"And I am going to claim all a brother's rights immediately, Hilda." - -"What are a brother's rights?" - -"I am going to look after you, to scold you, to see you don't overwork -yourself." - -"I give you leave, but you mustn't presume _too_ much on the new -rights." - -"Ah! but I have old ones as well." - -"You mustn't be tyrannical!" she still laughed gently as she withdrew -her hands; "I must go and see Katherine." - -"Yes, go and dress now, Hilda." Mrs. Archinard spoke from the sofa, -having watched the scene with a slight air of injury; Hilda's unwonted -gayety constituted a certain grievance. "Mr. Odd dines with us, and I -really can't bear to see you in that costume. The skirt especially is -really ludicrous, my dear. I am glad that I don't see you walking -through the streets in it." - -"Hilda knows that her feet bear showing," remarked the Captain, crossing -his own with complacency; "she has her mother's foot in size and mine -in make--the Archinard foot; narrow, arched instep, and small heel. - -"Really, Charles, I think the Maxwells will bear the comparison!" Mrs. -Archinard, though she smiled, looked distinctly distressed. - -Hilda found her sister before the long mirror in her room, Taylor -fastening the nasturtium velvet. Katherine always had a commanding air, -and it was quite regally apparent to-night; all things seemed made to -serve her, and Taylor's crouching attitude symbolic. - -Hilda put her arms around her neck. - -"My dear, dear Kathy, I am so glad! To think that good things _do_ come -true!" - -"You like my choice, pet?" - -"_No_ one else would have done," cried Hilda; "he is the only man I ever -saw whom I could have thought of for you. Why, Katherine, from that -first day when you told me you had met him at the dinner, I _knew_ it -would happen." - -"Yes, I certainly felt a prophetic sense of proprietorship from the -first," Katherine owned musingly. She looked over her sister's shoulder -at the fine outline of her own head and neck in the glass. - -"Aren't you rather splashed and muddy, pet? Poor people can't afford an -affection that puts their velvet gowns in danger. There, I mustn't -rumple my lace." - -"I haven't hurt, have I?" Hilda stood back hastily. "I forgot, I _am_ -rather muddy. And, Katherine, you will help one another so much; that -makes it so ideal." - -"Idealistic little Hilda!" - -"But that is evident, isn't it? You with all your energy and cleverness -and general _sanity_, and he so widely sympathetic that he is a bit -impersonal. I mean that he doubts himself because he doubts everything -rather; he sees how relative everything is; he probably thinks too much; -I am sure that is dangerous. You will make him act." - -"I am to be the concrete to his abstract. He certainly does lack energy. -I wonder if even I shall be able to prod him into initiative." - -Katherine patted down the fine old lace that edged her bodice, and -looked a smiling question from her own reflection in the mirror to her -sister. "Suppose I fail to arouse him." - -"You will understand him. He will have something to live for; that is -what he needs. He won't be able to say, 'Is it worth while?' about -_your_ happiness. As for initiative, you will probably have to have that -for both. After all, he has made his name and place. He has the nicest -kind of fame; the more apparent sort made up by the admiration of -mediocrities isn't half as nice." - -"Ah, pet, you are an intellectual aristocrat. My _pate_ is coarser. I -like the real thing; the donkey's brayings make a noise, and one must -take the whole world with all its donkeys conscious of one, to be -famous. I like noise." Katherine smiled as she spoke, and Hilda smiled, -too, a little smile of humorous comprehension, for she did not take -Katherine in this mood at all seriously. She was as stanch in her belief -of Katherine's ideals as she was in sticking to her own. - -"We will be married in March," said Katherine, pausing before her -dressing-table to put on her rings--a fine antique engraved gem and a -splendid opal. "You may go, Taylor; and Taylor, you may put out my -opera-cloak after dinner. I think, Hilda, I will go to the opera; papa -has a box. He and I and Peter might care about dropping in for the last -two acts. You don't care to come, do you?" - -"Well, mamma expects me to read to her; it's a charming book, too," -added Hilda, with tactful delicacy. - -"Well, I shall envy you your quiet evening. I can't ask Peter to spend -his here in the bosom of my family. Yes, March, I think, unless I decide -on making that round of visits in England; that would put it off for a -month. I hope the ravens will fetch me a trousseau--for I don't know who -else will." - -"I shall have quite a lot by that time, Katherine. I haven't heard from -the dealer in London yet, but those two pictures will sell, I hope. And, -at all events, with the other things, you know, I shall have about a -hundred pounds." - -Katherine flushed a little when Hilda spoke of "other things," and -looked round at her sister. - -"I _hate_ to think of taking the money, Hilda." - -"My dear, why should you? Except, of course--the debts," Hilda sighed -deeply: "but I think on _this_ occasion you have a right to forget -them." Katherine's flush perhaps showed a consciousness of having -forgotten the debts on many occasions less pressing. - -"I meant, in particular, taking the money from you." - -Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest. - -"Kathy! as if it were not my pleasure! my joy! I am lucky to be able to -get it for you. _Can_ you get a trousseau for that much, Kathy?" - -"Well, linen, yes. I don't care how little I get, but it must be -good--good lace. I shall manage; I don't care about gowns, I can get -them afterwards. Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband." A -pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine's lips. "He _is_ a -dear! I only hope, pet, that you will be able to hold on to the money. -Don't let the duns worry it out of you!" The weary, pallid look came to -Hilda's face. - -"I'll try, Kathy dear. I'll do my very best." - -"My precious Hilda! You need not tell me _that!_ Run quickly and dress, -dear, it must be almost dinner-time. What _have_ you to wear? Shall I -lend you anything?" - -"Why, you forgot my gray silk! My fichu! Insulting Kathy!" - -"So I did! And you look deliciously pretty in that dress, though she -_did_ make a fiasco of the back; let the fichu come well down over it. -You really shouldn't indulge your passion for _petites couturieres_, -child. It doesn't pay." - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Odd climbed the long flight of stairs that led to Hilda's studio. The -concierge below at the entrance to the court had looked at him with the -sourness common to her class, as she stood spaciously in her door. The -gentleman had, evidently, definite intentions, for he had asked her no -questions, and Madame Prinet felt his independence as a slur upon her -Cerberus qualifications. - -Odd was putting into practice his brotherly principles. He had spent the -morning with Katherine--the fifth morning since their engagement--and -time hanging unemployed and heavy on his hands this afternoon, a visit -to Hilda seemed altogether desirable. It really behoved him to solve -Hilda's dubious position and, if possible, help her to a more normal -outlook; he felt the task far more feasible since that glimpse of gayety -and confidence. Indeed he was quite unconscious of Madame Prinet's -suspicious observation as he crossed the court, and the absorption in -his pleasant duty held his mind while he wound up the interminable -staircase. - -His knock at Hilda's door--there was no mistaking it, for a card bearing -her name was neatly nailed thereon--was promptly answered, and Odd found -himself face to face with a middle-aged maiden of the artistic type -with which Paris swarms; thin, gray-haired, energetic eyes behind -eyeglasses, and a huge palette on her arm, so huge that it gave Odd the -impression of a misshapen table and blocked the distance out with its -brave array of color. Over the lady's shoulder, Odd caught sight of a -canvas of heroic proportions. - -"Oh! I thought it was the concierge," said the artist, evidently -disappointed; "have you come to the right door? I don't think I know -you." - -"No; I don't know you," Odd replied, smiling and casting a futile glance -around the studio, now fully revealed by the shifting of the palette to -a horizontal position. - -"I expected to find Miss Archinard. Are you working with her? Will she -be back presently?" - -The gray-haired lady smiled an answering and explanatory smile. - -"Miss Archinard rents me her studio in the afternoon. She only uses it -in the morning; she is never here in the afternoon." - -Odd felt a huge astonishment. - -"Never here?" - -"No; can I give her any message? I shall probably see her tomorrow if I -come early enough." - -"Oh no, thanks. Thanks very much." He realized that to reveal his dismay -would stamp Hilda with an unpleasantly mysterious character. - -"I shall see her this evening--at her mother's. I am sorry to have -interrupted you." - -"Oh! Don't mention it!" The gray-haired lady still smiled kindly; Peter -touched his hat and descended the stairs. Perhaps she worked in a large -atelier in the afternoon; strange that she had never mentioned it. - -Madame Prinet, who had followed the visitor to the foot of the staircase -and had located his errand, now stood in her door and surveyed his -retreat with a fine air of impartiality; people who consulted her need -not mount staircases for nothing. - -"Monsieur did not find Mademoiselle." - -Odd paused; he certainly would ask no questions of the concierge, but -she might, of her own accord, throw some light on Hilda's devious ways. - -"No; I had hoped to find her. Mademoiselle was in when I last called -with her sister. I did not know that she went out every afternoon." - -Odd thought this tactful, implying, as it did, that Miss Archinard's -friends were not in ignorance of her habits. - -"Every afternoon, monsieur; _elle et son chien_." - -"Ah, indeed!" Odd wished her good day and walked off. He had stumbled -upon a mystery only Hilda herself might divulge: it might be very -simple, and yet a sense of anxiety weighed upon him. - -At five he went to call on a pleasant and pretty woman, an American, who -lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He was to dine with the Archinards, -and Katherine had said she might meet him at Mrs. Pope's; if she were -not there by five he need not wait for her. She was not there, and Mr. -Pope took possession of him on his entrance and led him into the library -to show him some new acquisitions in bindings. Mrs. Pope was not a grass -widow, and her husband, a desultory dilettante, was always in evidence -in her graceful, crowded salon. He was a very tall, thin man, with -white hair and a mild, almost timid manner, dashed with the collector's -eagerness. - -"Now, Mr. Odd, I have a treasure here; really a perfect treasure. A -genuine Grolier; I captured it at the La Hire sale. Just look here, -please; come to the light. Isn't that a beauty?" - -Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter; she did not approve of -the hiding of her lion in the library. She took him into the -drawing-room, where a great many people were drinking tea and talking, -and he was passed dexterously from group to group; Mrs. Pope, gay and -stout, shuffling the pack and generously giving every one a glimpse of -her trump. It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find himself -at last in Mrs. Pope's undivided possession. He was sitting on a sofa -beside her, talking and drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a -picture on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He put down the -cup of tea and put up his eyeglasses to look at it. A woman in a dress -of Japanese blue, holding a paper fan; pink azaleas in the foreground. -The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality made it unmistakable. -He got up to look more closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing -signature: "Hilda Archinard." - -He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise. - -"I didn't know that Hilda had reached this degree of popularity. You are -very lucky. Did she give it to you?" - -Katherine's engagement was generally known, and Mrs. Pope reproached -herself for having failed to draw Mr. Odd's attention before this to the -work of his future sister. - -"Oh no; she is altogether too distinguished a little person to give away -her pictures. That was in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The -two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of her things; for -high prices, too. Always the way, you know; a starving genius is allowed -to starve, but material success comes to a pretty girl who doesn't need -it. Katherine is so well known in Paris that Hilda's public was already -made for her; there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her due. -Her work is certainly charming." - -Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could not share Mrs. Pope's -feeling of easy pleasantness. Hilda _did_ need it. Certainly there was -nothing pathetic in doing what she liked best and making money at it. -Yet he wondered just how far Hilda's earnings helped the family; kept -the butcher and baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture he -thought of the black serge dress; somewhere about Hilda's artistic -indifference there might well lurk a tragic element. Did she not really -care to wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings perhaps went to -provide? The vague distress that had never left him since his first -disappointment at the Embassy dinner, that the afternoon's discovery at -the atelier had sharpened, now became acute. - -"I always think it such a pretty compensation of Providence," said Mrs. -Pope, gracefully anxious to please, "that all the talent that Hilda -Archinard expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in Katherine; -is part of herself as it were, like a perfume about her." - -"Yes," said Odd rather dully, not particularly pleased with the -comparison. - -"She is such a brilliant girl," Mrs. Pope added, "such a splendid -character. I can't tell you how it delighted me to hear that Katherine -had at last found the rare some one who could really appreciate her. It -strengthened my pet theory of the fundamental fitness of things." - -"Yes," Odd repeated, so vaguely that Mrs. Pope hurriedly wondered if she -had been guilty of bad taste, and changed the subject. - -When Peter reached the Archinards' at half-past six that evening, he -found the Captain and Mrs. Archinard alone in the drawing-room. - -"Hilda not in yet?" he asked. His anxiety was so oppressive that he -really could not forbear opening the old subject of grievance. Indeed, -Odd fancied that in Mrs. Archinard's jeremiads there was an element of -maternal solicitude. That Hilda should voluntarily immolate herself, -have no pretty dresses, show herself nowhere--these facts perhaps moved -Mrs. Archinard as much as her own neglected condition. At least, so -Peter charitably hoped, feeling almost cruel as he deliberately broached -the painful subject. - -Mrs. Archinard now gave a dismal sigh, and the Captain shook his head -impatiently as he put down _Le Temps_. - -Odd went on quite doggedly-- - -"I didn't know that Hilda sold her pictures. I saw one of them at Mrs. -Pope's this afternoon." - -There could certainly be no indiscretion in the statement, for Mrs. -Pope herself had mentioned the fact of Hilda's success as well known. -Indeed, although the Captain's face showed an uneasy little change, Mrs. -Archinard's retained its undisturbed pathos. - -"Yes," she said, "oh yes, Hilda has sold several things, I believe. She -certainly needs the money. We are not _rich_ people, Peter." Mrs. -Archinard had immediately adopted the affectionate intimacy of the -Christian name. "And we could hardly indulge Hilda in her artistic -career if, to some extent, she did not help herself. I fancy that Hilda -makes few demands on her papa's purse, and she must have many expenses. -Models are expensive things, I hear. I cannot say that I rejoice in her -success. It seems to justify her obstinacy--makes her independent of our -desires--our requests." - -Odd felt that there was a depth of selfish ignorance in these remarks. -The Captain's purse he knew by experience to be very nearly mythical, -and the Captain's expression at this moment showed to Peter's sharpened -apprehension an uncomfortable consciousness. Peter was convinced that, -far from making demands on papa's purse, Hilda had replenished it, and -further conjectures as to Hilda's egotistic one-sidedness began to shape -themselves. - -"And a very lucky girl she is to be able to make money so easily," the -Captain remarked, after a pause. "By Jove! I wish that doing what -pleased me most would give me a large income!" and the Captain, who -certainly had made most conscientious efforts to fulfil his nature, and -had, at least, tried to do what most pleased him all his life long, and -with the utmost energy, looked resentfully at his narrow well-kept -finger-nails. - -"Does she work all day long at her studio?" Peter asked, conscious of a -certain hesitation in his voice. The mystery of Hilda's afternoon -absences would now be either solved or determined. It was -determined--definitely. There was no shade of suspicion in Mrs. -Archinard's sighing, "Dear me, yes!" or in the Captain's, "From morning -till night. Wears herself out." - -Hilda, all too evidently, had a secret. - -"She ought to go to two studios, it would tire her less. Her own half -the day, and a large atelier the other." Assurance might as well be made -doubly sure. - -"Hilda left Julian's a long time ago. She has lived in her own place -since then, really lived there. I haven't seen it; of course I could not -attempt the stairs. Katherine tells me there are terrible stairs. Most -shockingly unhealthy life she leads, I think, and most, _most_ -inconsiderate." - -At the dinner-table Odd knew that Hilda had only him to thank for the -thorough "heckling" she received at the hands of both her parents. Her -silence, with its element of vacant dulness, now admitted many -interpretations. It hedged round a secret unknown to either father or -mother. Unknown to Katherine? Her grave air of aloofness might imply as -much, or might mean only a natural disapproval of the scolding process -carried on before her lover, a loyalty to Hilda that would ask no -question and make no reproach. - -"Any one would tell you, Hilda, that it is positively not _decent_ in -Paris for a young girl to be out alone after dusk," said the Captain. -"Odd will tell you so; he was speaking about it only this evening. You -must come home earlier; I insist upon it." - -Odd sat opposite to her, and Hilda raised her eyes and met his. - -He smiled gravely at her, and shook his head. - -"Naughty little Hilda!" but his voice expressed all the tender sympathy -the very sight of her roused in him, and Hilda smiled back faintly. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Peter brought Katherine the engagement ring a few days afterward. The -drifting had ceased abruptly, and he felt the new sense of reality as -most salutary. His personality and hers now filled the horizon; their -relations demanded a healthy condensation of thoughts before expanded in -wandering infinity, and he was thankful for the consciousness of -definite duty and responsibility that made past years seem the -refinement of egotism. - -Katherine looked almost roguishly gay that afternoon, and, even after -the ring was exclaimed over, put on, and Peter duly kissed for it, he -felt that there was still an expression of happy knowingness not yet -accounted for. - -"The ring wasn't a surprise, but you have one for me, Katherine." - -Katherine laughed out at his acuteness. - -"The ring is lovely; clever, sensitive Peter!" - -"You have quite convinced me of your pleasure and my own good taste. -What is the news?" - -"Well, Peter, a delightful thing has happened, or is _going_ to happen, -rather. Allan Hope is coming to Paris next week! Peter, we may have a -double wedding!" - -"Hilda has accepted him?" - -"Oh, we have not openly discussed it, you know. Mamma got his letter -this morning; very short. He hoped to see us all by Wednesday. Of -course, mamma is charmed. Hilda said nothing, and went off to the studio -as usual; but Hilda never _does_ say anything if she is really feeling." - -"Doesn't she?" There was a musing quality in Odd's voice. - -"_I_ think the child is in love with him; I thought so from the first. -Wednesday! A week from to-morrow! Oh, of course she will have him!" -Katherine said jubilantly. - -"Allan isn't the man to fail in anything. He has a great deal of -determination." - -"Yes, he seems the very embodiment of success, doesn't he? That is -because he doesn't try to see everything at once, like some people I -know." And Katherine nodded her head laughingly at her _fiance_. -"Intellectual epicureanism is fatal. Allan Hope has no unmanageable -opinions. His party can always count on him. He is always there, -unchanged--unless they change! He pins his faith to his party, and -verily he shall have his reward! By mere force of honest mediocrity he -will mount to the highest places!" - -"Venomous little Katherine! What are you trying to insinuate?" - -"Why, that Lord Allan isn't particularly clever, nor particularly -anything, except particularly useful to men who can be clever for him. -He is the bricks they build with." - -"Allan is as honest as the day," said Peter, a little shortly. - -"Honest? Who's a denygin' of it, pray? His honesty is part of his -supreme utility. My simile holds good; he is a brick; a dishonest man is -a mere tool, fit only to be cast away, once used." - -"How rhetorical we are!" said Odd, smiling at her with a touch of -friendly mockery. - -"Lord Allan most devoutly believes that in his party lies the salvation -of his country," Katherine pursued. "Oh, I have talked to him!" - -"You have, have you? Poor chap!" ejaculated Peter. "Will you ever serve -me up in this neatly dissected way, as a result of our confidential -conversations?" - -"Willingly! but only to yourself. Don't be afraid, Peter. I could -dissect myself far more neatly, far more unpleasantly. I have a genius -for the scalpel! And I have said nothing in the least derogatory to -Allan Hope. He couldn't disagree with his party, any more than a pious -Catholic could disagree with his church. It is a matter of faith, and of -shutting the eyes." - -If Hilda was so soon to pass to the supreme authority of an accepted -lover, Peter felt that for his own satisfaction he must make the most of -the time left him, and solve the riddle of her occupations. That -delicate sense of loyal reticence had held him from a hinted question to -even Katherine. If Katherine were as ignorant as he, a question would -arouse and imply suspicion. Odd could suspect Hilda of nothing worse -than a silly disobedience founded on a foolish idea of her own artistic -worth; a dull self-absorption, unsaved by a touch of humor. Yet this -very suspicion irritated Odd profoundly; it seemed logical and yet -impossible. He felt, in his very revulsion from it, a justification for -a storming of her barriers. - -That very evening, while Katherine played Schumann, the Captain having -gone out and Mrs. Archinard dozing on the sofa, he determined to have -the truth if possible. - -Hilda stood behind her sister, listening. Her tall slenderness looked -well in anything that fell in long lines, even if made by the most -_petite_ of _petite couturieres_, as the gray silk had been. The white -fichu covered deficiencies of fit, and left free the exquisite line of -her throat. Her head, in its attitude of quiet listening, struck Odd -with the old sense of a beauty significant, not the lovely mask of -emptiness. - -"Come and sit by me, Hilda," he said from his place on the sofa, "you -can hear better at this distance." - -The quick turn of her head, her pretty look of willingness were -charming, he thought. - -"I like to see you in that dress," he said, as she sat down beside him -on the sofa, "there isn't a whiff of paint or palette about it, except -that, in it, you look like a picture, and a prettier one than even you -could paint." - -"That is a very subtle insult!" Hilda's smile showed a most encouraging -continuation of the pretty willingness. - -"You see," said Odd, "you are not fair to your friends. You should paint -fewer pictures, and be more constantly a picture in yourself." She -showed a little uneasy doubtfulness of look. - -"I am afraid I don't understand you. I am afraid I am stupid." - -"You should _be_ a little more, and _act_ a little less." - -"But to act is to be," said Hilda, with a sudden laugh. "We are not -listening to Schumann," she added, a trifle maliciously. Her face turned -toward him in a soft shadow, a line of light just defining the cheek's -young oval, the lovely slimness of the throat affected Odd with a really -rapturously artistic appreciation. The shape of her small head, too, -with its high curves of hair, was elegant with an intimate elegance -peculiarly characteristic. An inner gentle dignity, a voluntary -submission to exterior facts of existence resulting in a higher freedom, -a more perfect self-possession, seemed to emanate from her; the very -poise of her head suggested it, and so strong and so sudden was the -suggestion that Odd felt his curiosity intolerable, and those groping -suspicions outrageously at sea. - -"Hilda," he said abruptly, "I went to your studio the other afternoon. -You were not there." - -Her finger flashed warningly to her lip, and her glance towards her -mother turned again to him, pained and beseeching. - -"She--they can't hear," said Odd, in a still lower voice. - -"No, I was not there," Hilda repeated. - -"And your father, your mother, Katherine, think you are there when you -are not. Is that wise? Don't be angry with me, my dear Hilda. You may -have confidence in me. Tell me, do you work somewhere else?" - -"_No._ I am not angry. You startled me." Her look was indeed shaken, -but sweet, touched even. "Yes, I work somewhere else." - -"And you keep it a secret?" - -She nodded. - -"Is it safe to keep secrets from your father and mother? Or is it a -secret kept for their sakes, Hilda?" Peter had made mental combinations, -yet he suspected that in this one he was shooting rather far from the -mark. No matter. Hilda looked away, and seemed revolving some inner -doubt. Her hesitation surprised him; he was more surprised when, half -unwillingly, she whispered, "Yes," still not looking at him. - -"For their sakes," repeated Odd, his curiosity redoubled. "Come, Hilda, -please tell me all about it. For _their_ sakes?" - -"In one way." Hilda spoke with the same air of half-unwilling -confidence. But that she should confide, that she should not lock -herself in stubborn silence, was much. - -"And