TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER I—THE AVERY FAIRCHILDS SPEND A QUIET EVENING AT HOME

CHAPTER II—AVERY MAKES AN ACQUAINTANCE

CHAPTER Ill—AVERY’S FRIEND MRS. BUTLER

CHAPTER IV—DUET

CHAPTER V—A QUESTION OF CECILY’S LIKES

CHAPTER VI—THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

CHAPTER VII—CONTAINS A REFERENCE TO IBSEN

CHAPTER VIII—AVERY ENTERS HIS NOVITIATE

CHAPTER IX—NOVICE’S PROGRESS

CHAPTER X—THE END OF PENELOPE

CHAPTER XI—LOIS AND CECILY

CHAPTER XI—THE WORLD RECEIVES

CHAPTER XIII—AND EVEN COMPLIMENTS

CHAPTER XIV—AND AVERY GOES MARCHING ON

CHAPTER XV—THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER

CHAPTER XVI—A LUNCHEON PARTY

CHAPTER XVII—AND A MORNING CALL

CHAPTER XVIII—DEALS WITH AN OFFICE PERSON

CHAPTER XIX—DEALS WITH CEASING TO BE AN OFFICE PERSON

CHAPTER XX—AVERY’S LITTLE AFFAIR

CHAPTER XXI—PROGRESS OF AVERY’S LITTLE AFFAIR

CHAPTER XXII—MORLEY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

CHAPTER XXIII—EPISODE

CHAPTER XXIV—AVERY PAYS A VISIT

CHAPTER XXV—DIVERSIONS OF A FIANCE

CHAPTER XXVI——AND OF A FIANCEE

CHAPTER XXVII—INFERENCES FROM A SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE

CHAPTER XXVIII—THE GLEAM

CHAPTER XXIX—THOSE TEDIOUS PRELIMINARIES

CHAPTER XXX—THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

CHAPTER XXXI—“ I MADE A SECOND MARRIAGE IN MY HOUSE ”

CHAPTER XXXII—THE LAST WORD

CHAPTER I

THE AVERY FAIRCHILDS SPEND A QUIET EVENING AT HOME

It was what in his own mind Dr. Fairchild always called “ the hour between ": that pleasant twilit interval when, the work of the afternoon being over, and dinner and the duties and diversions of the evening yet to come, one may pause to savor life. It is a time to walk city streets, if you are of an observant turn of mind, mingling with the crowds, and watching the lights come on; or, if yours be the domestic turn of mind, to sit a few minutes with your wife before your own lights are turned on, and hear what the bairns have been about today.

Either of these ways of passing the hour would have suited Avery, who was an observer by nature, and domestic by circumstances; but as he had been up most of the night before, he had hardly energy enough to stroll, and as Cecily was at one of her innumerable afternoon parties, he could not talk family matters with her. So he lay on a couch in the dim living-room, hearing vague sounds from above-stairs of his children being put to bed, and conscious of the fact that mutton roasted in the kitchen. He was tranquil, and rather happy; he would have liked to lie there indefinitely, with his home life thus vaguely presented to him.

Presently, however, the front door opened and closed, quick footsteps crossed the hall and mounted the stairs, and he heard a question put in a clear staccato voice. Then the house was as quiet as before, but somehow tranquillity had fled. Fairchild got up and turned on the light, aggrievedly conscious of hunger and headache. He was ambushed behind a newspaper when the disturber of his peace descended the stairs and entered the living-room. “ Oh, good-evening, Cecily,’' he said in response to her greeting.

Unshaded electric lights seemed rather appropriate for Cecily Fairchild, or at least appropriate to that voice of hers; but to any one who saw her only after hearing that rather hard voice, she must come as a delightful surprise: so pretty was she, so becomingly dressed, such a little miracle of effectiveness. For the rest, a cool, competent woman of twenty-six, prone at times to wistfulness, but much oftener to cynicism; a perfect wife for an ambitious man.

“ Are you ready for dinner, Avery? ” she asked, picking up some embroidery from the table.

“ More than ready, so far as hunger goes, but perhaps I’d better brush up a bit.”

In his turn Avery ascended the stairs, and returned a few minutes later, very sleek and presentable, in spite of his evident fatigue. He was a handsome dour man, big and dark, with thick hair brushed until it shone like black satin. He and Cecily, facing each other across their well-appointed dining-table, looked like a couple to be envied.

“ Both the children were asleep when I came in,” said Cecily as her soup was set before her.

“ They went very quietly tonight,” answered Avery. “ Junior can be broken of his naughtiness, if we’re only firm with him.”

“ Junior’s wilful, like his mother,” said Cecily, smiling. “ None of his father’s family are afflicted that way.”

“ The baby is more like me,” said Avery, smiling back at her.

“ Yes. And isn’t it awful to see one’s faults repeated in one’s child? One has so much more patience with them in oneself.”

Avery laughed shortly. “ You’re feeling witty, aren’t you? ” he asked.

“ No. Conversational. I’m not hungry, so I have to talk while you eat.”

“ Have you been eating this afternoon? ” asked Avery.

“ Yes, Dr. Fairchild. Horrible sweet things, that took away my appetite. I don’t let my children eat unwholesome things, but it’s different with their mother.”

“ Was it a card or a sewing party? ”

“ Card. Everything is cards nowadays. Absolute silence while you play, then redoubled gabble to make up for lost time. These afternoon parties, women only, are an awful bore.”

“ Why go to them, then? ”

“ Oh, one must go somewhere.”

The tone of both their voices suggested that they had been over this ground before. Cecily ate a stalk of celery, and helped herself to another; then her eyes brightened as she said, “ There was one real bit of news going the rounds today. Walter Butler is married.”

“Walter Butler! Is that so?” ejaculated Fairchild.

“ Yes. It’s rather a joke on the cats who have been trying to get him ever since he was out of knee-breeches, either for themselves or for their daughters. It was a surprise to everybody. By the way, we didn’t get an announcement, did we? ”

“ I haven’t seen one. There’s no reason why we should have an announcement; we’ve never been at all intimate with Walter Butler.”

“ No, but you always liked him.”

“ He’s quite the best of the young bloods here—not that he’s very young, either. He must be thirty-five, I should think.”

“Aren’t the Butlers the people in Jefferson?” asked Cecily.

“ If you ask the Butlers, they are. According to the Gregorys, the Gregorys are; and if you ask the Owens, no claims are valid but the Owens’ claims.”

“ At least, Walter Butler was a catch,” said Cecily. “ Now he’s caught, and by no one here.”

“ He married a girl from out of town? ”

“ Yes. Keith, her name was—Lois Keith. She is some sort of social worker, I believe—at least, some one this afternoon seemed to think so.”

“ There is a very distinguished social worker of that name,” said Avery. “I wonder if it’s she? She’s the greatest authority on housing in the United States; she has made wonderful surveys of the housing conditions in many cities.”

“ I dare say it’s the same lady.”

“ It can’t be, though,” Avery decided. “ No woman like that would marry Butler, nice fellow though he is.”

“ We can soon find out when she comes here,” said Cecily. “I wonder when that will be?”

“ I wonder what she’ll make of us when she sees us, if this really is the Lois Keith.” Avery still hung between two hypotheses.

“I wonder if she’ll make a survey of us?” suggested Cecily.

“ Perhaps it would not be without interest if she did,” said Fairchild. She ignpred the remark.

“You’re going to be at home this evening, aren’t you?” asked Cecily after a pause.

“ Yes, so far as I know. I have no evening office hours today, thank fortune.”

“ I’ve asked Mr. and Mrs. Wallace in for a little while,” said Cecily.

“ To play cards, when you’re bored with cards already? ”

“ I sacrifice my own inclinations,” said Cecily smoothly. “ You need the practice, Avery, you play such a shocking bad hand. It’s really good of the Wallaces to be willing to play with you.”

“ I dare say it is,” rejoined Fairchild. “ But I thought just you and I would be together for an evening; and we’d have an open fire, maybe, and just sit beside it and talk.” “ After which you’d go to sleep behind a newspaper, and Mrs. Fairchild could talk to herself for the rest of the evening.”

Avery grinned sheepishly. “You must remember, dear, how many women I have to talk to during the day.” “ Listen to, I think you mean. I suppose some of them are sillier than I, too.”

“ All of them are, Cecily.”

As they left the table and went into the living-room, Avery smiled down at her. “ You know no other woman can come up to you, Cecily, you wretch. You know that I’m irritable only because I’m never alone with you any more, and don’t get half enough of you.”

He slipped his arm around her, and kissed her. Her delightful supple body yielded to him, her cheek was smooth and cool beneath his kiss; but he had a quick, uneasy feeling that day by day Cecily’s spirit was growing more aloof from his, more critical and unsatisfied. Yet when she lifted her head it was to say, “ It’s too bad we can’t always be lovers, isn’t it, Avery?”

“Can’t we?” demanded Avery. “Why can’t we?”

“ With a house and a practice, and two children to bring up, and a social position to maintain? That doesn’t leave much time for lovering, does it? ”

“ No, it doesn’t. Let’s give the kids to an orphan asylum, and let the practice go hang, and go gypsying in a van.”

“ Will you wear a red kerchief on your hair? ” asked Cecily, raising her hand to stroke that satiny hair of his. “ Your hair was the first thing I ever noticed about you. If you’ll wear a red kerchief, I’ll go with you.”

“ And you’ll wear a blue blouse,” romanced Avery, “ and strings of blue and yellow beads. We’ll cook in the open, and sleep under the stars, and know no bounds but the ends of the earth. I can fairly see you, Cecily, stirring things in a pot slung on three sticks over a fire built beside the wagon.”

“ No. If I’ve got to cook, I’d sooner cook on a gas stove,” said Cecily disappointingly; and she sat down again to her embroidery.

She was working at it as if her life or at least her living demanded that she finish that piece of embroidery, and Avery had unfolded his newspaper and was getting drowsy, when the door-bell rang. “ Here comes our social position now,” he said, rousing himself.

“ Or our practice,” said Cecily.

It was the social position that entered, in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Wallace. Wallace owned one of the largest factories in town, and his wife came of an excellent eastern family. For reasons of policy Cecily endured them; they could open doors to her. Fairchild despised them both: the woman was a chattering flirtatious fool, in his estimation, the man a dissipated idler, who but for inherited money would have been classed simply as what he was, one of the chronic unemployed. Avery retreated into himself, and looked his dourest; he was actually glad of the cards, which kept him from having to talk to his guests.

Cecily kept things pleasant with that little manner of hers, at once so smooth and so piquant. Cecily was a rising woman, Fairchild thought; and if in leading this chosen life of hers she was fulfilling her destiny, he, who profited by it, had no right to complain. Avery admired the way she put Wallace at his ease and yet made him keep his distance; she was a clever girl, and if a man could keep from wishing to wring Wallace’s neck, it was amusing to watch her.

In watching her, to be sure, Avery lost track of the cards, and played worse than usual. They were very good-tempered in their corrections; but in virtue of their better playing the three of them formed a circle, with him outside. When about nine o’clock he was summoned to the telephone, he could only hope that it was an urgent call.

A woman’s voice came over the wire, a plaintive underbred voice, with a slight German accent. Lena Schulz was talking, and her mother wished to see him.

“ Is your mother worse, Lena? ” asked Avery.

“ No. It isn’t about herself she wants to see you. There isn’t any hurry; tomorrow will do,” the voice assured him.

Avery hesitated. There was a general laugh about the card-table just at that moment, and something in the laughter decided him. “ I’ll be over this evening, Lena,” he said. “ In twenty minutes or so, you may look for me.”

He went back to the group about the card-table. “ Cecily, my dear,” he said, “ I shall have to ask you to excuse me.

“ You see what a doctor’s life is,” Cecily said to Wallace, “and the life of a doctor’s wife. I hope it’s a person with lots of money who’s sick, Avery.”

“ I always hope that,” said Avery. “ This isn’t, however.”

“ No? Well, get home as soon as you can. Let me see— we can play with a permanent dummy.”

“ You can, and not be able to tell it from me,” said Avery. Which, for Avery, was a sally.

Ten minutes later Avery’s little two-passenger car drew up before a row of tiny cottages, all built alike, all outwardly ugly and miserable. Apparently, however, they did not daunt Avery; his bearing was alert and his eyes bright as he knocked at the corner house.

The door was opened by a stout, shy German girl, the Lena of the telephone. Behind her was a lamp-lit sitting-room, very small, very neat, and, in its furnishings and fittings, very German. Close to the lamp sat an elderly woman in a wheeled chair; the hands that held her knitting were crippled with rheumatism. Both the women beamed on Avery, who seated himself and smiled back at them— no one who had seen Avery at the card-table half an hour before would have believed him capable of such a smile. It was evident that he was a welcome guest, and that he liked to be here.

“What are you making?” he asked, and admired the green and purple shawl Mrs. Schulz was knitting, and the sofa-pillow on which Lena painstakingly embroidered poppies and a sentiment dealing with sleep. Then he heard all about their Christmas plans, and sampled their Christmas cookies, made a month beforehand and aged in jars, in true German style. Mrs. Schulz’s rheumatism, and Lena’s vicissitudes as a saleswoman in a department store, were then discussed. Finally, but without any undue haste in coming to the point, Avery asked why he had been sent for that evening.

“ It’s the family next door,” Mrs. Schulz explained, with her broad German accent.

“Annoying neighbors?” asked Avery, smiling.

“ Ach, we get on with our neighbors! ” said Mrs. Schulz. “ But sick, and poor. The father dead, as in this house. The mother, left with three small children, has gonsump-tion; a sister of the mother’s works where Lena does. They are poor, fery poor. They call no doctor—they cannot pay. You will go to them? ”

“ I surely will,” said Avery, getting to his feet. “ Any time you hear of a case like that, let me know.”

“ I always do,” said Mrs. Schulz.

“ That’s right.” Avery produced a handful of change, and counted out the nickels on the table. “ Use these for telephone calls,” he said.

“ We can pay for them,” objected Lena, embarrassed.

“ I know it, but you’re not going to. You’re doing me a favor when you let me know about such cases. Do you suppose,” he asked, “ that I like to doctor people who have nothing the matter with them except that they eat too much, and know all the time that really sick people are going without a doctor because they can’t afford to pay one? No, indeed,” said Avery heartily. “ No doctor likes that kind of thing, Lena.”

At least, he reflected as he knocked at the house next door, he could speak for himself; and he liked the hand-to-hand encounter with disease and poverty. It was, indeed, what had attracted him to medicine in the first place, and had kept his rather unscientific mind to it all through the years of preparation. He had never dreamed in those days that he would come to have a society practice.

The girl who answered his knock was a sullen, overdressed young person, who did not look in the least like the backbone of a family. “ I'm Dr. Fairchild,” said Avery briskly. “ I was at Mrs. Schulz’s, and she thought I might see Mrs. Fisher. Are you Mrs. Fisher’s sister?”

The girl nodded and drew back to let him in. The room in which the door opened corresponded to the Schulz’s sitting-room; but it was dirty, exceedingly untidy, and so close that Fairchild almost choked. A bed had been set up against one wall, and in it lay propped a woman in an advanced stage of tuberculosis. Two small children crawled and tumbled about on the bed, and a third had fallen asleep on the floor.

“ Let’s have a few of the children out of the way first,” said Avery, possessing himself of the smaller child on the bed, who had scuttled close to his mother on the doctor’s approach. “ Here, you rascal, where’s your bed? And your nighty? ”

“ They sleep in the bedroom, back there. They—haven’t any nightgowns,” their mother said.

“ Then off come their dresses, and in they pop,” said Avery. “ Let’s see which can get there the fastest. All three together? ”

He bundled the three of them into the larger of the two beds in the bedroom, covered them with all the bedclothes he could find, opened the window, and closed the door. The mother was smiling as he sat down, a little short-breathed with his struggles.

“ You didn’t think I could manage them, did you? ” he asked. “ I have two of my own, a boy and a girl, three and one. The girl is nothing but a baby, of course, but the boy’s a handful already.”

Mrs. Fisher took an immediate interest in his children. “ What are their names? ” she asked.

“ Avery, Junior and Margaret,” said Fairchild.

“ Mine are Mercedes, Clarence and Hildegarde,” said Mrs. Fisher.

“ What very nice names,” said Avery without a tremor. “ They’re very nice children. You ought to put them to bed earlier, you know; and you really ought not to have them playing on the bed when you’re sick.”

She looked at him sadly. “ I like to have them around me,” she said.

“ Of course you do. But children of that age ought to be outdoors most of the day, and in bed by seven every night. You will see that they are, when you realize it’s for their own good. A mother can always make a sacrifice, when it’s for the sake of her children.”

He saw Mrs. Fisher’s face brighten; the idealism to which he was appealing so shamelessly certainly existed in her nature. But her sister struck in at that moment, “ Suppose they do go outdoors, where are they to play? On the four feet of cinders we call back-yard, or in the street? ”

“ Now you’re asking something,” said Avery cheerfully. “ I should say on the cinders. Now, Mrs. Fisher, if you’ll smoke this thermometer for a few minutes, your sister and I will talk.”

He found, however, that although he might talk to the sister, getting into conversation with her was not so easy. After her one savage speech she lapsed into her former sullen silence, and the most he could get from her was “ Yes ” and “ No.” He wondered how valuable as a saleswoman she was to Lena’s employers.

When he was ready to leave he beckoned her, and she followed him outside. “ Your sister ought to be in a hospital,” he said. “ There’s no hospital in Jefferson, though, that will take cases like hers, so we must see what we can do. I’ll leave orders tomorrow for milk and eggs to be sent here. You’re to see that she gets them; and you must keep a window open all the time in that room where your sister is. Do you understand?”

She stood on the steps above him, her arms hanging limp at her sides, and stared off dully into the distance. “ It would be better if she died,” she said slowly. “ If she died, and the kids went to an asylum, and gave me a chance.”

“ Don’t say that,” said Avery. “ This is hard on you, I know, but you’ll be sorry some day if you say things like that.”

He seized her hand, and shook it swiftly; it lay limp in his. “ If anything happens,” he said, “ telephone for me, or ask Lena Schulz to do it. I’ll be around again in a few days, anyway.”

She did not answer, and as he cranked his car he heard her slam the door. “ There’s so much to be done for people like that,” he said to himself as he drove home. “ Those children ought to have proper care, and a decent place to play. That woman ought to be taken to a sanitarium. The girl should have that load of responsibility off her shoulders, and get a little pleasure in her youth. That whole row of wretched little buildings ought to come down. By George! ” said Avery; “ I only wish that I had the time and the money to do what ought to be done.”

It was half-past ten when he reached home. The house smelled most invitingly of percolating coffee, and the cards had been replaced by a chafing-dish, over which Wallace presided. After the sights and smells he had come from, Avery’s senses were gratified by the warm, sweet air, and the tasteful, softly-lighted room, with its clean, prosperous occupants. Prosperous people were more agreeable than his poor; he had to say that for them.

“ Just in time for the eats,” Wallace sang out at him.

“Did you get a big fee?” asked Mrs. Wallace.

“ Did you get any fee at all? ” asked the more penetrating Cecily.

Avery smiled. “ You don’t any of you ask about the case,” he said.

“ I never know anything about Avery’s cases,” Cecily explained to Mrs. Wallace. “ If any one asks me about them, I’d rather not know.”

“ You could know, and say you didn’t,” suggested Mrs. Wallace. “ This way of doing is hard on the doctor, isn’t it?”

The look on Avery’s face when he heard that embarrassed Cecily; she turned out the light under the percolator, and busied herself with the coffee.

“ This is done,” announced Wallace. “ Here, all of you —spoils it to stand.”

Avery supplied Mrs. Wallace, and sat down beside her. He liked her better than usual the rest of that evening: she had had one of her gleams of intelligence.

CHAPTER II

AVERY MAKES AN ACQUAINTANCE

Cecily Fairchild might know nothing about the particulars of her husband’s cases; but that next week she knew that there were many of them. In the wake of bad weather, grippe had become epidemic in Jefferson, and it was followed in many cases by pneumonia. Fairchild was busy night and day: all his meals were lunches, and sleep was chiefly a memory. Cecily was a vague figure on the horizon; his children he scarcely saw.

In a way he enjoyed the tension: he liked the sharp struggle with disease and death, the feeling of vital service rendered. When conditions became more nearly normal, and he had only his usual patients, he began to chafe. He was, half in spite of himself, building up a “ society ” practice: idle, overfed women flocked to him, because he was handsome and could say agreeable things. He often longed to say disagreeable ones; but that class of patients paid well, and he had heavy expenses to meet. It was with all the greater relief that he went back to his poor, although he was often stung by his own inadequacy in the face of their problems—there was so much more than sickness that needed help here.

He came home one afternoon from a visit to the consumptive Mrs. Fisher. His patient was holding her own now, and the children, thanks to Fairchild’s attentions, were better cared for than they had been. Only the sister proved impossible of approach, growing more sullen and defiant every time he saw her. He had not seen her that afternoon, as it was too early for her return from work, and in a way he was rather glad he had not: she seemed to him the ungracious victim of the whole situation.

With his mind running on that family, Avery rushed upstairs toward his own room. In the upper hall he came full upon Cecily, clad in her dressing-gown. Cecily in her dressing-gown in the day-time was breath-taking, for she was possessed of a neatness that went fully dressed from morning until night, and of an activity that disdained naps. “ What’s the matter? ” he asked hastily. “ Are you sick? ”

“ No. I’m going to lie down a little while. You are, too, aren’t you? ”

“ Are we going out tonight? ”

“ Why, Avery, you know we are! ”

“No, I don’t; or, at least, I’ve forgotten. What is the occasion? ”

“ The Charity Ball, of course.”

“ The Charity Ball! ” Fairchild exploded. “ I haven’t any patience with the Charity Ball! If frivolous people want to give a big party, that’s all right; but how they have the impudence to dance and flirt because other people are poor and miserable, is more than I can see. The things that are done in the name of philanthropy—!”

Cecily sighed faintly. She had embroidered for a month on her dress, and had had only the bare making done by a dressmaker; the dress was lovely, and she was looking forward to wearing it. Avery’s harangues were rather disturbing at times.

Avery heard the sigh. “ That needn’t spoil our good time, Cecily,” he said. “ Run along and get your nap, and I’ll nap too.”

“ It will be lovely,” she said. “ We haven’t been out together in so long, Avery—these last few weeks—”

She vanished into her room. Avery went to his own, and threw himself on his bed. He lay there with his eyes closed, and wondered why disgust with things in general was growing upon him. He had an increasing practice— no doctor could choose his patients, if you came to that; his house was pretty and comfortable, his children charming; and Cecily alone ought to be enough to reconcile him to life. He had overborne all opposition to get Cecily, who had had ambitions above him, and a fixed habit of getting what she wanted. He was not exactly unhappy; at times he was very happy indeed. If he had remained single he might have lived his life rather differently; but that meant if he had never met Cecily. From the moment that his eyes first lighted upon her, a crisp, self-confident girl of twenty, he had bent every effort to marrying her. What a chase she had led him, the clever, saucy little thing! Fair-child grinned as he remembered how he had been put through his paces. Well, housekeeping and babies must seem dull to a girl with a disposition like that; it was ungenerous of him to grudge Cecily any amusement she could get, even Charity Balls. And Avery, quieted by reflection and restored by his nap, appeared in good humor at dinner, waited patiently while Cecily finished with her dressing, and complimented her on her appearance.

The Charity Ball was the social event of the year in Jefferson. It was given in the largest dancing-hall in town, which was elaborately decorated for the evening. Everybody who had any social pretensions whatever went to it; but the inner circle kept itself to itself. The inner circle in Jefferson was very exclusive; the town was old, for the middle west, and its aristocracy was well established. The Fairchilds had gone to the Charity Ball every year since they settled in Jefferson as bride and groom; both the babies had arrived so opportunely as not to interfere with their parents’ attendance at that function. It amused Avery to watch from year to year the progress that he and Cecily made socially, or rather the progress that Cecily made for them both. At first they had been rank outsiders at the Charity Ball; now they were in the inner circle, and in the course of a few more balls they would be of that circle, if he knew the wife of his bosom.

The dancing had begun when the Fairchilds arrived. Cecily was not in sight when Avery came out of the cloakroom, but as he stood in the end of the ballroom he made her out among a knot of people at the farther end. “ I wonder whom she’s meeting now? ” he thought. “ Somebody who’s exactly the right person to meet, I have no doubt.”

Mrs. Wallace spied Avery, and descended upon him. “Who do you think is here?” she demanded. “Walter Butler and his bride! Do come and meet them. She’s lovely, and he’s so proud of her—it’s pretty to see them. It’s a surprise to everybody, their being here; they only arrived in town this afternoon, and nobody had any idea that they had arrived.”

She began to pilot him along the wall, toward the group of which Cecily made one. “ As I suspected! ” thought Avery.

He and Mrs. Wallace were half-way to the end of the room when the music stopped, the dancers began to walk toward seats, and the group toward which they were walking shifted. Across the intervening space Fairchild’s eyes met those of a tall and lovely woman; she held his eyes in smiling scrutiny for a moment, and then looked away. Fairchild drew in his breath sharply.

“ That’s she! ” said Mrs. Wallace. " That’s Mrs. Butler.”

“That, she!”

“Yes. Are you surprised?”

“ No. She looks the sort of woman you would expect Walter Butler to marry.”

But not, he might have added, the sort of woman who conducted surveys of housing conditions. Unconsciously he had formed a picture of Lois Butler, as a wan, overdriven woman, with patient, weary eyes. This handsome, eager, colorful person, who, in spite of a certain air of the public platform, looked very much like any season’s prettiest bride at the season’s biggest party, thrilled him for a moment: here was something beyond his previous experience. The next instant he thought, “ It’s probably not the same Lois Keith; that’s the explanation.” His heart sank.

Cecily was talking to Walter Butler, handsome, good-tempered Walter Butler, one of those people who live through the day’s business in order to reach the evening’s pleasure. Butler seized Avery's hand, and introduced him. “ I want you to meet my wife,” he said. “ I want you to dance with her. I want to dance with your wife; I haven’t forgotten Mrs. Fairchild’s dancing.”

“ Shall we say the fifteenth? ” asked Cecily. She and Butler laid their heads together over their dance programs, and Avery turned to Mrs. Butler.

“ Such a pretty party! ” she said, looking down at the smooth floor, and then up at the lights wreathed in greenery.

“ I’m so glad you got here for it,” said Avery. “ You’ll meet all Jefferson society at once, in its best clothes and its best manners.”

“ And have it over with, your tone suggests,” said Mrs. Butler.

“ I didn’t mean that at all,” said Avery, coloring. “ It’s nice to meet people at their best.”

“ I think so too. But I’m afraid that I shan’t know people when I see them in their street clothes, and shall cut them.”

“ I dare say you will,” said Avery. “ Now, to me, all the women look pretty at a dance, and that’s very confusing.”

“ Take the sixteenth dance with Mrs. Butler, Avery,” said Cecily, lifting her head from her study of the two programs. “ I’ll have it with Mr. Butler.”

The music began again. “ Come on, Cecily,” said Fair-child. “ Let’s scandalize the town by the spectacle of a husband and wife dancing together.”

They danced that dance together; but when Avery tried to persuade her to a second, Cecily laughed, and proceeded to fill up her program. Her partners were on the whole higher in the social scale than they had been the year before; her progress was going on, as scheduled.

As to Avery, a partner was a partner with him. If she danced very well, he enjoyed himself; if not so well, he was glad to get through the dance without disaster, and pass on to the next. On the whole his partners were good that evening, and the lights and rhythm appealed to him. He was hypnotized into a dreamy mood; through it all he saw by flashes two women who passed him on the dancing-floor: Cecily, a perfect dancer, not missing a moment of the music, and chattering like a magpie between numbers, and Mrs. Butler.

His own dance with Mrs. Butler was the second after supper. Walter Butler had put his arm about Cecily and whirled her away on the floor, beaming as her step fell in with his. Avery and Mrs. Butler followed. She danced well, with a free movement quite her own; but when after discreet applause an encore was begun, Fairchild said, “ Let’s sit down, shan’t we? ”

They walked to a little seat half-hidden by plants. “ Pretty! ” said Mrs. Butler, watching the dancers. “ How well your wife dances! ”

“Yes, doesn’t she?” After a moment’s pause, Avery burst out, “ Mrs. Butler, there’s something I’d like to know. Are you the Lois Keith? ”

“ The Lois Keith? I’m the only Lois Keith I know of, Dr. Fairchild.”

“ Thank you, that’s what I wanted to know,” said Avery. “ You see, your reputation has preceded you.”

“ I see. I’m alarmed.” She smiled, but she kept her eyes on the dancers. “ This, I think you said a while back, is Jefferson at its best?”

“ Or Jefferson looking its best,” he answered. “ Look hard in your turn, and get the pleasantest sort of first impression.”

She looked at him instead; gave him an instant of that smiling, searching gaze of hers, and began to beat time to the music. “ Tell me about the rest,” she said. “ What’s the complement to all this? ”

“ Well, we have a city of forty thousand,” said Avery.

“ There are the aristocrats: factory owners, bankers and professional people; the middle class, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers; and the factory hands. We have no organized charities; relief is still a matter of private philanthropy. It’s considered quite sociological to serve on the Hospital or the Public Library Board.”

“ Do all the factory owners live here? ” asked Mrs. Butler. “Yes. Jefferson is a pretty city; at least along the river bank, where the factory owners live, it’s pretty.”

“ You’re something of a sociologist, I see,” said Mrs. Butler. “ Have you ever worked along that line, Dr. Fair-child?”

“ I’m a common, ordinary, practicing physician,” said Avery. “A G. P., nothing more. But I’ve lived here four years, and I can’t help seeing things.”

“If you’ve lived here only four years, perhaps that’s why you’ve seen so much. Walter has lived here all his life, and I couldn’t elicit anything from him except that it was a --nice enough place to live, and that you could always get out of town when you were bored.”

Avery wanted to laugh, that speech hit off Butler’s limitations so well; but he confined himself to saying, “ Then this is something of an adventure for you, marrying and coming to live in a perfectly strange place.”

“ It is an adventure. But then there are plenty of adventures in the world nowadays. Dr. Fairchild. I don’t mean magazine fiction adventures, but true trials of valor a'nd endurance. Even these nice, comfortable people who bore you so aren’t exempt.”

“ When any Jeffersonian goes in pursuit of spiritual adventure, may I be there to see! ” said Avery.

“ I hope you may,” said Mrs. Butler gravely. It was not until long afterward that Fairchild appreciated the significance of that remark.

The encore ended then, and Walter Butler brought Cecily up to them. “ You look as if you were having a jolly time back here,” he remarked. “Getting acquainted?”

“We are acquainted,” said Mrs. Butler. “We must have another talk soon, Dr. Fairchild.”

Cecily looked after the Butlers as they walked away together; but it was not until she and Avery were on their way home that she spoke of them. “ Did you like Mrs. Butler? ” she asked then. “ She’s very good-looking, isn’t she?”

“Yes; she’s good-looking. She’s interesting, too,” said Avery.

“ How old should you think she was?” asked Cecily.

“ How old? I hadn’t thought about her age.”

“ I don’t know that I should have, only I heard it discussed several times this evening. I shouldn’t be surprised if she were a year or two older than he.”

They were silent the rest of the way, leaning back in their corners of the carriage. Cecily leaned against him as Avery helped her out at their doorstep. “ Why, girl, how tired you are! ” he said. “ You ought not to get yourself done up like this.”

“ I’m glad to have a good time, even at the cost of being tired,” she returned icily.

“ Of course you are, but you ought not to try to do so many things.” He was letting them in as he said that.

“ I’d like to know where we should be if I didn’t do so many things,” answered Cecily.

Cecily was a last word woman; Avery desisted from argument. But he followed her into her room, got her dressing-gown and slippers for her, and hung up her cloak and dress. “ You’d better sleep late in the morning,” he said as he left her room.

He knew his advice was wasted. He had insisted on separate rooms when they were married, in order that his night calls and early risings might not disturb Cecily. But Cecily had proved no lie-abed wife; she was always stirring before he was, and she always faced him across the breakfast-table. When he began his daily round she began hers: keeping house, sewing, looking after the children, parties, calls, bazaars and benefits. The Fairchilds kept two servants, but Cecily would have found occupation if they had kept a dozen; the Fairchild children were dressed as prettily as any in town, and Avery’s meals were punctual and perfect.

She had looked very tired that night. There was great nervous energy in her slim body, but Avery thought she often taxed it too far. He hoped she was not going to be sick. He saw enough sick women every day; a sick wife would be the dickens. There was one thing certain: Cecily ought to have had money. “ I wish,” Avery thought, sitting on the edge of his bed, “ I wish I had Butler’s money. I don’t believe that new wife of his needs it particularly— a woman who has always looked after herself. If I had money, I’d— Well, I don’t know what I would do. It would be nice for Cecily, but I suppose I should still keep on doing the same old things. Lois Butler must have had an interesting life. I wonder if she’ll keep up her work now that she’s married. It seems as if to a modern woman marriage was pretty much like death.”

Having reached that remarkable conclusion, Avery became suddenly aware that it was four o’clock in the morning, and the room was cold. He got into bed. “ I hope we’ll be on top some day,” was his conclusion. “ Do I really hope that? I don’t know.”

CHAPTER Ill

AVERY’S FRIEND MRS. BUTLER

If Cecily did not care to hear about Avery’s cases, Avery in his turn was deaf to the gossip in which Jefferson was so fruitful. Cecily, who had a sly touch with comment upon her neighbors’ conduct and characters, would perhaps have liked to have him listen; indeed she sometimes found a topic which appealed to him sufficiently so that he would at least hear her out before he returned to his book.

She discovered soon enough that she had such a topic in Lois Butler. After their meeting at the Charity Ball that lady often recurred in her conversation. “ I met Mrs. Butler shopping today,” Cecily would remark. “ She has very pretty clothes; but she looks as if she entered them rather hastily.” Or, “ I saw the Butlers today in a brand-new motor-car. She was driving; she does all those athletic things, I suspect.” Again, “ The stately Lois was at the card party this afternoon. She plays badly; I should think she had never played before. Do you know, Avery, I think she has a system? She goes to some affair of every clique in this town, but she hasn’t identified herself with any clique.”

To all this Avery listened, usually without comment. Once Cecily alluded to her subject as “your friend Mrs. Butler,” and then Avery was stung into replying, “ I don’t know why you say my friend. I haven’t seen her since that first evening.”

Cecily smiled amiably at that, and Fairchild ignored her smile. He had, indeed, more or less irrationally expected to see Lois Butler, sometime or somewhere; and as she rather interested him, he was more or less excusably disappointed at not having been favored with even a chance meeting. But Christmas came and went without his laying eyes on “ the stately Lois.”

One afternoon in January, as he waited for the elevator to take him up to his office, Avery Fairchild heard himself hailed by name. He turned to greet Walter Butler, who was wearing a fur-lined overcoat and smoking an opulent cigar. Butler beamed on him and extended his hand. “ What luck to meet you down here! ” he said. “ I though I’d have to wait an hour or so in your office, staring at a row of doleful old women. And all on an errand of my missus's.”

“ Is Mrs. Butler sick? ” asked Avery.

“ No, indeed. She was never better. She wants to see you only semi-professionally.”

“ Semi-professionally? ”

“ Yes. She has schemes—vast schemes. What is more, she puts them into practice. She thinks you may help her on some points—doctorial points; or should I say physicianly?” Butler stood leaning against a door-jamb, and beamed more than ever.

“When does Mrs. Butler wish to see me?”

“At your convenience,” answered Butler.

“ Now you puzzle me,” said Avery. “ If this were a professional call, I should go to your house this afternoon, or this evening at latest. As it’s only semi-professional——“ Go this afternoon, anyway, if you can take the time,” said Butler. “ The sooner the better, so far as Lois is concerned. I’ll be home myself about half-past five, to extend the welcoming hand of hospitality.”

“ This afternoon, then,” agreed Avery.

Butler nodded, smiled afresh, and was gone, good-looking, insouciant, incorrigibly gay. “ His money aids her philanthropic schemes,” thought Avery. “ I begin to see— lots of things.”

Demands upon him were fewer than usual that afternoon; the “ row of doleful old women ” was not so long. Before five o’clock Avery presented himself at the Butlers’ door. They lived in a huge old house, all spreading wings and French windows, built on the bluffs overlooking the river; Walter Butler’s grandfather had built it as a wedding present to Walter’s father.

“ Mrs. Butler is expecting you,” said the maid when he gave his name. “ Will you wait in the conservatory? ”

Why in the conservatory, Avery wondered. The rooms he passed through, following the maid, had been little altered by either Butler or his new wife; they were Victorian, but so frankly Victorian and so decently aged that they commanded a certain respect. Any one of them would have served to receive a chance visitor in; why then the conservatory?

He knew when he reached it. The large glazed apartment, built on the side toward the river, had been disused altogether during Walter’s bachelorhood. Lois Butler, enchanted by the view and the sunshine, had adopted it as a sort of private sitting-room. Green curtains, the. height of a man’s head, hung all around it; overhead, sliding white shades like a photographer’s admitted or excluded the sun at will. Deep wicker chairs and little wicker tables piled with books and magazines stood about; a wicker couch was heaped with green cushions; a luxurious bunch of red roses lightened one corner, and a typewriter on a heavy square desk stood austerely in another.

Avery had pushed aside one of the green curtains and was looking at the river when Mrs. Butler came in. She wore a dark silk blouse, open at the neck, with wide sleeves that fell back from her round arms. “ This is good of you,” she said. “ Walter telephoned that you would be up this afternoon, and I appreciate your promptness. I hope you haven’t put yourself to inconvenience.”

“ My work was light today,” said Avery. “ And perhaps curiosity had as much to do as goodness with bringing me here.”

“ Sit down,” said Mrs. Butler, motioning to a chair near her own. “ My reason for calling you in isn’t at all exciting; yet I hope you will be interested when you find out about it. It’s a question of sleeping-porches.”

“ Of sleeping-porches? ”

She nodded. At that moment the same maid who had admitted Avery appeared in the door with a tea-cart. “ I hope you like tea,” said Mrs. Butler. “ I’ve become quite devoted to it since I came to Jefferson.”

“ That’s only natural,” said Avery, accepting a cup. “ I suppose that you get it wherever you go, and that you go incessantly.”

“ By no means incessantly,” said Mrs. Butler. “ I decline all invitations that I can’t see any good reason for accepting. That’s a splendid plan—saves so much time. Did you ever try it? ”

“ My dear Mrs. Butler,” said Avery, “ in America social engagements are made by the women for the family, as you very well know.”

Mrs. Butler laughed. “ I see the pretty maker of your engagements often,” she said. “ I judge she hasn’t tried my plan. How is she? ”

“ She was well at lunch time. I have no reason to suppose that disaster has befallen her since.”

“ Will you have a cake? ” asked Mrs. Butler.

“ Thank you. One.”

There was silence for a moment. Mrs. Butler finished her tea and set down the cup. “ Now about my sleeping-porches,” she said. “ We’re going to do quite a little building here in town. The psychological moment hasn’t come for making our plans public, but I may tell you that Butler and Company is to put up two sorts of dwellings for its employees, bungalows that they may buy on the installment plan, and model tenements to rent.”

“And you are planning them?”

“ You guess well. Fortunately, as you may know, Butler and Company is practically just Walter Butler. That simplifies things.”

“ It must,” said Avery. “ It also explains tenements with sleeping-porches.”

“Ah, but I don’t wish to be extravagant! I want my bungalows to sell at very little more than cost, but the tenements should pay a small return on the investment. Not so much by a good deal as ‘ company real estate ’ usually pays, but two or three per cent. In order to do that, I have to plan carefully.”

“ By George, that’s a new form of philanthropy! ” said Aveiy. “ Philanthropy at three per cent.”

She laughed again; it was evident that she liked not being taken too seriously. But she was serious for a moment to say, “ I don’t call this philanthropy, Dr. Fairchild—just common decency.”

She fetched a roll of paper and blue-prints, and put it down on the nearest of the small tables. “ Draw up your chair,” she said. “ I’m half an architect, just from looking into houses, and I’ve had great fun with these. Most people like to plan houses, don’t you think? It sets your imagination—”

“ To playing house? ” he suggested.

“ I don’t know but it does, something like that. Now, on a bungalow like this—you see the bungalows are all different—”

An hour later Walter Butler found them over the plans, talking, gesticulating, drawing lines. “ I was going to apologize for my tardiness,” he said, “ but I should judge from appearances that I’ve come too soon. What have the two of you cooked up? ”

Mrs. Butler looked up radiantly. “ We haven’t finished,” she said, “ but I'm getting just what I wanted. Dr. Fairchild knows all about sleeping-porches, and we are working out a model porch at a minimum cost.”

“Didn’t I tell you she was full of schemes?” Butler asked Fairchild. As he leaned on his wife’s chair-back, and looked at her drawings, his hand fell on her shoulder; her hand stole up to meet it. At this bit of sweethearting Fairchild felt both surprised and paternal.

The three of them talked together for a while, so that it was nearly seven o’clock when Fairchild unlocked his own front door. His dinner hour was half-past six, but no Cecily greeted him with uplifted eyebrows that deprecated his tardiness; and the baby, who was usually in bed at this hour, lay in her carriage in the deserted front hall. Avery did not know whether such disorganization demanded protest or heralded calamity; vaguely disturbed he lifted the baby and carried her upstairs.

Lights were blazing in Cecily’s room, and he heard her voice questioning and another answering. From the doorway he beheld a scene of confusion: open drawers, half-packed valises, and Cecily on her knees in the midst of things, folding garments and giving directions to the worried “ second girl.”

“ Anna, take this baby and put her to bed,” said Avery. “I’ll help Mrs. Fairchild. What’s the matter, Cecily?” Cecily watched the departure of the baby for bed, and then lifted red-rimmed eyes to his. “ Cecily, my dear, what’s the matter? ” he cried, this time in real concern.

“ It’s mother,” said Cecily. “ She’s dead. I got a telegram about an hour ago.”

“ So suddenly? You hadn’t any warning, had you?”

“ No, I hadn’t any warning.”

“ What was the trouble? ”

“ The telegram didn't say,” answered Cecily.

Fairchild drew a long breath. He had never been on the most cordial terms with his mother-in-law, who had not considered him a brilliant enough match for Cecily. “ When shall we leave? ” he asked.

Cecily’s eyes thanked him for his heroism; but she only said, “ I’m going tonight, but that wouldn’t give you much time to get ready. You ought to have at least another day, withyour patientsand all, oughtn’t you? It will be all right if you start tomorrow night; the funeral will be the day after tomorrow, I think.”

“ Let’s have dinner now, and finish your packing afterward,” said Avery. “Have you ’phoned for your berth?” Twice during dinner he was about to tell her of his visit to the Butlers’; both times he was interrupted. After that he let the matter rest: it was not so important that he needed to make a point of telling her. He put her on the train at ten o’clock, charging her not to wear herself out, and to telegraph if she wanted anything. Then he drove about for an hour, glad of the keen, cold air that blew against his face. The events of the preceding three hours had damped his spirits, but they recovered now; and it was in holiday mood that he finished his drive and entered his own house again. He reproved himself, recalling Cecily’s anxiety and probable fatigue; but it was pleasant to be master in his own house.

He foraged in the ice-box, and carried a lunch up to his room with him; when he had eaten it and smoked two or three cigars, he found to his surprise that it was almost one o’clock. He stole in his slippers to the nursery, to see if the children were covered. They were both sound asleep in their little white beds; the nursery lamp showed them to him in the charm and abandon of their sleep. As he bent over them, the thought occurred to Fairchild that they would grow up some day, and marry, and their marriages might not be more agreeable to Cecily and to him than Cecily’s had been to her mother, and their spouses might come to his funeral or Cecily’s with the decently veiled indifference which he would carry to his mother-in-law’s.

Avery smiled at his own absurdity; if he wanted something to worry about, he might much better worry about his children’s chances of getting measles than about the distant day of their marriages. But he had them in the room with him at breakfast the next day, and played with them afterward, as if to enjoy their charm now, while they were wholly and unquestionably his.

He worked hard that day and forewent luncheon: he would be out of town all the day after, and beside, he was due at the Butlers’ at four o’clock, to help finish the plans for the sleeping-porches. He thought of telephoning that he could not come; but while he was still debating the matter it was a quarter of four, and he went anyway.

He made the interview brief and business-like, as was suitable for a busy man whose wife was out of town by reason of bereavement. He mentioned his wife’s absence, and Lois Butler was properly sympathetic. It was easier, some way, to talk of Cecily to Lois than of Lois to Cecily.

Perhaps he overtired himself; for in his berth that night Avery could not sleep. His thoughts flew back to Lois Butler and her plans, and ahead to Cecily waiting for him; and then increasingly to his own past life. Avery composed himself to rest; he resolutely tried to make his mind a blank. He saw his eager youthful dreaming self, set on accomplishing great things: a young man who studied and read and thought, and walked endless miles for the good of his health and to give his mind free play. He recalled his first meeting with Cecily, who had fascinated and baffled him, and made herself the subject of those dreams of his, the invisible companion of his long walks. His third meeting with her would have disillusioned him if anything could, for it was then that he met Cecily’s parents, her weakly romantic father, now dead some years, her weakly mercenary mother. But the infatuated youth saw only Cecily, Cecily springing from such parents as a tamarack springs from the marsh.

Only weeks had elapsed after their meeting when Avery had decided to marry her, had discarded every ambition that might conflict with marriage, was bending every energy to make it possible. It had been Cecily who held off, poor puzzled Cecily, trained by her father to expect “ the right man,” kept by her mother from facing the problem of what to do when the right man chanced to have the wrong income. Her love had overborne her in the end, and her mother had never afterward looked at her without reproach; a girl with Cecily’s brains and looks could have done so much better for herself.

The day of his marriage Avery had tasted such happiness as he had never supposed possible. But after you were married you had to go on living, just as you had lived before. Marriage and paternity had not stifled in him either the discomforts or the aspirations of his youth, and it was those discomforts and aspirations that found an echo in his talk with Lois Butler. Avery could not be tranquil in the face of injustice and misery; whereas Cecily would calmly have gone on embroidering pretty clothes for her children while countless thousands starved at her doors, always provided, of course, that the countless thousands did not have the bad taste to clamor as they starved.

In the gray dawn Avery pushed up the shade and looked out. A few hours separated him and Cecily; he found himself wondering whether she would meet him at the station, and whether she was very tired indeed. “ We do love each other,” he said to himself. “ We never quarrel—not what could really be called quarreling. And I’m mighty anxious to see her.” Having found the right note at last, he dwelt lingeringly on his genuine anxiety to see her.

CHAPTER IV

DUET

As they were in mourning during the rest of that winter and through the spring, the Avery Fairchilds spent Avery’s free evenings at home. In one corner of their living-room was an electric lamp with a yellow silk shade; on opposite sides of this lamp Avery and Cecily would establish themselves after dinner. Cecily sewed while Avery read; occasionally he read aloud to her. He would have done so oftener, but his own reading had lately become markedly economic and sociological; so that if he read what really interested him, Cecily was deaf to it. She was rather petulant at times: her mother’s death had brought home to her her own lack of devotion to that thoroughly uninteresting woman. But for the most part Cecily was amiable, if a bit bored; and Avery enjoyed those slippered lamp-lit evenings, when he was not thinking about something else.

One evening Avery sat with two solid volumes before him, and read the newspaper. He was approaching the point where the news was exhausted, and the solid volumes were beginning to reproach him, when Cecily spoke. “ Avery,” she said, without lifting her eyes from her embroidery, “ Avery! Did you know that Mrs. Walter Butler is going to have a baby?”

“ Yes,” answered Avery from behind his newspaper. “ I wish you wouldn’t use that euphemism, Cecily; it’s in bad taste.”

“ If you knew, why didn’t you tell me?” asked Cecily.

“ You know you never care to hear about my cases,” said Avery.

“ Is this your case? ”

“ No,” said Avery, looking somewhat foolish. “ I only know the fact as any one might.”

“ Well, why don’t you share a bit of gossip with your wife? ” asked Cecily.

“ There isn’t any why not. I simply didn’t happen to think of it.”