as you need not keep it for my sake, you may tell me," he urged; "I -may be able to help you." - -"Oh! I don't need help." She turned a slightly challenging look upon -him. "It is no hardship to me, no trouble to keep my little secret." - -"You are really unkind now, Hilda." - -"No,"--her smile dwelt on him meditatively; "but I see no reason, no -necessity for telling you. I have nothing naughty to confess!" and there -was a touch of pride in her laugh. - -"Yes, you are unkind, for you turn my real anxiety to a jest." - -"You must not be anxious." Her eyes still rested on his, sweetly and -gently. - -"Not when I see you surrounded by an atmosphere of carping criticism? -When I see you coming home, night after night, worn out, too fatigued to -speak? When I see that you are thin and white and sad?" - -Hilda drew herself up a little. - -"Oh, you are mistaken. But--how _kind_ of you!" and again the irradiated -look lit up her face. - -"Does _that_ surprise you? Hilda, Katherine is in the dark about this -too?" - -"Katherine knows; but please don't ask her about it." - -"She doesn't approve, then?" - -"Not exactly. Besides, it might hurt her. Please don't ask me either. It -really isn't worth any mystery, and yet I must keep it a secret." - -Odd was silent for a moment, a baffling sense of pitfalls and -hiding-places upon him. - -"But Katherine ought to tell me," he said at last, smiling. - -"Now you are pushing an unfair advantage. She thinks, probably, that it -might hurt _me_. Really, _really_," she added urgently, "it isn't so -serious as all this seems to make it. The one serious thing is that it -_would_ hurt mamma, and that is why I make such a mountain out of my -mole-hill. How mystery does magnify the tiniest things!" - -"Tell me, at least, where you go in the afternoon. I mean to what part -of Paris, to what street." - -"I go to several streets," said Hilda, smiling resignedly, "since you -_will_ be so curious." - -"Where are you going to-morrow? Give me just an idea of your prowess." - -"I go to-morrow to the Rue d'Assas." - -"Near the Luxembourg Gardens?" - -"Yes." - -"I fancied you were walking yourself to death. And next day?" - -"Next day--the Rue Poulletier." - -"And where may that be? I fancied I knew my Paris well." - -"It is a little street in the Ile St. Louis. That is my favorite walk; -home along the quays. I get the view of Notre Dame from the back, with -all the flying buttresses, and the sunset beyond." - -"No wonder you are tired every night. You always walk?" - -"Usually. I have Palamon with me, and they would not take him in a 'bus. -But from the Ile St. Louis I often take the boat, and that is one of the -treats of Paris, I think, especially when the lights are lit. And on -some days I go to the Boulevard St. Germain. There; now you shall ask me -no more questions." - -Odd made no further comment on the information he had received, but he -resolved to be in the Rue d'Assas to-morrow. He did not intend to spy, -but he did intend to walk home with Hilda, and to make her understand -that one of the brotherly offices he claimed was the right to protecting -companionship. He revolved the _role_ and its possibilities, as he lay -back in the sofa watching Hilda's profile, and listening to Schumann--a -_role_ that could, at all events, not last long, since Allan Hope -arrived on Wednesday. Allan's arrival would put an end to mysteries, to -a need for brotherly protection. Odd felt a certain curiosity on this -point; indeed his attitude towards Hilda was one of continual curiosity. - -"So Allan Hope turns up Wednesday week," he said. "I shall be glad to -see Allan again." - -Hilda's silence might imply displeasure, but Odd, in an attitude of -manly laziness, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding an -ankle, thought a little gentle teasing quite allowable. - -"Will you go bicycling with him, unkind Hilda?" He was not prepared for -the startled look she turned on him. - -"When I would not go with _you_?" Her own vehemence seemed to embarrass -her. "I hardly know how to bicycle at all," she added lamely; "I would -have gone with you if I had had time." She looked away again, and then, -taking a book from the table beside her-- - -"Have you seen the last volume of _decadent_ poetry? Isn't the binding -nice?" Odd felt himself justly, but rather severely, reproved; yet the -gentle candor of her eyes was kind and soothing. Katherine was playing -the "Chopin" from Schumann's "Carnaval," and Peter, still holding his -ankle and feeling rather like a naughty little boy forgiven, did not -look at the fantastic volume she held, but at Hilda herself. How blue -the shadows were on the milky whiteness of her skin. Odd's eyes followed -the thick, soft eddies of hair about her forehead. - -"Aren't the margins generous?" said Hilda, turning the pages; "a mere -trickle of print through the whiteness. Some of the verses are really -very pretty," and she talked gayly, in her gentle way, as they went -through the pages together. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -It was just past four when Peter walked up the Rue Bonaparte and -stationed himself at the corner of the Rue Vavin and the Rue d'Assas, -opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. - -From this point of vantage he could look up and down the street, and -there would be no chance of missing her. She rarely reached home till -past six, and, even allowing for very slow walking, he was if anything -too early. - -He felt, as he opened his umbrella--it had begun to rain--that his -present position might look foolish, but was certainly justifiable. He -would ask Hilda no questions, force in no way her confidence, but really -on the gray dreariness of such a day she ought not to reject but rather -to be glad for his proffered and unexpected companionship. The combined -dreariness of the afternoon with its cold rain, the gray street, the -desolate-looking branches of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, -inspired him with a painful sympathy for Hilda's pursuits. She was, -probably, working in one of these tall, severe houses; perhaps with some -atelier chum fallen beneath the ban of Mrs. Archinard's disapproval, and -clung to with a girl's enthusiasm. Disobedient of Hilda, very. The chum -might be masculine. This was a new and disagreeable supposition; a Marie -Bashkirtseff, Bastien Lepage affair; Bohemia gloried in such -audacities; it was difficult to associate Hilda with such feats of -independence. There was a mystery somewhere, however, and if not -mountainous, it must be more than mere mole-hill. It was very windy, and -the rain blew slantingly. Katherine would find the situation amusing. A -vision of the sympathetic amusement was followed by the realization that -to betray his Quixotism might be to betray Hilda's confidence. Yet Hilda -had made no confidence. Peter rebelled at the mere suggestion of -concealment. Knowing all, Katherine could surely know that he had been -admitted into the outer courts of the mystery. He had ample time for -every variety of reflection, for he had been standing in the rain for -over an hour, when Hilda appeared not far from him, stepping from the -door of one of the largest and most dignified of the gray houses. She -paused on the wet pavement to open her umbrella, and Peter had a glimpse -of the wide red lips and small black beard of an unpleasant-looking -French youth, who seemed to loiter behind her with a certain air of -expectancy. It was impossible to connect his commonplace vulgarity of -aspect with Bohemian friendships or with Hilda, and, indeed, she gave -him a mere nod, not looking at him at all, and came walking up the -street, her skirt raised in one hand, showing slim feet and ankles. Odd, -as he contemplated her advance, was reminded of the light poise of a -Jean Goujon nymph. Her umbrella, lowered against the wind, hid him from -her. - -"Well, Hilda," he said amicably, when she was almost beside him--the -umbrella tilted back over her shoulder, and the rain fell on her -startled face--"Here I am." - -Her stare of utmost amazement was very amusing, but she looked white and -tired. - -"I must get a _fiacre_, I haven't your taste for plodding through rain -and mud, and you'll be kind enough to forgo the enjoyment for one day, -won't you?" Her stupefaction at last resolved itself into one word: -"Well!" she exclaimed with emphasis, and then she laughed outright. - -"By Jove, child, you look done up. I'm glad you're not angry, though. -You wouldn't laugh if you were angry, would you? Here is a _fiacre_." He -hailed the approaching vehicle; the _cocher's_ hat and cape, the roof of -the cab, the horse's waterproof covering glistened with rain in the -dying light. - -"You are very, very kind," Hilda said, rather gravely now, as they stood -side by side on the curb while the _fiacre_ rattled up to them. - -"I always intend to be kind, Hilda, if you will let me. Jump in." He -followed her, slamming the door with relief, and depositing the two -dripping umbrellas in a corner. - -"You must be drenched," said Hilda solemnly. - -"Imitation is the sincerest flattery, I believe; your fondness for -drenchings inspired me. You are not one bit angry, then? You see I ask -you no questions." - -"Angry? It was too good of you!" Her voice was still meditative. - -"I am much relieved that you should say so. I was only conscious of -guilt." - -"How long did you wait?" - -"About an hour." - -"And it was _pouring_!" - -"Oh no, not pouring. I have suffered far worse drenchings for far less -pleasure. One has no umbrella in Scotland on the moors." - -"One has, at least, the scenery." Hilda smiled. - -"Yes; the Rue d'Assas isn't particularly inspiring. I don't disclaim -honor; that corner was most wearing. Only the irritation of waiting for -my mysterious little truant kept me from finding it dreary." - -"Don't call me mysterious, please." - -"But you are mysterious, Hilda; very. However, I promised myself, and I -promise you, to say no more about it, to ask no questions." - -"You are so kind, so good." There was deep feeling in her voice; she -looked at him with a certain wistful eagerness. "You really do care, -don't you? Shall I tell you? I should like to. It seems silly not to -tell you, and I think you have a right to know--after to-day." - -"I really care a great deal, Hilda; but--I don't want to take an unfair -advantage, you know; I really have no right whatsoever. Wait till this -impulse of unmerited gratitude has passed." - -"But it is nothing to tell, really nothing. You see--I make money. I -have to--I teach. There; that is all." - -Peter looked at her, at the white oval of her face, at the unfashionable -little hat, at the shabby coat and skirt. A lily of the field who toiled -and spun. And a hot resentment rose within him as he thought of the -father, the mother, the sister. - -"Why _have_ you to?" he asked, in a hard voice. - -"We are so dreadfully poor, and we are so dreadfully in debt." - -"But why you alone? What can _you_ do?" - -"I can do a good deal. I have been very lucky. I love my work too, and I -make money by it, so it is natural. Mamma, of course, would think it -terrible, degrading even; but I can't agree with mamma's point of view; -I think it is quite wrong. I see nothing terrible or degrading." - -"No; nothing terrible or degrading, I grant you." - -"You think I am right, don't you?" - -"Yes; quite right, dear, quite right." - -Odd paused before adding: "It is the incongruity that is shocking." - -"The incongruity?" Hilda's voice was vague. - -"Between your life and theirs; yes." - -"Oh, you don't understand. I love my work; it is my pleasure. Besides, -they don't know; they don't realize the necessity either." - -"Why the teaching? I thought your pictures sold well." - -"And so they do, often; but I took up the teaching some years ago, -before I had any hope of selling my pictures; it is very _sure_, very -well paid, and I really find it a rest after five hours of studio work; -after five hours I don't feel a picture any longer." - -"Yet they must know that the money comes from somewhere?" - -Hilda's voice in replying held a pained quality; this attack on her -family very evidently perplexed her. - -"Mamma thinks it comes from papa, and papa, I suppose, doesn't think -about it at all; he knows, too, that I sell my pictures. You mustn't -imagine," she added, with a touch of pride and resentment, "that they -would let me teach if they knew; you mustn't imagine that for one -moment. And I don't mean to let them know, for then I couldn't help -them; as it is, my help is limited. The money goes, for the most part, -towards _guarding_ mamma. She could not bear shocks and anxiety." - -Odd said nothing for some moments. - -"How did it begin? how did you come to think of it?" he asked. - -"It began some years ago, at the studio where I worked when I first came -to Paris. There was a kind, dull French girl there; she had no talent, -and she was very rich. She heard my work praised a good deal, and one -day, after I had got a picture into the Salon for the first time, she -came and asked me if I would give her lessons. Fifteen francs an hour." -Hilda paused in a way which showed Odd that the recollection was painful -to her. - -"It seemed a _very_ strange thing to me at first, that she should ask -me. I had, I'm afraid, rather silly ideas about Katherine and myself; as -though we were very elevated young persons, above all the unpleasant -realities of life. But my common sense soon got the better of my pride; -or rather, I should say, the false pride made way for the honest. We -were _awfully_ poor just then. Papa, of course, never could, never even -tried to make money; but that winter he went in for exasperated -speculation, and really Katherine and I did not know what was to become -of us. To keep it from mamma was the great thing. Katherine was just -beginning to go out, and no money for gowns and cabs; no money, even, -for mamma's books. Keeping up with current literature is expensive, you -know, and mamma has a horror of circulating libraries. The thought of -poor mamma's empty life soon decided me. I remember she had asked one -day for John Addington Symonds's last book, and Katherine and I looked -at one another, knowing that it could not be bought. I realized then, -that at all events I could make enough to keep mamma in books and -Katherine in gloves. You can't think how nasty, how egotistic my vulgar -hesitation seemed to me. My life so full, so happy, and theirs on the -verge of ruin. There is something very selfish about art, you know; it -shuts one off so much from real life, makes one so indifferent to -scrapings and pinchings. I realized that, with my shabby clothes and -apparent talent, it was most natural for the French girl to think I -should be glad of her offer; and indeed I was. It was soothing, too, to -have her so eager. She wanted me very much, so I yielded gracefully." -Hilda gave a little smile of self-mockery. "I have taught her ever -since. She lives in that house in the Rue d'Assas; rich, bourgeois -people, common, but kind. She has no talent"--Hilda's matter-of-fact -manner of knowledge was really impressive--"but I don't feel unfair in -going on with her, for she really does see things now, and that is the -greatest pleasure next to seeing and accomplishing; and, indeed, how -rarely one accomplishes. Through her I have a great many pupils, for -other girls at the studio heard of her progress with me, and wanted -private lessons too. All my afternoons are taken up, and, with fifteen -francs an hour, you can see what a lot I make. It rather annoys me to -think of people far cleverer than I am who can make nothing, and I, just -because I have had luck, making so much. But among my pupils, I really -have quite a _vogue_; and I _am_ a good teacher, I really think I am." - -"I am sure your pupils are very lucky. You have a great many, you say?" - -"Yes, quite a lot. Sometimes I give three lessons in an afternoon. With -Mademoiselle Lebon, my first pupil, I spend all the afternoon twice a -week. She has a gorgeous studio." Hilda smiled again. "It is very nice -working there. To-morrow I go for two hours to an old lady; she lives in -the Boulevard St. Germain; she is a dear, and a great deal of talent -too; she does flowers exquisitely; not the dreadful feminine vulgarities -one usually associates with women's flower-painting; why all the -incompetents should fall back on those loveliest and most difficult -things, I never could understand. But my pupil really sees and selects. -Only think how funny! Katherine met her son at a dance one night--the -Comte de Chalons--insignificant but nice, she said; how little he could -have connected Katherine with his mother's teacher! Indeed, he never saw -me," and Hilda's smile became decidedly clever. "I suppose the -comtesse--she really is a dear, too--thinks that for a penniless young -teacher I am too pretty. Well, I make on an average thirty francs an -afternoon. I give Mademoiselle Lebon and Madame de Chalons double time -for their money, as old pupils. It would be easier to have a class in -my studio, of course, but I would lose many of my most interesting -pupils, who don't care about going out; then, too, it would be almost -impossible to keep my misdoings undiscovered. And there is all the -mystery!" She leaned forward in the dusk of the cab to smile at him -playfully. "I am glad to get it off my mind; glad, too, that you should -know why I am so often cross and dull; by the time I reach home I am -tired. I always bring Palamon, unless it is as rainy as to-day, and of -course he puts omnibuses out of the question; omnibuses mount up, too, -when one takes them every day. Excuse these sordid details." - -"I should think that a young lady who earns thirty francs an afternoon -might afford a cab." Odd found it rather difficult to speak. She was -mercifully unaware of the aspect in which her drudging, crushed young -life appeared to him. - -"And then, what would Palamon and I do for exercise!" said Hilda -lightly; "it is the walking that keeps me well, I am sure." - -His silence seemed to depress her gayety, for after a moment she added: -"And really you don't know how poor we are. I have no right to cabs, -really. As it is, it often seems wrong to me spending the money as I do -when we owe so much, so terribly much. Thirty francs is a lot, but we -need every penny of it, for mere everyday life. I have paid off some of -the smaller debts by instalments, but the weekly bills seem to swallow -up everything." - -His realization of this silent struggle--the whole weight of her -selfish family on her frail shoulders--made Odd afraid of his own -indignation. The remembrance of Mrs. Archinard's whines, the Captain's -taunts, yes, and worst of all, Katherine's gowns and gayety, almost -overcame him. He took her hand in his and held it as they rolled along -through the wetly shining streets. His continued silence rather alarmed -Hilda. The relief of full confidence was so great that she could not -bear it impaired by any misinterpretation. - -"You do understand," she said; "you do think I am right? My success -seems unmerited to you, perhaps? But I try to give my best. I seem very -selfish and unkind to mamma, I know, but I really am kind--don't you -think so?--in keeping the truth from her and letting her misjudge me. I -know you have thought of me that I was one of those selfish idiots who -neglect their real duties for their art; but I can do more for mamma -outside our home. And I read to her in the evening. Oh, how conceited, -egotistic, all that sounds! But I do want you to believe that I try to -do what seems best and wisest." - -"Hilda! Hilda!" he put her hand to his lips and kissed the worn glove. - -"You simply astound me," he said, after a moment; "your little life -facing this great Paris." - -"Oh, I am very careful, very wise," Hilda said quickly. - -"Careful? You mean that if you were not you might encounter -unpleasantnesses?" - -She looked at him with a look of knowledge that went strangely with her -delicate face. - -"Of course one must be careful. I am young--and pretty. I have learned -that." - -"My child, what other things have you learned?" And Odd's hold tightened -on her hand. - -"That terrifying things might happen if one were not brave. Don't -exaggerate, please. I really have found so few lions in my path, and a -girl of dignity cannot be really annoyed beyond a certain point. Lions -are very much magnified in popular and conventional estimation. A girl -can, practically, do anything she likes here in Paris if she is quiet -and self-reliant." - -Odd stared at her. - -"Of course I have always been a coward, after a fashion; I was -frightened at first," said Hilda. He understood now the look of moral -courage that had haunted him; natural timidity steeled to endurance. -"The greatest trouble with me is that I am too noticeable, too pretty." -She spoke of her beauty in a tone of matter-of-fact experience; "it is a -pity for a working woman." - -"My child," Odd repeated. He felt dazed. - -"Please don't exaggerate," Hilda reiterated. - -"Exaggerate? Tell me about these lions. How have you vanquished them?" - -"I have merely walked past them." - -His evident dismay gave her a merry little moment of superior wisdom. - -"They frightened me and that was all. One was the husband of a person I -taught. He used to lie in wait for me in the dining-room." Hilda gave -Odd a rather meditative glance. "You won't be angry? Angry with _me_ -for keeping on in my path of independence?" - -"No; I won't be angry with you." Odd felt that his very lips were white. - -"Well, he gave me a letter one day." Hilda paused. "What a despicable -man!" she said reflectively; "I taught his wife! I tore the letter in -two, gave it back to him, and walked out. Naturally, I never went back -again." Her voice suddenly broke. "Oh! it was horrible! I felt--" - -"What did you feel?" - -"I felt as though I were for evermore set apart from _my_ kind of girl, -from girls like Katherine. I felt smirched, as though some one had -thrown mud at me. That was morbid. I got over it." - -"Heavens!" Odd ejaculated. "Katherine knows this too?" he asked -bitingly. - -"Oh no, no! Mr. Odd, you are the only person. Never speak of it, will -you? Never, never! Poor Kathy! It would drive her mad!" - -"And she knows of your work?" - -"Yes; I had to tell her of that. She felt dreadfully about it. She -wanted me to go out with her, and have pretty dresses, and meet the -clever people she meets. You should have seen how happy she was in -London last spring! To have me with her! Wrenched away from my paint! Of -course I could not give up my work, even if there had been money enough. -I made her see that, and I can't say I made her agree, but I made her -yield. She takes a false view of it still, and worries over it. She -wants me to give up the teaching and paint pictures only; but that would -be too risky, they don't sell so surely. I have several on my hands. -But Katherine knows nothing of lions and unpleasantness. I must keep -such things secret, or I should not be allowed to go on." - -"You think I am safe. I must allow you, I suppose?" - -"Yes, you must." She smiled a very decided little smile, adding gravely, -"I have confided in you." - -"Trust me." There was silence in the cab for some moments. The tall -trees of the Cours la Reine dripped in a misty mass on one side; on the -other was the Seine with its lights. - -"And the young man I saw at the door as you came out to-day?" said Odd. - -"Oh, that is nothing, I hope. He is Mademoiselle Lebon's brother. A -harmlessly disagreeable creature, I fancy." Odd resumed his brooding -silence. "What are you thinking of so solemnly?" she asked. - -"Of you." - -"Why so solemnly? I am afraid you are laboring under all sorts of false -impressions. I have told my story stupidly." - -"The true impression has stupefied me. Good heavens! Theoretically I -believe in the development of character at all costs, and you have -certainly developed a _rara avis_ in the line; but practically, -practically, my dear little girl, I would have you taken care of in -cotton-wool, guarded, protected; you would always be lovely, and you -would have been happy. You have been very unhappy." - -Hilda was looking at him with that rather vague look of impersonal -contemplation characteristic of her. - -"How you exaggerate things," she said, smiling; "I have not been -unhappy." - -"The pity of it! The pathos!" Odd pursued, not heeding her comment. -Hilda looked at him rather sadly. - -"You mean that I should have lost my ignorance? Yes, that made me feel -badly," she assented. "That is the worst of it. One becomes so -suspicious. But, Mr. Odd, that is merely a sentimental regret. I have -not lost my self-respect. I am not ignorant of things I should like to -ignore; but one may know a great many things, and be unharmed." - -"My dear child, you are probably innocent of things familiar to many -modern girls. No knowledge could harm you. You have a right to more than -self-respect. You are a little heroine. Your unrewarded, unrecognized -fight fills me with amazement and reverence. I did not know that such -self-forgetful devotion existed." - -"Oh, please don't talk like that! It is quite ridiculous! We must have -money, and I can make it easily. I would be quite a monster if I sat -idly at home, and saw mamma in squalid misery. I merely do my duty." -Hilda spoke quite sharply and decisively. - -"Merely!" Odd ejaculated. - -A thought of the near future, of Allan Hope, kept him silent, otherwise -he might have indulged in reckless invective. He still held her hand, -and again he raised it to his lips. - -"That is a very stubborn and unconvinced salute, I am afraid," Hilda -said good-humoredly. - -"May I come and get you now and then?" he asked. - -"You think it would be wise?" - -"How do you mean wise, Hilda?" - -"I might be found out. I have given you my secret. You must help me to -keep it." - -"I may speak of it to Katharine--since she knows?" - -"Oh, of course, to Katherine. But don't _egg_ her on to worry me!" -laughed Hilda; "and speak to her with _reservations_--there are things -she must not know." - -Peter wondered if the child-friendship, the brotherly relations, -entitled him to seal the compact with a kiss upon her lips. He looked at -her with a sudden quickening of breath. Her dimly seen face was very -beautiful. This realization of her beauty's attraction at that moment -struck him with a sense of abasement before her. Surely no such poor tie -held him to this lovely soul. And, at the turn of his own thoughts, Odd -felt a vague stir of fear. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Odd was to take a walk in the Bois with Katherine the next morning, and -he found her waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delightfully -smart and wintry little figure. Katherine never failed in elegance, in -well-groomed finish--her low-heeled little boots, her irreproachable -snowy gloves, bore the same unmistakable stamp of the _cachet_ that -costs, that is not to be procured ready made. Odd, as a rich man, had -given very little thought to the power of money, and little thought to -Katherine's garments except as charmingly characteristic symbols of good -taste; but to-day his eye noted the black fur that fell about her -shoulders and trailed lustrous ends to her very feet, more for its -richness than its becomingness. - -Her bright though slightly grave smile failed to restore him to his -usual attitude of _bon camaraderie_. He smiled and kissed her, but he -was conscious of underlying soreness, conscious, too, that he might lose -his temper with Katherine; he had never lost it with Alicia. Katherine's -very superiority made it imperative to have things out with her. Kindly -resignation was an impossibility. He realized that not to admire -Katherine would make life with her intolerable. She would immediately -perceive reservations and she would revolt against them. He wondered -whether he should be the one to broach the subject of Hilda's -ill-treatment, and was amazed at a certain embarrassed shrinking, as -from a feeling too deep for words, that kept him silent as they walked -along, taking a short cut to the Place de l'Etoile, where the Arc stood -in almost cardboard clearness on the pale cold sky. It was Katherine who -spoke-- - -"Hilda told me of your kindness yesterday. It touched her very much." - -In some subtle way it irritated Odd to hear Katherine vouch for Hilda's -feeling. - -"And Hilda told you that I had been admitted into the mystery of the -Archinard family?" His voice was even enough, but it held a certain -keenness that Katherine was quick to recognize. - -"You don't think their mystery creditable, do you? Nor do I, Peter. But -mamma knows nothing of it, nor papa; and I have tried to dissuade Hilda -from the first." - -"My dear Katherine, the child has worked like a galley-slave for you -all! Your necessities were more potent facts than your dissuasions, I -fancy!" - -Katherine gave a look at the fine severity of the profile beside her. -She felt herself arraigned, and her impulse was towards rebellion. -However, her voice was gentle, submissive even, as she answered him-- - -"I know it must look badly to you--cruel even. But, Peter, don't you -know--you do know--how things _grow_ around one? One can hardly tell -where the definite wrongdoing comes in, or rather the definite -submission to a wrong situation." This was so true, that Katherine felt -immediately the mollified quality of his voice as he answered-- - -"I know. I know submission was forced upon you, no doubt. But I had -rather you had not submitted when once the situation grew definite. And -I wish, Katherine, that you had helped her in making the situation -easier. Granting that you could give her no material aid--granting that -her faculty is good luck--still the actual burden might have been -lightened." - -Odd paused; he could not say his thoughts outright--tell her that the -comparative luxury of her life and her mother's was outrageous, shocking -to him now that he understood its source. - -"It is part of Hilda's good luck that her pleasures are not costly, or -rather that she can herself defray their cost," said Katherine quietly. -"She has always lived in her art--seemed to care for nothing else. My -life would indeed have been dreadful had I not accepted the interests -that came into it. I have always felt, too, that in following the -natural bent of my own character, I was laying foundations that might -some day repay Hilda for everything. If she has friends--a public--it is -owing to me. It was I who persuaded her to come to London last spring. -I, therefore, who assured her future, in a sense, for there Allan Hope -fell in love with her. I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my -own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it nevertheless. I make -a circle for mamma; I brighten her life and my own and Hilda's, as far -as she will let me. Certain _tools_ are necessary--Hilda needs brushes -and canvases and studios; I, a few gowns, a few cabs, and a supply of -neat boots and gloves. Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I -own; but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I entreated her to give -up the idea--I said we would all starve together rather. She insisted, -and how can I interfere?" - -"I can understand, Katherine, that everything you say is most convincing -to yourself; I see the perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, -my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda denies herself -the commonest comforts of life, not only to give you the luxuries, but -because her high sense of honor rebels against spending on herself money -that is owed to others. Don't misunderstand me; I don't ask any such -perhaps overstrained sense of responsibility from you. You have, no -doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; but could it not -have been lived with a little less elegance? I am sure that you would be -welcomed everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and fewer gloves." - -Katherine flushed lightly; her flushes were never deep, and always -becoming. It certainly cut her now to hear his almost unconscious -implication--that from her he expected a less perfect sense of honor -than from her sister. She swallowed a certain wrathful mortification -that welled up, and answered with some apparent cheerfulness-- - -"You don't know your world, Peter, if you fancy that even Katherine -Archinard would be welcome in darned and dirty gloves!" - -Odd walked on silently. - -"And might she not be forced into taking some girlish distraction?" he -said presently. "It came out yesterday, with that astounding air of -_excusing_ herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the evening! -Could not you do that, Katherine, and let Hilda profit now and then by -the _entourage_ you have created for her?" - -Katherine's flush deepened. - -"Mamma doesn't care for my reading, and Hilda won't go out; she goes to -bed too early." - -"And then," Odd continued, ignoring her comment in a way most irritating -to Katherine's smarting susceptibility, "you might have gone with her -now and again to these houses where she teaches. You would have stood -for protection. You would have seen for yourself if, in this drudgery, -there lurked any unpleasantness, any danger. A girl of her extreme -beauty is--exposed to insult." - -Katherine gave him a stare of frank astonishment. - -"Oh, you must not give way to unpleasant romancing of that sort! Things -like that only happen in novels of the silliest sort--even to beauties! -And Hilda would have told _me_. She tells me _everything_. Really, -Peter, she must have given you a wrong impression; she enjoys her life!" - -"So she tried to convince me," said Odd, with a good deal of sharpness; -"there was no hint of complaint, regret, reproach, in Hilda's recountal; -don't imagine it, Katherine." - -Katherine was telling herself that never in all her life had she -experienced so many rebuffs. She contemplated her own good temper with -some amazement; she also wondered how long it would last. By this time -they were half-way down the Avenue du Bois; the day was fine and clear, -and the wintry trees were sharply definite against the sky. - -"I have never even seen her in a well-made gown," said Odd. - -"Hilda scorns the fashion-plate garment, as I do. We are both original -in that respect." - -"Your originality takes different forms." - -"Because it must adapt itself to different conditions, Peter. I won't be -scolded about my dresses. Men like you imagine that, because a woman -looks well, she must spend a lot. It isn't so with me. My dresses last -forever, and, to go into details, Hilda by no means clothes me. Papa has -money--now and then. Even Hilda could not support the family, and her -money mainly goes for mamma's books and oysters and hot-house grapes. If -she will not spend it on herself, and if, now and then, I accept some of -it, I cannot consent to feel unduly humiliated." - -There was a decisiveness in Katherine's tone that warned Peter to -self-control. Indeed the situation had been created for her. She had -owned up frankly to her distaste for it, her realization of its wrong. - -"I am not going to ask undue humiliation of you, my dear Katherine. -Don't think me such a priggish brute; but I am going to ask you to help -me to put an end to this." Katherine's smiles had returned. - -"Allan Hope will." - -Peter walked on, looking gloomy. - -"You won't realize that Hilda's life is the one that gives her the -greatest enjoyment. I have always envied Hilda till _you_ came; and even -now"--Katherine's smile was playful--"Allan Hope is very nice! Take -patience, Peter, till Wednesday." - -"Yes; we must wait." - -"I have waited for so long! Hilda could not have minded what you call -the 'drudgery.' She had only to lift her finger to end it." - -"Hilda would not be the girl to lift her finger." - -"You appreciate my Hilda, Peter; I am glad." Katherine gave his -abstracted countenance another of her bright contemplative glances. -There was nothing sly in Katherine's glances, and yet underlying this -one was a world of kindly, though very keen analysis; disappointment, -rebellion, and level-headed tolerance. This was decidedly not the man to -be fitted to her frame. He could not be moulded to a clever woman's -liking, for all his indefiniteness. On certain points of the conduct of -life, Katherine felt that she would meet an opposition sharply definite. -Katherine understood and was perfectly tolerant of criticism, but she -did not like it; nor did she like being put in the wrong. That Peter now -considered her very much in the wrong was evident. She was also aware -that the sophistry of her explanation had deceived herself even less -than it had deceived him. That Hilda spent her life in drudgery, and -that she spent hers in pleasure-seeking, were facts most palpable to -Katherine's very impartial vision. She knew she was wrong, and she knew -that only frank avowal would meet Peter's severity and touch his -tenderness and humor. If she heaped shame on her own head, he would be -the first to cry out against the injustice. - -Yet Katherine hesitated to own herself wrong. She was not sure that she -cared to place her lover in the sheltering and leading attitude of the -Love in the "Love and Life." The meek, trembling look of Life had -always irritated her in the picture. Katherine felt herself quite strong -enough to stand alone, and felt that she would like to lead in all -things. It was with a deep inner sense of humiliation that she said-- - -"Please don't be cross with me, Peter. Please don't scold me. I have -been naughty--far naughtier than I dreamed of--you have made me realize -it, though you are not quite just. But you must comfort me for my own -misdoings." - -As Katherine went on she felt an artistic impulsiveness, almost real, -and which sounded so real that Peter met the sweet pleading of her eyes -with a start of self-disgust. - -Peter was very tender-hearted, very sympathetic, very prone to -self-doubt. Katherine's look made him feel a very prig of pompous -righteousness. - -"Why, Katherine!" he said, pausing in his walk. "My dear Katherine! as -if I could not appreciate the slow growth of necessity! I only hope you -may never have to comfort me for far worse sins!" - -This was satisfactory. But Katherine's pride still squirmed. - -Odd went to meet Hilda on Thursday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday. The -distances were always great, and he insisted on cabs for the return -trip. Palamon must be tired, even if Hilda were not. He was too old for -such journeyings; and Hilda had smilingly to submit. Wednesday would end -it all definitely; Peter thought that he saw the end with unmixed -satisfaction, and yet when Allan Hope walked into his rooms early on -Wednesday morning, this Perseus of Hilda's womanhood gave the Perseus -of her childhood a really unpleasant turn of the blood. There was -something irritating in Allan Hope's absolute fitness for the _role_, -emphasizing, as it did, Peter's own unfitness, his forty years, and his -desultory life. - -Active energy, the go-ahead perseverance that knows no doubts, the -honest and loyal convictions which were all arranged for him from his -cradle, and which he would bequeath to his children unaltered, all -things that make for order and well-being, looked at one from Lord -Allan's clear, light eyes. Odd suddenly felt himself to be an uncertain -cumberer of the earth; failure personified beside the other's air of -inevitable success. He was fond of Hope and Hope fond of him, and they -talked as old friends talk, with the intimacy that time brings; an -intimacy far removed from the strong knittings of sympathy that an hour -may accomplish; for, though Odd understood Allan very well, Allan did -not muddle his direct views of things by a comprehension that implied -condonation. He thought it rather a pity that Odd had not made more of -his life. Odd's books weren't much good that he could see; better do -something than write about the things other men have done. Odd felt that -Allan was probably quite right. They hardly spoke of Hilda, but in -Hope's congratulations on Peter's engagement there was a ring of -heartfelt brotherly warmth that implied much, and left Peter in a gloomy -rage with himself for feeling miserable. Peter had not analyzed the -darks and glooms of the last few days. - -Growth does not admit of much self-contemplation. One wakes suddenly to -the accomplished change. If Peter was conscious of developments, he -defined them as morbid enlargements of that self-doubt which would -naturally thrill under the stress of new responsibilities. - -Only from the force of newly formed habit did he go to the Rue -Poulletier that afternoon, hardly expecting to meet Hilda. But Hilda -had, as yet, not interrupted her usual avocations. She emerged from the -gloomy portals of one of the old dismantled-looking _hotels_ that line -the Rue Poulletier with a certain dignity, and she looked toward the -corner where he stood with a confident glance. It was the second time he -had met her there, twice in the Rue d'Assas too. - -"It is so kind of you," she said, as she joined him and they turned into -the _quai_; "only you mustn't think that you _must_, you know." - -"_May_ I think that I _must_? Give me the assurance of necessity. I am -always a little afraid of seeming officious." - -Hilda smiled round at him. - -"Who is fishing? You know I love to have you come. You can't think how I -look forward to it." She was walking beside him along the _quai_. The -unobtrusive squareness of the "Doric little Morgue" was on their left, -as they faced the keen wind and the dying sunset. Notre Dame stood gray -upon a chilly evening sky of palest yellow. "I know now that I _was_ -lonely." - -"That implies the kindest compliment." - -"More than _implies_, I hope." - -"You really like to have me come?" - -"You know I do. I am only afraid that you will rob yourself--of other -things for me." - -The candor of her eyes was childlike. - -"My little friend." Odd felt that he could not quite trust himself, and -took refuge in the convenient assertion. - -The cold, clear wind blew against their faces; it ruffled the water, and -the gray waves showed sharp steely lights. The leafless trees made an -arabesque of tracery on the river and the sky. Hilda looked up at the -kind, melancholy face beside her, a faint touch of cynicism in her sad -smile; but the cynicism was all for herself, and it was not excessive. -She accepted this renaissance gratefully, though the disillusions of the -past were unforgettable. - -"Tell me, Hilda, that you will be my friend whatever happens--to you or -to me." - -"I have always been your friend, have I not?" - -"Have you, Hilda, always?" - -"I am dully faithful." Hilda's smile was a little baffling; it gave no -warrant for the sudden quickening of the breath that he had experienced -more than once of late. - -"I feel as if I had _found_ you, Hilda." - -"Did you _look_ for me, then?" - -The smile was now decidedly baffling and yet very sweet. - -"You know," she added, "I liked you from that first moment when you -fished me out of the river. It seems that you are fated to act always -the chivalrous part toward me." - -"I would ask no better fate. Hilda, you have seen Allan Hope? Not yet?" - -"No; not yet." Hilda's face grew serious. "He is coming to tea this -afternoon." - -"But you must be there." - -"Yes, I suppose I must." This affectation of girlish indifference seemed -to Odd more significant than noticeable shyness. - -"We must take a cab," he said, trying to keep his voice level. - -"Oh, it makes no difference. Cabs, you see, are never reckoned with in -my arrivals. I am warranted to be late." - -"But you must not be late." - -"But if I want to?" There was certainly a touch of roguery in her eyes. - -"If you want to and if I want you to, it shows that you are cruel and I -conscienceless. Here is a cab. Away with you, Hilda. _Au revoir_." - -"Aren't you coming too?" asked Hilda, pausing in the act of lifting -Palamon. - -"Not to-day; I can't." Odd knew that he was cowardly. "I shall see you -to-morrow? I suppose not." - -"Why, yes, if you come to the Boulevard St. Germain." Hilda had -deposited Palamon on the floor of the cab and still stood by the open -door looking rather dismayed. - -"Really!" - -"I shall go there." - -"I too, then. Remember our vow of friendship, Hilda. I wish you -everything that is good and happy." - -There was seemingly a slightly hurt look on Hilda's face as she drove -away. In spite of the vow, Peter feared that this was the last of Hilda, -of even this rather shadowy second edition of friendship. - -He had done his duty; to hurt oneself badly seems a surety of having -done one's duty thoroughly. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Hilda drove home, with Palamon leaning his warm body against her feet as -he sat on the floor of the cab. She put out her hand now and then and -laid it on his head, but absently. She leaned back presently and closed -her eyes, only rousing herself with a little start when the cab drew up -with a jerk in the Rue Pierre Charron. Palamon stood dully on the -pavement while she spoke to the cabman--but the _monsieur_ had paid him, -as Hilda had forgotten for the moment. Palamon was evidently tired too, -and with a little turn of dread she wondered if the time would come when -she must leave Palamon to a lonely day in the apartment. Mrs. Archinard -did not like dogs near her. Katherine was always out, and although -Rosalie the cook was devoted to the _tou-tou_, Hilda would miss him -terribly and he would miss her. - -She said to herself that if it came to that she would allow herself a -daily cab-fare rather than leave Palamon, and she toiled up the steep -stairs carrying him. Taylor opened the door to her. - -"Give me the dog, Miss Hilda; you do look that tired. You are to go at -once into the drawing-room, Miss. Lord Allan Hope has been waiting for -some time." - -Hilda was surprised to find that she had been thinking of Palamon -rather than of the ordeal before her. She felt calm now, perfectly, as -she walked into the drawing-room, a little taken aback, however, to find -Lord Allan there waiting for her and alone. - -Katherine was in the next room, her own pretty room, a rather perplexed -smile of expectancy on her face. Taylor brought in Palamon, and -Katherine gave him a drink and patted him kindly. Palamon would go with -Hilda to her new home--dear old Palamon! The thought of Hilda's new home -and homes--of the castle in Somersetshire and the shooting-lodge in -Scotland, and the big house in Grosvenor Square, deepened the look of -perplexity on Katherine's brow. - -While Palamon lapped the water, she watched him with an expression of -absent-minded concentration. She could hear nothing in the drawing-room, -except now and then the slightly raised quiet of Allan Hope's fine -voice. Presently there was a long silence, and Katherine paused near the -door. - -The quizzical lift of her eyebrows spoke her amused inquiry. She could -hardly imagine Hilda allowing herself to be kissed, and as the silence -continued, Katherine felt a touch of impatience color her sisterly -sympathy. Lord Allan's voice, pitched on a deep note of pain, startled -her. There followed quite a burst of ardent eloquence. With a little -_moue_ of self-disapproval Katherine bent her ear to the door. She heard -Lord Allan quite distinctly. He was pleading in more desperate accents -than she could have imagined possible from him, and Katherine caught, -too, the half frightened reiteration of Hilda's voice: "I can't, I -can't; really I can't. I am so--_so_ sorry, so sorry--" The -childishness of this helpless repetition brought a quick frown to -Katherine's brow. - -"Little idiot! Baby!" - -She straightened herself and stood staring at the gray houses across the -way. Then, at renewed silence in the drawing-room, she walked to the -mirror and looked at her amethyst-robed reflection. - -Her eyes lingered on the contour of her waist, the supple elegance of -the line that fell gleaming from her hip. She met the half-shamed, -half-daring glance of her deeply set eyes. The silence continued, and -Katherine walked out through the entrance and into the drawing-room. - -Hilda was sitting upright on a tall chair, looking at the floor with an -expression of painful endurance, and Lord Allan stood looking at her. - -He turned his eyes almost unseeingly on Katherine and remained silent, -while Hilda rose and put out her hand to him. Hilda had no variety of -metaphor; "I am so sorry," she repeated. - -She left her hand in his for one moment and then passed swiftly out of -the room. Katherine was left facing the unfortunate lover. Katherine -showed great tact. - -"Lord Allan, don't mind me. Sit down for a moment. Perhaps then you may -be able to tell me. Perhaps I can help you." - -"No good, Miss Archinard; it's all up with me." - -Her gentle voice evidently turned aside the current of his frank -despair. Instead of rushing out, he dropped on the sofa and looked at -the carpet over his locked hands. - -"I am not going to talk to you for a little while." - -The lamps were lighted and the tea-things all in readiness on the little -table. Katherine lit the kettle and turned a log on the fire. Lord -Allan's silence implied a dull acquiescence. He did not move until -Katherine came and sat down on the chair beside him. - -"_I_ am so sorry, too," she said, with a sad little smile. "Lord Allan, -I thought she cared for you." - -"I hoped so." - -"And have you no more hope?" - -"None--absolutely none. I tell you it's rough on a fellow, Miss -Archinard. I--I _adore_ that child." - -"Poor Lord Allan," Katherine gently breathed. She stretched out her slim -hand and laid it almost tenderly on his. Katherine was rather surprised -at herself, and to herself her motives were rather confused. "I should -have liked you as a brother, Lord Allan." - -"You are awfully kind." He lifted his dreary eyes and surveyed her -absently, but with some gratitude. "I suppose I had best be going," he -added suddenly, as if struck by the anti-climax of his position. - -"No, no; not unless you feel you must." Katherine put out her hand again -and detained his rising. "I can't bear to think of you going out alone -like that into the cold. Just wait. You are bruised. Get back your -breath. I am not going to be tiresome." - -Lord Allan leaned back in the sofa with a long sigh, relapsing into the -same half stunned silence, while Katherine moved about the tea-table, -measuring out the tea from the caddy to the teapot, pouring on the -boiling water, and pausing to wait for the tea to steep. Presently Lord -Allan was startled by a proffered steaming cup. - -"Will you?" she said. "I made it for you. It is such a chilly evening." - -"Oh, how awfully kind of you," he started from his crushed recumbency of -attitude, "but you know I really _can't!_" But at the grieved gentleness -of Katherine's eyes he took the cup. "It is too awfully kind of you. I -do feel abominably chilly." He gulped down the tea, and gave a half -shame-faced smile as she took the cup for replenishment. - -"No, don't get up," she urged, as he made an effort to collect his -courtesy; "let me wait on you," and she returned with a discreetly -tempting plate of the thinnest bread and butter. She sat down beside him -again, looking into the fire with kind, sad eyes as she stirred her tea. -She asked him presently, in the same quietly gentle voice, some little -question about the most recent debate in the House. Lord Allan had -rather distinguished himself in that debate; it was on the crest of that -wave of triumph that he had come to Hilda. From monosyllabic replies he -was led on to a rather doleful recitation of his own prowess; it seemed -that Katherine had followed it all in the newspapers, so tactfully -intelligent were her comments. He found himself sipping his third cup of -tea, enjoying in a dreary way the expounding of his favorite political -theories to the quiet, purple-robed figure beside him. He remembered -that Miss Archinard had always been interested in his career; she, of -course, was the intellectual one, though Hilda's beauty sent a sharp -stab of pain through him as he made the comparison; he appreciated now -Miss Archinard's kindness and sympathy with a brotherly warmth of -gratitude. When he at last rose to go, he was dejected; but no longer -the crushed individual of an hour before. - -"You have been too good to a beaten man," he said, taking her hand. - -"Oh, Lord Allan, by the laws of compensation you must lose _sometimes_. -Hilda, poor child, doesn't know what she has done; she cannot know. Her -little achievements bound the world for her. She doesn't see outside her -studio walls. _Your_ great world of action, true beneficent action, -would stun her. Do you leave Paris directly, Lord Allan? Yes! Then won't -you write to me now and then? I am interested in you. I won't relinquish -the claim of 'it might have been.' May I keep in touch with you--as a -sister would?" - -"You are too good, Miss Archinard." - -"To an old friend? A man I have followed and admired as I have you? Lord -Allan, I respect you from the bottom of my heart for the way in which -you have borne this knock-down from fate. You are strong, it won't hurt -you in the end. Let me know how you get on." - -Katherine's eyes were compelling in their candid kindness. Lord Allan -said that he would, with emphasis. As he went down the long staircase, -the purple-robed figure filled his thoughts with a reviving -beneficence. He felt that the blow was perhaps not so bad as he had -imagined--might even be for the best; better for him, for his career. -Katherine's words enveloped him in an atmosphere that was soothing. - -Left alone, Katherine finished her second cup of tea, and made, as she -looked thoughtfully into the fire, a second little _moue_ of -self-disapprobation. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Odd, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing-room when he called next -morning. The Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the aspect of -illusions of late; for the regularity of his daily routine--the morning -spent with Katherine, and the afternoon with Hilda--excluded the hours -of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the discovered immunity. - -Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim sole tilted towards the -blaze, and she looked round at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd's -face wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, seemed -thinner, older than usual. He looked even haggard, Katherine thought. -She liked his thin face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as -Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pretences of any kind for -mockery to fasten on. The clever feminine eye is quick to remark the -subtlest signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine's eye was very -clever, and this morning, in looking at Odd, she was conscious of a -little inner sigh. Katherine had asked herself more than once of late -whether a husband, not only too superior for success, but morally her -superior, might not make life a little wearing. Some such thought -crossed her mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized that through -Allan Hope's discomfiture she herself was as wrongly placed as ever, and -Hilda's drudgery as binding. - -Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that general sense of _malaise_. - -One was that Allan Hope's smooth, handsome face was rather fatuous; the -face that knows no doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a -Katherine. - -Another thought held a keen conjecture on Peter's haggard looks. - -She put out her hand to him, and, stooping over her, he kissed her with -more tenderness than he always showed. Their engagement had left almost -untouched the easy unsentimental attitude of earlier days. - -"Well," he said, and Katherine understood and resented somewhat the -quick attack of the absorbing subject. She shook her head. - -"Bad news, Peter. Bad and very unexpected." - -Odd stood upright and looked at her. - -"Bad!" he repeated. - -"She refused him," Katherine said tersely, and her glance turned once -more from the fire to Peter's face. He looked at her silently. - -"She is a foolish baby," added Katherine. - -"She refused him--definitely?" - -"Quite. She had to face the music last night, of course. Mamma and papa -were rather--shabby--let us say, in their disinterested disappointment." -Odd flushed a little at the cool cynicism of Katherine's tone. "She told -me, when I removed her from the battlefield, that she doesn't love him -and never will. So, of course, from every high and mighty point of view -she is right, quite right." - -Katherine's eyes returned contemplatively to the fire. Odd was still -silent. - -"She ought to love him, of course; that is where she is so foolish. I am -afraid she has ruined her life. I love you, Peter, and he is every bit -as good-looking as you are." Katherine glanced at him with a sad and -whimsical smile. Peter, certainly, was looking rather dazed. He stooped -once more and kissed her. - -"Thank you for loving me, Katherine." - -"You are welcome. It _is_ a pity, isn't it?" - -"Yes, it is"--Peter seated himself on the sofa, where Allan had sat the -night before--"an awful pity," he added. "I am astonished. I thought she -cared for him." - -"So did I." - -"She cares for some one else, perhaps." Odd locked his hands behind his -head, and he too stared at the fire. - -"There is no one else she could care for. I know Hilda's outlook too -well." - -"And she refused him," he repeated musingly. - -"Really, Peter, that sounds a little dull--not like you." Katherine -smiled at him. - -"I feel dulled. I am awfully sorry. It would have been so satisfactory. -And what's to be done now?" - -"That is for you to suggest, Peter. My power over Hilda is very limited. -You may have more influence." - -"She might come and live with us." - -"That would be very nice," Katherine assented, "and it is very dear of -you to suggest it." - -Peter was conscious of sudden terrors that prompted him to add with -self-scorn-- - -"What would your mother do?" - -"Without her? I don't know." - -"Of course," Peter hastened to add, "as far as money goes, you know; you -understand, dear, that your mother shall want nothing. But to rob her of -the companionship of both daughters?" Peter rose and walked to the -window. It needed some heroism, he thought, to put aside the idea of -Hilda living with them; he tried to pride himself on the renunciation, -while under the poor crust of self-approbation lurked jibing depths of -consciousness. Heroism would not lie in renunciation, but in living with -her. The cowardice of his own retreat left him horribly shaken. - -Katherine watched him from her chair, calmly. - -"But Hilda's work must cease at once," he said presently, finding a -certain relief in decisive measures. "She won't show any false pride, I -hope, about allowing me to put an end to it." - -"It would be like her," said Katherine, sliding a sympathetic gloom of -voice over the hard reality of her conclusions; conclusions half angry, -half sarcastic. Peter was dull after all. Katherine felt alarmed, -humiliated, and amused, but she steeled herself inwardly to a calm -contemplation of facts. She joined him at the window. "What a burden you -have taken on your poor shoulders, Peter." Peter immediately put his arm -around her waist, and, though Katherine felt a deeper humiliation, she -saw that alarm was needless; a proof of Peter's superiority, a proof, -too, of his stupidity; as her own most original and clever superiority -was proved by the fact of her calm under humiliation. Could she accept -that humiliation as the bitter drop in the cup of good things Peter had -to offer her? Katherine asked herself the question; it was answered by -another. Just how far did the humiliation go? Peter's infidelity might -be mere shallow passion, _passagere;_ the fine part might be to feign -blindness and help him out of it. _Attendons_ summed up Katherine's -mental attitude at the moment. - -"Don't talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine," said Peter. "Don't try to -spoil my humble little pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, -what more can I ask?" He looked at her with kind, tired eyes. - -"I won't thwart you, but Hilda will." - -"Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. That must be soon, -Katherine." - -Katherine looked pensively out of the window. - -"We will see," she replied, with a pretty evasiveness. - -It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the Boulevard St. Germain that -afternoon. He walked at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to -cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did not think much, and -was convinced that his mind was a comparatively happy blank as he paused -before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her avocations. If he -made any definite reflections while he walked up and down between the -doorway and the next corner, they were on his last few conversations -with Hilda; and then on rather abstract points merely. He had drawn the -child out. He had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired for -enjoyment, not for display. He had found out that Hilda knew Italian -literature, from Dante to Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, -and loved it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandinavia was -deeply appreciated by her, and the essayists of France. Her tastes were -as delicately discriminative as Katherine's, but lacked that metallic -assurance of which lately Peter had become rather uncomfortably aware. -As for the English tongue, from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they -could range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson's sweet radiance. - -Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey and evaded any -trespassing beyond its limits. His reticence was not put to a prolonged -test. Hilda met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were -accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious guilt, though Peter was -not sure that she was not a "foolish baby." - -"Let us walk," she said, "it is such a lovely day." - -"We will walk at least till the sun goes. We will just have time to -catch the sunset on the Seine." - -"Yes; what a _lovely_ day! I wish I were ten, with short skirts, and a -hoop, that I could run and roll." - -"You would like a bicycle ride. Come to-morrow with Katherine and me." - -"I can't. Don't think me a prig, but my model is due and I am finishing -my picture. Thanks so much; and this walk is almost as good." - -"If Palamon is tired I will carry him, Hilda." - -"Oh, he isn't tired. See how he pulls at his cord. The sunlight is -getting into his veins. What delicious air." - -"The sunlight is getting into your veins too, Hilda. You are looking a -little as you should look." - -Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It was an original -characteristic of Hilda's that she did not seem at all anxious to talk -about herself, and Odd continued, looking down at her profile-- - -"That's what you ought to have--sunlight. You are a little white flower -that has grown in a shadow." Hilda did not glance up at him; she smiled -rather distantly. - -"What a sad simile!" - -"Is it a true one, Hilda?" - -"I don't think so. I never thought of myself in that sentimental light. -I suppose to friendly eyes every life has a certain pathos." - -"No; some lives are too evidently and merely flaunting in the sunlight -for even friendly eyes to poetize--to sentimentalize, as you rather -unkindly said." - -"Sunlight is poetic, too." - -"Success and selfishness, and all the commonplaces that make up a happy -life, are not poetic." - -"That is rather morbid, you know--_decadent_." - -"I don't imply a fondness for illness and wrongness. Rather the -contrary. It is a very beautiful rightness that keeps in the shade to -give others the sunshine." - -Hilda's eyes were downcast, and in her look a certain pale reserve that -implied no liking for these personalities--personalities that glanced -from her to others, as Odd realized. - -He paused, and it was only after quite a little silence that Hilda said, -with all her gentle quiet-- - -"You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or that my life has been an -unhappy life. It is very good of you to trouble about it, but I can't -claim the rather self-righteously heroic _role_ you give me. I think it -is others who live in the shadow. I think that any work, however feebly -done, is a happy thing. I find so much pleasure in things other people -don't care about." - -"A very nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You couldn't have told me -to mind my own business more kindly." Odd's humorous look met her glance -of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, "Will you try to find -pleasure in a thing most girls _do_ care for? Will you go to the -Meltons' dance on Monday? Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and -I said I would try to persuade you." - -"I _didn't_ mean to snub you." - -"Very well; convince me of it by saying you will come to the dance." - -The girlish pleasure of her face was evident. - -"Do you really want me to?" - -"It would make me very happy." - -"It is against my rules, you know. I can't get up at six and go out in -the evening besides. But I will make an exception for this once, to show -you I wasn't snubbing you! And, besides, I should love to." The gayety -of her look suddenly fell to hesitation. "Only I am afraid I can't. I -remember I haven't any dress." - -"_Any_ dress will do, Hilda." - -"But I haven't any dress. The gray silk is impossible." - -Peter's mind made a most unmasculine excursion into the position. - -"But you were in London last year. You went to court. You must have had -dresses." - -"Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came back. I had no need for -them. Her own wore out, and mine fit her very well--a little too long -and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps the white satin would -do, if it wasn't cut at the bottom; it could be let down again, if it -was only turned up. It is trimmed with _mousseline de soie_, and the -flounce would hide the line." - -Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; he found it horribly -touching. "It might do." - -"It must do. If it doesn't, another of Katherine's can be -metamorphosized." - -"And you will dance with me? I love dancing, and I don't know many -people. Of course Katherine will see that I am not neglected, but I -should like to _depend_ on you; and if I am left sitting alone in a -corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be responsible for me?" Her -smiling eyes met the badly controlled emotion of his look. - -"Hilda, you are quite frivolous." Terms of reckless endearment were on -his lips; he hardly knew how he kept them down. "How shall I manoeuvre -that you be left sitting alone in corners? Remember that if the miracle -occurs I shall come, whether you beckon or no." - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - - -Odd was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for -several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he -would see her at the Meltons' on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had -been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a -witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that -might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine -had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety. - -The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton's -apartment--one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the -Avenue du Bois de Boulogne--and after greeting his hostess, he waited -for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully -apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine's -smooth dark head, the Captain's correctly impassive good looks, and -Hilda's loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter -thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility -as acute as a fond mother's, he saw--felt, even--the stir, the ripple of -inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of -a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious -of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a -bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the -very air with sudden perfume. "Her dear little head," "Her lovely little -head," he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally -spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, -which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. -Then, turning to Hilda-- - -"The white satin _does_," he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did -not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her -sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen -people already. - -"See that Hilda, in her _embarras de choix_, doesn't become too much -embarrassed," she said to Peter. "Exercise for her a brotherly -discretion." - -The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton--a pretty little woman with -languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself -there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her -exclusiveness, which she took _au grand serieux_, highly amused -Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton's. -She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself -at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as -tolerant of a millionaire _parvenu_ as might be a duchess with a -political _entourage_ to manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton's anxious -social self-satisfaction humorous--a fact of which Mrs. Melton was -unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly -impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull too, and a few grievances -whispered behind her fan in Katherine's ear _en passant_--for subject, -the unfortunate and eternal _nouveau riche_--made pleasant gravity -difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her -dull and funny. - -Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the -opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes. - -"I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, -led by your father and Mrs. Melton." - -He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced -it--charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, -surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, -with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else's hair -was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was -a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and -floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz -came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his -felicity carry him too far into conjecture. - -"Are you enjoying yourself?" he asked, as they joined the eddy circling -around Mrs. Melton's ballroom. - -"So much; thanks to you." Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at -the joy of dancing. "I had almost forgotten how delicious it was." - -"More delicious than the studio, isn't it?" - -"You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche -could do it--all light and movement and color. I should like to come -out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows -everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls' throats. There is -the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly -heads! Isn't that worth while?" - -Odd's eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda's throat. - -"Everything you do is worth while--from painting to dancing. You dance -very well." - -The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display -of which he recognized the gown's quondam possessor, gave him a little -pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of -cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the -happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue--the long fatigue of a -weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge -of the aloofness--the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night -Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago. - -"You dance well, too, Mr. Odd," she said. - -"I very seldom waltz." - -"In _my_ honor then?" - -"Solely in your honor. I haven't waltzed five times in one evening with -one young woman--for ages!" - -"You haven't waltzed five times with me yet. I may wear you out!" - -"What an implied reflection on my forty years! Do I seem so old to you, -Hilda?" - -"No; I don't think of you as old." - -"But I think of you as young, very young, deliciously young." - -"Deliciously?" she repeated. "That is a fallacy, I think. Youth is sad; -doesn't see things in _value_; everything is blacker or whiter than -reality, so that one is disappointed or desperate all the time." - -"And you, Hilda?" - -Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful defiance. - -"Don't be personal." - -"But you were. And, after the other day--your declaration of -contentment." - -"Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. I hate people who talk -about themselves," Hilda added; "it's the worst kind of immodesty. -Material and mental braggarts are far more endurable than the people who -go round telling about their souls." - -"Severe, rigid child!" Odd laughed, and, after a little pause, laughed -again. "You are horribly reserved, Hilda." - -"Very sage when one has nothing to show. Silence covers such a multitude -of sins. If one is consistently silent, people may even imagine that one -isn't dull," said Hilda maliciously. - -"You are dull and silent, then?" - -"I have few opinions; that is, perhaps, dulness." - -"It may be a very wide cleverness." - -"Yes; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz is yours too, you know. -You have quite a cluster here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an -ice." - -Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on a small sofa in a corner -of the ballroom. Katherine passed, dancing; her dark eyes flashed upon -them a glance that might have been one of amusement. Odd was conscious -of a painful effort in his answering smile. - -Hilda's eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her sister with a fond -contemplation. - -"Isn't that dress becoming to her? The shade of deepening, changing -rose." - -"Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely." - -"Do you notice dresses, care about them?" - -"I think I do, sometimes; not in detail as a woman would, but in the -blended effect of dress and wearer." - -"I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you -noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? -I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has -visions of crushed ribs, don't you think?" - -Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile -that he still felt to be painful. "And is not this lace gathered around -the shoulders pretty too?" Hilda turned to him for inspection. - -"You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, -Hilda." Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her -gown. - -"The lace is mamma's. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem -hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has -Meredith's last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing -all the talking. _You_ talk now." - -"About Meredith, your dress, or you?" - -"About yourself, if you please." - -"It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me -than you were in yourself." - -Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers -with a force which almost compelled her-- - -"No; I am very much interested in you." Odd was silent, studying her -face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown--the -expression of painfully controlled emotion. - -"There is nothing comparably interesting in me," he said; "I have had my -story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story." - -"What do you mean?" - -"Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn't." - -"And your books?" - -"They are as negative as I am." - -"Yet they have helped me to live." Hilda looked hard at him while she -spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the -emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white. - -"Helped you to live, Hilda!" he almost stammered; "my gropings!" - -"You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like -Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and -lit my path!" She smiled, adding: "I suppose you think you have failed -because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you -yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success." - -"I didn't even know you read my books." - -"I know your books very well; much better than I know you." - -"Don't say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them." - -"One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. -Perhaps you _do_ even better than you write." - -"Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison." His voice -stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile-- - -"Shall we dance?" - -In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the -dance's circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of -desire; he must hear from Hilda's lips why she had refused Allan Hope. - -An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed his mind once and again -with a dull ache of self-reproach, all the more insistent from his -realization that its cause was not so much the infidelity to Katherine -as that Hilda would think him a sorry villain. - -Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying herself. She knew that his -energy this evening was on Hilda's account; he had claimed the -responsibility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider herself -neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, with perhaps a display of -the dulness she had discovered in him, upon her confidence and common -sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray that confidence; there -was some rather dislocated consolation in that. - -Hilda was a little breathless when he came to claim her for the second -cluster of waltzes. It was near the end of the evening. - -"I have been dancing _steadily_," she announced, "and twice down to -supper! Did you try any of the narrow little sandwiches? So good!" - -"And you still don't grudge me my waltzes?" - -"I like yours _best_!" she said, smiling at him as she laid her hand on -his shoulder. They took a few turns around the room and then Hilda owned -that she was a little tired. They sat down again on the sofa. - -"Hilda!" said Odd suddenly, "will you think me very rude if I ask you -why you refused Allan Hope?" - -Hilda turned a startled glance upon him. - -"No; perhaps not," she answered, though the voice was rather frigid. - -"You don't think I have a right to ask, do you?" - -"Well, the answer is so evident." - -"Is it?" Hilda had looked away at the dancers; she turned her head now -half unwillingly and glanced at him, smiling. - -"I would not have refused him if I had loved him, would I? You know -that. It doesn't seem quite fair, quite kind, to talk of, does it?" - -"Not to me even? I have been interested in it for a long time. Katherine -told me, and Mary." - -"I don't know why they should have been so sure," said Hilda, with some -hardness of tone. "I never encouraged him. I avoided him." She looked at -Odd again. "But I am not angry with you; if any one has a right, you -have." - -"Thanks; thanks, dear. You understand, you know my interest, my -anxiety. It seemed so--happy for both. And you care for no one else?" - -"No one else." Hilda's eyes rested on his with clear sincerity. - -"Don't you ever intend to marry, Hilda?" Odd was leaning forward, his -elbows on his knees, and looking at the floor. There was certainly a -tension in his voice, and he felt that Hilda was scanning him with some -wonder. - -"Does a refusal to take one person imply that? I have made no vows." - -"I don't see--" Odd paused; "I don't see why you shouldn't care for -Hope." - -"Are you going to plead his cause?" she asked lightly. - -"Would it not be for your happiness?" Odd sat upright now, putting on -his eyeglasses and looking at her with a certain air of resolution. - -"I don't love him." Hilda returned the look sweetly and frankly. - -"What do you know of love, you child? Why not have given him a chance, -put him on trial? Nothing wins a woman like wooing." - -"How didactic we are becoming. I am afraid I should really get to loathe -poor Lord Allan if I had given him leave to woo me." - -"I suppose you think him too unindividual, too much of a pattern with -other healthy and hearty young men. Don't you know, foolish child, that -a good man, a man who would love you as he would, make you the husband -he would, is a rarity and very individual?" - -Odd found a perverse pleasure in his own paternally admonishing -attitude. Hilda's lightly amused but touched look implied a confidence -so charming that he found the attitude sublimely courageous. - -"I suppose so," she said, and she added, "I haven't one word to say -against Lord Allan, except--" She paused meditatively. - -"Except what?" Odd asked rather breathlessly. - -"He doesn't really _need_ me." - -"Doesn't _need_ you! Why, the man is desperately in love with you!" - -"He needs a wife, but he doesn't need _me_." - -"You are subtle, Hilda." - -"I don't think I am _that_." - -"You are waiting, then, for some one who can satisfy you as to his -_need_ of you?" - -"I shall only marry that person." - -Hilda jumped up. "But I'm not waiting at all, you know. _Dansons -maintenant!