“ Perhaps you would have, if I hadn’t spoken first,” said Cecily. “ I rather rely on you for my news about the Butlers; you know them so well that—”

“ I don’t know them very well,” said Avery shortly. He had, somewhat tardily to be sure, mentioned to his wife the affair of the sleeping-porches; half a dozen subsequent consultations on similar matters had gone unrevealed.

“ Oh, I thought you knew them quite well! ” said Cecily, threading her needle and looking at him candidly.

“ Mrs. Butler has consulted me occasionally about conditions among the factory hands. She has some plans for bettering things, and of course she has to get all the information she can. I didn’t know that those things interested you.”

“ They don’t particularly. I hope she isn’t going to give a bazaar for the hands; I’m sure I’d be in demand for that.”

They both smiled at the idea of Mrs. Butler’s giving a bazaar for the factory people; Avery felt relieved, having escaped from the situation of husband explaining. Cecily held up her work to examine it. “ I wonder,” she said, half to herself, “ I wonder if Mrs. Butler will go on with all her plans when she has children? ”

The remark stabbed Avery. He let the conversation drop, and tried to become attentive to his book; but between him and the printed page came the words, in Cecily’s clear staccato accents, “ I wonder whether she will go on with all her plans when she has children? ” He must have grown more interested in those schemes of Lois Butler’s than he had realized. And children were likely to make a great difference in a woman, and in her interests. To be sure, a husband had evidently not changed Lois Butler; but then she had a very amenable husband. But for that bright star of a woman to be quenched in a sea of maternity was an appalling prospect.

Avery looked at his wife, embroidering meticulous white sprigs on a dress for little Margaret. He thought of her as a girl, when bird-notes seemed to follow her as she went, and the very spirit of youth and spring looked out of the eyes she now strained so mercilessly. Avery walked around the yellow-shaded lamp, and sat down on the arm of her chair. “ I declare, it’s too bad, Cecily,” he said, stooping over her.

Cecily kissed him absent-mindedly. “ What’s too bad? ” she demanded.

“ That a bright girl like you should spend the evening drawing a needle through cloth, and leave her husband to books he finds he doesn’t care to read.”

“ Well, I’ll play cribbage with you, if you can find the board,” said Cecily. “ Or double Canfield, if you like.”

“ Thank you. I think double Canfield is about my intellectual level,” said Avery. He found the cards, and they did indeed finish the evening at double Canfield, not without concealed yawns on both sides.

The next afternoon he made a call in one of the poorest sections of the city. It was spring down by the river, spring out in the country, spring along the street where Avery himself lived; and even here, where the soot from factory chimneys reduced street, buildings, and people to a uniform hue of dirty gray, something in the aspect of the swarming children told one that it was spring.

As Avery stepped off the curb to crank his car, he saw a couple approaching on foot, a tall, handsome, beaming man, a tall, handsome, cheerful woman: they were radiant against the surrounding dinginess. They both saw him at the same moment; simultaneously they beamed upon him.

“We’ve just been down to see them break ground for a tenement,” Butler called to him.

“ And two of our bungalows are under way,” said Mrs. Butler.

They stopped beside his car. “ Most married couples think it fun to plan one house,” said Butler. “ Think of the houses we’ve had the fun of planning.”

“ You helped us so much, Dr. Fairchild,” said Mrs. Butler. “ I’ll tell you, come up to the house when you’ve finished with your visits, and drink tea with us on the fruition of our plans.”

“ Yes, do,” chimed in Butler. “ It’s a long time since we’ve seen you.”

It was not a long time since Lois had seen him; but Butler had not happened in on the latest of their interviews. “ I have been at your house quite recently,” said Avery with determined frankness.

“ Well, establish the habit,” said Butler.

“ Yes, do,” chimed in Mrs. Butler.

“ I may be late,” said Avery. “ I have several places still to call.”

“ Everybody sick? The more the merrier—for you,” said Butler.

“ Any hour will suit us, Dr. Fairchild,” said Mrs. Butler. “ We’re going to reach home in half an hour, and we’ll be there the rest of the day.”

Avery found them together in the quondam conservatory: Lois was writing letters on the typewriter, and Butler, sunk into the deepest of the chairs, smoked and looked over foreign weeklies. «

The husband’s was the social end in this family, as the wife’s is in so many: Butler talked to Avery, while Lois finished her letters. On their completion she sent for tea, and then she and her husband took up the conversation. When they were together like this, they had a way of talking in duet, he supplementing her statements and she his; the word “ we ” in all its inflectional forms recurred constantly in their talk.

“ Our houses are to be model houses, you know,” she said. “ But that isn’t all."

“ No, that isn’t all,” said Butler. “ We’re going to ram some housing ordinances through the City Council, and then see that somebody enforces them.”

“ Getting them enforced will probably mean having a new office created,” said Mrs. Butler. “ And that may mean going to the legislature.”

“ We don’t know yet, but it may,” said Butler. “ We haven’t home rule in Jefferson. Are you a home-ruler, Dr. Fairchild? ”

“ It won’t be the first time I have been before a legislature, if we do have to go,” said Mrs. Butler. “ I shan’t mind doing it. It will break up next winter.”

“ The .first time I ever saw my wife she was before a legislature,” said Butler. “I had just strayed in there; I was in the town on business, and in those beastly little state capitals there is never anything to do in the evening. I saw lights in the Capitol, and went in, not expecting to see any women, far less a woman like the one now under discussion. There she was, standing up at the speaker's table in an evening gown, and those old boys were all listening to her, and swayed by every word she said.”

“ I have a disturbing recollection that I didn’t say much that evening which was worth listening to,” said Lois Butler. “ I was paving the way for another speaker, and I was trying to be funny. But it wasn’t a regular legislative session, you understand, Dr. Fairchild—hence the evening gown that appealed to Walter. We had borrowed the Assembly Chamber for an evening meeting, to rouse sympathy for a bill we wanted to put through.”

“ I never went to anything like that before,” said Butler. “ I just strayed in there.”

“ Yes,” said Avery. “ Suppose you hadn’t! ”

“ I absolutely decline to suppose that,” said Butler.

“ There’s one thing I’m surely going to do next winter, legislature or no legislature,” said Mrs. Butler. “ I’m going to have some parties for the wives of our workingmen.”

“ We’ll buy a phonograph to entertain them,” suggested Walter. “ My father never would have one in the house.”

“ Yes, we’ll buy a phonograph; a phonograph will help. And we’ll just get together and have a good time,” said Mrs. Butler, with a gesture of her fine hands.

“But will you?” objected Fairchild. “Won’t there be a certain constraint on their side, and—forgive me—a little condescension on yours?”

“ Why should there be? ” asked Lois Butler. “ My grandfather was a workingman. He was one of the saving, God-fearing, educate-your-children workingmen, and my father was a lawyer; still, I’m a thoroughly democratic product, brought up in the west and co-educated. If any of Walter’s family were alive now, they wouldn’t exactly approve of me.”

“ They would adore you,” said Butler, who obviously could not bear to have some things said even in fun.

“And, Dr. Fairchild,” Mrs. Butler went on, “you’ve seen a good deal of the workingman yourself. Don’t you at the bottom of your heart think he’s in many ways a most enjoyable person?”

“ Indeed I do,” said Fairchild. “ I think that’s why he is so conspicuously the pet of sociologists. The average workingman isn’t any worse off than—well, than the average clergyman; but he’s more interesting.”

“ Then you would at least incline to think that Mrs. Butler’s experience may be interesting?” asked Butler.

“ Mrs. Butler, I believe, intends to deal, not with the workingman, but with the workingman’s wife,” said Fair-child.

Butler threw back his head and laughed. “ I think he has you there, Lois,” he said.

Lois smiled broadly. “ We shall see,” she said. “ It won’t be easy, I know that.”

The long spring twilight was settling toward actual darkness. Lois lighted a lamp on a little table—no electric deception this, but a veritable lamp which had belonged to Walter’s mother. The light was reflected from the white shade high over their heads; the glass above the green curtains was dark as an emerald. The three of them sat on, and talked on; sometimes they would all three fall silent, and then some one would think of something, and they would talk again. Fairchild felt himself strangely drawn to these two, this thrilling significant woman, and the agreeable, inconsequential man who incorporated himself so thoroughly with her as to seem part of her significance.

At length Fairchild rose to go. Mrs. Butler shook hands with him in the conservatory, but Butler followed him to the hall and held his overcoat. “ Oh, wouldn’t you like that book we were speaking of?” he said as Fairchild was drawing on his gloves. “ It’s right here, and you’re welcome to it.”

Fairchild went with him into the high, dim library. The walls were lined with tall black walnut cases, from the tops of which peered down ghostly busts of the immortals. It was a room so respectable, and so frigid, that Fairchild would not have dared to read there; it was also singularly suggestive of Walter’s father and mother, that devoted late Victorian couple who had worshiped God most Episco-palianly, and had together set their faces against all radicalism, including phonographs and electric lighting. What they would have thought of the proposal to entertain workingmen’s wives in these stately rooms was more than Fairchild could conjecture.

“ Here’s the book,” said Butler. “ I hope you’ll like it.”

“ Thank you,” answered Avery. “ I hope I shall.”

He would have turned and gone out at once, but Butler seemed in no hurry to leave the room; he seemed indeed to have something he wished to say. Avery stood paging over the book; presently he looked up, and at his look Butler took courage. “You know about us, don’t you?” he said impulsively. “ About Lois? ” Avery nodded. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Avery was touched; he was also a little superior, as became one so much older in experience. “ Yes, it’s all wonderful,” he conceded.

“ The most wonderful part is what women will do for us men,” said Butler. “ Even make fathers of us.”

Butler was five or six years older than Fairchild; but at that remark Avery felt not only comparatively but positively older. “ I hope,” he said abruptly and almost fiercely, “ that you will never be less happy than you are now.”

“Now?” Butler was puzzled.

“ Now,” Avery repeated.

They went back to the hall after that, and Butler opened the heavy front door; he stood with one hand resting on the knob, and held out the other. Avery seized it in his. “ Good luck to you, Walter Butler,” he said.

CHAPTER V

A QUESTION OF CECILY’S LIKES

To all outward appearance Avery’s life was as diversified as a busy professional man’s could be, and was chiefly regulated by the demands his profession made upon it. It seemed to Avery maddeningly alike from month to month: so many sick people, for a considerable proportion of whom little could be done, so many other people who thought they were sick, so much amusement, so much reading. And that life was actually regulated, not by professional demands nor by personal aspirations, but by the woman Cecily.

Opposite her Avery ate the meals that Cecily had ordered. He saw her dressing his children exquisitely, and moulding their minds and manners according to approved standards. She was building up his social position, and drawing him steadily toward a more remunerative class of patients. When he read late at night, partitions and dosed doors could not keep the fact from her, and she would come reminding him of the hour. He was not even sure that she sleeping did not feel through the very walls how he slept. Yet she had properly speaking no system of wifely espionage; Cecily was a rather incurious woman. Sometimes indeed she was downright indifferent; she would present a smooth cheek to his eager kiss, and contrive to make him feel that she was interested, not in him or his kiss, but in something, say, just over his shoulder. He could not accuse her of intrusiveness; it was simply that she was always so maddeningly there.

With the coming of warm weather Cecily mourned seasonably in white, and enlarged her daily program to include golf, and more frequently than not luncheon at the Country Club. Once or twice Avery went with her. She played well enough, but not too well; she won or lost with equal good temper, and she looked her best in sport costume. On the links or resting on the clubhouse veranda, Avery found her adorable. If life had been one continuous Country Club, he thought, Cecily Fairchild would have been an artist in life.

In August she took the children and went on a round of visits. She wrote to him frequently, short, pungent letters, rather impersonal in tone. In September she came back, somewhat worn, and plunged into the problems of a fall wardrobe. Thus Avery measured the months by her. For the rest, he worked, and mused, and fretted in his secret soul. As a sign of how time was passing, his son, now approaching four years of age, most impudently ceased to be merely a baby, and began to develop a personality of his own. He was a quick, restless child, who adored and resembled his mother; he and Avery were not on intimate terms.

In October Cecily inaugurated a season of rigid economy. She had, intermittently, a laudable desire to be square with the world; and one could economize so nicely during a period of mourning. Avery was always preaching about paying bills promptly; he had, apparently, no notion of the great principle that modern business is run on credit. Naturally, Cecily looked to him for approval of this season of meat loaves and darned stockings. Just at that time, however, Avery ceased temporarily to know what he ate or what went on at home. Outside the orbit dominated by Cecily there occurred two events, unconnected with each other and but distantly connected with Avery, which yet seemed to him profoundly if vaguely significant. On these two he mused. In her little cottage next to Mrs.

Schulz’s the consumptive Mrs. Fisher died, leaving her three children to a county institution, and her tired, sullen sister to her own devices, free at last of responsibility or of check. And in the big Victorian house that looked down on the river, Lois Butler’s son was born.

Walter Butler, debonair as ever, met Avery one day and took him home to see the fortnight-old baby. The baby, in the arms of a miraculous nurse, looked much like any other baby. “ A fine, healthy child,” said Avery.

“ And pretty, isn’t he? ” asked Butler, eying his child. “ I never thought such a little baby could be pretty, but this one certainly is.” Glancing up he caught a flicker of a smile on Avery’s face. Butler smiled back, but not in the least in deprecation of his own enthusiasm. “ Now that you’ve seen the baby, come and see the mother,” he said. “That’s proper, isn’t it?”

He led the way into a great, lofty bedroom overlooking the river; a light, airy room, solidly furnished. In a chaise longue near the windows Mrs. Butler lounged among yellow cushions; an open book lay on her knees, a new publication on “ Poverty and Relief.”

When the baby had been complimented Butler bethought himself of some telephoning he wished to do, and went into the next room. Left alone with Avery, Mrs. Butler began to talk, not about the baby, but about the possibility of organizing an association of the private charities in Jefferson. “ So much overlapping,” she said. “ Of course, that’s easy enough to demonstrate to them; but when you come to doing anything, you’re blocked by so much jealousy.” Avery felt his old fear that maternity would absorb Lois yielding to a fear that it would bore her. She was not unwilling to be a mother; but was it possible that she was uninterested?

As he sat listening to Lois, and Butler lingered over his telephoning, the miraculous nurse passed the door with the baby in her arms. Lois turned her head and called to her. The nurse approached the chaise longue, and as she approached Lois leaned forward; when she was near enough, she reached up and snatched the baby. “ Leave him here with me a few minutes,” she demanded. “ When he needs you, I’ll call you.” And the nurse’s immaculate alien presence faded from the room.

“ Isn’t he sweet?” Lois demanded of Avery as she cuddled the baby. “ I was afraid I might not like him—just at first, you know; but I do—I do—I do.” She kissed the top of the baby’s head; then she smiled over it at Avery. “ You don’t mind my acting silly over my baby? ” she asked.

“ I rather like to see it,” said Avery.

“ Oh, of course! You have children of your own,” said Lois Butler. “ Bring Mrs. Fairchild up to see my baby, won’t you? She hasn’t ever come to see me, but I’m sure she will come now.” She lowered the baby to the bend of her arm, and held it as expertly as if she had never done anything else. Walter Butler, coming in just then, walked abruptly to a window and stood with his back to them for a few moments. In those days life seemed to the excellent Walter almost too good to last.

When Mrs. Butler’s invitation was delivered to her Cecily replied that she would go tb see her, with pleasure, any day that Avery could go too. The two of them accordingly set out one Sunday afternoon; and as the weather was fine they walked. Avery, who had had a nap after his dinner, was in uncommonly good temper; striding along in the bright autumn weather, he was pleasantly conscious of his own health and sleekness, his wife’s grace and style, and the way their steps synchronized. No wonder plain people were satisfied, if all their bourgeois enjoyments were like this Sunday afternoon walking!

Cecily enjoyed things too. Her eyes sparkled through her little veil, and color came into her cheeks; her lips kept twisting toward a smile. She commented gaily on people they met, never missing a grotesquely turned-out woman, or a stumbling urchin, or a brisk, thin little girl, “ all legs,” as she observed with delight.

It came to him, therefore, as rather a sickening surprise when throughout the interview with the Butlers Cecily was as frostily bright as a January morning. She thawed only slightly toward the baby; she made none of those amusing tart comments that she so well knew how to make; and when Mrs. Butler, who was cordiality itself, proposed an informal little supper, Cecily, who usually loved informal little suppers, pleaded another engagement.

“ Well, it’s done for,” Avery thought gloomily on his way home, “ it ” signifying any possibility of neighborly intimacy between the Fairchilds and the Butlers. It did indeed seem improbable that Mrs. Butler would make further overtures after such a rebuff; yet two weeks later she drove over to call on Cecily. Then she asked the Fairchilds to a big dinner, and Cecily to luncheon; and after that she called again. The attention was curiously one-sided; Cecily had declined both the invitations, and had not returned her first call. Yet Lois Butler persisted. Why did she persist, Avery wondered, and why did Cecily cold-shoulder what was obviously such a social opportunity?

He dared finally to ask Lois. Perhaps it was significant that he sought enlightenment from her rather than from Cecily; but possibly it was because opportunity offered in the one case. The Butlers had kept to their family physician until now; he had been a friend of Walter's father, and descended to the younger man like the house and the business. One morning, however, one of the servants was sick, and asked that Dr. Fairchild be called. On his way out of the house Avery stopped to see Mrs. Butler. She was in the dining-room, opening some boxes of little cakes that had come by express from the city, and sampling them as she opened. “ Aren’t these good? ” she demanded, handing two to Avery.

Avery munched and nodded. “ Are you having a party? ” he asked.

“ One of the parties I threatened—for workingmen’s wives. I telephoned to the Health Department, and they said there wasn’t any contagious disease in town, so I felt quite safe about the baby.”

Avery laughed. “ You telephoned to the Health Department? The modern mother! ”

“ I wasn’t going to take any risks with Jerry,” said Mrs. Butler, smiling. “ Old people like me would do well to be careful of their children.”

“ It’s as well to be careful of them anyway,” said Avery.

“ I suppose even Dr. Fairchild is careful of his, isn’t he?” she asked. “ How are the children, and how is Mrs. Fairchild? ”

“ They’re all well, thank you.”

“Won’t you have another cake?” she asked.

“ No, thank you, no more.”

Mrs. Butler selected a fresh cake for herself, and bit into it. “ She doesn’t like me,” she announced calmly.

“Who doesn’t?” stammered Avery.

“ Mrs. Fairchild. Oh, don’t let my remark embarrass you! Lots of people don’t like me, you know. But I think it’s too bad that she doesn’t, because I like her very much.”

“Well, lots of people do like Cecily,” said Avery.

“ She interests me,” said Lois Butler.

“ That is rather more surprising,” said Avery. “ Cecily is pretty, witty, a good housekeeper, clever with people; she’s my wife, and I’m fond of her. But why should she interest you? ”

“ Partly, I think, because she’s so very modern.”

“Modern?” exclaimed Avery. “Why, her type is as old as civilization itself.”

“ That’s just where you’re wrong! ” Lois slammed the cover on the nearest box, with a sort of burlesque emphasis. “ Cecily Fairchild is a modern woman. Do you think I don’t know a modern woman when I see one? Do you think I don’t know modern women, anyway? ”

“ Any one ought to. There’s enough written about them,” said Avery.

The discussion had been only half in earnest—that was its excuse. Now Lois Butler laughed outright, and dropped the matter. “ How did you find my maid? ” she asked.

“ It’s nothing but grippe. I left directions with one of the other servants, and a prescription as well. I say—”

“Yes?”

“ Keep the baby way from your grippy servants. There is lots of grippe in town, and it’s a thing that isn’t reported to the Health Department.”

Lois looked worried. “ The baby’s nurse—” she said.

“ She’ll take all due precautions, I have no doubt,” said Avery. “ She seems a flawless person.”

“Do you mean a trying person?” asked Mrs. Butler.

“ Oh, Jerry isn’t old enough to have any nerves, and if she doesn’t get on yours—”

“ People seldom get on my nerves,” she said.

“ Lucky woman! ” Avery started toward the door.

Mrs. Butler followed him into the hall. “ Come over soon to see us,” she said. “ I hardly ever meet you, of course, on my visits to your wife. If I ask you to dinner, will you both come? ”

“ Don’t do it yet. We don’t emerge from mourning for my wife’s mother until some time after Christmas.”

“ I had forgotten about that. Perhaps I’ve done something I ought not to in intruding on—”

“On a couple mourning with the full rigor of custom? And you have dared to call us modern! ” said Avery.

She had always a smile for any idiotic remark of his; she smiled now. A random ray of morning sunlight, finding its way into the dull old hall, brought out golden flecks in her friendly brown eyes. She was so cordial and frank, she so obviously meant all kindness toward the Fairchilds, that she increased Avery’s bewilderment at Cecily’s behavior. For a moment to be sure, as he took leave of Mrs. Butler, Avery was thinking chiefly about her gracious self; but as soon as he was in the outer air he was confronted mentally with his problematical wife.

He thought about Cecily’s attitude as if it were, not a matter on which farther events might cast fresh light, but a thing that could be thought out to a satisfactory conclusion. It occurred to him that Cecily might be jealous, but he dismissed that idea at once. It was inconceivable that Lois Butler should be flirting with Avery; and even if she had been, discovery of the fact would not have caused rage or sullenness on Cecily’s part. If any woman wanted to take Cecily’s husband from her, she was welcome to try. From the time she was sixteen until she married, Cecily had been surrounded with men, youths and maturer beaux as well, the band of candidates from whom her mother thought she ought to have selected better; and no woman ever had got one of her swains away from her. Each in turn had had to be dismissed, and each had been loath to go. Doubtless her dislike of Mrs. Butler was only a whim; but how particularly unfortunate that she should seize this situation in which to be whimsical!

Lois Butler had not despaired of conquering Cecily. Inasmuch as that protracted “ mourning ” barred formal social intercourse, she and Butler “ dropped in ” at the Fairchilds’ one Sunday afternoon. They were a radiant pair; to Avery the contagion of their happiness seemed irresistible. Cecily was as polite as she had to be, but she was very cool, and she did not warm as the visit progressed. She drew the line very cleverly, though; she did and said nothing on which Avery could take her up.

To take her up, however, he was determined. When after the Butlers’ departure he was called professionally, he asked her to go with him in the car, for the express purpose of taking her up. She went with him readily; she was even rather sweetly and touchingly glad to be riding with him through the crisp air of the late autumn afternoon. But Avery was in no mood to be touched. Now or never was the time for frankness, he thought; the most stimulating friendship that had ever been offered him was at stake.

Cecily chattered to him gaily as they drove; and her gay chatter gave him the opening he desired. “ You’re an amusing talker, Cecily,” he said. “ Why don’t you talk more to Mrs. Butler? ”

“ She overwhelms me,” said Cecily shortly. As if that subject were disposed of, she went back to her amusing trivialities.

Avery subsided; he couldn’t get anything out of Cecily unless she chose to give it. He ought to have known better. But he drove home past a row of the Butler bungalows, many of them already occupied, and, down another street well out of his way, past the Butler model tenement, now nearing completion.

CHAPTER VI

THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

It was the combination in Lois that made her so singularly effective. A gracious and lovely mother, dividing her attention between her adored first-born and “ Poverty and Relief,” had him on every side at once. Perhaps that was what irked Cecily—that and the perception of her own deficiencies as one of the socially conscious.

For Avery preferred to believe that Cecily was irked, and retaliated upon him. He refused to admit that a gulf was opening between them: that he and Cecily spent progressively less and less of their time in each other’s company, and had less and less to say when they were together. Wasn’t she his wife? Didn’t he indubitably love her? Avery held hard to those two facts, and refused to admit to himself that anything dreadful or even unsightly could be true in spite of such facts.

If he had acknowledged in the tribunal of his own conscience that he was at outs with Cecily, he must have made a whole series of minor admissions. Instead, for instance, of saving things to tell Cecily, he now saved them to tell Lois Butler. As his interviews with that lady were often weeks and sometimes months apart, things piled up; and when opportunity at last afforded itself, he was most abominably confiding, most uncharacteristically talkative.

Returning from a significant expedition out of town, and thirsting to tell Mrs. Butler about it, he drove to the Butlers’ one morning immediately after breakfast. Just as he entered the hall, admitted by the maid who had once called him to minister to her grippe, Walter Butler de scended the stairs. “Hello!” he called to Avery. “Have you had breakfast? Oh, you’re earlier than I am. I was hoping you hadn’t had it; then you could breakfast with me.

He drew nearer, and continued confidentially, “ Lois usually breakfasts with me, but this morning she isn’t down yet. She rose betimes, too. And what do you think the rising betimes and the late to breakfast is all about? She wanted to bathe the baby! I thought the nurse did it well enough. Lois thought so too, but she said she wanted to know how—wanted the experience. I think it’s Jerry who’s getting the experience. She’s been washing and washing, and she doesn’t seem to get him clean.”

“Does Jerry like it?” asked Avery.

“ He howled at first,” answered Jerry’s father, “ but he gave that up long ago. Jerry’s a child of discernment, and he knows that his mother is a determined woman.”

“ Do I hear myself discussed? ” called a clear voice from above them. “ Come up and see for yourselves.”

“A sharp-eared woman,” said Butler, seizing Avery’s arm. “ Come on! Let’s take her at her word.”

The big square upper hall of the Victorian house had been furnished and to some extent used as a sitting-room. It is doubtful whether in the decorous days of Walter’s parents it had ever been used as a bathroom. Here, however, attracted by the solid coal fire that glowed in the old-fashioned grate—a fire that was actually necessary if the huge unmodern house were to be kept sufficiently warm— here Lois Butler had elected to bathe her baby. She had just completed the protracted bath when she invited the two men to come upstairs; and as they came she rolled down her sleeves, dropped her towels, and rose with the baby in her arms. A long soft yellow robe swirled about her; and as she held out the beautiful naked baby for their inspection she made a picture almost achingly lovely.

“ All clean,” she announced. “ Washed and rubbed and powdered. Isn’t he darling? ”

“Are you going to dress him?” asked Butler.

“ No. I’m going to let the nurse do that. At my rate of speed, he would hardly be dressed by noon. Go down to your breakfast, Walter; I’ll be with you soon. Keep Dr. Fairchild; I want to talk with him.”

“Oh, I’m not going!” said Fairchild. “I came on purpose, you know, to talk with you.”

“ That’s fine,” said Mrs. Butler. “ I won’t be long.” She wrapped the baby in a blanket, and disappeared into her own room.

“ It’s just like Lois,” said Butler, grinning, “ to pull even the baby’s bath to a triumphant conclusion before we get there.”

“ Thereby depriving you of your legal right to gloat over her,” said Avery. “ Isn’t it a trial to you to live with an impeccable woman? ”

“ Lois isn’t ever a trial,” answered Butler, touched at once in that sensitive spot of his. “ And she’s not impeccable—she wouldn’t be Lois if she were. I don’t like that word impeccable. But she is triumphant. All her life she has passed from one triumph to another, in small things as in great. Well, never mind that now. Come along to breakfast; breakfast is a great idea.”

The iconoclastic young Butlers, who sat in the conservatory and bathed the baby in the hall, were not of course satisfied to breakfast in any room that an older generation had devoted to that purpose. The house did not indeed provide a separate breakfast-room; and Walter’s father and mother had always breakfasted solemnly in the dining-room, at opposite ends of the long table, and talked solemnly or been seriously silent across shining yards of damask. Even now Walter Butler shuddered at the remembrance of those breakfasts at which he had assisted in his youth. Lois and he had seized upon a small room used by Walter’s father as an office, and called “the study.” Here, beside the.open fire in winter and the open windows in summer, their breakfasts were set forth on a small mahogany table covered with a square of printed Oriental cotton.

Avery accepted a cup of coffee, and Butler helped himself generously to whatever was before him. “ What should we ever do without food, I wonder? ” he speculated. “ Eating is such a resource. When I feel bad I eat for consolation, and when I feel good I eat to celebrate. And at all times I eat just for amusement.”

“ Obesity threatens,” Avery warned him.

“ That sounds like George Meredith,” said Butler. “ All I have to say to George is, Let it threaten.”

Mrs. Butler came in at that moment, having changed her flowing yellow robe for one of her open-necked blouses. With the blouse she seemed to have put on some sharp executive quality; at her entrance both men sat straighter in their chairs. Butler's eyes beamed as they rested on her. “ We have bacon this morning, Lois,” he said.

“ That’s good. I’m hungry.” She looked at Avery as she poured her coffee. “ You’ve been out of town, haven’t you, Dr. Fairchild?” she asked.

“ Yes. I’ve been at the convention of the state medical association,” said Avery. “ How did you know it? ”

“ She read it in the paper, of course,” said Butler. “ In the great and glorious Jefferson Clarion. Where else? ”

“ The Clarion said you were to give a paper before the association,” said Mrs. Butler.

“ Yes. I was allowed to choose my own subject, and I talked on education for health.”

“ Are you very much interested in that? ” she asked.

“ Very much.”

“ It’s rather a new field,” said Lois, sipping her coffee. “ I think, though, that it’s going to be a big one.”

“ A big field? ” Avery wondered.

“ Yes. If you have any type of education, it takes people to disseminate that education, doesn’t it? ”

“ Why don’t you go into that field, Dr. Fairchild? ” asked Butler. “ If it’s new, and interests you—”

"Yes. Why don’t you go into it?” Lois echoed.

“ For a very good reason,” said Avery shortly. “ I have my living to make.”

“Oh, one can make a living at anything!” said Lois with a laugh. “ If you can’t get a state or a municipality to adopt yourself and your ideas, organize a society and get yourself made secretary with a salary.”

Both men laughed at that. “ Lois, you’re an unprincipled woman,” said Butler.

“ No, I’m not. But I didn’t always have a factory behind me; I had to do for myself.”

Butler rose, walked around the table, and put his arm about his wife. “ Poor girl! ” he said. “ Well, you’ve got the factory now, and I think I’d better run along to it. If I don’t give it some attention, we may not always have it.” “ What is the nature of your duties at that factory of yours? ” asked Avery.

On this point Butler was not sensitive. “ Oh, I sign papers,” he said with a wave of the hand. “ Letters—and checks.”

A moment later the door closed behind him. “ Isn’t it considerate of him to go,” said Avery, “ when he saw that I could talk more freely to you alone? ”

“ Oh, he is considerate,” said Mrs. Butler. “ And he really has to go to the factory sometimes, you know.”

She set down her empty cup, and rang for the breakfast things to be taken away. Then from a drawer she produced a package of cigarettes. She gave one to Avery, and lighted one herself. Now Lois was, as Avery knew, but a half-hearted smoker; left to herself, she would never have smoked thus early in the day. He realized that this was a significant, even a symbolical cigarette; that as Cecily often took to her embroidery to erect a barrier around her, so Lois Butler was smoking to show him that he might freely confess himself.

He looked at her steadily; she turned to him with just a shade of the quizzical in her glance. “ Promise me,’' said Avery, “ promise me not to think me a fool.”

“ You rouse my curiosity,” said Mrs. Butler. “ What have you been doing or thinking of that requires that preamble? Have you had an inspiration? ”

“ Something like that,” said Avery eagerly. “ Call it a vision, if you like.”

“ Has it anything to do with medical associations—and papers read—and education for health? ”

“It has a great deal to do with just that,” answered Avery. “ Butler suggested a few minutes since that I might go in for health education. I don’t believe he spoke seriously, but when I was working on my paper, and more or less all the time since then, I—I’ve thought I might.”

“ Splendid! ” said Mrs. Butler. “ Splendid! ”

“ I don’t know how to go about it,” said Avery. “ But I should love it, and I don’t like to practice medicine. I’ve always seen the need for such a work as this we speak of; the novel part, the inspiration, is simply the idea that I myself was the one to do the work.”

Lois leaned toward him. “ And you’re going—you’re going to do it.”

“ That’s just what I don’t know. There are difficulties,” said Avery. “Doubtless a living could be made at this work; but the financial aspect of it bothers me. I’m a married man, you know.”

“ Are you the sort of married man who takes shelter behind the petticoats of his wife? ”

“ I hope not; I do indeed hope not. But the woman has to be considered first. Our whole domestic system was built up in view of that.”

“ If it was built up for any such end, our whole domestic system is a ghastly failure,” said Mrs. Butler quickly. Then her face grew at once graver and brighter as she went on, “ Let’s talk for a moment about a particular woman, a special case. That’s better than trying to deal with a whole set of social institutions, and perhaps saying things about them that we don’t mean.”

“A special case,” repeated Avery. “My special case?”

“ Yours. Are you actually sacrificing to her happiness, in living as you do now? And is your sacrifice rewarded? Is she happy? ”

“ In a way, I think she is,” said Avery.

“ Is she fulfilling all her possibilities? Has she that kind of happiness? And is she—forgive me—is she growing more interesting every year? She should, you know.”

“ I’m afraid she isn’t fulfilling all her possibilities. Isn’t domestic life always to some extent anaesthetic? ”

“ Oh, it mustn’t be! ” she cried. “ I can't presume to advise you; no one could. But you have courage enough to face the situation. If you sacrifice yourself to your wife, you may be at the same time sacrificing her to society, and you may end as a stultified and disappointed couple.”

“ I am not to think myself a hero when I’m merely a coward? ”

“ You’re not a coward. You’re least of all a coward.”

“ I can see all that,” said Avery. “ Indeed most of it is true, truer than you can know. But what haunts me and distresses me is this: If I go, go out to preach health to the people, you know, I go less because people need me than because—

Oh, hang it all! ” he brought out in anguish;

“ because I want to go to them. Because, don’t you see, I shall like it 1 ”

Lois Butler laughed. “ You inimitable Puritan! ” she said. “ Of course that’s why you go; because you like it, because, indeed, you can’t help yourself. That’s why we all go. Don’t you suppose that even the martyr realizes himself better at the stake than he would in a life of ease and compromise? ”

Avery stared at her. “ Even we who aren’t martyrs,” she went on, “we cheerful workers for the social cause— don’t you suppose that we would rather do what we do than something easier, or nothing at all? ”

“ I suppose so,” stammered Avery.

“ I know so. Since the field of my own endeavors has changed I am sure that the endeavors have been made in freedom of spirit. I get a better perspective now on all that time, you see; and I find too that when the chance is offered me I don’t care permanently to quit the field of my early interests. Before I came to Jefferson, I didn’t haggle with city councils and poke about slums and bother landlords because I was resolved to make a martyr of myself, and to be superior to girls who did fancy-work and waited for some man to come along and marry them. I preferred poking about slums to fancy-work, and activity to waiting. It’s a question of the way one is made.”

“ That sounds Nietzschean,” said Avery. “ It’s a gospel of social reform for highly individualistic reasons.”

“ Oh, you’ll find a Nietzsche somewhere about the house, though I doubt if you will find what I am telling you in Nietzsche,” said Mrs. Butler. “ But this is only secondarily a gospel of individualism.”

“ And primarily? ” he asked.

“ Primarily it’s a gospel of looking things in the face.”

“ Suppose I did,” said Avery. “ Suppose I looked things in the face, and decided to make of myself a voice crying in this wilderness—though I really think in this instance it’s a case of the wilderness crying. Suppose I made the decision, how would I begin to work?”

“ If you ask me for suggestions,” said Mrs. Butler, “ I can refer you to a man who knows more about the subject than any one else in the country. He was at one time virtually in your position. It’s Dr. Grosvenor, Adam Grosvenor. You’ve heard of him?”

“ He’s a pioneer and pathfinder in this kind of work, isn’t he? Didn’t he found an anti-tuberculosis association in New York?”

“ Indeed he did. It’s the only one in the country so far, but it won’t be the only one forever.”

“ You think that I ought to sit at his feet? ” asked Avery. “ You think that he’d have me? ”

“ He’d be glad enough to get you. And if you really care to sit at his feet, as you put it, and learn what he has to teach you about his own work, I’ll give you a letter to him. He’s a personal friend of mine.”

“ It seems—it is practicable,” mused Avery.

“ Practicable? Man, once you set your hand to it, it’s as good as done! ” she cried.

“ You have confidence,” said Avery.

“ So would you have, if you could see what I see. I get the whole picture, you know, including you. And this is so exactly the complement to you. What you have been doing in Jefferson,” said Mrs. Butler succinctly, “ is not. It never has been.”

She had drawn him to the point of a determination. Now, little by little, she hardened him in that determination, and Avery let her do it. Why else, indeed, had he come here, except to have her do this very thing? She planned the undertaking for him in detail, clearing away some difficulties, making the whole thing seem luminous and practicable, and near—so awfully near. An hour they lingered in talk, and then another hour. For Avery it was like breathing a clearer air and feeling a warmer sun; so pleasant are the rare occasions when the ego dances to the piping of conscience.

When at length he rose to go, Dr. Grosvenor’s address was in his pocket, and Lois had undertaken definitely to write to the great man as well. Avery set off on his rounds like a man doing hastily something he had been in the habit of doing, but was soon to quit.

Mrs. Butler had bade him good-by with that wonderful, heartening confidence. “ I know you can do it. I believe you will,” she said as they shook hands.

“ I believe I can. I know I will,” said Avery, relinquishing her firm, generous hand.

Her image, not so much glorified as glorifying, stayed with him all day, during his visits and a hasty lunch snatched at a restaurant. He did not care to go home for lunch that day; he wished to get this thing firmly fixed in his mind before he exposed it to the domestic atmosphere. When along toward dinner-time he reached home, he felt that he had made the idea so thoroughly his, had reviewed his determination so from every point of view, that he was invincible. He had possessed himself of a new life; all that remained was to announce his possession. “ Now,” he said to himself as he applied his key to the latch, “ now for Cecily! ”

CHAPTER VII

CONTAINS A REFERENCE TO IBSEN

Cecily was seated beside a low table in the living-room. On her lap the sleepy baby half sat, half lay, with her adorable round limbs sprawling. Cecily was not looking at the baby; indeed she was staring at the opposite wall. She looked listless, quite unlike herself; but when she saw him her eyes brightened. “ I’m glad you’ve come, Avery,” she said. “ I’ve been dull as ditch-water all day. I’ve been wishing for an hour that you would come in and talk to me. How have things been going?”

What possessed her, Avery wondered, to make such an appeal this day of all days? She always listened to anything he had to say, politely if somewhat absent-mindedly; but he did not recall her ever having asked him to talk to her before. He sat down near her, and talked obediently. He had come in full of something that must be said to her, but it could hardly be said in this connection. Avery made conversation for her as flagrantly as he ever did for his lady-patients.

That happened to be one of the evenings when he had office hours. He left the house soon after dinner, and it was late when he returned. The lower floor was in darkness; Cecily had gone to bed.

The door that led from her room into the hall was open, and Avery stood for a moment in the doorway. He could see her in the light that shone in from behind him. She was fast asleep, and sleeping more soundly than usual; under the bedclothes her slim body looked as small as a child’s. Avery could not wake her up to talk to her; he went on to his own room.

If any slight strangeness in her behavior could hold in check for a day that fine new determination of his, Avery was bound hand and foot by the familiarity of her usual demeanor as he beheld it next morning. His home and his children, expressed in and through this woman Cecily— these things were the very stuff of his life, whether he liked it or not. These things loomed heroic size in his mind, and all the delicious possibilities which his interview with Lois Butler had brought so near receded until they were pigmies.

Not that he ever changed his mind about the situation. He wrote to Dr. Grosvenor, and began to consider the sale of his practice; he got from Mrs. Butler, and studied diligently, some publications of Dr. Grosvenor’s society. But he found no opening to tell his wife what she must be told. For a week he hesitated and evaded, and was moody and absent-minded. Meanwhile Cecily went on attending to her own business, and attending to it most efficiently.

Then one afternoon he met her at his own front steps, approaching from one direction as he approached from the other. She advanced with her nervous, restrained stride, that was yet somehow so graceful; between her dark furs and her dark hat her vivid little face glowed; the tints of her lips and cheeks were repeated in a rose pinned among the fur, a visible sign that she had ceased officially to grieve for her mother. How full of life she was, he thought; and how happy she always seemed in the open air. Perhaps she was only half domesticated, after all; he hoped it was barely half.

She smiled a little as they met. “ Aren’t you a little late today, Avery?” she asked.

“ Perhaps I am, a little. Have you had a pleasant afternoon? ” He followed her up the steps and into the house.

“A pleasant afternoon?” she repeated over her shoulder. “ Oh, yes! Pleasant enough.” She looked for mail, and found three or four letters. “ One for you, Avery; the rest for Cecily,” she said.

Avery saw with a leap of the heart that his letter came from Dr. Grosvenor. Holding it unopened in his hand, he followed her into the living-room. Still in her wraps, Cecily perched on the arm of a chair to read her letters; she always had a liking for chair-arms. With a hand that shook a little, Avery opened his letter. Dr. Grosvenor had heard from him, and from his friend Mrs. Butler about him. He was always glad to have new and enthusiastic workers; at any time when Dr. Fairchild could come to New York, he could find work for him with the Association.

It was all that Avery had dared to hope. He read the letter twice, to make sure that it was really quite all right; then he looked up, to find Cecily’s eyes upon him. “ Well, Avery? ” she said.

“ Well, Cecily?” he countered, stuffing the letter into his pocket.

“ Did your letter please you? ” she asked.

“ It did. Did yours please you, Cecily? ”

“ Mine were negligible,” she said. Perching there on the arm of the chair, swinging one foot, she scrutinized Avery. He met her look as well as he could. Presently she smiled, but her eyes continued to hold his. Avery turned uneasily, and walked across the room. Her voice followed him, her imperative staccato voice. “ Out with it, Aveiyr,” she said.

“ Out with what? ” asked Avery with his back turned.

“ With whatever you’ve been trying to tell me for the last few days.”

At this specimen of wifely second sight Avery was at once relieved and perplexed. It opened up the subject, but it seemed to warn him away from the opening. He was silent, and Cecily went on:

“ I don’t care what it is, Avery, I would rather you spoke of it than tried to ignore it. You’ve been walking around with your head in the clouds for ever so long. In fact I should notice it if your head weren’t in the clouds. But this past week you’ve been beginning things, and then dropping them and looking self-conscious, until it’s fairly made me nervous. It was amusing at first, but the amusement soon wore off. Indeed, I’d rather you made a row about the bills than kept this up any longer. Is it the bills? ”

“ No, indeed, it isn’t the bills. During the last few months we have lived more nearly within our income than at any other time since we were married. The fact is, Cecily, I have thought of making some changes.”

Cecily’s foot swung wider; she smiled sweetly. “ Why not? I like changes.”

“ The fact is,” said Avery, “ I don’t like to practice medicine.”

“ Carry a hod, if that suits you better,” suggested Cecily.

“ Yes, I know you think I’ll take it out in not liking. But that,” said Avery firmly, “ is exactly what I purpose not to do.”

“ May I ask what you purpose to do? ” Cecily’s foot had stopped swinging.

“ I think of going to New York to work for a man there, Dr. Adam Grosvenor. I heard from him today that he can find work for me.”

“ Where did you hear of him? ” asked Cecily.

“ From Mrs. Butler.” Avery had nothing to conceal.

“ Oh, from Mrs. Butler! And what is the nature of the work that is so superior to what you are leaving? ”

“ Dr. Grosvenor is Director of the State Anti-Tuberculosis Association. I have called the field, into which I may go permanently if I’m successful with this beginning—I have called the field health education.”

“ Health education! How interesting! ” said Cecily.

“ Perhaps that isn’t a very good name for it. Publicity and propaganda for hygiene—that’s what it amounts to. Teaching people to take care of themselves, so they won’t get sick, you know.”

“ Aiming eventually to drive the doctors out of business and thus avenge Avery on the hated medical profession? ”

“Hardly that.”

“ You seem to have it all fairly well worked out in your mind,” she said.

“ You think I should have told you earlier.”

“ I don’t know what difference that would have made. What are your plans for me, Avery? Am I to pack up the children and come too? ”

“ I had thought not. That would be troublesome and expensive; and after it was all done we might have to move back here again. Nothing is settled, Cecily; and 1 don’t wish to base too much action on what may, after all, turn out to be a mistake.”

“ Then I’m to stay here. Pm to be a good little wife, and keep up appearances.”

“ Would you—would you like to come with me? ” asked Avery with sudden eagerness.

“ I don’t know that I particularly care about it. Health education is scarcely in my line.”

“But wouldn’t you like to come—just for the lark? Aren’t you tired of Jefferson? ”

“ I might like a lark, if the children were grown. I’m not any tireder of Jefferson than I have been for several years.”

“ This may mean everything to me,” pleaded Avery, drawing a step nearer to her.

“ Am I hindering you? ” asked Cecily.

“ No. But I’d go with so much more light-heartedness if I thought you approved.”

“ Very well. I approve,” said Cecily.

“ That’s mighty fine of you, Cecily.”

“ Oh, mighty! ” said Cecily. “ Only one thing irks my nobility.”

“ What’s that? ”

“ I’m wondering how I shall run the house without your fees.”

“ I was coming to that, of course,” said Avery. “ I have some money on certificate of deposit; it’s what my father left, you know. I had thought of putting it into a little place some time, but perhaps it would be better to use it now."

“ Yes. The little place would be so very little, and real estate is so high in New York.”

Avery ignored her jibe. “ There is some money in my checking account. After I’ve taken out my traveling expenses, you may have the rest of that to use first.”

“ I’ll have the money from Mother's estate soon,” said Cecily.

In life Cecily’s mother’s name had seemed never to appear except in troublous connections. Now that Cecily’s first natural grief had worn off, Avery shuddered at the mention of her mother; it was a gloomy augury. “ It won’t be necessary for you to touch that money,” he said quickly. “ This experimental part won’t take so very long, and when it’s over I shall either be a man with a new profession, or else I shall be satisfied to go back to the old.”

“ You think, then, that it’s better all around? ”

“ I do,” he affirmed stoutly. “ You’ll come to see that it is, I’m sure. And for the present, I think it’s wise of you to decide to remain here.”

She made no answer to that, but still in her outdoor garments she continued to sit on the arm of the great chair, as if her being here were somehow only provisional. Suddenly her pose struck Avery as almost uncannily significant. She had been there in his life for so long, and yet he had never exactly got to look upon her as a permanency. Suppose she shouldn’t always be there? Suppose this present fair-seeming project of his should have such a result as to eliminate Cecily from his life?

Avery stifled the question as he had so many others: he went up to her and kissed her. Then, as she seemed to have nothing more to say, he closed the discussion by leaving the room. In the doorway he paused and looked back. Cecily’s eyes were on the floor; with a gloved forefinger she was slowly rubbing her cheek where he had kissed it.

Left to herself, Cecily sat still a few minutes longer. Then she slipped off the chair, and began to walk about the room. It was an aimless walk, from the mantel to the windows, from the windows to the book-cases, from the bookcases to the center table. Presently she stood still, and looked around her. She had fitted up this room with care: some of her wedding presents were here; and the rest of the things she and Avery had got from year to year, as they could afford them. Cecily’s taste was excellent, and the room was lovely in the twilight, with the corners full of dusk, and high lights on bits of metal: samovar, candlesticks, a tall silver vase that always held a single rose. As she stood there drinking in this softened aspect of the room’s familiar charm, Cecily’s vivid face was gloomy, and even a trifle hard.

Meanwhile Avery, feeling some compunction, but on the whole immensely relieved, had gone upstairs to his own room, and written to Dr. Grosvenor. With the letter accepting that gentleman’s offer in his hand, he descended the stairs, and walked down the hall to the front door. Cecily heard his quick, decisive step—he had not always walked that way; then the heavy front door closed behind him.

Its reverberation startled Cecily. She had heard that door close thousands of times before, though not always with such a bang; but this time it suggested something to her. She stood frowning, trying to recall just exactly what it was that was suggested. Suddenly she smiled her impish smile; she had recollected. “ Nora,” she said aloud. “ Leaving his doll’s house."

CHAPTER VIII

AVERY ENTERS HIS NOVITIATE

Now that he was so close to his Promised Land, Avery regretted every hour that separated him from it. Fortunately his practice was easy to dispose of; it was such a good practice, among such a “paying” class of people. It went to a brother physician whom Avery thoroughly respected, a kindly, honest fellow, intelligent enough in his profession, and not in the least at the mercy of vagrant ideas. Dr. Davis, indeed, considered Avery a visionary, and this adventure of his a piece of pure Quixoticism; but he liked Avery immensely for all that, and he admitted to himself that the Quixotic temper, backed by certain other qualities, made friends for itself. The extent of the practice that Avery was throwing away so lightly rather awed the other doctor.