_ Your task is nearly over!" - -It was very late when Odd gave Hilda up to her last partner, and joined -Katherine in a small antechamber, where she was sitting among flowers, -talking to an appreciative Frenchman. This gentleman, with the -ceremonious bow of his race, made away when Miss Archinard's _fiance_ -appeared, and Odd dropped into the vacated seat with a horrible sinking -of the heart. The dull self-reproach was now acute, he felt meanly -guilty. Katherine looked at him funnily--very good-humoredly. - -"I didn't know you had it in you to dance so well and so persistently, -Peter. You have done honor to Hilda's ball." - -"I hope I wasn't too selfishly monopolizing." - -"Oh, you had a right to a certain monopoly since, owing to you only, she -came," and Katherine added, smiling still more good-humoredly, "I am -_not_ jealous, Peter." - -He turned to look at her. The words, the playful tone in which they were -uttered, struck him like a blow. His guilty consciousness of his own -feeling gave them a supreme nobility. She was _not_ jealous. What a cur -he would be if ever he gave her apparent cause for jealousy. The cause -was there; his task must be to keep it hidden. - -"But suppose _I_ am?" he said; "you haven't given me a single dance." - -Katherine's smile was placid; she did not say that he had not asked for -one. Indeed they had rarely danced together. - -"I think of going to England in a day or two, Peter," she observed. "The -Devreuxs have asked me to spend a month with them." - -Peter sat very still. - -"A sudden decision, Kathy?" - -"No, not so sudden. Our _tete-a-tete_ can't be prolonged forever." - -"Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the wedding day must be fixed -before you go." - -"I yield. The first part of May." - -"Three months! Let it be April at least, Kathy." - -"No, I am for May." - -"It's an unlucky month." - -"Oh, _we_ can defy bad luck, can't we?" Katherine smiled. - -"If you go away, I shall," said Odd, after a moment's silence. - -"Why, I thought you would stay here and look after mamma--and Hilda," -said Katherine slowly, and with a wondering thought for this revealment -of poor Peter's folly. Peter then intended to heroically sacrifice his -infidelity. That he should think she did not see it! - -"I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip through Provence would set -me right. I should come back through Touraine just at the season of -lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in Paris. I see so little -of your mother--and Hilda. Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after -her lessons." - -"I am afraid that mamma can't spare Taylor." - -Peter moved impatiently. - -"Katherine, may I give you some money? She would take it from you. -Persuade her to give up that work. You could do it delicately." - -"As I have told you, you exaggerate my influence. She would suspect the -donor. She would not take the money." - -"I could speak to your father; lend him a sum." - -Katherine flushed. - -"It would make him very angry with her if he knew. And the lessons are a -fixed sum; only a steady income would be the equivalent." - -"Oh dear!" sighed Peter. He suddenly realized that of late he had talked -of little else but Hilda in his conversations with Katherine. - -"When do you go to London, dear?" he asked. - -"The day after to-morrow." Katherine, above the waving of her fan, -smiled slightly at his change of tone. "Will you miss me, Peter?" - -"All the more for being cross with you. It is very wrong of you to play -truant like this." - -"It will be good for both of us." Katherine's voice was playful, and -showed no trace of the bitterness she was feeling. "I might get tired of -you, Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence is the best fuel -to appreciation. I shall come back realizing more fully than ever your -perfection." - -"What a sage little person it is! Sarcastic as well! May I write to you -very often?" - -"As often as you feel like it; but don't force feeling." - -"May I describe chateaux and churches? And will you read my descriptions -if I do?" - -"With pleasure--and profit. Let me know, too, how the book gets on. Can -I do anything for you at the British Museum?" - -It struck Katherine that the change in their relation which she now -contemplated as very probably definite might well allow of a return to -the first phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan Hope which -she had received that morning, though satisfactory in many respects, was -not quite so from an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friendship -with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for any woman, and Katherine -perhaps, with an excusable malice, rather anticipated the time when -Peter might have regrets, and find in that friendship the solace of -certain disappointments from which Katherine had almost decided not to -withhold him. - -"I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, even in London, shall -I?" said Odd, in reply to an offer more generous than he could have -divined. "Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. Don't -be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the Elgin Marbles if you like. I -shall set you no heavier task." - -"They are so profoundly melancholy in their cellared respectable abode, -poor dears! I know they would have preferred dropping to pieces under a -Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in an insulting -immortality. The frieze especially, stretched round the ugly wall like a -butterfly under a glass case!" Odd laughed with more light-heartedness -than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced him to feel that he still -found Katherine charming. There must certainly be safety in that -affectionate admiration. - -"I won't even ask you to harrow your susceptibility by a look at the -insulted frieze, then; you must know it well, to enter with such -sympathy into its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I shall be -lonely down there. A daily letter would be none too many." - -"I can't quite see why you are exiling yourself. Of course, the weather -here is nasty just now. I have noticed your cough all the evening. Come -and say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so fix your hour." - -"Our usual hour? In the morning?" - -"You will not see Hilda then." - -"Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. You will kiss her _au -revoir_ for me." - -Odd felt a certain triumph. - -Katherine's departure could be taken as a merciful opportunity for -makeshift flight. After a month or two of solitary wrestling and -wandering, he might find that the dubiously directed forces of -Providence were willing to help one who helped himself. - -His mind fastened persistently on the details of the suddenly -entertained idea of escape from the madness he felt closing round him. -The disclosure of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. And how -face the truth? A man may fight a dishonoring weakness, but how fight -the realization that a love founded on highest things, stirring highest -emotions in him, had, for the first time, come into his life, and too -late? A love as far removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as it -was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling toward Katherine; -and yet, because of that tie, drifted into from a lazy indifference and -kindness for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing him to a more -fearful shipwreck. - -Hilda's selflessness was rather awful to the man who loved her, and gave -her a power of clear perception that made sinking in her eyes more to be -dreaded than any hurt to himself. - -And Peter departed for the South without seeing her again. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - - -An April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd's return. A rather -prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs. - -He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had -announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied -some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard's. -Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the -Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she -knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter -had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the -Captain's projected jaunt. He surmised that her father's absence would -lighten Hilda's load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain's -hands--on the understanding that most of it was to be given to -Hilda--but _from_ her father, would relieve her from the necessity for -teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, -but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking -individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told -him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed -"_toujours souffrante_," and "Mademoiselle 'Ilda"--Odd had hesitated -uncomfortably before asking for her--was out. "_Pas bien non plus, -celle-la_," she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still -more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; "_Elle -s'ereinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle_." With a sick -sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she -might be found. All the morning, it seemed "_Il faut bien qu'elle soigne -madame, et puis elle m'aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop -lourde_," and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that "_Madame est -tres, mais tres exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une -dame comme celle-la_." - -Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her -days he should probably find her in the Rue d'Assas, and, with the -angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda -excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in -fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he -caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. -The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half -dazed her evidently. - -"You? I can hardly believe it!" she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that -plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was -wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips -a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had -reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the -slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable -little hat symbolized a biting poverty. - -"Hilda! Hilda!" was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He -was aghast. - -"I _am_ glad to see you," she said, and her voice had a forced gayety -over its real weakness; "I haven't seen any of my people for so long, -except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn't it? -Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I -could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and -Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and -mamma is much, _much_ better. As for papa, the last time I heard from -him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that -he hasn't been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last -letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you -are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking." - -Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be -over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control. - -"If I had known I would have come sooner," he said; "you would have let -me help you, wouldn't you?" - -"I am afraid you couldn't have _helped_ me. That is the worst of -illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up." - -"My poor child!" Odd inwardly cursed himself. "If I had known! What have -you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look--" - -"Fagged, don't I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since -you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We'll all go -to the _vernissage_ together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer -have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for -mamma." - -"Taylor helped you, I suppose?" - -"Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and -indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that -she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, -of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed -her." There was an explanatory note in Hilda's voice; indeed Odd's -silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. "It made double -duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not -minded." - -"And Wilson?" - -"He went with papa. I don't think papa could live without Wilson." - -"Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of your ghastly little face. -You have been housemaid, _garde-malade_, and bread-winner. Had you no -money at all?" Hilda flushed--the quick flush of physical weakness. - -"Yes, at first," she replied; "papa gave me quite a lot before going, -and that has paid part of the doctor's bills, and my lessons brought in -the usual amount." - -"Could you not have given up the lessons for the time being?" - -"I know you think it dreadful in me to have left mamma for all those -afternoons." Her acceptation of a blame infinitely removed from his -thoughts stupefied Odd. "And mamma has thought it heartless, most -naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy and kind. The doctor came three -times a day and I can explain to _you_"--Hilda hesitated--"the money -papa gave me went almost immediately--some unpaid bills." - -"What bills?" Odd spoke sternly. - -"Why, we owe bills right and left!" said Hilda. - -"But what bills were these?" - -"There was the rent of the apartment for one thing; we should have had -to go had that not been paid; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker; they -threatened to seize the furniture." - -"Katherine's dressmaker?" - -"Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that she would be so impatient; -but I suppose, on hearing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman -became frightened." Peter controlled himself to silence. The very -fulness of Hilda's confidence showed the strain that had been put upon -her. "And then," she went on, as he did not speak, "some of the money -had to go to Katherine in England. Poor Kathy! To be pinched like that! -She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling to tip the -servants and get her railway ticket to Surrey." - -"Why did she not write to me? Considering all things--" - -"Oh!" said Hilda--her tone needed no comment--"we have not quite come to -that." She added presently and gently, "I had money for her." - -Odd took her hand and kissed it; the glove was loose upon it. - -"And now," said Hilda, leaning forward and smiling at him, "you have -heard me _filer mon chapelet_. Tell me what you have been doing." - -"My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too grossly egotistic after -your story." - -"Has my story sounded so dismal? _I_ have been egotistic, then. I had -hoped that perhaps you would write to me," she added, and a delicately -malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard at her, with a -half-dreamy stare. - -"I thought of you," he said; "I should have liked to write." - -"Well, in the future do, please, when you feel like it." - -Mrs. Archinard was extended on the sofa in the drawing-room when they -reached the Rue Pierre Charron. The crisp daintiness of -pseudo-invalidism had withered to a look of sickly convalescence. She -was much faded, and her little air of melancholy affectation pitifully -fretful. - -"You come before my own daughter, Peter," she said; "I don't _blame_ -Katherine, since Hilda tells me that she did not let her know of my -dangerous condition." - -"Not _dangerous_, mamma," Hilda said, with a patient firmness not -untouched by resentment, a touch to Odd most new and pleasing. "The -doctor had perfect confidence in me, and would have told me. I should -have sent for papa and Katherine the moment he thought it advisable. -Under the circumstances they could have done nothing for you that I did -not do." Hilda had, indeed, rather distorted facts to shield Katherine. -What would Mrs. Archinard have said had she known that Katherine, in -answer to a letter begging her to return, had replied that she _could_ -not? Even in Hilda's charitable heart that "_could_ not" had rankled. -Odd's despairing gloom discerned something of this truth, as he realized -that the uncharacteristic self-justification was prompted by a rebellion -against misinterpretation before _him_. Mrs. Archinard showed some -nervous surprise. - -"Very well, very well, Hilda," she said, "I am sure I ask no sacrifices -on _my_ account. One may die alone as one has lived--alone. My life has -trained me in stoicism. You had better wash your face, Hilda. There is a -great smudge of charcoal on your cheek," and, as Hilda turned and walked -out, "I have looked on the face of the King of Terrors, Peter. Peter! -dear old homely name! the faithful ring in it! It is easy for Hilda to -talk! I make no complaint. She has nursed me excellently well--as far as -her nursing went. But she has a _hard_ soul! no tenderness! no sympathy! -To leave her dying mother every afternoon! To sacrifice me to her -_painting_! At such a time! Ah me!" Large tears rolled down Mrs. -Archinard's cheeks, and her voice trembled with weakness and self-pity. -Odd, in his raging resentment, could have exploded the truth upon her; -the tears arrested his impulse, and he sat moodily gazing at the floor. -Mrs. Archinard raised her lace-edged handkerchief and delicately touched -away the tears. - -"I have given my whole life, my whole life, Peter, for my girls! I have -borne this long exile from my home for their sakes!" At Allersley Mrs. -Archinard had never ceased complaining of her restricted lot, and had -characterized her neighbors as "yokels and Philistines." Speaking with -her handkerchief pressed by her finger-tips upon her eyelids, she -continued, "I have asked nothing of them but sympathy; _that_ I have -craved! And in my hour of need--" Mrs. Archinard's _point de Venise_ -bosom heaved once more. Odd took her hand with the unwilling yet pitying -kindness one would show towards a silly and unpleasant child. - -"I don't think you are quite fair," he said; "Hilda looks as badly as -you do. She has had a heavy load to carry." - -"I told her again and again to get a _garde-malade_, two if necessary." -Mrs. Archinard's voice rose to a higher key. "She has chosen to ruin her -appearance by sitting up to all hours of the night, and by working all -day in that futile studio." - -"_Garde-malades_ are expensive." Odd could not restrain his voice's -edge. - -"Expensive! For a dying mother! And with all that is lavished on her -studio--canvases, paints, models!" - -The depths of misconception were too hopelessly great, and, as Mrs. -Archinard's voice had now become shrilly emphatic, he kept silence, his -heart shaken with misery and with pity, despairing pity for Hilda. She -re-entered presently, wearing on her face too evident signs of -contrition. She spoke to her mother in tones of gentle entreaty, humored -her sweetly, gayly even, while she made tea. - -"You know I cannot touch cake, Hilda." - -"There are buttered _brioches_, mamma, piping hot." - -"Properly buttered, I hope. Rosalie usually places a great clot in the -centre, leaving the edges uneatable." - -"Mamma is like the princess who felt the pea through all the dozens of -mattresses, isn't she?" said Hilda, smiling at Odd. "But _I_ buttered -these with scientific exactitude." - -"Exactitude! Ah! the mirage of science! More milk, more milk!" Mrs. -Archinard raised herself on one elbow to watch with expectant -disapproval the concoction of her tea, and, relapsing on her cushions as -the tea was brought to her, "I suppose it _is_ milk, though I prefer -cream." - -"No, it's cream." Hilda should know, as she had herself just darted -round the corner to the _cremerie_. Odd sprang up to take his cup from -her. He thought she looked in danger of falling to the ground. - -"Do sit down," he said in a low voice; "you look very, very badly." - -"Have you read Meredith's last?" asked Mrs. Archinard from the sofa. -"Hilda is reading it to me in the evenings. We began it, ah! long, long -ago. I have sympathy for Meredith, an _intimite!_ It is so I feel, see -things--super-subtly. Strange how coarsely objective some minds are! Did -you order the oysters for my dinner, Hilda, and the ice from -Gage's--_pistache?_ I hope you impressed _pistache_. You will dine with -Hilda, of course, Peter; I have my dinner here; I am not yet strong -enough to sit through a meal. And then you must talk to me about -Meredith. I always find you most suggestive--such new lights on old -things. And Verhaeren, too; do you care for Verhaeren? Morbid? Yes, -perhaps, but that is a truism--not like you, Peter. '_Les apparus dans -mes chemins_,' poor, modern, broken, bleeding soul! We must talk of -Verhaeren. Just now I feel very sleepy. You will excuse me if I simply -_sans gene_ turn over and take a nap? I can often sleep at this hour. -Hilda, show Peter the Burne-Jones Chaucer over there. Hilda doesn't find -him limpid, sweet, healthy enough for Chaucer; but _nous sommes tous les -enfants malades_ nowadays. There is a beauty, you know, in that. Talk it -over." - -Hilda and Peter sat down obediently side by side on the distant little -_canape_ before the Burne-Jones Chaucer. They went over the pages, not -paying much attention to the woodcuts, but looking down favorite -passages together. The description of "my swete" in "The Book of the -Duchess," the complaint of poor Troilus, and, once more, Arcite's death. -The quiet room was very quiet, and they looked up from the pages now and -then to smile, perhaps a little sadly, at one another. When the dinner -was announced Hilda said, as they went into the dining-room-- - -"If your courage fails you, just say so frankly. I have very childish -tastes and childish fare." - -Indeed, half a cold chicken and a dish of rice constituted the repast. A -bottle of claret stood by Odd's place, and there was a white jar filled -with buttercups on the table; but even Rosalie seemed depressed by the -air of meagreness, and gave them a rather _effare_ glance as they sat -down. Odd suspected that the cold chicken was in his honor. He had come -to the conclusion that Hilda was capable of dining off rice alone. - -"Delightful!" he said. The chicken and rice were indeed very good, but -Hilda saw that he ate very little. - -"I make no further apologies," she said, smiling at him over the -buttercups; "your hunger be upon your own head." - -"I am not hungry, dear." - -Hilda had to do most of the talking, but they were both rather silent. -It was a happy silence to Hilda, full of a loving trust. - -When he spoke, it was in a voice of the same gentle fatigue that his -eyes showed; but as the eyes rested upon her she felt that the past and -the present had surely joined hands. - - - - -CHAPTER X - - -Odd went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the -next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he -could hardly have told. - -He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d'Assas and go home to tea and dinner -with her. His love for Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that -his late flight seemed degrading. - -So loving her, he could not be base. - -The Rue d'Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling rain. In the Luxembourg -Gardens the first young green made a mist upon the trees. - -It was only half-past four when Odd reached his accustomed post, but -hardly had he taken a turn up and down the street when he saw Hilda come -quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half-an-hour early, but Odd -had merely time to note the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was -in trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him; and he met her -half-way with outstretched hands. - -"O Peter!" It was the first time she had used his name, and Odd's heart -leaped as her hands caught his with a sort of desperate relief. "Come, -come," she said, taking his arm. "Let us go quickly." Peter's heart -after its leap began to thump fast. The white distress of her face gave -him a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had distressed her? He asked the -question as they crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears now -streamed down her face. - -He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and as she hung shaken with -sobs on his arm, the past child, the present Hilda merged into one; his -one, his only love. - -"Let us walk here, dear," he said; "you will be quieter." - -The little path down which they turned was empty, and the fine rain -enveloped but hardly wet them. They came to a bench under a tree, -circled by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the weeping girl to it -and they sat down. She still held his arm tightly. - -"Now, what is it?" - -"O Peter! I can hardly tell you! The brother, the horrible brother." - -"Yes?" Peter felt the accumulations of rage that had been gathering for -months hurrying forward to spring upon, to pulverize "the brother." - -"He made love to me, said awful things!" Odd whitened to the lips. - -"Tell me all you can." - -"I wish I were dead!" sobbed Hilda, "I am so unhappy." - -Peter did not trust himself to speak; he took her hand and held it to -his lips. - -"Yes; you care," said Hilda. She drew herself up and wiped her eyes. "I -never thought he would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he came a -good deal into the studio where we worked and, behind his sister's -back, looked silly. But he never really annoyed me. I thought myself -unkindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon was called away and he -came in. I went on painting. I did not dream--! When, suddenly he put -his arms around me--and tried to kiss me!" Hilda gave an hysterical -laugh. "Do you know, I had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great -blow with it! You should have seen his head! Oh, to think that I can -find that funny now! His ear was covered with cobalt!" Hilda sobbed -again, even while she laughed. "He was very angry and horrible. I said I -would call his mother and sister if he did not leave me at once, and -then--and then"--Hilda dropped her face into her hands--"he jeered at -me; 'You mustn't play the prude,' he said." - -Odd clenched his teeth. - -"Hilda, dear," he said, in a voice cold to severity, "you must go home; -I will put you in a cab. I will come to you as soon as I have punished -that dog." - -"Peter, don't! I beg of you to come _with_ me. You can do nothing. I -must bury it, forget it." She had risen as he rose. - -"Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall never forget it." - -Odd's fixed look as he led her into the street forced her to helpless -silence. - -"Peter, _please!