The day after he had told Cecily that he was leaving for New York, Avery began to pack. In the event most of the packing was done by his wife; Cecily had a provoking ability to stow away two articles where Avery could stow but one, and she gave him at the same time the benefit of this talent and the contempt that one of the endowed may properly feel for the untalented. She was not sulky, how-ever—Cecily never was; but when she was not packing for him he saw little of her. She was off on one of her rounds of gaiety: a monotonous enough gaiety, it seemed to him. When she dined out he of course accompanied her; for the rest he witnessed her comings and goings on the round of daylight and feminine entertainment of which a “ city ” like Jefferson affords so much. She lunched, played cards, entered fervently if not feverishly into everything that offered itself; she even organized a bazaar, for some obscure philanthropic purpose in which Avery did not believe that she was interested.

When they were both at home, and by chance alone, Cecily made her husband feel as if her back were perpetually turned to him. That was just as well, thought Avery whimsically, for Cecily had an exceedingly graceful back, but an all-inquiring gaze. It never occurred to him that in a matter like this every woman has eyes in the back of her head; he went on to the end feeling that his domestic espionage had vanished.

The afternoon before he left Avery spent in a round of farewell visits. He and Cecily were to have a little dinner that night; a “ little dinner ” meant about ten people for whom neither of them cared a particle, but whom Cecily considered it correct to invite. She had not invited the Butlers, so Avery went to their house immediately after lunch. They were both at home, and they both shook hands with him warmly and wished him “ all sorts of luck.” “ I’m sure you won’t ever regret the change you are making,” Lois Butler said. As he was leaving she added, “ Do write to us. We shall both be so interested in hearing from you.”

From the Butlers’ Avery went to Dr. Davis’s office; after that he walked to Mrs. Schulz’s. She wept at his departure, and presented him with a knitted muffler. “ You will leave many down this way who regret you. There is no one to take your place,” she said wistfully.

“ There are plenty of doctors left in Jefferson,” said Avery. “ And you must make the people you know feel that most doctors are willing to take care even of those who can’t pay.”

“ I will do that,” she said. “ It is not the doctor though whose place no one can take. It is the friend.”

Looking into her humble, patient old face, Avery doubted for a moment the wisdom of his decision. Then he remembered that he was going to work for the poor and humble, and he must not let his judgment be unbalanced by the fact that one of them was so near him. “ Don’t forget me,” he said. “ I don’t want you to forget me, Mrs. Schulz. And remember that you’ll see me again some time. What is it you Germans say when you leave each other? ”

When he left her Avery went to see others of his poor. They were all sorry to see him go; and in his valedictory mood Avery realized that there was not a house among those he now entered in which he had not done some good. Recognition of what he had done down here in the shabby, sooty cabins led him naturally to think of what he had failed to do; and there came into his mind the completely baffling case of the late Mrs. Fisher’s sister. He had never got into actual touch with her, poor sullen rebellious girl. Avery thought impulsively that he should like to see her once more; and his impulse carried him to the “ store ” where she worked. She was not in her department, however; and as Avery had no idea where she now lived, and had never learned her name, this last chance slipped away from him.

The dinner that evening was as little consonant with Avery’s mood as he had expected it to be; but he reflected thrillingly that it was the last. Tomorrow was the day that would emancipate him; and the nearer he drew to the actual time, the more firmly Avery was convinced of the appropriateness and the permanence of the change he was making.

He was to leave Jefferson on the afternoon train. Cecily, who had slept late, came into his room in the morning in time to pack his suitcase. “ You can bid the children good-by here at the house, can’t you? ” she asked. “We needn’t take them to the station with us.”

“You’re going to the station?”

“ Yes, of course. We’re going down in the car, aren’t we?”

They went, indeed, in Avery’s car; but Cecily would have to drive it back. It was strange to Avery to think that he would not be beside her when she did so, strange to think that he would not return tonight to Cecily. He stole a glance at her. She was looking straight ahead, and her color was high. Avery felt a stab of desire, regret, compunction. Everything would be so different if she were going with him, or even if he felt that she actually wished to go. He might have tried harder to persuade her; but what good would that have done when on some subjects her mind and his were a world apart?

“ Don’t tire yourself too much, dear,” he said. “ You often put yourself under too great a strain.”

“ I’ll try to be good,” she answered. “ Write when you can.”

“ Indeed, I shall. I’ll write oftener than you do, I know,” said Avery.

“I’m a poor correspondent. Don’t expect much,” she said.

She was silent then until they reached the station; and Avery, occupied with his racing thoughts, was silent too. At the station she got out with him, and walked back and forth on the platform while he saw to his ticket and luggage. She had halted at the very end when he emerged, and the graceful back was now indeed toward him. The wind whipped her skirt and fluttered her veil—“ they,” the mysterious arbiters of fashion, were wearing loose veils that year, so Cecily’s was the sort of veil that flutters. She was an appealing, a provoking figure as she stood there. Avery strode up behind her. “ Cecily,” he said chokingly.

She turned, and he felt her critical gaze; she raised a flushed, hard face to his, and lifted her veil for a perfunctory kiss. It was not until minutes later, when he was on the moving train, that Avery remembered how she had clung with both hands to his lapels as she had said the last inane things, which must be said some time. Avery, sunk deep into his seat, feeling the train thunder and thump as it bore him away from her, felt even more plainly those nervous, revealing hands. Why hadn’t he, when she clung to him, simply lifted her aboard the' train? Or why hadn’t he at least made her promise to follow him, tomorrow, in a week, in a month? What was misunderstanding, or even flat lack of understanding, compared to little, clinging hands, like a wistful child’s?

At first Avery decided to telegraph; then as his tempest of feeling subsided he realized that that was absurd. He would write. Yet what could he say if he did write? How had the situation changed? What had the grasp of Cecily’s hands revealed that he ought not to have known all along? He had a fatal vision of Cecily’s ironic smile if he wrote her, now and in the present situation, a letter that she could interpret as sentimental. When two or three days later he actually did write to his wife, it was a letter full of practical details; no symbolism of clinging hands survived in it.

Cecily did not go straight home from the station. There was a tea that afternoon, a large affair at which “ everybody ” in Jefferson was present; and Cecily was glad to meet that collective feminine everybody. Let them find out, if they could, the state of affairs between herself and her husband; in the face of her smile that afternoon she knew that only an absolutely feminine everybody could insinuate that she was a deserted wife, or at any rate that she was not glad to be deserted. In her excitement she liked to feel the collective eye upon her; building up her attitude for it strengthened her attitude for herself.

“ Come home for dinner with me, Cecily,” said Mrs. Wallace as they were leaving. “ Pot luck, you know.”

“ Thank you,” said Cecily. “ I shall be glad even of pot luck; you know in houses where there isn’t a man there never is anything fit to eat. I dare say we shan’t have a real meal until Avery comes back. There! ” she thought. “ Let her make what she wants to of that.”

Cecily stayed until eleven o’clock, and Wallace took her home in his car. Wallace admired Cecily; he would have been gallant to her, if he had not been afraid to be. He was rather sorry for her tonight. He knew that his wife was curious about her, and that all “ the cats ” would have their say about her soon. “ The cats and the hounds,” he said to himself. “ And she’s so game. Funny Fairchild doesn’t appreciate what a good thing he has.”

Anna, her “second girl” and the children’s nurse, was waiting for Cecily. “ I’ve opened your bed, Mrs. Fair-child,” she said. “ Is there anything else I can do for you? ”

“You shouldn’t have stayed up,” said Cecily. “Didn’t I say when I ’phoned that I was spending the evening? You never need wait for me, Anna, when I’m out late.”

“ I thought perhaps there was something I could do,” persisted Anna.

“ Well, there isn’t,” said Cecily. “ I’m not sick, and not in the least in need of attention.”

Anna still lingered. “ The children went to bed very nicely,” she said. “ Can’t I take your things, Mrs. Fair-child?”

“ Oh, very well! ” Cecily submitted with an amused smile. “ You’re a tyrant, Anna.”

Without answering, Anna took the pins from Cecily’s hair, and began to brush it. “ I am tired,” said Cecily a moment later. “ I hadn’t realized it, but I am. On the whole, Anna, I’m glad that you’re a tyrant.”

Cecily emerged in the morning her crisp, imperturbable self. Her first act was to close the door of Aveiy’s room, and she got into the habit of going by it with averted eyes; but below-stairs and out in the world she did not betray grief or anxiety by so much as a glance. She bought some new clothes, and remodeled some old ones; she accepted every invitation that came to her; when there was nothing else to do, she embroidered ceaselessly.

“ If Fairchild has actually left his wife,” said Wallace to Mrs. Wallace, “ it’s because she sent him away.”

“ Nonsense! ” she retorted.

“Oh, yes she did!” he insisted. “If I had been in his place, I shouldn’t have gone.”

“Do you mean if I had sent you away?” asked Mrs. Wallace.

That was not in the least what he meant; but like a wise man Wallace changed the subject.

Cecily was sustained at first by a mighty conviction of the unreality of the situation. She knew that Avery had made a great change in his life, a change that might lead to anything; but she could not believe that he had. She felt that he might come in at any time after one of his temporary, trumpery absences; she continued to feel it until his letters began to arrive regularly.

Those letters of his were so different from the kind he meant to write; they were brief, stereotyped communications, telling her that he was well and hoped the children were “all right”; the “dear Cecily” to whom they were addressed might have been any sort of acquaintance. “ If he would only rage at me,” Cecily thought, “ or forget altogether to write! Anything but these forced, conscientious letters! ”

At the end of the first month Avery enclosed a check for twenty dollars. “ It is all I can send just now,” he wrote. “ I am getting only seventy dollars a month. I should get nothing at all, as I’m a rank novice, and it takes the time of experienced workers to teach me; but as I’m giving up a practice for this work, Grosvenor thinks it only decent to pay me.”

Cecily was touched for a moment. If Avery was living on fifty dollars a month, Avery was certainly practicing iron-clad economy; and to scrimp oneself for such a pitiful result as a saving of twenty dollars seemed to her quite pathetic. But when she reflected that Avery was now making in a day what he had formerly made in one visit, she checked an impulse to write, “ You fool! Come home.”

Instead she left his letter unanswered for a week, and Avery wrote again, in some anxiety. She answered then, and the one thing in her letter that was not utterly flat and empty was the pertinent query, “ Shall I sell the car? It’s eating its head off in the garage; I very seldom use it.”

“ Perhaps you would better sell it, since you can make so little use of it,” Avery replied. “ If I come back to Jefferson I will get a new car.”

“ He has already ceased to say, ‘ When I come back,’ ” was her comment on that. “ He doesn’t intend to come back, of course—he never did; and he likes his new work and his new surroundings so well that he’s afraid to tell me how well.”

Yet she hardly knew whether it was then, or earlier or later, that the idea of actual rupture with Avery first came to her. She seemed to wake suddenly in full possession of that idea; and it was that which made her go on her way numb and stiff with anger and rebellion, and conscious of curious eyes everywhere fixed upon her. She felt bitterly at this time the need of a friend, some kind, serene soul whose mere presence and unspoken understanding would make things easier for her. But she felt that no one in Jefferson answered to her need. In her sensitive state she could fairly hear the jibes of her neighbors; and as she was cleverer than most of them, she heard jibes more penetrating than were ever uttered about her.

Such of her ingenuity as she did not use to torture herself she used for defense against the public, who should never see beneath her gaiety the horrible burning and stiffening that was going on inside her; and there was still a residuum to be applied in writing to Avery. Cecily’s letters were even briefer and colder than his; either they were soddenly domestic, or else they turned on the wonderful “ good times ” she was having without him. Avery, to be sure, was naturally impersonal on paper; and he was farther constrained now by feeling that Cecily had no interest in these things that so constantly and so passionately interested him. But Cecily struck deliberately; she was in spite of appearances suffering intensely just now, and she did not intend to suffer alone.

One fine March day Cecily walked to the post-office to mail one of those letters to Avery. At the door she encountered Dr. Davis. He drew back to let her pass; and as he acknowledged her quick nod he looked at her steadily and sympathetically. For some reason Cecily was not displeased: this stalwart, honest person wouldn’t wish her any evil, wouldn’t even take a zestful interest in evil when it happened to her. Cecily smiled at him, and stepped aside; Dr. Davis, emboldened by the smile, placed himself in front of her. “How are the babies, Mrs. Fairchild?” he asked.

“ Growing and flourishing,” said Cecily. “ How is Mrs. Davis?”

“ She is well.”

Cecily tried to remember whether the Davises had any children; failing in the attempt, she remarked, “ My husband writes me that he’s having a fine time. He likes his new work.”

“ I’m glad he does. Personally, though, I don’t see how he could ever bring himself to leave the old. But I’m a plodding sort of man, and never make any change that I’m not obliged to make.”

“ Both sorts are needed in this world, I suppose,” said Cecily. She started to pass him, murmuring half in excuse, “ Don’t you feel restless today? I think everybody is restless in the spring.”

“ Yes, but the feeling doesn’t last long.” He turned and accompanied her into the post-office.

This short and quite unoriginal dialogue came as a Godsend to Cecily. Dr. Davis was a simple man, rigidly faithful to his uninteresting wife; but he recognized that Cecily was not at all the same sort of woman as his wife. Cecily was not only a woman to be faithful to: she was a woman to adore. The mere idea that she might be neglected and unhappy jarred on him; and today, when he felt that she actually was so, his admiration was heightened by his disturbance and perplexity.

Just at this moment any admiration would have been grateful to Cecily; and the simple, unimaginative goodness, which in other days might have neutralized the admiration, now only made it more welcome. Dr. Davis walked to the window with her while she posted her letter, offered to take her in his car wherever she was going, and when she informed him that she was simply walking for exercise, lingered a few minutes longer in talk with her. When he left her, Cecily was in a rare mood of sweet solemnity.

She took this welcome peace with her down to the river, and there unfortunately another encounter disturbed it. Walking smartly along the bluff, with the wind in her face, she felt an arm slide under hers, and looked up to see Lois Butler, who had fallen into step with her. “ Isn’t it lovely here?” asked Mrs. Butler. “You look as if you were thoroughly enjoying yourself.”

“ Oh, I am,” said Cecily. “ I always enjoy walking in a wind. Then, too, this is my day for meeting people. I remember that on a day when she had met many persons by chance my mother always said she had had a profitable day.”

“ It would be, in one way of looking at it,” said Lois easily. “ And I’m very glad that today I am one of the people. I haven’t seen you in such a long time.”

“ Not since you took my husband away from me,” thought Cecily. Aloud she said, “ Yes, it has been a long time, hasn’t it? ”

“ Dr. Fairchild is getting on wonderfully in his new work,” remarked Mrs. Butler.

“ Yes, so everybody says.”

“ Oh, I have it on high authority,” Mrs. Butler assured her. “ Dr. Grosvenor has written to thank me for putting him in touch with Dr. Fairchild. He says that Dr. Fair-child has a great future, that he is a born leader.”

“ Isn’t that nice! ” said Cecily.

“ I imagine that he hasn’t told this to Dr. Fairchild himself; that is why I am telling you. It seems like poetic justice, doesn’t it, to have Dr. Fairchild fit at once into his chosen work, when he has given up an assured position for what he hoped would be a life of greater usefulness ? I am sure now that it will be. Of course, one can’t say that such a man would be totally lost in private life; but so much of him would be lost. And waste of talent is one of the worst forms of social waste.”

“ Yes, indeed,” said Cecily.

The swift walk and strong arm of her companion bore her along; when she lifted her eyes, it was to look into that handsome, smiling, self-confident face. Except by jerking her arm away and taking to her heels Cecily could not escape this preachment. She made a determined effort, however, to change the subject; and Mrs. Butler slipped easily to talk of books, of the prospect of an early spring, of some political changes in the town. Cecily assented, politely if icily, to everything she said. She thought it best to confine herself to monosyllables, for fear some part of what she was so intensely thinking should pass her lips.

“ I wouldn’t mind her taking him,” ran the current of her thought, “ I wouldn’t mind her taking him if she wanted him herself. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t want him at all. She’s taking him for lofty reasons. That is what I can’t endure. It’s the same as taking him for sheer love of mischief. If she wanted him herself it would be different. But she doesn’t want him. She wouldn’t have him. That’s what I resent: she wouldn’t have him.”

At her own door Mrs. Butler halted, and asked Cecily to come in for tea. Cecily declined, saying that she hadn’t walked long enough. As a matter of fact she was very tired; but now that she was once more alone she kept on walking, trying to regain her lost serenity. Head in the air and eyes sparkling, she was a fine, dauntless figure; every line of her body, every detail of her beautiful fawn-colored clothes, was gracious, confident, the expression of a conquering nature. So one must appear to the common eye; it was the only way to avoid making one’s griefs and anxieties common property.

Presently Cecily found herself in a crowd. Looking up, she saw that she was passing the Jefferson Commercial College, and that it was the hour of dismissal. Youths and maidens were pouring out of the red-brick building; there were more maidens than youths, and it was at them that Cecily looked. Some few of them had the look of quiet capability, more were frowsy, noisy, over-dressed; but from Cecily’s point of view they were all worth looking at, because they all had something definite, however modest, ahead of them. “ The time may come,” thought Cecily whimsically, “ when I shall want a ten-dollar-a-week position. But what can I do for which any one would pay me ten dollars a week? ”

At the edge of the crowd Cecily particularly noticed one girl, perhaps because the girl looked very hard at her. She was a shabby, sullen, underbred creature; but there was in her thin face a look of dawning power. “ I believe she’s a self-improver,” thought Cecily. “ Perhaps if I knew her I might respect her, even if her blouse is dirty.”

Junior Fairchild was watching for Cecily’s return, and ran to meet her in the hall. Cecily felt a sudden warmth at her heart as she stooped to put her arms around him. “ Mother’s very glad to see her little boy,” she said. “ You were watching for Mother, weren’t you? Where’s little sister? ”

“Will you eat your supper with us tonight?” asked the boy. He spoke quite plainly, and constructed his sentences well; he was a highly intelligent child, and as affectionate as he was headstrong,

“ I will, Boysie. And I’ll read to you afterward,” she answered.

Her rage had spent itself, and she was now ripe for distraction. It was in a mood of rather sleepy magnanimity that she left the nursery after the children were abed. “ I think that life will still go on,” she reflected, “ in spite of Dr. Fairchild and his decisions.”

CHAPTER IX

NOVICE’S PROGRESS

The reports of Avery that drifted back to Jefferson were true enough in a dry way, but not one of them conveyed any idea of the actual austere glory in which he was living. At bottom he belonged surely to the order of the simple-minded and saintly. So long as he could see a great end looming hazily in the distance, he did not resent drudgery or petty discouragements; while his eyes feasted on the distant vision he was not incommoded by, say, the barking of his shins.

It had been the lack, as he viewed it, of any such inspiring end, that had sickened him of the practice of medicine, in spite of its much more tangible results. The merely tangible had no hold on Avery: indeed Cecily had sometimes felt that he loved the idea of marriage and parenthood more than he did her and the children. In so feeling she had done him a wrong; but in matters only a degree more abstract, in things that came home rather to his business than to his bosom, his vision was, perhaps, hypermetropic.

In pursuit of his distant end, however, he did not shrink from details. Nothing that he was asked to do was too unimportant or too tiresome. He would present a case fervently to the most unresponsive City Council or Board of Supervisors, exert his every fiber in a speech before a woman’s club, fraternize furiously with capitalists, reporters, any one who might be of service to his cause. Dr. Grosvenor, seeing the dark, dour young man attack things so valiantly, wondered how much of his zeal was simply a condition of his newness.

As the months rolled on Avery grew quieter, indeed, but it was with the quietness of one who has settled to his work. The lamp of his faith was lighted for good now, and he spent all of his time before it. When he was on the road, preaching the gospel of health in the rural districts, as he was for weeks together, scientific volumes traveled with him, and he devoted his leisure to mastering them. When he was in New York he haunted hospitals and laboratories as his recreation. With his El Dorado shining before his eyes he loved medicine; not writing prescriptions—he never could love that—but the aspect of it which he now saw.

He had a profound respect and admiration for Grosvenor, a man who put his visions into practice, for whom obstacles simply didn’t exist. It is significant of Avery’s state of mind at the time that in spite of this admiration he rather shrank from seeing Grosvenor outside of working hours, and declined several invitations to his home. Grosvenor, however, persisted in inviting him; and there came a time when Avery could no longer refuse without offense.

One May evening, therefore, he abandoned his fascinating studies and walked to Grosvenor’s apartment. The whole family was at home to receive him: Grosvenor, his amiable wife and his pretty half-grown daughter. The apartment itself was not quite what Avery had expected: it ran to wicker furniture and cretonne, cheerful but impermanent. Grosvenor too was different, as Avery had dreaded that he would be: sunk in one of the cretonne-covered chairs, he smoked and gossiped, and played with a ridiculous little dog that seemed to be the pride of the family.

The women-folk withdrew presently, and Avery plunged at once into things that he thought better worth saying than what had gone before. Grosvenor listened in silence for a time, stroking his dog; he was thinking how handsome Avery looked, in the light of a lamp that strongly illumined his face and hands, and left most of his figure in the shadow. Avery had fine hands, smooth, strong and supple, and they had not changed; but since the day that Grosvenor first saw him his face had taken on an ascetic look. “ A young monk of science,” thought Grosvenor. “ He is hardly the man I should have selected for the part, either.” Aloud he said, “ This is all very well, Fairchild; but you mustn’t take your work, or your mission, too seriously.”

“ It’s my work,” said Avery. “ I don’t go so far as to call it a mission. I prefer to take it seriously; the more seriously the better.”

“ That’s beautifully young,” remarked Grosvenor. “ So young that I hesitate to spoil it. Rejoice, young man, in thy youth.”

“ I’m not so very young,” objected Avery.

“ You’re young enough to feel piqued when you’re called young; that shows more than the mere count of years would. You’re not old enough to have perceived a thing that lots of people you would consider far below your level have learned.”

“That is—?”

“To restrict business to business hours.”

“ But I don’t care,” said Avery, “ to fence off my leisure, or to treat my work as if it were a trespasser.”

“ Yet that is exactly what, in the interest of self-preservation, you should do.” Seeing Avery’s look of dissent, Grosvenor added, smiling, “ Women will persist in doing business at all hours, even the best of them.. That’s my greatest objection to them in public life.”

“ I hadn’t ever noticed that,” said Avery stiffly.

“ Then it’s because you weren’t noticing. Doesn’t Loi9 Butler do it?”

“ Perhaps, to some extent.”

“ She used to, to any extent. I always told her that it was a survival of the housekeeping habit of mind, living with your job twenty-four hours a day—woman’s work is never done, that idea, you know. Perhaps her marriage has altered her. I haven’t seen her since then, but I used to know her mighty well. She and I were pioneers in the sociological field when it was very new, when, indeed, our two furrows were almost the only ones on its virgin expanse. Many is the lengthy session I’ve had with her. She’s a fine woman, Lois is. I don’t see how any man would have the courage to marry her.”

“ Walter Butler is a very happy man,” said Avery drily. “ I can believe that. Don’t for a moment think that I’m disparaging Lois; it’s only that I prefer something softer in the domestic sphere.”

“ There’s nothing criminal in that,” said Avery.

“ I should think not. It’s a great thing, the domestic sphere. Domesticity is a hobby of mine. Perhaps it’s mean of me to talk to you about it, when your own wife isn’t here. I dare say if she was, you wouldn’t have that monastic look.”

“ It wasn’t worth while to transport the family here for a few months. I have two children, you know.”

“ Boy and girl? ” asked Grosvenor.

“ Boy and girl.”

“Do you carry their pictures with you?”

“In my pocket, do you mean? Why, no. I have some at my room.”

“ Oh, I thought perhaps you would have them with you. I thought you might be one of the sentimental dads. I’ll wager your wife carries their pictures all the time.”

“ I don’t think she does,” said Avery.

“Isn’t she one of the soft sort?”

“ No. There’s nothing soft about Cecily.”

“ Cecily! That’s a pretty name. Is she pretty? ”

“ Distinctly pretty. No, I don’t carry her picture in my pocket, either, so you needn’t ask for it.”

“You won’t feed my passion for domestic sentiment?” said Grosvenor, smiling. “ Well, perhaps I shall see the two of you together some day.”

“ I don’t see how, if I take up work in the middle west.” “ After we have taught you all we know, aren’t you ever coming to see us again? ”

“ I shan’t have any money, you know,” said Avery. “ Not any money to take trips with.”

Mrs. Grosvenor, who had been hovering in the distance, came in again. “ Did I hear you speak of Lois Keith? ” she asked. “ I think my husband mentioned that you know her?”

“ Yes. I know her, and we were speaking of her,” said Avery.

“How is she?”

“Very well, very useful, very happy.”

“ I should like to see her again, she’s so wonderful. It must be splendid to live a life like hers.” Mrs. Grosvenor sighed a little, and an expression that hinted of envy flitted across her pretty, pleasant face.

“ Oh, you’ll see her again some time,” said Grosvenor, with a smile that was like a pat on his wife’s hand. “ She has been honeymooning, you must remember, and then too she has a small child. When home ties cease to be quite so binding we shall see her again.”

Avery stayed an hour longer; but nothing in the last hour’s conversation struck him as significant. What was significant, he reflected as he walked home, was Mrs. Gros-venor’s suppressed envy of a woman who was not “ soft,” as her husband put it, and Grosvenor's critical attitude toward his old friend. They were both regrettable facts, if not hard to understand; but the one that Avery found it easier to forgive Grosvenor was his dread of the domestic qualities of a woman whom his imagination pictured as terrible as an army with banners. “ He hasn’t any idea of how gracious she has become,” thought Avery. “ Even he would like such graciousness better than that fluttering softness.”

He had not thought much about Lois Butler lately; but in the sweet May evening he began to think about her. Perhaps he was prompted by images of her graciousness; perhaps some deep unconscious view of the whole situation was working itself toward the surface. At any rate, when he reached his room he sat down to write to Cecily, and wrote instead to Mrs. Butler.

He had drawn the paper to him and written “ My dear—” with every intention of going on “ Cecily ”; but the other name somehow got itself written instead. Then suddenly his pen began to fly; he covered sheet after sheet with a detailed description of his work. He hardly drew breath until he had finished it; when he re-read it the letter seemed rather interesting. “ I think I’ll send it, now that I’ve written it,” he said to himself. “ If Mrs. Butler doesn’t care to read all this, she can put it in the fire. If I could only write to Cecily about these same things, I should write with the same ease; but Cecily isn’t interested in my work. I really ought to write her at least a few lines, though.” But on looking at his watch he discovered that it was midnight; and the letter to Mrs. Butler went off the next morning alone.

It was the first of many letters. The mere fact that Lois was written to and Cecily was not seemed to Avery a possible injustice to Cecily; but was it his fault that the sum of things in which he was interested and Cecily was not kept mounting? His letters to Lois went unanswered oftener than not; sometimes Butler answered them, and he probably read them all. When Lois wrote, it was in terms of committees and bills and influencing public opinion. Her answers were not more impersonal than the letters; indeed those letters of Avery’s went, a few years later, into. a book on “ Social Workers’ Experiences,” substantially without change. The informality of such a book added greatly to its vividness, discerning readers said.

But all this was not patent to Cecily Fairchild, conscious of her husband’s increasing neglect, and conscious too, beneath all her perplexity and pain, of the fact that even if by some miracle Avery became the most attentive and affectionate of husbands, she would not be a happy nor even a satisfied wife.

Her perception would come to a head, as it were, in the evening after she had gone to her own room. It was an exquisite room, all ivory white and dull blue and green, with low lights that shone through silk shades; Cecily's excellent taste came to its finest flower in this little room of hers. The domestic touch was given by a small but excellent photograph of Avery which stood on the dressing-table and a large picture of Cecily and the two children which hung near it. Cecily came up here early now, on the evenings when she was at home and alone. She had come to love the solitary evening hour at home, now that there was no Avery to come in later, tired and possibly ill-tempered. When the children were in bed, and everything snug for the night, it was so pleasant to be all by oneself, with the curtains drawn and all the lights on. Cecily had fallen victim to her husband’s habit of reading in bed; she had even begun to read French books, surreptitiously and apologetically, she who had always had a smile for women who “ kept up ” their languages. But after an hour or two alone in the stillness it was sometimes hard to keep from thinking.

One particular evening she had gone to bed early, and had opened “ Pecheur d’lslande ” in the expectation of a long, comfortable “ read.” Yet she had not finished a page when she had lowered the book and was thinking of her own situation. Resolutely she turned her attention to her book; she had heard of its charm, and was determined to forget herself therein. She read for ten minutes, and realized that she did not know a word she had read. Perhaps she was not up to a foreign language tonight. She picked up an English novel, the significance of which was so great that “ everybody ” was talking about it. Cecily would be unable to talk on the strength of this evening’s acquaintance, for it held her attention no better than had the Iceland fisherman. She found herself staring at the ceiling; and there came to her one of those hours of merciless clearness that come sometimes to every one, and come to no one with greater bitterness than to such a nature as hers.

In every woman’s life there comes a time when romance ceases; but it does not come to every woman as early as it did to Cecily Fairchild, or as comprehensively. She had married Avery for reasons of pure romance, although she was by nature not a romantic woman. Romance had deserted Avery less completely than it had her—he loved Cecily in the same way he always had, if not to the same extent. Nothing had grown up in her life to take the place of dead romance; and yet so strong is habit, and so powerful life itself, that under ordinary circumstances she would probably have gone on living as most of the couples about her were, she believed, living: not very happily, but very respectably, swallowing their discontent and hiding their maladjustment.

Avery had willed otherwise. His leaving home as he had left implied no criticism of his domestic conditions—at least, it implied none patently; what may have lain unacknowledged in a corner of Avery's mind, Cecily was not sure. Avery probably realized something; he was not stupid. What was important in his going was that he had allowed her all this time by herself, time to get used to being alone, time to think things over carefully; and that he had saved her the necessity of doing anything spectacular. It would have taken some mighty domestic flare-up ever to make Cecily pack her baggage and leave him; and one of the worst features of such situations as theirs was that they never did flare up. But if the present state of things lasted long enough—and it gave every sign of lasting—it would resolve itself into something definitive. Something definitive, the end of what she had had these past years: the wonder and surprise of first joy—gone; the weariness and impatience of later disillusion—ended. The tide was creeping up, and she had no need to move, could scarcely have moved if she had wanted to. When it receded, it would leave only smooth sand all about her.

Cecily got out of bed, turned off her lights, and sat down at an open window. It was a soft summer night, with a deep sky full of stars. What a night for lovers! she thought. To love and be loved, on a night such as this, would compensate for dreary stretches in between. And yet, was not the actual meaning of things somewhere in the dreary in-between, rather than in the poppied reaches of love? Even if romance were dead, for a woman considerably under thirty much life must remain.

As Cecily sat there the magic of the night claimed her for a moment: she seemed to feel her lover’s arm about her and his hands on hers, his strong, supple, man’s hands, the touch of which she had so loved. So sweet was the dream that awakening brought a moment of sharp agony. But when she was restored to her previous lucidity of soul Cecily was sad, perhaps, but calm and a little curious.

Suddenly she smiled, a mischievous little smile. “ I forgive you, Lois Butler,” she said to herself. “ You took my husband when you didn’t want him, but I don’t want him either. Poor Avery! I wonder who does want him. He’s nice. He and I could be great friends, I think, if I had never married him. In view of our past, we can’t be even that now. Why do people marry? Marry and tire—there ought to be a French proverb running like that. There probably is. Eh-h-h, how tired one does get! ”

She rose and went over to her dressing-table. The picture of Avery was indistinct in the dusk, but she knew it so well that she had no need actually to see it. “ It was your good looks that did it, I think,” she said. “ You were quite the handsomest young man I ever saw, Avery; there were others who had more money, but I always thought of how tired I should get of looking at them. Or perhaps it wasn’t your looks; and perhaps the thing will work out yet to a conceivable end. I should feel so much better about it if I could get it all quite straight in my mind.”

She went back to bed then, and lay looking at the lucid squares of the open windows. “ Margaret looks like her father,” she reflected. “ If she grows dark as she grows older, she will be the image of him. At least, I have given my children a handsome father. If it weren’t for that, I might almost as well have made a suitable marriage, instead of taking Avery because I loved him. Yet Heaven knows I did love him. I loved him—and all I want now is a way out of the labyrinth. I’ll find it some day: he will come back, and we shall settle. Until then, I shall figure in the eyes of Jefferson as a patient Penelope.”

CHAPTER X

THE END OF PENELOPE

It was autumn once more when Avery came back. His train drew into Jefferson about nine o’clock; as his coming was unannounced, there was no one at the station to meet him. The station looked as dingy as ever, and the familiar “hack” in which he journeyed uptown'—at that date Jefferson boasted no taxicabs—had the same musty smell that he remembered from one or two previous experiences. It was a little mustier, that was all. From now on Avery was to ride in musty hacks, or public street cars; gone was the day of even his modest motor.

In the eyes of people who measure success in terms of motor-cars, he had returned in a plight as sorry as Rip Van Winkle’s; but while his hack rolled uptown Avery had all the true sensations of a conquering hero. His parting talk with Grosvenor had been like medals and bands of music: it meant welcome appreciation, it connoted glorious possibilities. “ You know all that we can teach you,” the older man had said, smiling. “ Now set up for yourself; go back to your own middle west, and do the best that’s in you.”

“ The best that’s in me isn’t any too good, if only to repay you for what you have taught me and what you have made me see,” said Avery. “ It has been a privilege to work under you, Dr. Grosvenor; you’re a wonderful man.” Grosvenor smiled at his earnestness. “ Be that as it may,” he said, “ you’ll be a bigger man than I some day. I have benefited from having you here; there’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that, now that you’re leaving. If Lois Butler has any more aspirants like you, tell her to send them along.”

From Grosvenor, this was great praise: it was at once a decoration for deeds well done, and a trumpet call to farther service. Avery’s life should go to justifying his preceptor's confidence in him; he was now one of the called, and he appreciated the solemnity of the call. And his intentions as to private matters, if not so well nor quite so enthusiastically thought out, were of a becoming magnanimity. His domestic life was to be re-established on a sounder and broader basis; in it he was to taste freedom as well as re-ponsibility. If he could only keep his temper, and make Cecily see things as he saw them, he was sure that it was not at all impossible. And then—his mind shot a gleam ahead—when his life was secure in its new fulness and fineness, he would go to see Mrs. Butler; he would display the fulness and fineness to her, and explain that it was the ripening of her gift to him.

As the hack began to lumber down his own street, Avery almost wished that he had telegraphed Cecily of his coming. His idea in not doing so had been to take her unprepared, before she had a chance to erect barriers against him; to take advantage even—he owned it—of her surprise and delight when she saw him. But in this way he ran the risk of not finding her at home; and to his mounting impatience any delay began to seem terrible. He risked, moreover, finding a houseful of people; and to rush in unexpectedly and greet her before the collective eye of the town suggested possibilities of embarrassment.

When he came in sight of the house, however, there were lights upstairs and none down. The shades baffled him for a moment; then he became sure that there was a light in Cecily’s own room—or rather perhaps that there were five or six, burning serenely beneath silken shades. With a delicious sense of adventure, Avery unlocked the door and let himself into the dim hall. Cautiously he started up the stairs; he did not wish to alarm her by sudden noise. Half-way up he crossed a broad band of light that came from Cecily’s open door.

She was standing in the middle of the floor, in her long night-gown. She had raised one hand to take out the first hairpin when she heard him; and she remained motionless for a moment, her eyes turned to the doorway. Then she said quietly, “ You startled me, Avery.”

He advanced into the room and halted uncertainly. Cecily produced from the closet a lacy white negligee, one he had never seen before; having donned it, she sat on the edge of the bed. “ Sit down, Avery,” she said. “ Have you had your dinner? ”

Avery nodded, and seated himself on a chair near her. Except for several volumes near at hand, an indication that Cecily had fallen victim to his deplorable habit of reading in bed, the room was just as he remembered it: exquisite, subdued, waxenly neat. Only Cecily was somehow not the same. She had her old tenseness, to be sure: she sat on the edge of her bed as some queenly warrior might have sat her horse going into battle. Perhaps the length of their separation made him fancy a difference where none existed; perhaps it made her—very naturally too—a little shy and distant.

“You aren’t surprised to see me, Cecily?” he asked. “You’ve been expecting me?”

“ Yes, rather,” she said. “ Some time.”

“ Well, yes, of course. But you hadn’t any idea that I would come tonight? ”

“ No.”

“ I have wanted, to come for such a long time,” he said. “ But I delayed until I had settled some things.”

“ It’s nice to have things settled,” she said. But she did not ask what he had settled.

“ Confound it, Cecily, aren’t you glad to see me? ” he broke out. “ You haven’t even offered to let me kiss you.”

“ You may kiss me if you like,” said Cecily.

After the kiss, however, she slipped out of his encircling arm, and took up her former dispassionate scrutiny. She was not sulky, Avery decided, but she certainly was queer. “ How are the children?” he asked.

“ They’re very well. Tomorrow is Junior’s birthday.” “ So it is! He is five years old, isn’t he? I’m glad I came in time for his birthday.”

“ It will be pleasant,” said Cecily. “ How long do you intend to stay? ”

“ Except for a few days that I may have to be away making arrangements, I shall be here until we are all ready to leave,” said Avery.

“ Oh! Then we are all to leave Jefferson?”

“ I’m going into work here in the middle west; but of course Jefferson isn’t a large enough place to try out any such plan as that I have in mind.”

“Your plans are extensive, Avery?”

“ I’m sure they are quite practicable.”

“ That’s nice. Are you sure you aren’t hungry, Avery? Wouldn’t you like some beer and a sandwich? ”

Avery shook his head impatiently. “ I don’t want to think about food,” he said. “ I’m thinking about you. It’s months since I have seen you, and you are lovelier than ever.”

“ That’s why I’m lovelier than ever to you; just because it’s months since you’ve seen me.”

He demurred. “ Now, Cecily, that implies all sorts of things that I don’t like. Perhaps you think that I’ve neglected you, dear; but I’m sure you will see in the end that this—this hiatus has been for the best.”

“ Undoubtedly it has. A great many marriages go on existing, Avery, simply because people don’t think about them.”

“ Perhaps that’s just as well for a great many people,” said Avery. “ But no one could imagine that ours was one of that kind.”

“ I don’t know why not, Avery. I don’t know why not.” Avery jumped out of his chair, and stood over her. “ Cecily, you don’t realize what you are saying! ”

“ Oh, yes I do! ” she said calmly. “ I’ve thought it all out.”

“ I’ve been away for too long,” he said. “ I didn’t realize that a few months’ absence would make such a difference in you, or I should have come back sooner, at any cost.”

“ The only difference it has made in me is that it has given me time to think.”

“ Oh, my dear,” he said softly, “ can’t we stop analyzing for a few minutes, and just be happy?”

“ It used to be different, didn’t it? You used to analyze, and I was the one who was contented to be happy.” Cecily held him with that calm, considering gaze.

“ I’ll never give you any more time to think, if it’s to be used for thinking things like this.” Avery walked to the other side of the room. “ When we begin our new life—”

“ We are to have a new life, then? ”

“ Didn’t I tell you that we are going to leave Jefferson? ” “ Yes. I’m glad of that, Avery, so glad.”

“ What do you mean by that? ”

“ Well, if you had come back here to take up the old life, that would have made it hard for me not to take it up too.” “ Who says I wanted to take up the old life, Cecily? It was a life of misfits, I grant that readily enough.”

He came back toward the bed then, and sat down facing her. Eye to eye, he groped for her meaning. Eye to eye, and speaking low, she enlightened him. “ No man is ever to live with me, Avery,, simply because he has married me.

If he adores me once in six months, he need see me but once in six months. I never intend to live on the charity of custom.”

Avery drew a long breath. “ Oh, is that all? ”

“ It is sufficient, Avery. It covers the case.”

“ Cecily, I make every allowance for your pride. From your point of view I’ve neglected you, and I dare say I have. You’re angry with me, and I dare say you have a right to be.”

“Do I seem angry, Avery? I’m not.”

“ If you’re not angry, you’re cynical,” he declared. “ When did you turn cynic about marriage, Cecily? ”

“ I’m not cynical, about that or anything. I’m not a person with theories, either. I simply have my eyes open now, Avery.”

Avery examined her curiously: she seemed to have everything so carefully thought out. She didn’t look like a cynic, he was aware, or like a “ person with theories.” She did look as if her eyes were open; but most of all she looked pretty and familiar and utterly his. “ Are you warm enough, Cecily? ” he asked unexpectedly.

“ Yes. I’m quite comfortable, thank you,” she said politely.

“ If your eyes are open,” Avery went on, returning to the matter in hand, “ if your eyes are open, dear, they must see first of all that I’ve come back to you.”

“ If yours are open, Avery,” she rejoined, “ you must see that I haven’t waited.”

For a single moment everything seemed to recede very far from Avery; and into the void so left there flashed a horrible, nameless suspicion. Then the very sight of her reassured him: he saw what in her fine clearness Cecily meant. She was only telling him that she had determined to do without him.

How lonely she must have been, to have thought of a thing like that! It wasn’t pique that had determined her, it was sheer morbidness. He was deeply to blame in having left her so alone;—alone, a woman so young, so lovely, and his wife!

“ Cecily, love, what a tone for us to take! ” he cried. “Tonight, and here! ” A quick gesture of his arm included the whole delightful room, breathing quiet and intimacy; his glance came to rest on Cecily.

“ Neither time nor place is of my choosing,” she said. “ I suspect though that it’s too late to talk sense. You must be tired, Avery.”

If she had been merely setting herself up against him, his masculine part was simply to batter down her defenses. But you couldn’t do that sort of thing with Cecily. If she chose to let down the drawbridge and come out of her own accord, she would do it superbly. But he had no heavy artillery that would force her to capitulate. Indeed for artillery he was much worse off than usual: he had lately given her, whether she pointedly used it or magnanimously refrained from using it, a grievance against him.

He took refuge in the excuse she offered. “ I am tired,” he said. It was quite true now; and yet when he had entered that house he had not been conscious of the slightest fatigue. In spite of its truth he was ashamed of the excuse as soon as he had offered it; he hastened to add, “ Upon my soul, Cecily, I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

“ You can make a very shrewd guess. Don’t, by being naive, force me to be brutal, Avery.” She stifled a yawn.

Again he spent a moment stupidly staring at her; there was no doubt that her appearance fascinated him. She looked, in that light, that costume, those surroundings, a creature made for all life’s softest uses; and looking at her so he could never quite lose consciousness of what she had been to him. But there stood out through all her loveliness and all his remembrances the patent fact of what she now was to him.

Avery gave it up. “ Let’s leave our discussion until morning,” he said.

“ Very well,” she concurred. “ I don’t want you to think I’m hasty, Avery.”

Hasty? He saw, on the contrary, that she was so sure of herself that she didn’t thirst for immediate battle; whatever else it might be, this clearly wasn’t a question of nerves. Avery rose from his chair. “ I don’t think you’re hasty; but perhaps you’re a bit sudden, dear,” he said.

“ I think you will find your room in order,” she said. (Oh, impeccable housekeeper—his room was always in order!) “Call me if you want anything. You’re quite sure you aren’t hungry? ”

“ Quite sure.” Avery stooped and kissed her. “ Goodnight, dear.”

He awoke late the next morning. He had been late in getting to sleep, and had slept badly. Cecily’s present attitude and his memories of their common past were a poor sleeping draught. But to wake in the familiar room seemed like a glorious continuation of that past. Delighting in the morning sunlight and cold water, Avery splashed in his tub; sniffing coffee and ham and eggs, he descended the stairs.

Cecily was seated at the head of the breakfast-table, with an open newspaper in front of her; one on either hand, her children ate their oatmeal. “ Good-morning, Avery,” she said, glancing up as he entered. “ I thought you might wish to sleep this morning, so we didn’t wait for you. Junior, here’s Daddy. Margaret, Daddy’s here.”

That was all delightfully as it should have been. Avery kissed the children, kissed his wife, sat down to breakfast with an appetite. Cecily returned to her newspaper, only glancing up occasionally to see that the children were progressing with their meal and minding their manners. Her continued application to that newspaper gave Avery his first chilly feeling that last night’s talk had been what counted, that the morning’s joys were illusory. Of course, if a man stayed away and left the morning paper to his wife for months, he needn’t expect her to resign it at once on his reappearance; yet Cecily, bending over it in absorption, sipping her coffee without ever looking at him, began to seem formidable.

After the children had finished their breakfast and had been excused from the table, she finally looked at him. “ Are you going out this morning? ” she asked.

“ I don’t know,” he stammered. “ I hadn’t thought. Why?”

“ I thought perhaps there were people here in town that you wanted to see.”

“ Oh, there are, of course. But I wanted to see you chiefly. I should like to stay here this morning with you.” “ It’s a particularly fine morning, and I have Junior’s birthday cake to make.”

“ Then I’ll go downtown and buy him a present. Is he to have his cake this noon? ”

“ Yes. He isn’t allowed cake at night.”

“ Then perhaps I can see you this afternoon, Cecily— when he and the baby are having their outing? ”

“ Yes, surely. Any time when I’m not busy.”

Avery went downtown. Choosing a present for his boy was not so easy as it might have been; he wished Cecily had come with him, to help him select. He finally chose an engine, for which he paid more than he had intended to pay. As he was waiting for it to be wrapped up, it occurred to him that this was the department where Mrs. Fisher’s sister used to work. “Wasn’t there once a dark girl in this department? ” he said to a saleswoman. “ A dark, quiet girl, whose sister died of consumption? ”

The saleswoman looked at him distantly. “ I couldn’t say,” she answered. “ There’s no such person here now.”

He asked the same question of Lena Schulz, whose department he visited next. Lena told him the girl had left town, she thought; her interest in the subject was scanty, so overwhelmed was she by Dr. Fairchild’s presence. “ You will go to see my mother? ” she implored. “ It would make her so happy. We so often speak of you.”

“ Yes, of course I’ll go to see her. I wouldn’t leave Jefferson without seeing Mrs. Schulz,” said Avery heartily.

He went at once to Mrs. Schulz’s cottage, where he was wept and almost prayed over. From there he walked to another of his poorer friends’, and then to another. Finally it grew so late that he had almost to run home, in order not to miss Junior's birthday dinner.

The youngster was in a wriggle of anticipation. The baby Margaret had, on the other hand, already developed an enormous power of keeping still—“ my dourness cropping out in the second generation,” thought Avery. “ Poor little girl! ” Cecily sat at the head of the table; she had her children so well in hand that she could turn her attention to amusing Avery.

“ I let the children come to the table at every meal now,” she began by explaining. “ They aren’t allowed everything that I eat, of course; but their manners are improved by the change, I think, and meal-times are pleasanter for them.”

“ That is nice,” said Avery.

“ They are both learning something new every day,” said Cecily, “ but Junior has got to the place where I can positively see his mind opening out.”

“ That must be interesting,” said Avery.

“ It is, especially as his mind is much like mine—and I myself have only just got to the stage where my mind is opening out.”

Avery stared.

It was not altogether a comfortable meal for him. Cecily seemed to have got on very well without him; it was not surprising, in view of that fact, if she had made up her mind to get on altogether without him. He had been a fool to give her the opportunity to find it out, a fool to think that life would stand still while he was learning how to begin again! What fatuity had ever made him suppose that Cecily was a woman who could be dropped and taken up again at will? He looked at her across the table; he noted her slim shoulders, erect under her white blouse, her little, straight nose, her thin-lipped, red mouth; and he wondered if there was actually some new resilient quality in her, or if she only seemed new to him because he had forgotten all that was most characteristic about her.

After Junior had finally had his birthday cake, and had blown out the candles, and had opened his presents and approved them, the children were led off for their afternoon walk. “ Let’s have a talk, Cecily,” said Avery, “ now that we are alone for a few minutes.”