_" she breathed, clasping her hands together and gazing -at him as he hailed a _fiacre_. - -"I will come to you soon. Good-bye." - -And so Hilda was driven away. - -It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened -the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is -lying down. She seemed ill. "_Et bien malade meme,_" and had said that -she wanted no dinner. - -"I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I -think," said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost -immediately. - -She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had -cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine -fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the -disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked -ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness -of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as -the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, -beyond all wish for it. The afternoon's unpleasantness had been merely -the last straw. The long endurance of the past month--the past months -indeed--that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on -pity--was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a -quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the -one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and -loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence -of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes. - -He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her -face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden -horrible weakness almost overcame him. - -"Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the -fiery _jeune premier_ to such an extent this afternoon that dramatic -restlessness is in keeping." - -Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns -up and down the room. - -"You look so badly," he said, pausing before her; "how do you feel?" - -"Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself." Hilda tried to smile, -stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. "I feel weak and -foolish," she added, clasping her hands on her knee. - -"It is all right, you know. He apologized profusely." - -"How did you make him do that?" - -"I told him the truth, including the fact of his own despicableness." - -"And he believed it?" - -"I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough thrashing." - -"Oh!" cried Hilda. - -"He deserved it, dear." - -"But--I had exposed myself to it; he thought himself justified." - -"I had to disabuse him of that thought. He bawled out something like a -challenge under the salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the -suggestion--insisted on the extreme satisfaction it would give me to -have a shot at him--the bourgeois strain came out. He fairly whined. I -was disappointed. I had bloodthirsty desires." - -"Oh, I am very glad he whined then! Don't speak of such horrors. You -know I am hysterical." - -Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her hand. - -"How can I thank you?" He put her hand to his lips, not looking at her -but down at the heavy folds of her white dress; it had a shroud-like -look that gave him a shudder. Hilda's life seemed shroud-like, shutting -her out from all brightness, from all love--love hers by right, and only -hers. - -"You know, you know that I would do anything for you," he said. - -The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, hardly consciously, and he -yielded to the longing he felt in her for comforting kindness and -nearness; yielded, too, to his own growing weakness; but he still held -the hand to his lips, not daring to look at her. This childlike trust, -this dependence, were dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled -soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on him when he raised his -own. - -"I never thought it would come true--in this way," she said. - -"What come true?" - -"That you would really care for me." - -Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold peaceful wings on his -breast; its very contentment constituted a caress. The child was still a -child, and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant revelation. A -shock of possibilities made Odd dizzy, and the certain strain of -weakness in him made it impossible for him to warn and protect her -ignorance. - -He was conscious of a quick grasp at the transcendental friendship of -which alone she was aware. - -"My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly." But with the words, -his hold on the transcendental friendship slipped, fundamental truths -surged up; he took both her hands, and clasping them on his breast, -said, hardly conscious of his words-- - -"Sweetest, noblest--dearest," with an emotion only too contagious, for -Hilda's eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, -the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, -to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his -arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him. - -"I understand, Hilda, I understand it all--all you have suffered; the -loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know -that you have been unhappy." - -"Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!" The tears rolled down her -cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd's hands clasping hers. "No one ever -cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn't it -cruel, cruel?" This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did -the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless -terror. "That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be -my fault." The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: "I have been -so lonely." - -"My child! My poor, poor child!" - -"Let me tell you everything. I _must_ tell you now since you care for -me. I have been so fond of you--always. You remember when I was a -child?" Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; -they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling -shipwreck. "Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it -weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what -they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me -that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them -take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It -sounds morbid, doesn't it? But it isn't, for my loneliness was almost -unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things -were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn't you? Only I -don't think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to -you." Hilda's tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled -now at Odd, a quivering smile. - -"And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can't tell you -what I suffered." - -Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his. - -"But how could you have known?" said Hilda tenderly; "I was really very -silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come back _because_ I -needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the -shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was -waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that." -She paused a moment: "It all ended in Florence," she went on sadly; -"such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I see -the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where -I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know -those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for -something that could never come; that you had never really understood, -and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a -pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. -I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be -misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love perhaps. A sort of -cold shame crept through me, and I felt really alone then. Do you know -what that feeling is?" Her hand under his forehead lifted his head a -little as though to question his face, but putting both her hands over -his eyes he would not look at her. - -"You are so sorry?" Odd nodded. "But you have had that feeling? -Imprisoned in oneself; looking, longing for a voice, a smile,--and -silence, always, always silence. A thing quite apart from the surface -intercourse of everyday life, not touched by it. You have so many -friends, so many windows in your prison, you can't know." - -"I know." - -"Really?" - -"Yes, yes." - -"And you call out for help and no one hears. Oh, I can't explain -properly; do you understand?" - -"I understand, dear." - -"Well, after that day in Florence, the last cranny of my prison seemed -walled up. And--oh, then our troubles came, worse and worse. -Responsibilities braced me up--far healthier, of course. And your -books! Their strength; their philosophy--don't tell me I might find it -all in Marcus Aurelius; your way of saying it went more deeply in me. -Just to do one's duty; to love people and be sorry for them, and not -snivel over oneself. Ah! if you knew all your books had been to me! -Would you like it, I wonder?" Again the tenderness, almost playful, in -her voice. Odd raised his head and looked at her. - -"And when I came at last, what did you think?" - -The loving candor of her eyes dwelt on him. - -"When you came?" she repeated. "Then I saw at once that you were -Katherine's friend, and that your books were the nearest I should ever -get to you." Hilda's voice hesitated a little; a doubt of the exactitude -of her perceptions from this point showed itself in a certain perplexity -of tone. "And--I don't quite understand myself, for I didn't plan -anything--but just because I felt so much I was afraid that you would -imagine I made claims on you. I was resolved that you should see that I -had reached your standpoint--that I had forgotten--that the present had -no connection with the past." - -"But I had not forgotten," Odd groaned. - -"No?" Hilda smiled rather lightly; "it would have been very strange if -you hadn't. Besides, as I say, I saw at once that you were Katherine's, -and that it was right and natural. Your books taught me, too, the true -peace of renunciation, you see! Not that this called for renunciation -exactly," and again Hilda paused with the faint look of perplexity. -"There was nothing to renounce since you were hers, except I must have -felt a certain disappointment. I felt a little frozen. Such dull -egotism!" She turned her eyes away, looking vaguely out into the dusky -room. "But even on that first day I meant that you should see, and that -she should see, that I knew that the past made no bond: in my heart it -might, not in yours, I knew, for all your kindness." - -"Go on, Hilda," said Odd, as she paused. - -"Well, you know all the rest. When you were engaged and she more than -friend, I had hoped for it, and I saw that my turn might come; that I -might step into Kathy's vacated shoes, so to speak; that we might be -friends, and all my dreams be fulfilled after all. I began then to let -myself know that I did care, for I had tried to help myself before by -pretending that I didn't. I wouldn't do anything to make you like me. If -you were to like me, you would of yourself; all the joy of having you -care for me would be in having made no effort. And the dream did come -true. I saw more and more that you cared. To-day I feel it, like -sunshine." Odd still stared at her, and again through sudden tears she -smiled at him. "Only--isn't it strange?--things are always so; it must -be, too, that I am weak, overwrought, for I feel so sad, as though I -were at the bottom of the sea, and looking up through it at the sun." - -"Great heavens!" muttered Odd. He looked at her for a silent moment, -then suddenly putting his arm around her neck, he drew her to him. - -He did not kiss her, but he said, leaning his head against hers-- - -"And I--so unworthy!" - -"No, no," said Hilda, and with a little sigh, "not unworthy, dear -Peter." - -"I, dully stumbling about your exquisite soul," Peter went on, pressing -her head more closely to his. "Ah, Hilda! Hilda!" - -"What, dear friend?" - -"I cannot tell you." - -"Unkind; I tell you everything." - -"You can tell me everything. You can tell me how much you have cared for -me, how much you care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot tell -you how infinitely dear you are to me." He had spoken, her face hidden -from him in its nearness; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and -frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. Hilda drew back -and rose to her feet. A subtle change, perplexity deepened, crossed her -face, but, standing before him, she looked down at him and he saw that -her trust rose as to a test. She put her hands out as though from an -impulse to lay them on his shoulders; then, as an instinct within the -impulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear look untouched, she -clasped them together and said gravely-- - -"You may tell me. You are infinitely dear to _me_." - -Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave him a sense of helpless -baseness. - -"I may tell you how much I love you?" and he too rose and stood before -her. - -"I have always loved you," said Hilda, with her grave look. "I love you -now as much as I did when I was a child." - -The impossible height where she placed him beside her made Odd's head -swim. He felt himself caught up for a moment into the purity of her -eyes, and looking into them he came close to her. - -"My angel! My angel!" he hardly breathed. - -"Dear Peter," and the tears came into the pure eyes. And, at the sight, -the heaven brimmed with loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious -but all revealed, Odd was conscious only of a dizzy descent from -impossibility, the crash of the inevitable. - -One step and he had taken her into his arms, seeing as he did so, in a -flash, the white wonder of her face; he could almost have smiled at -it--divinely dull creature! Holding her closely, the white folds of the -shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, his cheek upon her hair, -he could not kiss her and he could not speak, and in a silence as -unmistakable as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the past and -defied the future. - -The painful image of a bird he had once seen, wings broken, dying of a -shot and feebly fluttering, came to him as he felt her stir; her hands -pushing him away. - -"Dearest--dearest--dearest." - -Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness. - -Stooping his head he looked at her face; it wore an almost tranquil, a -corpse-like look. Her eyes were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a -little in a faint, fixed frown; but the childlike line of her mouth had -all the sad passivity of death. Odd tremblingly kissed the gentle -sternness of the lips. - -She loved him, but how cruel he was. - -"Oh, my precious," he said, "look at me. Forgive me; I love you." - -He had freed her hands, and she raised them and bent her face upon them. - -"You don't hate me for telling you the truth?" And as she made no sign: -"No, no, you don't hate me; you love me and I love you. I have loved you -from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why did you let me think you -did not care? Look at me, dearest." - -"What have I done?" said Hilda. She still kept her face hidden in her -hands. - -"You have done nothing; it is I, I who have done it!" - -"I never could have believed it of you," she said, and he felt it to be -the simple statement of a fact. - -"O Hilda--I have only told you the truth, that is my crime." - -"You told me because of what I said? You love me because of what I -said?" - -"Good God! I have been madly in love with you for months!" - -"For months?" she repeated dully. - -"For years, perhaps, who knows!" - -"I did not know that I--that you--" - -"You knew nothing, my poor angel." - -He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to stumble and grope for an -entreaty; her very powerlessness in the grasp of her realized love -enchanted him. - -"How base! how base!" she moaned. - -"Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, and I cannot help myself." - -"No--you cannot help yourself. I love you and I told you so." - -"You did not mean _this_." - -"I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did not doubt myself. I am -wicked." The strange revulsion from her long selflessness had reached -its height in poor Hilda; but, in her eyes, the discovered self was -indeed wicked, a terrible revelation. - -Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder. - -"O Peter, Peter!" - -"What, my darling child?" - -"That we should be so base!" - -"Not _we_, Hilda. Not _you_!" - -"Yes, I--for I am happy--think of it, happy! Peter, I love you so much." -She wept, her head upon his shoulder. "Keep me for a moment, only a -moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the good of it. I am glad -that you love me. No; don't kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved -me for a long time." - -"From the moment I saw you again, I think. I knew it when I began -meeting you after your lessons. Do you remember that first day in the -rain? I do; and your little hat with the bow on it, the hole in your -little glove, your white little face. I went away to the South because I -could not trust myself with you. I did not dream that you loved me, but -I felt--ah! I felt--that I could have made you love me!" - -"And yet--you loved Katherine!" - -The anguish of the broken words pierced him. - -"Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find myself. I did not love -her." - -"Peter! Peter!" - -"Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you that you are the only -one--my only love!" - -"O Peter!" - -"I never thought that I loved Katherine, but I had no fear of injustice -to her, for I never thought that love would come into my life; and, -hardly was the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth crept upon -me. Friendly comradeship on the one hand, and on the other--O Hilda!--a -passion that has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you like a -thunderbolt; my love for you crashed in upon your heavenly dreaming; but -you see--be brave enough to acknowledge what it all means, your dream -and my love that needed no thunderbolt to wake it,--be brave enough to -own that it is inevitable, that from the time that you put your hand in -mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest thing, a love, a -sympathy infinite. Dear child, be brave enough to own that before it, -mistakes may be put aside without dishonor." - -"Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor! We are both already -dishonorable, and oh! it is that that breaks my heart; that you, that -you who should have helped me, protected me from the folly of my -ignorance, that you should be dishonorable!" - -"O Hilda!" - -"Yes," she said wildly, "yes, yes, Peter; and I am wicked--wicked, for I -love you. Yes--kiss me; there, now I am thoroughly wicked. Now let me -go." - -Odd, white and shaken, still locked his arms about her. - -"I was base if you will, too base for your loveliness; but you, my -darling, have not a shadow on you; you were impossibly noble. Remember, -that if there is dishonor, I am dishonored, not you; remember that _I_ -have done this!" - -As he spoke, holding Hilda in his arms, the door opened and Katherine -entered. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - - -Katherine closed the door swiftly behind her and looked at them, not -with a horror of surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened -look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a wrap on her arm, and the -thumping of her boxes was heard outside on the stairs. - -Katherine had schemed and success was hers, but this unlooked-for -achievement struck her like a dagger and made triumph bitter. - -Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was the heroine. Katherine -felt herself struck down from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced -to a miserable position, a tool with the other tools--Peter and Hilda. - -To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shattering of ideals and pierced -even her own humiliation, for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked -up to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with her, but for Hilda's -own advantage; she, not Fate, was to put her in Peter's arms, unspotted -and innocent of the combinations that had led her there. All Katherine's -plans in England had prospered and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited -her. Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous perception of his -love for Hilda--a brave, manlike part--to which she had looked forward -as to an atonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine had almost -persuaded herself that there would be little acting needed. Had she not -seen, guessed, the truth? Had the truth not pained her, humiliated her? -Had she not risen finely above her pain and wished them happiness? In -moments of self-scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look -before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorchings, and Katherine -could scorch herself as well as others in the pitiless flame of -clear-sighted analysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome -standards of a higher nature--a rebellion that had carried her into such -opposition as to fall below herself to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, -touched with a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment,--was that -rebellion, that ambition, so base, so pitiful? - -Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes sophistical if carried too -far, and Katherine found excuses that explained for herself. But now all -was base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda's fall, had -risen. On this lowered platform, the advantage was hers, terribly hers, -and it was good, good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them. - -She laid down her wrap on a table and began to slowly draw off her -gloves. - -"My return was inopportune." The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her -own sense of fitness. "Or opportune?" She directed her eyes upon Odd, -and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He -welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he -prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his arm around -Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt -that Hilda's look of frozen horror gave him the advantage. - -"Opportune, Katherine," he said; "now at least I shall not have to lie -to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness." - -"Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?" - -It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel -his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, -for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "I can only beg you to believe that I have -struggled--for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought -that neither of you would ever know the truth." - -This bracketing of Hilda's injury with hers stank in Katherine's -nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, -speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself-- - -"I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so -chivalrously preparing for me," she said. "Marriage with an unloving -man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from -you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?" The -white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their -sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter's futile efforts to -withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his -stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the -retrospect grew lurid. - -"Katherine," said Odd gloomily, "I would not so have insulted you after -this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult." - -"I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have -waited, Peter." - -Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had -been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most -painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew -for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon -her sister. - -"So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda," she said. - -Hilda's wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the -stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds -at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long -resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to -cruelty. - -"Katherine, say anything--anything you will to me," and Odd's voice -broke a little as he spoke, "but not one word to her! Not one word! It -comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire -with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life." He -held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man -driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and -Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight -eyebrows, breathing quickly. - -"Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this -evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this -past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your -mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with -you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life--you and your -father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and -once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard -I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon -her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us." - -"Yes; as I see you." Katharine's very lips were white. - -Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly she thrust Odd away; the -terror on her face had hardened to that look of resolution; Odd -remembered it. From the very extremity of anguish she passed to the -extremity of self-control. - -"Katherine," she said, "he is trying to shield me. It did not happen -like that. I told him that I loved him. I told him that I had always -loved him." - -"Oh! did you?" said Katherine, with a withered little laugh. - -"My child!" cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of helplessness before this -assumption of incredible humiliation half paralyzing him--"my child, -what are you saying? What madness!" - -"I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told you that I loved you." - -"In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love you misunderstood. You -know, as I knew when you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, -so nobly, so purely, was the child's love, the love of the loyal sister -for her friend, the love of an angel." - -"I am not sure," said Hilda. - -"Oh!" cried Odd, looking at her with savage tenderness, "this is -unbearable." - -It was as if they had forgotten, each in the mutual justification of the -other, Katherine standing there a silent spectator. - -But Odd was conscious of that outraging contemplation. - -"Hilda," he said appealingly and yet sternly, "at the very height of -your trust in me I betrayed it. Your nobility had reached its climax. I -had kissed you and you retreated, but without a shadow of doubt; and I, -from the base wish to try your trust to the utmost, said that I loved -you. You never faltered from your innocent outlook in replying; it was I -who saw the truth, not you." - -"Katherine," Hilda repeated, "he is trying to shield me. We are both -base, yes; but I forced him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, -and when he took me in his arms, I was glad." - -"Good God!" cried Peter. - -Katherine averted her eyes from her sister's face. - -"I must own, Peter," she said, "that your position was difficult. Hilda -evidently painted the pathos of her life to you in most touching -colors--she herself very white on the background of our black depravity. -That in itself is enough to shake a rather emotional heart like yours. -And then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a Galahad I fear, she -confesses her love for you, retreating delicately before your kisses. Of -course those kisses she received as platonic pledges--from the man -engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, very; I quite recognize it. -Under such tempting circumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor -must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve the difficulty, she -solved it for you, very effectually, very courageously. When you took -her in your arms--how often we repeat that phrase--the 'truth' at last -flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship could hardly account for such -yielding unconventionality, and Hilda's hidden love won the day." - -During these remarks, Odd felt himself shaking with rage. If Katherine -had been a man he would have knocked her down; as it was, his voice was -the equivalent of a blow as he said, clenching his hand on the back of a -chair-- - -"You despicable creature!" - -He and Katherine glared at one another. - -"Only the higher nature can put itself so hideously in the power of the -lower," Odd went on; "and you dare!" - -"No, no; all she says may be true!" moaned Hilda. She dropped upon the -sofa and hid her face in her hands, adding brokenly: "And how can you be -so cruel? so cruel to her? She loves you too!" - -Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and then, impulse nipped by -quick reflection-- - -"You need not allow for a woman's jealousy, Mr. Odd. Don't, no indeed -you must not, flatter yourself with my broken heart. I don't like -humiliation for myself or for others. I don't like to scorn my sister -whom I trusted, whom I loved. I could have killed the person who had -told me this of her! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too bitter for -charity. But I give you back your word without one regret for myself. -You have killed my love very effectually." - -"Was there ever much to kill, Katherine?" - -"That is ignoble, quite as ignoble as I could predict of you. Hilda's -lesson must necessarily make the past look pale." - -"I can only hope that you do yourself an injustice by such base -speeches, Katherine." - -"Your example has been contagious." - -"Let me think so by proving yourself more worthy than you seem. Ask your -sister's forgiveness--as I ask yours--humbly. She has not feared -humiliation." - -"I do not find myself in a position to fear or accept it. I found Hilda -in the dust, and I cannot forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor -confession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I make an exit more -apropos than my entrance, and leave you with her." Katherine took up her -wrap and walked out without looking again at Hilda. - -"And I have done this," said Odd. Hilda lay motionless, her face upon -her arms, and he approached her. There was a strange effect of no Hilda -at all under the heavy folds of the gown; in the dark it glimmered with -a vacant whiteness; it was as though the cruel words had beaten away her -body and her soul. - -"Hilda!" said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating as he paused beside her, -not daring to touch the still figure. "Hilda!" he repeated; "if only you -will forgive me; if only you will own that it is I, I only who need -forgiveness, and unsay those mad words that gave her the power! Oh! that -she should have had the power! She has made remorse impossible!" Odd -added, addressing himself rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no -hint of sympathy. - -"Why did you put yourself under her feet and make me powerless?" he -asked; "you know that your gentle reticence had for months kept my love -in check; you knew that had I kept at your level, you would have never -realized that you loved me." He bent above her and kissed her hand. -"Precious one! Dearest, dearest child." - -"Oh, don't!" said Hilda. She drew her hand away, not lifting her head. -"Her heart is broken. I am all that she said." - -"Her heart is not broken!" cried Odd, in rather desperate accents. "I -could swear to it! She is a cruel, heartless girl!" - -"What would you have asked of her? You were cruel to her." - -"I am glad of it." And as Hilda made no reply to this statement, he -stooped to her again, imploring: "Will you not look at me? Look up, -dearest; tell me again that you love me." - -"I am already in the dust," said Hilda, after a pause. - -"You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!" cried Odd; he -took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. "Sit -up. Listen to me," he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken -face, his hands on her shoulders. "I have loved you passionately for -months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have -fumbled with that fatally misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved -me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn -out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, -of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, -wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!" Odd added, sitting -down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda -repeated-- - -"Don't." - -"You felt my pity, my sympathy," Odd went on, holding her hands. "You -felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the -child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation--for -love--you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found -more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too -high for the hearer." - -"Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that I _loved_ -you!" Hilda wailed suddenly. - -"Thank God that you own to that!" Odd ejaculated. - -"That does not clear me," she retorted. "No, no; I was a fool. You, the -man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty -of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to -you--it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly -whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all! -I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are -usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are -crimes, and I am wicked. I hate myself!" she sobbed, bending again her -face upon her hands. - -"Hilda," said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, "you could not -have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for -months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold -little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for -you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step--you -retreating before me--to the final realizations; and final they are not, -I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the -real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all -that you have suffered." Hilda interrupted him with an "Oh!" from -between clenched teeth. - -"Katherine was right," she said, "I have painted myself in pathetic -colors. What a prig! What an egotist!" Her voice trembled on its low -note of passionate self-scorn. - -"An egotist!" Odd burst into a loud laugh. "That caps the climax. Come, -Hilda," he added, "don't be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, -still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I -say, I haven't yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as -I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, -unconscious little child." Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but -Hilda's swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision. - -"You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to -speak of some day? There will never be any day for us--together." - -"I say there will be, Hilda." - -"You think that I could ever forget my sister's misery; my shame and -yours?" - -"You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the -day." - -"That is a placid term for such degradation." - -"I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake." - -"You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can't -mend a broken heart by marching over it." - -"One may avoid breaking another." - -"You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the -bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing -that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean." - -"You, Hilda, are only cruel--unutterably cruel," said Odd brokenly. - -"I never wish to see you again." Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his -eyes of pitiful appeal. "You have robbed my life of the little it had; -you have robbed me of self-respect." - -"Shall I leave you, Hilda?" - -"You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me." - -"Good-bye," said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to -the heart, and half-unconscious. - -"Peter!" cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was -standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed -and dilated eyes. - -"What is it, my child?" Odd asked gently. - -"Kiss me good-bye!" - -He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another. - -"Must I leave you?" he asked, in a stammering voice. - -"Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me." - -He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved -away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a -characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, -he said-- - -"I will wait." - -And turning away, he walked out of the room. - - - - -CHAPTER XII - - -For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda -stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant -devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for -Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she -announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine -had returned to England, she added with emphasis-- - -"But I don't go this time, Miss Hilda. It's your turn to have a maid -now." - -The news took a weight of dread from Hilda's heart. She shrank from -again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine's tragic eyes. -She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half -delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, -of everlasting responsibility for her sister's misery. With all the -capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered -natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting -hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored -her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: "I love -you, too!" Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with -cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of -analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so -swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral -visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of -relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine's -ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness. - -Hilda's love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been -growing from the child's devotion, and, with the new torture of a -hopeless longing upon her--for which she despised herself--she saw in -the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart. - -Only a few days after Katherine's departure, the Captain returned. - -Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that -weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked -carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the -door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her -behalf. - -He hardly mentioned Katherine's broken engagement, and, for once in her -life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. -Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit -plaintively beside her daughter's bed; and it was from her that Hilda -learned that they were going back to Allersley. - -Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and -Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities -and to probabilities. The Captain's good fortune showed to her in a -dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at -its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, -and who it was that shielded her from even a feather's weight of -gratitude--for the Captain made no mention of his good luck. - -"Yes, we are going back to the Priory," Mrs. Archinard said, her -melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter's wasted -face. "It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to -compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. -Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I -predicted it rather. You have killed yourself _tout simplement_; I -consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks -it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, -'_Docteur, elle s'est tuee._' I said it frankly." - -Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so -long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones -of pathos and pity on Hilda's behalf, hardly realizing their objective -nature. - -By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like -returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker -chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the -meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and -felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood. - -Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her -sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, -too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa -existence; without the background of Hilda's quiet servitude, it became -flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and -for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in -pensive contemplation of tenants' havoc. She sighed over the Priory and -said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not -think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain -vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a -little--the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as -fishing--and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at -political follies. - -When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, her father often walked -aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed -glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted -passively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only -vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as -her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his -fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing-basket, and showing -evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a -sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a -sudden sense of method underlying the Captain's manoeuvres. - -"Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will -be glad of a respite. Isn't it a little sunny to-day for first-class -fishing?" Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up -to her with shy alacrity. - -"Even first-class fishing is a bore, _I_ think," he observed, not -taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his -daughter and then at the river. - -"Feeling better to-day, aren't you? You might take a stroll with me, -perhaps; but no, you're not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, -isn't it?" - -Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the -Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of -weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and -the absent-minded smile on her face reassured him as to immediate -issues. - -"How are _you_ feeling?" she asked; "I have been looking at the trees -and grass for so long that I had almost forgotten that there are human -beings in the world." - -"Oh, I'm very well; very well indeed." The Captain was again feeling -uncomfortable. An inner coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just -because speaking was not really imperative at the moment. A little glow -of self-approbation suddenly prompted him to add: "You know, I know -about it now. That is to say, I wasn't exactly to speak of it, if it -might pain you; but I don't see why it should do _that_. Upon my word," -said the Captain, feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was -broken, "it's more likely to pain me, isn't it? Rather to my discredit, -you know; though, intrinsically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of -course you helped me over a tight place now and then, but I thought the -money came to you with a mere turn of the hand, so to speak; and, as for -your teaching--wearing yourself out--well, I don't know which I was -angrier with first, you or myself. I never dreamed of it, it never -entered into my head. And then, _my_ daughter and low French cads! Well, -_he_ saw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too; thought it best, -you know; for, naturally, Odd couldn't have my weight and authority. I -was simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me over when he told -me. Odd told me--" - -The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, and then switched its -limber length tentatively through the air. It was embarrassing, after -all, this recognition of his daughter's life. - -"Now your mother doesn't know," he pursued; "Odd seemed rather anxious -that she should; rather unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no -necessity for that, was there? It would have quite killed her, wouldn't -it? Quite." - -"You need neither of you have known." All she was wondering about, -trying to grasp, made Hilda pale. "It came about most naturally; and, if -mamma's illness and that other unpleasant episode had not broken me -down, my modest business might have come to an end--no one the wiser for -it. Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt." - -"Well, I don't know." The Captain now sat down on the chair with a sigh -of some relief. "It's off my mind at all events. I wanted to express -my--pain, you know, and my gratitude--and to say what a jolly trump I -thought you; that kind of thing." - -"Dear papa, I don't deserve it." - -"Ah, well, Odd isn't the man to make misstatements, you know. A bit of -dreamer, unpractical, no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, -you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cutting, to tell you the -truth. Of course he's very fond of you; that's natural. This sad affair -of Katherine's; if it hadn't been for that, you and he would be brother -and sister by this time." - -It was Hilda's turn now to draw in a little breath of relief. At all -events her father was no ally. No other secret had been told, and she -saw, now that the dread had gone, that any cause for it would have -involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of which she knew Odd to be -incapable. - -"Where is he--Mr. Odd?" she asked, steeling herself to the question. - -The look of gloom which touched the Captain's face anew, confirmed Hilda -in her certainty of infinite pecuniary obligation. - -"Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A man can't sit down quietly -under a blow like that." - -A flush came over Hilda's face. Part of her punishment was evident. She -must hear Katherine spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, -guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered and crowned with -praises. Yet Katherine herself--any woman--would choose the part Odd had -given her--the part of jilt rather than jilted; and she, Hilda, was -helpless. - -"Papa," she asked, driving in the dagger up to the hilt--she could at -least punish herself, if no one else could punish her--"where is -Katherine? Is she not coming to stay with us?" The Captain swung one leg -over the other with impatience. - -"I've hardly heard from her; she is with the Leonards in London. Odd -spoke very highly of her; seemed to think she had acted honorably; but, -naturally, Katherine must feel that she has behaved badly." - -"I am sure she has not done that, papa. She found that she would not be -happy with him." - -"Pshaw! That's all feminine folly, you know. She probably saw some one -she liked better, some bigger match. Katherine isn't the girl to throw -over a man like Odd for a whim." - -Hilda's flush was now as much for her father as for herself. She felt -her cheeks burning as she said, her voice trembling-- - -"Papa, papa! How can you say such a thing of Katherine! How can you! I -know it is not true. I know it!" - -"Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know Katherine pretty well -though, and it's not unimaginable. I don't imply anything vulgar." The -Captain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into place; "that's not -conceivable in my daughter. But Katherine's ambitious, very ambitious. -As for you, Hilda--and all that, you know--I am awfully sorry, you -understand." The Captain walked away briskly, satisfied at having eased -his conscience. Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and unwieldy, -and the Captain's conscience was, by nature, slim and flexible. - -Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river running brightly beyond -the branches of the lime-tree under which she sat. The flush of misery -that her father's cool suppositions on Katherine's conduct had seemed -to strike into her face, only died slowly. She had to turn from that -shame resolutely, contemplation would only deepen its helplessness. She -looked at the river, and thought of the time when she had stood beside -it with Odd and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the humorous -droop of his eyelids, the kind, comprehensive clasp of his hand on hers; -the look of the hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too -dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his finger. Hilda turned -her head away from the river and closed her eyes. - -"Allone, withouten any companye," that was the fated motto of her life. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - - -By the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to -seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with -something--with anything--and experienced the odd sensation of a person -upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for -duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, -unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of -labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission -to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with -artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she -told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in -her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks -and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like -crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms. - -Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active _role_ in life most -confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard -drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little -_coterie_ of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard's little _Causeries -de Mardi_, her society for little weekly dinners--only six chosen -members--_les Elites_--stirred Allersley to the quick with aesthetic -thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly -at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its -Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations. - -Hilda was not one of _les Elites_. "Just for us old people, trying to -amuse ourselves," Mrs. Archinard said, and at the _Causeries_ Hilda was -an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the _Causeries_ were quite -Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard _causant_ and -Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a -revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the _elites_ -and the _mardis_, and devoted himself to more commonplace -individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn't required to -strain one's temper by listening to fine talk. - -Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she -came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows -of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on -her arm. Mary's mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture -since Peter's flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and -yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary -was generous, and the sight of Hilda's white sunlit face completed -Peter's work. She found that she had kissed Hilda--she, so -undemonstrative--and standing with her arms around the girl's slight -shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the -slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter-- - -"You will see _me_, won't you?" - -Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut--palest -pink and palest purple, "on tiptoe for a flight." - -"How kind of you to come," she said. - -"Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy's camp. That -reckless brother of mine!" - -"Did he send you?" Hilda asked, fright in her eyes. - -"Send me? Oh no, he didn't send me; but after what he has told me, I -came naturally of my own free will." Hilda smiled faintly in reply to -Mary's smile. - -"What has he told you?" - -"Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he -proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really -Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving -him!" - -Hilda winced at the humorous tone. - -"That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in -upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel--natural, though, wasn't -it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been -badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and -that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and--oh, a great -many things." - -"Did he tell you that I loved him?" Hilda asked, looking down at her -sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if -it was demanded of her that she should humiliate herself before Peter's -sister--tell her that she had made love to him. - -"My dear child," Mary's voice dropped to a graver key, "Peter trusts me, -you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to -you, you and he together found out that fact." - -Even Hilda's morbid self-doubt could not deny the essential truth of -this point of view. - -"And now you won't marry him," Mary added, but in a matter-of-fact -manner, and as if the subject were folded up and put away by that -conclusive statement. - -"Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. What a delightful garden -this is. I must have a pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, -why have you always so persistently and doggedly effaced yourself? Why -did you never let anybody know you, and subside passively into the -background _role_? I never knew you, I am sure, and if it hadn't been -for Peter I shouldn't have known you now. He made me see things very -clearly. The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, and holding -up a whole edifice on its shoulders." - -"How could he! Why will he always see things so? It makes me miserable." - -"Well, well; perhaps Peter's point of view would seem to you -exaggerated. But, as I say, why did you never let me get a glimpse of -you?" - -"I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me apart. I loved my work." - -"Yes; it must have been charming work, in all its branches." Mary gave -her a gravely gay glance. "When you did emerge from your shadows, why -did you never talk--make an effect, like Katherine?" - -"Katherine makes effects without trying. She is effective, and people -like her for herself. I was fitted for the dark corner. That is why I -stayed there." - -"No, my dear, one can't explain the injustices of fortune by that -comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatalistic philosophy. Noble natures get -oddly jumped on in this world," Mary added reflectively. "The tragedy, -of course, lies in being too noble for one's milieu, for then, not only -does one renounce, but one is expected to, as a matter of course. -Forgive me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am speaking, for -the moment, with gloves off; I know the truth, and you may as well face -it. It's a pity to be too noble; one should have just a spice of -egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one's corner." - -"Peter found me," said Hilda, with a sad smile that evaded the "coarse" -frankness. - -They walked silently along the little path under the sunlit shade of the -fruit-trees. Mary stopped at a turning. - -"Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of Emerson and optimism. Peter -did find you." Her large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda's. -"Peter found you, my dear child; let Peter keep you, then." - -"He always will keep--what he found," said Hilda, trembling. "I love -him. I shall always love him." - -"My dear Hilda!" - -"But I cannot marry him. I cannot." - -"You are a foolish little Hilda." - -"We made Katherine miserable." - -"And therefore all three must be miserable. For Peter to have kept faith -with Katherine--loving you--might have called down a far worse tragedy." - -Hilda gazed widely at her-- - -"Yes; I deserve that suspicion." - -"Oh, you foolish, foolish child!" cried Mary, laughing; and she kissed -her. "Come, come; say that you will be good to my poor brother?" - -"I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness on a wrong." - -"Your happiness would be grounded on a right; the wrong was a mere -incidental. Peter must wait, I see. Perhaps you will own some day that -that was ample expiation." - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - - -One October day Hilda received a queer little note from Katherine. That -Katherine had spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht with a -party of friends, Hilda knew, and the note was dated from Amalfi. - -"Why don't you marry Peter, you little goose?" was all it said. - -Hilda trembled as she read. Katherine's scorn and Katherine's nobility -seemed to breathe from it. - -"I am not as base as you think," was her answer. - -Katherine received this answer in Amalfi. She had come in from a walk -with Allan Hope along the road that runs above the sea between Amalfi -and Sorrento, and one of the yachting party, a girl who much admired -Katherine, was waiting for her before the hotel holding the letter, an -excuse for the excited whisper with which she gave it to her. - -"Dear Miss Archinard, _he_ is here!" - -"What 'he,' Nelly?" asked Katherine; she looked down at the writing on -the envelope of her letter, and the becoming flush that her walk through -the warm evening had brought to her cheeks faded a little. - -Allan Hope had gone on into the hotel, and Nelly's excited eyes followed -him till he was safely out of sight. - -"Mr. Odd," she said with dramatic emphasis. "Of course he didn't know." - -"Oh, he is here!" Katherine's eyes were still on the writing. "No, of -course he didn't know." - -"You aren't afraid of his meeting Allan?" Nelly was Allan Hope's cousin. -"Is there no danger, Miss Archinard? He must be feeling so--dreadfully!" - -"What a romantic little pate it is! I really believe you were looking -forward to a duel. No, no, Nelly, there is nothing of an exciting nature -to hope for!" - -"But won't it be terrible for you to meet him? The first time, you know! -And engaged to Allan!" said Nelly. - -"We are not at all afraid of one another. Don't tremble, Nelly." - -Katherine read her letter standing on the terrace before the hotel. The -dying evening seemed to throb softly in the southern sky, arching -solemnly to the horizon line. Katherine looked out at the sea--it was -characteristic of her deeply set eyes to look straight out and seldom -up. She stood still, holding the letter quietly; Katherine had none of -the weakness that seeks an outlet for the stress of resolution in -nervous gesture. She did not even walk up and down; indeed the -resolution was made and meditation needless. Turning after a moment, she -went into the hotel and asked at the office whether Mr. Odd were to be -found. - -"Yes, he was in his room; he had only arrived an hour ago." - -Katherine requested the man to tell Mr. Odd that Miss Archinard was on -the terrace and would like to see him. In two minutes Peter was walking -out to meet her. - -Peter's eyes, as they shook hands, were rather sternly steady; -Katherine's steady, but more humorous. - -"_Sans rancune?_" she inquired, with some lightness, and then, sparing -him the necessity for a reply that might be embarrassing for both of -them-- - -"I want to ask you a question; pardon abruptness; why don't you marry -Hilda? Won't she? There are two questions!" - -"I don't marry her because she won't. And there is the evident reply, -Katherine." - -"Do you despair?" she asked. - -"I can't say that. Time may wear out her resistance." - -"I know Hilda better than you do--perhaps. You see I have got over my -jealousy." Katherine's smile had all its charm. "She won't if she said -she wouldn't; if she has ideals on the subject." - -"Then I must resign myself to hopeless wretchedness." - -"No; you must not. _I_ am going to help you. Don't look so gloomily -unimpressed. I am going to help you. I am going to do penance, and I -don't believe you will consider it an expiation either! Just encourage -me by a little appreciation of my dubious nobility." Odd looked -questioningly at her. - -"Peter, when I came back that night I was engaged to Allan Hope." - -"Oh!" said Peter. They looked at one another through the almost palpable -dusk of the evening. - -"I'll give you the facts--draw your own conclusions. I'll give you -facts, but don't ask self-abasement put into words. You really haven't -the right, have you, Peter?" - -"No; I suppose not. No, _I_ haven't the right." - -"You put yourself in the wrong, you see. You must allow me to flaunt -that ragged superiority. Peter, very soon after our engagement you began -to dissatisfy me because I realized that I should never satisfy you. The -more you knew me the more you would disapprove, and your nature could -never understand mine to the extent of pardoning. Once I'd seen that, -everything was up. It wouldn't do; and the knowledge grew upon me that -the impossibility was emphasized by the fact that Hilda _would_ do. _I_ -saw that you loved her, Peter; stupid, stupid Peter! And poor little -Hilda! She was ground between two stones, wasn't she? your ignorance and -my knowledge. I give you leave to offer me up as a burnt sacrifice at -her altar, only don't let me hear myself crackling. Yes; I saw that you -were in love with her, and that she would be in love with you if it -could come--as it should have come--as I intended it to come--foolish, -hasty Peter! No; no comments, please! I know everything you can say. I -took precious good care of myself, no doubt; my generosity wasn't very -spontaneous; perhaps I thought you'd get over it; perhaps I wanted you -to get over it; perhaps even while seeing that Allan Hope would do--for -I satisfy him most thoroughly--I kept a tiny indefinite corner in my -motives for possible reactions; I give you leave to draw your -inferences, but don't ask me to dot my i's and cross my t's too -cold-bloodedly. I accepted Allan Hope on the understanding that the -engagement was to be kept secret for a few months. I told Allan that you -did not love me; that I did not love you; that our engagement was -broken. I told him that when I saw his love for me struggling with his -loyalty to you. It was the truth from my point of view; but from his, -from yours, it was a lie--and own that at least I am generous in telling -you! Too generous perhaps. I came back to Paris to tell you that I had -discovered it wouldn't do, and to make you and Hilda happy. And, when I -saw you together, both as bad as I was--at least I thought so at the -time--both disloyal--I forgot my own self-scorn; I felt a right to a -position I had repudiated. I _had_ to be cruel, for, Peter, I was -jealous; I hated her for being the one who would satisfy you thoroughly -and forever." - -There was silence between them. If she had satisfied him as only Hilda -could satisfy him, she would not have gone to Allan perhaps. Odd with a -quick throb of sympathy understood the intimation, understood both her -courage and her reticence. He had seen her at her noblest, yet there was -much not touched upon, far from noble. - -The half avowal of a disappointed love flawed her loyalty to Allan. Such -love deserved disappointment and was of a doubtful quality. Peter -respected her frankness but was not deceived by it. His manliness was -touched by the possibility she had hinted at. He understood Katherine -and he forgave her--with reservations. - -There seemed to be nothing to say, and he did not seek words. He and -Katherine walked slowly to the end of the terrace. - -Then Katherine told him of her note to Hilda and handed him Hilda's -reply. - -"I shall go to England to-morrow, Katherine," said Odd, when he had read -it. - -"You will have to fight, you know. She will say that my wrong did not -excuse hers. She will say that nothing excused you. She _is_ a little -goose." - -"I'll fight." - -They had walked back to the entrance of the hotel and here they paused; -there was a fitness in farewell. - -"Katherine," said Odd, "it would have been very base in you to have kept -silence, and yet, in spite of that, you have been very courageous this -evening." - -"You are a hideously truthful person, Peter. Why put in that damaging -clause? Have I merely escaped baseness?" - -"No, for you have never been finer." - -"That is true. I'll never reach the same heights again," and Katherine -laughed. - -"Understand that _I_ understand. Your story has not absolved _me_." - -"There is the danger with Hilda. You must make my holocaust avail." - -"I hope that a good thing is never lost," Peter replied. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - - -The October day was deliciously warm at Allersley, a fragrant autumnal -warmth, limpid with sunshine, and the woods all golden. - -Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine of home and hope in his -blood, his mood of resolute success tempered by no more than just a -touch of trembling. - -In the distance lay the river, a glitter here and there beyond the tree -trunks; the little landing-wharf where he had first seen Hilda was no -doubt still unchanged and worth a pilgrimage on some later day, but now -he must take the most direct way to the Priory; he had only arrived an -hour before, but a minute's further delay would be unbearable. This day -must atone for all the past failure of his life, and make his autumn -golden. He walked quickly, following, he remembered, almost the same -path among the trees that he and Hilda had gone by that night, ten years -ago; the memory emphasized the touch of trembling. To dwell on her -dearness made fear tread closely. The gray stone wall wound among the -woods, Peter caught sight of it, and, at the same moment, of the -fluttering white of a dress beyond it that made his heart stand still. - -He could not have hoped to find Hilda here with no teasing -preliminaries, no languid mother or sulky father to mar the fine rush of -his onslaught. - -Such good luck augured well, for--yes, it was Hilda walking slowly among -the trees--and at the clear sight of her, Peter wondered if the -breathing space of a conventional preliminary would not have been -better, and felt that he had exaggerated his own courage in picturing -that conquering impetuosity. - -She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an air of patient sadness. -Her hands clasped behind her, she walked aimlessly over the falling -leaves and seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness as her -footsteps passed through them. There was a black bow in the ruffled -bodice, and with her black hair she made on the gold and gray a -colorless silhouette. - -Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached her, the rustling leaves -under his feet, their falling patter from the trees, seemed to fill the -air with loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of her own -footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled at the weary unexpectancy of -her look transformed to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in -a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous comprehension -conceded, Katherine's confession had been cruelly tardy and Hilda's face -was pitiful. She stood silent and motionless looking at him, and Odd, as -he joined her, said the first words that came to his lips. - -"My child! How ill you look!" - -The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across -her face, but Odd, seeing only its frozen pain, remembered those -stabbing words: "You are cruel and weak and mean," which she had spoken -with just such a look, and any lingering thought of a fine onslaught was -nipped in the bud. - -"I may speak to you?" he asked. - -Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impossible to speak; she wanted -to throw herself on his breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, -all the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight of him gave -her such joy that everything was already half forgotten--even Katherine; -even Katherine--she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold -faintness-- - -"Oh, yes;" adding, "you startled me." - -"So thin, so pale, such woful eyes!" He stood staring at her. - -"You--don't look well either," she said, still in the soft cold voice. - -"I should be very sorry to look well." - -Peter was adapting himself to reality; but if the impetuous dream was -abandoned, the courage of humbler methods was growing, and he could -smile a little at her. - -"Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will you walk with me for a -little while? It is a lovely day for walking. How beautiful the woods -are looking." - -"Beautiful. I walk here a great deal." She looked away from him and into -the golden distance. - -"And you will walk here now with me?" he asked, adding, as the pale -hesitation of her face again turned to him, "Don't be frightened, dear, -I am not going to force any solution upon you; I am not going to try to -make you think well of me in spite of your conscience." - -Think well of him! As if, good or bad, he was not everything to her, and -the rest of the world nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves. - -"And here is Palamon," said Peter, as that delightful beast came at a -sort of abrupt and ploughing gallop, necessitated by the extreme -shortness of his crumpled legs, through the heaped and fallen foliage. -"He remembers me, too, the dear old boy," and Palamon, whose very -absorbed and business-like manner gave way to sudden and smiling -demonstration, was patted and rubbed cordially in answer to his cordial -welcome. - -"It must seem strange to you being here again after such a time," said -Odd, when he and Hilda turned towards the river, Palamon, with an air of -happy sympathy, at their heels. The river was invisible, a good -half-mile away, and the whispering hush of the woods surrounded them. - -"It doesn't seem strange, no," Hilda replied; "it seems very peaceful." - -"And are you peaceful with it?" All the implied reserves of her tone -made Peter wonder, as he had often wondered, at the strength of this -fragile creature; for, although that conviction of having wronged -another was accountable for her haggard young face, the crushed anguish -of her love for him was no less apparent in the very aloofness of her -glance. - -"I feel merely very useless," she said with a vague smile. - -"I have seen Katherine, Hilda." Odd waited during a few moments of -silent walking before making the announcement, and Hilda stopped short -and turned wondering eyes on him. - -"It was at Amalfi. She had just received your letter, and she sent for -me; she had something to say to me." Hilda kept silence, and Odd added, -"You knew that she was on a yachting trip?" Hilda bowed assent. "And -that Allan Hope is of the party?" - -"I heard that; yes." - -"And that he and Katherine are to be married?" - -Here Hilda gave a little gasp. - -"She doesn't love him," she cried. Odd considered her with a disturbed -look. - -"You mustn't say that, you know. I fancy she does--love him." - -"She did it desperately after you had failed her; after I had robbed -her." - -Odd was too conscious of the possibility of a subtle half-truth in this -to assert the bold unvarnished whole truth of a negative. - -Hilda's loyalty lent a dignity to Katharine's most doubtful motives, a -dignity that Katherine would probably contemplate with surprise, but -accept with philosophic pleasure. - -Had Hilda indeed robbed her unwittingly? Had he failed her long before -her deliberate breach of faith? He had, she said, shown his love for -Hilda, and would she have turned to Lord Allan's more facile contentment -had she been sure of Peter's? - -Delicate problem, without doubt. His mind dwelt on its vexatious -tragic-comic aspect, while he stared almost absently at Hilda. - -Certainly his disloyalty had been unintentional, guiltless of plot or -falsehood; and Katherine's was intentional, deceitful, ignoble. It would -be possible to shock every chord of honor in Hilda with the bold -announcement that Katherine had been engaged when she came to Paris, and -that her cruel triumph had been won under a lying standard. - -And that shock might shatter forever, not the sense of personal -wrong-doing, but all responsibility towards one so base, all that -brooding consciousness of having spoiled another's life. Katherine had -abandoned the position, and poor Hilda had merely stumbled on its vacant -lie. - -Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble self-interest in showing -the ugly fact with no softening circumstances; circumstances might -indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to -despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of -the circumstances than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to -think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that the irksomeness of -his growing disapproval, rather than the loss of his love, had led -Katherine to seek a more amenable substitute; but with a sense of honor -so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put aside his own advantageous -surmises, and prepared to give Katherine's story from a most delicate -and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Katherine's words, and yet -such artistic chivalry in their setting that even Katherine would find -her sacrifice at Hilda's altar painless. - -"You shall have her own words," he said, after a long pause. He felt -that the inner trembling had grown to a great terror. He became pale -before the compelling necessity for exaggerated magnanimity. - -To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine's loomed a black -probability, yet in his very defeat he would prove himself not unworthy -of Hilda's love; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah! piercing words! At -least he could now draw them from their rankling. And as they walked -together he told Katherine's story, lending to it every charitable -possibility with which she herself could not honestly have invested it. - -When he had done, taking off his hat, for his temples were throbbing -with the stress of the recital, and looking at Hilda with an almost -pitifully boyish look, he had emphasized his own unconscious revelation -of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of broken-hearted generosity -in Katherine, he had hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the -glaring fact that she had made sure of him before giving Peter his -freedom. The soreness that the revelation of Katherine's selfishness had -made between them so soon after their engagement, he had not mentioned. - -Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once or twice during the -story she had clutched her clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice -her step had faltered and she had paused as though to listen more -intently, but the white profile with its framing eddies of hair crossed -the pale gold background, its attitude of intense quiet unchanged. - -The silence that followed his last words seemed cruelly long to Odd, but -at last she lifted her eyes, and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish -look, her own look broke suddenly into passionate sympathy and emotion. - -"Peter," she said, standing still before him, "she didn't love you." - -"I don't think she did." Odd's voice was shaken but non-committal. - -"Perhaps she loved you more than she could love any one else," said -Hilda. - -"Yes; perhaps." - -Hilda's hands were still clasped behind her, and she looked hard into -his face as she added with a certain stern deliberateness-- - -"I don't believe she ever loved anybody." - -Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for such a clear perception. - -"She was very cruel to me," said Hilda, after a little pause, and her -eyes, turning from his, looked far away as if following the fading of a -lost illusion. - -"I don't think she ever cared much for me either," she added. - -"Not much; not as you interpret caring." - -Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over him rushed that -indignant realization of Katherine's intrinsic selfishness. - -"No; I could not have been so cruel to her, not even if she had robbed -me of you." It was the most self-assertive speech he had ever heard her -utter. - -"No; you could not have been so cruel to her," he repeated, "not even -loving me as you did and as she did not." - -There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed to Odd that the very trees -stretched out their branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said -slowly-- - -"But that doesn't make what I did less wrong. I was as weak, as -disloyal, as though Katherine had loved us both as much as I thought she -did." - -"And I as cruel, as weak, as mean?" Odd asked. - -"Ah, don't!" she said, with a look of pain. "You have redeemed -yourself," she added, "and have made me more ashamed." - -"Then I have made a miserable failure of my attempt." - -"No, no; you have not." - -The river was before them now, and the woods sloped down to its curving -band of silver. They both stood still and looked at it, and beyond it at -the gentle stretches of autumnal hill and meadow. - -"Dear Peter," said Hilda gently. He looked down at her and she up at -him, putting her hand in his, but so gravely and quietly that the tender -little action conveyed nothing but a reminiscence of the child of ten -years ago. - -So, holding hands, they were both still silent, and again they looked at -the river, the meadows, and the blue distance of the hills. Palamon, -after running here and there, with rather assumed interest, his nose to -the ground, came and sat down before them with an air of dignified -acquiescence and appreciative contemplation. In the woods the sudden, -sad-sweet twitter of a bird seemed to embroider the silence with -unconscious pathos. - -"O Peter!" said Hilda suddenly, on a note as impulsive and as -inevitable as the bird's. He looked at her and put his arms around her, -saying nothing. - -"Oh!" said Hilda, "I cannot help it. I love you too much, dear Peter. -Everything else may have been wrong, but it is right to love you." - -He took her face between his hands and looked at her. - -"Everything else would be wrong." - -"Then kiss me, Peter." - -He gave himself the joy of a delicious postponement. - -"Not till you tell me that you see that everything else would be wrong." -But the kiss was given before her answer. - -"I trust you, and you must know." - -THE END. - - * * * * * - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -you remem-him=> you remember him {pg 19} - -the coencirge=> the concierge {pg 139} - -to forego the enjoyment=> to forgo the enjoyment {pg 158} - -unforgetable=> unforgettable {pg 181} - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Dull Miss Archinard, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD *** - -***** This file should be named 42109.txt or 42109.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/1/0/42109/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -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. 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