They sat down in the living-room, Avery near the table, Cecily at the windows. As she turned to look out of them, in the strong light her face was different. # You have changed,” said Avery involuntarily. “ I am beginning to believe that about your mind’s opening out.”

She turned to him then, and smiled at him, a smile happy, confident, not in the least ironic. “ Avery, to tell you the truth,” she said, “ I am beginning to feel that I shall soon be free from compromises and from false positions. That is enough to change me.”

“ I wasn’t aware that you were ever in a false position,” said Avery doggedly.

She turned back to the window. The strong light behind her head made a halo of the edge of her hair, a reddish halo; her hair must have been that reddish color when she was a little girl. Unlike last night, he was observing her today as if she were a stranger; and like a well-bred stranger, Cecily was determined to enter into no arguments. Avery was reduced to asking what was the meaning of “ all this,” and when she blandly refused to see what he meant by “ all this,” of inquiring, “ Just what do you intend to do, Cecily? ”

“ There is no use, is there,” she answered sweetly, “ of trying to keep from a man of your penetration the fact that I intend to do something? Well, I am going to leave Jefferson when you do, though perhaps our tickets will not bear the same destination. Jefferson is not quite the place I should choose for my experiment, even if it didn’t know too much about us. I intend, Avery, to try to work for my living. Now don’t, please don’t, say ‘ Who would have you to work for them? ’ I don’t know; but I intend to find out. That is the experimental part; for I really believe, Avery, that once I begin to work, I shall find that I am worth my salt.”

Avery bounded from his chair. “ That is the worst,” he shouted, “ the most preposterous thing I ever heard of! Do you think that I have forgotten all my responsibilities? ”

“ By no means,” said Cecily in cool tones that deprecated his violence. “ You may send me money for the support of the children, if you have it and care to send it. I shall take care of them, but of course you can come and see them. After all, isn’t that quite the way such things are usually arranged, even when families live all under one roof—the mother cares for the children, and the father calls on them? ”

Avery allowed himself to be distracted long enough to say, “ You have taken to observing social conditions, I see.”

“ At least to discussing them,” said Cecily.

Something in her tone as she uttered that last phrase caused Avery to say sharply, “ You are sure there isn’t in your decision any element of—well, of pique? ”

She looked at him candidly. “ There may be,” she said. “ But if there is, it’s quite negligible.”

She was so strong in her conclusions that she could afford to concede points in her argument. Avery’s anger began to be tinged with discouragement. “ I’m going to advise all husbands of my acquaintance never to go away and give their wives time to think,” he said bitterly.

“ On the ground, perhaps, that thinking threatens the stability of the marriage relation? ”

In spite of himself Avery laughed. “ Confound it, Cecily, you talk as if your mind were made up,” he said. “ You haven’t counted the cost.”

“ Well, no, I haven’t,” she answered. “ I can’t, until I’m much nearer the end of my life than I am now. Listening to wiseacres or judging by the experience of others won’t help me to count the cost in my own individual case, Avery. And I do know the cost of the sort of life I have always led.”

“ Was it so very bad? ”

“ It was so thoroughly artificial.”

“ But why do you confound your standard and your husband? ”

“ The two things seem to me to be rather closely connected, Avery.”

“ There is actually nothing the matter,” he flung at her, “ except that you are bored.”

“ Do you call that nothing? ” she asked.

“ You simply refuse to argue,” he said.

“ Do you think that by arguing we may convince each other? ”

“ Oh, I suppose you are right,” he admitted. “ At any rate, you seem to have made up your mind.”

“ Yes. You implied that before.”

“ It isn’t strange if I repeat myself,” said Avery. “ I’m confused. This is enough to take the wind out of anybody’s sails.”

“ It is rather hard on you,” she said gently.

Avery walked up and down the room for several turns, and then stopped before her. “ Cecily,” he said, “ did you ever actually care anything about me? ”

She rose and laid her hands lightly on his shoulders. “ I’m not trying to spoil the past, Avery,” she said quickly. “ If anything in it seems to you lovely, keep it. You can’t expect me to guide my life by your romantic sentiments; but I’m not trying to make you think that I never cared.”

He enfolded her for a moment, and laid his face against her hair. His eyes were wet, but those she lifted to him as he let her go were dry and very bright. “ You can always see the children, you know,” she said. “ I shall arrange to be near enough to you so that you can see them week-ends, at least.”

“ I can’t provide very liberally for the children,” said Avery. She did not answer that. “ I think I shall leave tonight, on the nine-o’clock train,” he added.

“ You needn’t hurry,” said Cecily. “ Stay a week, if you would like to. You probably need a rest.”

“ I’d stay a month, if I thought there was any hope of your changing your mind,” he said.

“ Perhaps you are right about going, though. Once you are at work again you will feel better,” said Cecily.

“ I hope so. I could feel much better, and still not be exactly cheerful.”

She took up a book from the table. Avery went into the hall, and found his hat. “ Is there anything you would especially like to have for dinner? ” she called after him.

“ Sackcloth and ashes,” said Avery over his shoulder.

“ Well, the ashes at least are possible,” answered Cecily. “ Avery—”

“Yes?” He turned back.

“ Thank you for not making a fuss, Avery.”

“ Oh, you’re welcome, I’m sure.” Avery slammed the door behind him.,

He walked aimlessly down the street, seeking the poor relief of motion. This was his chance to do several things he had spoken of doing: to see Mrs. Butler, for instance. Indeed, it was probably his only chance of seeing Mrs. Butler on his present visit. But somehow he did not care about seeing her Just now. Cecily ran in his head like a melody: Cecily his exquisite girl, his radiant bride, the mother of his beautiful children. Yet why, when he longed for her as he was longing now, had he given in so easily? He had run away from discussion last night, he had let her go today without “ making a fuss.” When he wooed her in the first place he had not given in easily; and his ancestral conscience assured him that she was, or at least ought to be, more to him now than she had been then. It was curious, unless in spite of both instinct and ancestral conscience, he at bottom believed she was right not only for herself but for him, and that he should get on better without her.

It was a thought that chilled him, even there in the bright sunlight. A fuller freedom, a larger service were fine things; but was he never to have anything else? Surely he and Cecily had started out to supply each other with all of the warm, the affectionate, the personal and human that one needed in a lifetime. Yet even in those early days the little rift must have been there, even if they had not perceived it. Avery shuddered when he thought that, for it was to those early days that he liked to go back in memory; these last years in Jefferson seemed to provide little that even gilding memory could work upon. It was curious, how people began a life together with every confidence in the happiness they could give each other, and ended by being simply a respectable couple.

He and Cecily might have ended in that way, if her spirit had been of a leaden conformity. He respected the strength of her decision, marveling at it the while; he felt that in time he should be grateful to her for her Atropos deed. He was not grateful yet, and he was thoroughly wretched. At intervals all the afternoon he felt that he would give freedom, service, rightness, for one hour of the old stinging bliss. But the spell of her person and his memories was less powerful somehow than the look in her cool eyes—her eyes had grown very cool. At the thought of them he winced when he remembered the magnanimous spirit in which he had come to take Cecily away with him.

CHAPTER XI

LOIS AND CECILY

Avery left that night, as he had threatened to. He kissed his sleeping children and his wife, and gave her half the money that he had in his pocket. “ I shall write you,” he said. “You will write to me?”

He wrote indeed a week later, to say that he was in Chicago and should probably remain there. “ Chicago is a wonderful place in which to start any work like mine,” he said. “ It is so naive, so eager to learn, to have what is best, if only it can find out what is best. Also, it would like to^ave everything that New York has, so you see I shall be a rival to Grosvenor.”

It was a freer and more interesting letter than any he had written her from New York. Cecily read it in bed: she had been very tired these last few mornings, and had lain abed late. “ It’s a real letter, though short,” she thought, as she finished it. “ It goes to show that if we had never married we might have been friends.”

The baby came presently and climbed on her bed. Listlessly Cecily began to play with her. “ You look like your father, honey,” said Cecily. “ Your father is a great man, married to a woman who doesn’t appreciate him.”

“ Daddy? ” said the baby inquiringly.

“ No, Muvver,” said Cecily. “ Daddy knows what he’s going to do; Muvver is just finding out.”

She rose soon after that, and sent for a woman to help the servants give the house a thorough cleaning. Whatever happened, it was well to set one’s house in order. Then she sent out invitations for a big luncheon. Whatever hap pened, it was not amiss to give a party. Finally, after lunch she sat down to her desk, spread out bills and bank book, and entered upon a serious consideration of her finances.

Cecily hated money matters, had always hated them. There were certain things one actually needed, certain others that were necessary properly to set one off; and in a really well-organized world these things would simply have been present without having to take thought about paying for them. Cecily was not extravagant, at least not in any sense in which she understood the word. She could instance, and sometimes did, her sewing, her remodeling, the systematic housekeeping which enabled her to get from two servants the work of three. But she had a liking for “ nice things ”; she had been brought up to think that it was a sign of superiority, the stamp of breeding, indeed, to “ like nice things.” Not to care particularly about “ things ” struck her as the acme of other-worldliness; Avery’s lack of reverence for things had always puzzled her.

Gloom descended on her present work with bills and lead-pencil. It was conceded that Avery had done very well in the years of his practice in Jefferson; indeed for so young a practitioner he had done phenomenally well. But the servants, the entertaining, the babies, the car, Cecily’s smart little costumes, of which she never had too many, had eaten up all his income. Cecily still had money in the bank, more than her debts amounted to; but with that supply diminishing, and Avery sending her only small checks, perhaps sometimes none at all, she had not money enough to care for herself and the children indefinitely. “ I can go to work, whether I like it or not, I see,” she said to herself. “ Of course I could take a small flat, and do my own housework, and perhaps take a roomer or two, and wear made-over clothes—shabby made-over clothes. But I couldn’t stand that—and I won’t go back to Avery. No, I’d run a boarding-house before I’d do that. Imagine me running a boarding-house! ” And with a flash ol fun she thrust her bills back into a drawer.

Her luncheon was a great success—Cecily never gave a party that wasn’t. The food, flowers and service were all perfect; after luncheon there was a little good music, and then cards. Cecily’s cheeks glowed; she dismissed troublesome matters from her mind, resolved to enjoy this day to the uttermost. It might be the last big party she would ever give.

Mrs. Wallace, assuming the privileges of an intimate friend, lingered after the others were gone. “ A lovely party,” she said. “You have such a knack with parties, Cecily.”

“ Oh, thank you! ” Cecily, fingering her own exquisite dress, smiled absently at her friend.

“ One thing surprised me, though,” Mrs. Wallace went on.

“ This is what she has stayed to tell me,” thought Cecily. Aloud she asked, “ What was that, Edith? ”

“ Mrs. Butler’s being here.”

That had surprised Cecily too; she had hardly expected Mrs. Butler to accept her invitation. But she did not think Mrs. Wallace had any reason to suspect her of unfriendly sentiments toward “the stately Lois”; if her friend had any such suspicion, Cecily purposed to put an end to it. She asked gently, “ Why did that surprise you, Edith? ”

“ Well, she isn’t asked as much as she was at first. She only goes where she feels like going, for one thing; and then, she’s so peculiar.”

“ Peculiar? ”

“ Yes. She’s always going to City Council meetings, and poking around in odd places, and asking the queerest people to her house. You never dare to go there, for you never can tell whom you will meet. I believe in being charitable, of course; but, my dear, those things should be kept within limits. And this winter she was away from home for weeks at a time, traveling around and lecturing.”

“ So would I be, if any one would pay to listen to me lecture,” said Cecily. “ So would you too, Edith Wallace.” “ But her husband was here most of the time! ”

“If he didn’t object, why should you?”

“ I’m sure I beg your pardon if I’ve said anything out of the way,” said Mrs. Wallace, rising and gathering her furs about her. “ I didn’t know you were an especial friend of hers.”

“ I’m not,” said Cecily. “ I know almost every one else who was here today better than I know Mrs. Butler. But I hate to see a remarkable woman judged by a provincial standard.”

“ Provincial! Thank you! ” said Mrs. Wallace, who was nothing if not studiously urban.

“ You’re welcome,” returned Cecily placidly.

When Mrs. Wallace had gone, Cecily sat for a time in her own room. Below-stairs she could hear a chair shoved across the floor occasionally, or a door closed; in the nursery Junior was telling a story to his sister, and the sound of his shrill voice went on and on. The house seemed very quiet after the late commotion; Cecily was still tingling with excitement. It would be impossible for her to read for a few hours and then go quietly to bed; beside, there was something she wanted to do. A vagrant idea kept coming and going in her mind. Against her own inclination, Mrs. Wallace’s attack had led Cecily to defend Mrs. Butler; and whether the mere act of defense had made her like the woman she championed, or whether her animosity of yesteryear had actually softened, Cecily at any rate was haunted by the idea of Lois Butler. “ I’d like,” she said to herself, “ I’d like to see her again—soon—now. I believe-”

After her solitary dinner she put on her wraps, and went out. It was a fine, cool night, tempting to a pedestrian. “ At any rate, I need a walk,” thought Cecily. She was not altogether decided; but little by little she drifted toward the river. Walking along the river drive, breasting with delight the keen river wind, watching the protracted reflection of the city lights in the water, Cecily presently found herself in front of the Butlers’. As she viewed the solid Victorian house, her enterprise ceased to seem absurd; and with the Quixoticism left out, it dwindled to an evening call on acquaintances. Viewing it as such, Cecily mounted the steps and rang the bell.

The Butlers were having their coffee in the library before an open fire, whose flickering light gave an odd appearance of life to the high-perched busts of Plato and Socrates. On hearing Cecily’s voice Lois turned in her chair; and the eager Walter came running out into the hall.

“ Do come in here! ” he said. “ It’s jolly to see you. Did you walk? Here, let me take your cloak. What a beautiful dress! ”

He drew her after him into the library; and she stood smiling at him. “It is a beautiful dress, isn’t it?” Lois answered her husband. “ It is the one she wore at her luncheon; I admired it all the afternoon. You always have such lovely clothes, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“ I didn’t know you ever noticed them,” said Cecily.

“ Did you think it was beneath me or above me to notice them? ” asked Lois.

“ She thought, dear, that you thought it was beneath you,” suggested Butler.

Cecily laughed, flushing a little. “ Please don’t make me seem to be any horrider than I am,” she said.

“ I don’t think you’re in the least horrid,” said Butler.

“ I was telling him all about your party,” said Mrs. Butler. “ Now it’s delightful to have you here to talk it over with.”

Lois was sitting in a low, roomy chair, her knees crossed and her head resting against the chair-back. The warm glow of the firelight brought out the warmth in her brown eyes, the deep browns of her hair. Seen so she herself gave the impression of warmth, of directed and controlled vigor, of a resultant something that was almost peace. She was not a serene woman, but her balance and development made her at least a woman touched with serenity. Before her the slim Cecily in her iridescent gown looked an eager, ephemeral thing, not without a certain bright significance and distinction. Lois was a magnificent, substantive woman; but tonight it was Cecily who drew the eye.

Cecily continued to stand, warming one foot at the fire. After a moment’s silence she said, addressing Lois as if Walter were not there, “ I am glad you liked my party. I liked it, too. It had, I thought, a swan-song brilliance.” “Swan-song?” Mrs. Butler repeated.

“Yes. One rather likes a swan-song to be brilliant, though liking doesn’t always make it so.”

“ Are you leaving Jefferson? ” asked Butler.

“ I am leaving Jefferson,” said Cecily, still looking at his wife and not at him.

“ Dr. Fairchild has established himself in his work,” said Mrs. Butler eagerly, “ and you are going to him? ”

“ He has established himself in his work,” answered Cecily. “ Didn’t you see him when he was here? ”

“No. He has been here recently?”

“ Very recently. Scarcely a month ago. I rather thought he came to see you.”

“ No. I rather think he ought to have; but perhaps he was modest. He has done so splendidly in the east—perhaps he didn’t want me to tell him how splendidly. He will go far, Mrs. Fairchild; you will see.”

“Yes,” said Cecily. “No doubt.”

Butler, whose conjectures went much nearer the facts of this case than his wife’s, said slowly, “ I don’t know, Lois. He was doing mighty fine things here in a quiet way, I thought. The poor people felt freer to call him than any other doctor in town.”

“ Yes, I know. I only wish we had some one like him to put in charge when we open the dispensary at the works, Walter. But you must remember that the same qualities which served Dr. Fairchild here will serve him elsewhere, and that it’s too bad for a man of his caliber to be restricted “ To a third-rate town? ” suggested Butler placidly. “ But abstractedly, Lois, didn’t you consider the spectacle of his efforts here a fine one?”

“ No, I didn’t,” said Lois bluntly. “ He was hemmed in and miserable, and in a few years more he would have been frustrated.”

“Am I right, Mrs. Fairchild?” asked Butler, turning to where Cecily stood watching the two of them.

“ No. Mrs. Butler is right,” said Cecily. She paid homage freely to Mrs. Butler’s gift of being always in the right; but from that moment on Butler was sure that his first surmise had been correct, and that she was somehow in trouble about her husband’s undertaking.

“ Well, we can’t allow Mrs. Butler to be too consistently in the right,” he said. “ Let’s have a game of three-hand auction, and put her in her place. She is the worst card-player in Jefferson, Mrs. Fairchild, as you probably found out this afternoon.”

“ I never played at all before I came here,” said Lois. “Should you like to play, Mrs. Fairchild?”

“ No, don’t let’s play,” said Cecily. “ I came here to ask you something, and I want to ask it.”

“To ask me something?” Lois straightened herself in her chair, and looked quickly up at the other woman.

“ Yes. When you provided my husband with a new, and undoubtedly more fitting, but less remunerative calling, what did you think was to become of me? ”

“ What was to become of you? ”

“Yes. Was I simply to be reduced from the wife of a professional man in fair circumstances to the wife of a struggling social reformer? Was my share of Avery’s new life to be only more housework and more economy? ” Butler held his breath, but Lois answered readily enough, “ You think me more influential in Dr. Fairchild’s decision than I was. I advised him to do what he has done, but I didn’t persuade or compel. However, I have no objection to answering your question as well as I can. I didn’t work out your part in the compact very exactly—I was considering your husband principally. But when he stated substantially the same objection that you have, I told him he was making a great mistake if he took you for an amiable little fool.”

' “ No, I’m not a fool, and I’m not embarrassingly amiable,” said Cecily. “ But he might consider me a sensible woman justly incensed, mightn’t he?”

“You are least of all the sort of woman who wants to be a burden on her husband,” said Mrs. Butler evenly.

“ I am least of all that? ” echoed Cecily.

It was an amicable conversation, almost jesting; yet Walter Butler held his breath as he listened and looked. He had never seen Cecily Fairchild look as she looked tonight. Usually he thought her a pretty woman of a not particularly significant type; but tonight she looked like the transparent vessel of some awfully luminous contents.

“ You are right. I’m least of all a burden to my husband,” Cecily repeated. “ So little that when he came home, on this visit during which you did not see him,—when he came home, and expressed his willingness to resume his burden, I sent him packing. I’m so little a burden to him that he has gone to one city to do his precious work, and I am going to another to earn my own living.”

There was a moment’s silence after that, and in the bright little after-dinner group clustered about the fire two pairs of eyes were turned on Cecily. No wonder, thought Butler, she looked luminous, poor heart-broken girl; in spite of the fact that he would rather have looked away, her luminousness held him.

Then Lois Butler left her chair, and spoke with a certain native nobility. “ I am very sorry anything like that has happened,” she said. “ You must think I have meddled abominably. But so far as one can be sure of anything in this world, I am sure that Avery Fairchild is fulfilling his destiny. And I’m sure that you will fulfil yours, and that it will be brighter than you can believe now. If I have caused you any suffering—and it seems that I have—I humbly ask your forgiveness for it.”

Those eager eyes of Cecily’s looked into hers; Lois took a step forward and put out her hands. Suddenly Cecily sobbed, “ Oh, I know it’s splendid some way, I know you meant it to be. But I do—I do miss him. I'm not used to this state of things—yet.”

Butler walked away to the other end of the room. “ I wonder if Fairchild ever saw her when she looked like that? ” he thought. “ He can’t have, or things never would have gone the length they evidently have gone.”

When he returned to the fire Lois was sitting with Cecily in her arms; but a moment later Cecily struggled to her feet and wiped her eyes. “ This isn’t in the least what I meant to tell you, or how I meant to tell it. I didn’t come here to reproach you, Mrs. Butler; I came to ask advice,” she said.

“ If there is anything I can tell you—” said Mrs.

Butler.

“ I think there is. At least, I want you to understand. I suppose, Mrs. Butler, that what I really want is a friend. My own people are all dead, you know; and as for friends, I haven’t any. Oh, there are a few old schoolmates I write to once a year or so; and there are plenty of acquaintances here. I wouldn’t talk to any of them about this; I couldn’t.”

“ I shall feel it an honor if you care to talk to me,” said Mrs. Butler.

“ Thank you.” Cecily sat down in the chair Butler had left. “ I am going to earn my own living, as I said. But the question is, what am I going to do? I was brought up in a very common fashion: I wasn’t taught anything except how to make myself attractive to men, and, in a vague way, how to keep house. So I think I shall begin now to do my learning. I would like to go into an office—in fact that seems to be about the only thing that there is for me to do. I suppose I can learn shorthand in any city I may move to.”

“ Of course you can. That is a sensible decision, isn’t it, Walter?”

“ I know to my sorrow,” said Butler, “ how few stenographers there are who seem to have any innate capacity. If a stenographer is what you want to be, Mrs. Fairchild, there are places waiting for you. There is one in my office, if you care to take it.”

“ Thank you,” said Cecily, “ but I don’t feel that I care to stay in Jefferson.”

“ Perhaps you are wise to make a new start in a new place. You have thought the whole thing out quite carefully, haven’t you?” said Lois.

“ It’s simple enough, I dare say,” answered Cecily. “ I will admit, though, that when I first thought of it, it seemed rather daring. You see, I had always thought of stenographers as a social class, instead of a business group.”

“ Oh, the education of a nice girl! ” deplored Mrs. Butler.

“ You speak as if you never were a nice girl,” said Butler, smiling.

“ My dear Walter, you will find plenty of people in this your native city who would tell you, if they dared, that far from being a nice girl, I’ve always been an unscrupulous woman.”

“ And your unscrupulousness approves of me? ” asked Cecily.

“ I altogether approve of you,” said Lois. “ I think you’re splendid.”

“ You’re splendid, but you’re wrong,” said Butler suddenly.

“ Why, Walter, what makes you say that? ” asked Lois, startled.

“ People can adjust their differences,” said Butler, “ by some fine, bold compromise.”

“ Or some little, sneaking compromise,” said Lois quickly.

“ I can’t argue with you, Lois; you are the most cogent woman I ever saw,” said Butler. “ But I feel quite strongly that our duties in this world are toward each other—not away from each other.”

“ They are talking for each other now, not for me,” thought Cecily. She could not have told in what way their few sentences seemed to her significant; in fact she did not try to tell. But she realized afterward that from that evening she always thought of Walter Butler as somehow the hero of this particular matrimonial alliance, as the cement in the structure, so to speak.

Butler turned to her now, and surprised her intent gaze. He smiled at her. “ Shan’t we have that game of auction now?” he asked. “The evening is only just beginning.”

“ I think I’ll go home now,” said Cecily slowly. “ You see, I wanted to bind myself to my arrangement by an- nouncing it to some one. I’m afraid you will think I've made a great to-do over a very trifling affair. One woman more or less earning her own living—what does that matter these days? ”

“ It matters a great deal to you, and you do not know how much it may matter to those about you,” said Lois gravely. “ One woman who is neither cowardly nor servile may make a difference in the general reckoning, Mrs. Fair-child.”

She looked so sympathetic as she said it, so magnanimous, so thoroughly true and right, that Cecily felt a thrill of admiration. “ No wonder Avery has been influenced by her,” she thought. “ She might influence anybody; she does even me, I think.”

Yet when, after their good-bys were said, Walter Butler took her home in the car, it was of him that she thought with more kindness. He was driving, and she sat beside him. “ If you ever decided to come back here,” he said with his eyes on the road, “ remember that we always have a position open to you.” And a little later, “ If you care to use my name as a reference at any time, you may, you know.” And again, “ Have you a lease of that house? I’ll help you to dispose of it, if you have.”

“ And yet you don’t approve of what I’m doing,” said Cecily after this last offer. He turned toward her with some surprise. “ You don’t approve, but you’re willing to help me all that you can,” she explained.

“ My dear girl, approval and disapproval are academic matters. I hope we all do what we can to help each other out.” Butler turned his attention back to the road.

His seriousness was not all on Cecily’s account. For once in his affectionate, easy-going life, Walter Butler was that night taking a definitely critical view of his wife Lois.

CHAPTER XI

THE WORLD RECEIVES

Once she had made up her mind to a thing, it was a foregone conclusion that Cecily Fairchild would carry it through. She had, as the saying is, her faults; but she had neither gaps nor lapses. Having made up her mind to leave Jefferson, she left: Walter Butler disposed of the lease of her house, and sent his trucks to take her furniture to the car. In mid-winter she put Jefferson behind her.

It is easy to leave a city, especially if your pride sustains you; it is not difficult to leave a husband, especially when you are backed by the powerful trinity, pride, anger and ennui, to say nothing of righteous and reasonable decision. But it is difficult to leave a beautiful little house, even though you may have chafed sometimes at its smallness, when you know that you have nothing better ahead than some dingy “ duplex,” like thousands of other duplexes. And it is altogether impossible to leave some people; they will not be left.

To this class belonged Cecily’s second maid, a prim, middle-aged woman of Scotch descent. Cooks had come to the exquisite little house while Cecily lived there, and had left it; the last incumbent took her dismissal calmly, and went. But Anna had been a fixture for several years, and a fixture she proposed to remain, if not in this house, then wherever else Cecily set up her household gods. “ Notices,” threats and even jeers made no impression on Anna; in vain Cecily protested that in the future she could afford nothing but a general servant. “ That may all be true, Mrs. Fairchild,” Anna would say, when Cecily pictured to her the life to which she was condemning herself. “ I’ve never been a general servant, but I’m quite willing to be, for the sake of staying with you and the children. If you aren’t going to have much money, Mrs. Fairchild, that’s all the more reason why you should have a maid you are accustomed to. No new person would be so careful and saving as I will be. And if you think of going to work somewhere, Mrs. Fairchild, I simply will not leave. I wouldn’t any more have Margaret left to one of those girls you pick up in a city—”

“ I thought your faithful servant type died long ago, long ago,” said Cecily, touched in spite of herself, and therefore determined to be flippant. “ Well, don’t blame me if you don’t like it, Anna.”

“ I’m sure I shouldn’t think of doing that, Mrs. Fair-child,” said Anna primly.

Secretly Cecily was glad enough of Anna’s support, for the two months during which she made her arrangements and moved proved to be a harassing period, though not without gleams of entertainment. Her broadest amusement was derived from the visits of sympathetic and curious friends. Defeating their curiosity and giving them no opening for their sympathy was a game at which Cecily came to be highly expert. “ I thought that this business might separate the sheep from the goats for me,” she reflected. “ But it seems they are all sheep.”

As the scene of her future life and labors Cecily had chosen a lakeside city a few hours’ ride from Chicago, near enough so that Avery could see his children occasionally. It was a city large enough to give commercial opportunities and chances of decent freedom of action, but not yet so large as to have robbed its denizens permanently of sunshine and fresh air. There she found a five-room “ duplex,” less dingy than many she looked at, and with the use of half a fair-sized back yard appertaining to it. Swallowing her memories of the little house in Jefferson, endeared to her in a thousand ways, and of the exquisite bedroom now vacant, Cecily moved in.

When it was furnished the flat looked much better. It could hardly have failed to look its best under Anna’s superintendence. That prim devoted person would work at the hardest sort of labor all day, and at night serve Cecily’s dinner with the utmost propriety. The dinner might consist of a scrambled egg and bread and butter; but at least the china and the linen were above reproach; and Anna’s correct cap, which was donned regularly, lent an air to everything. Cecily never would outgrow her fondness for an air; and Anna herself seemed to feel that so long as she clung to the air, and the caps, she would never deteriorate into an ordinary general servant, “ one of those girls you pick up in a city.” Her devotion to the two children left Cecily with her day and mind free for her new effort. “Without Anna’s old-fashioned virtues,” thought Cecily, “ where would my iconoclasm be? I suppose one can’t even upset a social tradition and do it effectively without the assistance of some simple good soul.”

As things were, her “ iconoclasm ” had a clear enough way. If Cecily had been one of your true iconoclasts, whose spice of life is hearing the uproar as the icons come crashing down, she would have been disappointed every day now. When things were fairly in order, she went downtown and enrolled herself at the leading “ business college.” The principal was obviously pleased with her superior intelligence and her good looks; the teachers welcomed her zealousness. But the roof failed to fall in; indeed, Cecily’s epoch-making advent caused only the smallest kind of a ripple. Most of the pupils were considerably younger than she, though one or two were older. Her excellent clothes drew some glances, which her manner sufficiently repelled; Cecily had no idea of acquainting herself with the unkempt and the unmannered. As she said herself, she hated frowsiness. So the frowsy went their way, and she went hers.

She had enough to do, indeed, to acquaint herself with her shorthand manual and her typewriter. It was a long time since she had studied anything absolutely new, and she was appalled to realize how hard she found it. “ I must have been keeping house and bringing up my children with half my head,” she reflected.

She made perceptible progress, however, as spring came on. She made, too, the mistake that nine out of ten women would make in her circumstances. After a day filled with shorthand she would fill an evening with sewing; she could make the children such “ adorable ” clothes, and ready-made garments were so far beneath her notice. Mere fatigue would perhaps not have taught her the folly of her ways; but fortunately, as it proved, she made herself actually sick. A week spent in bed with a high fever is a great chastener; Cecily was meek enough under the admonitions of the doctor whom the frightened Anna called in. What is more, she tried to live up to them. It might distress her to see her children wear ready-made clothes; but it distressed her much more to think of failing in her experiment.

The clothes they wore made no difference to the children; and after all they looked pretty in anything. Indeed, with the democracy of youth they rather preferred their present life to that in Jeffeson, which had not been wholly free from dress-parades and well-regulated walks. They had a sandpile here, in the fascinating back yard; it was near a high board fence, and screened from observation, as the season advanced, by the rows of flowers that Cecily planted. When the two of them were playing there on a breezy spring morning, between the hollyhocks that grew along the fence and the nasturtium vines that were allowed to run along the ground, they were as charming as they had ever been, and on the whole happier than before. “ It isn’t doing them any harm,” thought Cecily. She had to acknowledge, as one by one they disappeared, that in entering thus boldly on a new life her mind had not been wholly free from specters.

With specters generally she had increasingly less to do. When she was overtired, of course, she could see immense flaws in her present plan of life; she was conscious of its loneliness and bareness. But when she was not tired she found that that life did not lack variety, or even moments of charm; and she was learning the bracing happiness that comes from conquering obstacles.

To be sure, when she had finished her course of shorthand she was haunted for a time by the fear that she would never get a “ position.” Positions, she thought, did not go by fear or favor, but strictly by desert; and what did she deserve? Of what use could she, Cecily Fairchild, be in the market-place?

Consideration of the people with whom she went to “ business college ” helped her out of her panic; for if she knew little, most of them knew greatly less. When she received information from the college of a vacant “ position,” Cecily hid her timidity, dressed herself carefully, and sallied forth. An anxious and not altogether approving Anna waited for her at home, she knew; and the practicability of her enterprise was now being put to the test.

Once, twice, three times she was unsuccessful. At one place the pay was too low; at another there were too many people ahead of her; at the third her name was taken, but she never heard farther. With every attempt her courage sank, but she rallied it determinedly. This was simply the fortune of war.

A fourth time she went out to answer a call. This time she knew that Anna watched her from behind the curtains; so at the corner she looked back and waved her hand. As she turned the comer she was to all appearances the gayest of the gay.

About the middle of the afternoon, before she had dared to hope for her mistress’s return, Anna heard the front door open. “Make me a cup of tea, Anna, will you please?” Cecily’s voice called to her.

Anna, quite stiff and awkward with anger, made the tea. Her adored Mrs. Fairchild, returning and calling for tea in the middle of the afternoon, must be utterly worn out. The idea of Mrs. Fairchild out in the world earning her living hurt Anna at best, for Anna was not infected with the virus of mad modern ideas: she would have preferred to see her mistress stay quietly at home, her bills paid by Dr. Fairchild. But if Mrs. Fairchild would descend into the market-place, then the very least that the market-place could do was to recognize a lady when it saw one, and spread a carpet before her feet. Primmer than ever, but with eyes that smoldered, Anna appeared at Cecily’s bedroom door with the cup of tea.

Cecily, who was stooping to change her shoes, lifted a flushed and smiling face. “ Anna, what do you think? ” she demanded. “ I have a position.”

“ I’m sure I’m very glad to hear it,” said Anna.

“ I knew you would be, but not so glad as I am to get it. In a law office it is, one of the best firms in town: Sims, Morley and Sims. You would like the look of their office, Anna; it is respectable, solid, nay imposing.” Cecily sank on her bed and took the cup of tea. “ Even the card catalogue would inspire confidence, let alone the law library, which has a room to itself. There are three stenographers beside me, to say nothing of a young man clerk. You would be impressed, Anna.”

“ I dare say I should, Mrs. Fairchild.” Anna picked up the shoes that Cecily had just discarded, and fitted shoe-trees into them.

“ I am to get twelve dollars a week,” continued Cecily, sipping tea. “What do you think of that?”

“ It never took you long to spend twelve dollars, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“ Oh, I’ve been careful lately,” Cecily assured her. “ I’m much more careful than I used to be, Anna.”

“ Do you expect to get along and bring up the children on twelve dollars a week, ma’am? ”

“ Certainly not. I expect to get more some day. But I wish you could have seen how nicely I got this position, Anna. Some girls go from office to office for weeks before they find anything.”

Perhaps Cecily was trying to forget her own recently past tremors. The unflinching Anna remarked, “ Even if you tried, you couldn’t lower yourself to the level of most people, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“ Thank you, Anna,” said Cecily, her eyes twinkling. “ In spite of your undemocratic spirit, thank you. Thank you, too, for your tea; you make delicious tea.”

“ Will you have another cup, Mrs. Fairchild? ”

“ No, thank you. I think I’ll rest a bit before dinner; I want to be in good trim to-morrow. I have clean blouses enough to take me through the week, haven’t I? ”

“ Yes, Mrs. Fairchild, even at the rate of one a day.”

“ That’s probably what I shall need.” Cecily stretched her arms above her head, and yawned. “ I say, Anna, if you like you may take the children down to Chicago this week-end to see Dr. Fairchild. I can get along by myself for a day or two.”

Cecily felt magnanimous to be considering her husband just then, for her thoughts and interests were turning naturally to the work ahead. It was a great world that she was entering, this world of the market-place. From afar, from her position of “ sheltered woman,” she had suspected its existence, had sniffed in imagination its acrid and dusty odor; and now at length the gates were flung open to her. A hot, fierce world; a dirty, close-packed world; a world that would make short work of pretty illusions, but a world so wide—so wide.

It began for her, indeed, that very next day. And as summer ripened into fall, and then winter closed down upon her, Cecily enjoyed to the full her new pungent life. She liked its early risings and early retirings; liked departure for work, in her fresh blouse and neat suit, with a book under her arm for street-car consumption. She liked the big office, flanked on one side by the law library, and on the other by the three doors bearing the brass nameplates of the individual members of the firm. Mr. Sims Senior’s private office was somewhat somber and heavy, as became the surroundings of the head of so important a firm. Mr. Morley’s was tasteful, and boasted an etching or two, Mr. Morley being rather given to the patronage of the fine arts. Mr. Sims the younger ran to obtrusive cheerfulness in his furnishings, as he did to effusiveness in his personal bearing. He had a lot of growing up still to do, Cecily thought. She liked Mr. Morley; every one in the office liked Mr. Morley. Of Mr. Sims Senior Cecily had no very definite opinion; indeed as the newest stenographer in the office she had at first very little to do with him. It must be believed that the little was well done, or she would not have had an indefinite opinion about him; for on the whole Mr. Sims Senior was fairly well hated in his office.

Cecily liked her work. She liked the shorthand notes that she always took with some mental struggle, and deciphered with a sense of triumph. She liked the response of her typewriter to her fingers: there is no mechanical device that has more personality,—or at times more actually human perversity,—than a typewriter. She liked the neat letters and the legal papers that were for the present her contribution to the world’s business.

She liked not only the opportunities of her work, but also its limitations. The hours were limited, for one thing, though there were days when they seemed long enough; and if demands were made upon her time and energy, at least there were none upon her spirit. She was called upon to serve her employers, but not to love them. Moreover, when they had paid her her weekly stipend their responsibility toward her ended. If she met one of the firm outside of office hours, he greeted her according to his nature, Mr. Sims absent-mindedly, Mr. Morley courteously, young Mr. Sims jauntily. That was all. “ In modern business,” said Cecily, “each man minds his own.”

Best of all Cecily liked her home-comings. She had of course this advantage over most of her women fellow-workers, that she had a home to go to, and a veritable home, not a ghastly furnished room or a comer of a relative’s establishment. Her flat was small, the rooms were not elegantly proportioned, most of them were not light enough; but it offered Cecily rest, refreshment, the society of her children, books. And now that she had made up her mind to leave undone everything in the flat that Anna could not do, she found to her surprise that this was the first time in her life she had had a real home. In Jefferson her house had always been the field of her endeavors. When she returned from outside, it had been to confront problems, to meet demands upon her; and those problems and demands were usually of a trivial and frequently of an irritating nature. They had often spoiled the enjoyment she might have had at home; and even when they did not occur, she was never free from the possibility of them. But when you were away and at work all day, you didn’t allow anything to spoil your quiet dinner, or the bedtime hour of your babies, or the blessed afterward when with the shades all down and the low light glowing beside the bed, you sank back on your pillows and opened a cherished volume either of the new or old.

By way of welcome incident in so much serenity, Cecily’s employer on the day before Christmas raised her salary from twelve dollars a week to fourteen. She found an envelope announcing the change on her desk when she came to work. With the magnanimity of triumph she went, at her lunch hour, to the telegraph office, and sent Avery an invitation to come up Christmas Day for a noon dinner and “ to see the children.”

When she reached home she found his answering telegram, stiffly informing her that he was engaged to dine “ with friends.” There was also a large express package, addressed in his writing and filled with toys. It had evidently been sent the day before. The idea of Avery wandering forlornly from toy-counter to toy-counter, buying things for his absent children, struck Cecily as pathetic. She sat down forthwith and wrote to him, offering to let Anna take the children to Chicago for New Year’s; she charitably refrained from saying anything about the two dollars a week that stood to her for success. Perhaps Anna would tell him, if he consented to see her.

Avery answered his wife’s note at once; and Anna and the children made the journey to Chicago on the appointed day. “ Dr. Fairchild is well, ma’am, and very busy,” Anna reported on her return. “ He said to let him know if there was anything you wanted.”

Cecily was sitting on her divan, one of her newly-returned children in each arm. She looked up quickly. “ That’s kind of him,” she said, “ very kind. But I’m not asking for anything, either that he can give me or that he can’t. I have everything I want.” And she began forthwith to learn Junior’s impression of the hotel at which his father had lodged him.

Clearly, it is not every one who can say at the end of a first year in the world that she has everything she wants.

CHAPTER XIII

AND EVEN COMPLIMENTS

Cecily was happy now, not so happy as she had been early in her married life, but certainly far happier than she had been in the last few years. Her happiness was not surprising: no one is ever really safe from attacks of the mysterious thing, consequent sometimes on nothing more important than a change in temperature or a particularly well-digested meal. But what did astonish Cecily, at the same time that it delighted her, was her growing sense of permanence. Never even at her happiest had she felt that she “ belonged ” in the old life; long before she acknowledged it the fatal maladjustment had been there, if it had not, indeed, been present from the beginning. To “ belong ” is certainly a luxury; and for the restless permanence itself is something of a novelty.

It was inevitable that all years should not go as well as that first year. Indeed, early in the second Cecily went through a troubled period, and her troubles were of a very materia] nature. Her reserve money was almost gone, her salary was not sufficient for all the needs of her family, and Avery’s checks, although regular, remained dishearteningly small. The fourteen dollars a week that looked so big when she considered merely that she earned it, melted away at once when she began to spend it. When the rent of the little flat was paid, and Anna’s five dollars a week—Anna had had six in Jefferson for doing half the work—and when Anna’s carefully whittled bills for food were settled, there was nothing left for Cecily. Yet Cecily must have carfare, and ought to have had lunch. Instead she took to having soda fountain mixtures at noon, malted milk and eggs; and she wore her old clothes without renewal. Fortunately the clothes were still very good; but when at length they did wear out, where were the new ones to come from? “ That will be poverty,” thought Cecily. “ This is a sharp foretaste.” Fortunately the children were very well. If she had had to pay doctor’s bills on their account, she who was accustomed to the other end of a doctor’s bill, Cecily would have felt that she was indeed supplied with matter for irony.

And just when money for necessities was not too plentiful, Cecily began to long for diversion. Reading in the evening was all very well; but one got tired of spending every evening that way. There were times when Cecily tingled for movement and excitement: she would have given anything to step back even into Jefferson society, to dine elegantly, to dance, to talk for the sake of talking, to flirt a little. Her social impulse had not died during the last year; sometimes it seemed to be quite horribly alive. “At my age, and with my experience! I’m ashamed of me! ” she would say to herself.

Then she would devise some brave excursion to the public museum, or the library, or perhaps to a motion-picture theater, and would put on a clean blouse and go. Anna sometimes went with her at first; but Anna could never be happy away from the children, and would fret all the way for fear that the house might bum down or one of the children develop croup. “ Neither of them has ever had croup,” protested Cecily.

“ There is always a first time,” said Anna darkly.

Finally Anna refused to go at all. She excused herself on the plea that she had outings enough with the children, while her mistress was “ shut up in that office.” “ Go by yourself, Mrs. Fairchild,” she advised. “ There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Or to enjoy, Cecily felt like adding. However, she went alone a few times; after that she spent her evenings at home. “ There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she admitted. “ But I never have gone out alone in the evening, and I can’t get used to it.” It is evident that there clung to Cecily more of the Jefferson standard than could be expressed simply by Anna’s white cap.

In the middle of an especially dull and straitened week she sat one morning taking Mr. Sims Senior’s dictation. Lately more of Mr. Sims’ work had fallen to her, without giving her incidentally any more definite a view of Mr. Sims himself. It was generally agreed in the outer office that he was “ the brains of the concern ”; but he seemed to have little existence outside the law. He was a misanthropic man, who gave the impression of being absent-minded; and he had the reputation among his subordinates of being a brusque speaker.

He dictated droningly, without hesitation and without interest. Cecily was taking notes almost mechanically; she was growing better acquainted with her shorthand, shifting it bit by bit from her cerebrum to her finger-tips. Suddenly the droning ceased, and Mr. Sims interrupted himself to ask, “Is your husband living, Mrs. Fairchild?”

Cecily had always foreseen that some time some such inquiry would be put to her; it was surprising that the question had held off so long. She drew her breath sharply, and answered simply, “ Yes.”

“Is he a lawyer?” asked Mr. Sims.

“ No. He is a doctor.”

“Was your father a lawyer?”

“ No. He was in business.”

“ You have never worked for a lawyer before? I thought this was your first position? ”

“ It is my first position.” Cecily could not understand the turn that the conversation was taking, but it seemed at least to be away from her domestic affairs.

“ If this is absolutely your first acquaintance with law, how do you manage to do as well as you do? ” he flung at her.

“ I suppose, if I do well, it’s, simply because I put my mind on it,” said Cecily. “ I like the work. Candidly, I didn’t know that I did it particularly well.”

“ You have a mind to put, that’s the beginning,” said Mr. Sims. He went on almost grudgingly, as if the words were wrung from a reluctant soul. “ But putting your mind on a thing is all the battle. Women could get anywhere and do anything if they would put their minds on things, but they won’t. I have a wife, and what does she think of? Society—that only; and she only half thinks of that. I’ve a daughter, a girl with a fine mind; and what does she think of? Dress and young men. Those girls out there in the office with you, what do they think of? How soon they can draw their salary, and what fool things they can spend it on.”

He looked moodily out of the window, and Cecily let her pencil drop and leaned back in her chair. “ As bad as all that? ” she asked quietly.

A gleam almost of amusement came into Mr. Sims’ eyes as he turned to her. “ Am I right about you? ” he asked.

“Only in part. I must admit, however, that I don’t spend my working hours thinking about young men and new clothes,” answered Cecily.

“ Perhaps that explains it.” Mr. Sims began again to dictate without carrying the subject farther.

When some time later Cecily rose with a notebook almost full she was prepared for his usual, “ If you can’t finish that this afternoon, let it wait until tomorrow.” To justify his confidence in her she was prepared today to answer, “ I’ll do it before I leave tonight, Mr. Sims.” But instead of alluding to the dictation he had given, Mr. Sims again looked out of the window, frowned heavily and said, “ After this, when my bell ring9 I should like to have you answer it, if you are at liberty, Mrs. Fairchild. And you will please convey to the outer office news that I have asked you to answer it.”

This meant promotion, of course; but promotion was not Cecily’s first thought on hearing it. From such a source, such words as these were laureled tribute. All the afternoon Cecily worked in a glow, with a wonderful sense of something pleasant in one corner of the mind Mr. Sims so firmly believed to be undivided.

“ Anna,” she said as she ate her chop that evening, “ what do you think has happened to me today?”

Anna waited on table perfectly as ever, though she might have spent the whole day washing; but the conditions of their new life had removed many barriers between her and her mistress, and they often talked together during meals. Looking at Cecily, who was quite starry-eyed with pleasure, Anna replied, “ Something pleasant, I hope, Mrs. Fair-child.”

“ Pleasant enough, but startling,” answered Cecily. “ For the first time in my life, Anna, a man has approved of me for some other reason than because I was pretty and could answer him flippantly.”

Anna supplied Junior with a fresh slice of bread, and poured water all around. Then she remarked austerely, “ I’m sure it need make very little difference to any of us why any of them like us.”

“Anna, you’re an old maid!” Cecily jibed.

“ Yes, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“ Aren’t you even going to ask why the man approved of me? ”

“Why was it, Mrs. Fairchild?”

“ Because I can do things, Anna. I dare say you don’t think I can do much—”

“ I never gave you any cause to say that, Mrs. Fairchild,” Anna was stung into interrupting.

“ You’re right, Anna, and I beg your pardon. You’re a dear, generous old thing, and you believe in me far too implicitly. But implicit belief isn’t the way of the world, Anna; and impersonal liking doesn’t fall to most women. At least, I’ve never before been liked impersonally, and strictly on my merits. I feel that today I took a step, not as a woman, but simply as a human being.”

“ I once heard a lady talk about women and human beings,” said Anna. “ At a woman suffrage meeting it was; another maid took me there. That sort of talk is all very well for that sort of woman. If you could have seen her, Mrs. Fairchild—! But I remember thinking that night, ‘ If I was as pretty as Mrs. Fairchild, I’d like to have people remember all the.time that I was a woman.’”

“ Thank you for your admiration, Anna. You think me much prettier than I am; but even if I were as lovely as a woman could be, don’t you think it is too bad for any one’s life to be moulded wholly by her looks? ”

“ I shouldn’t think so, if I had the looks,” said Anna obstinately.

“ Your life is conditioned by your salads, Anna; and believe me, that’s much better. This salad was heavenly; and how you manage them for the money—! Wouldn’t you like to go out this evening, Anna? I am going to put the children to bed.”

“ I have going enough in the day. Why don’t you go somewhere yourself, Mrs. Fairchild? You slave all day in that office—”

“ While you are recreating at the washtub? Thank you, Anna. I think tonight I’ll attend to the children, and then write a letter.”

No letter would require the major part of an evening for its writing, unless it were a well-considered letter to a man—to Avery Fairchild, for instance. It was indeed to Avery that Cecily wrote that evening. Perhaps she wrote partly in a spirit of brag, but there was no brag in the letter. It told him simply how well the children were, and how well she herself was, and what good care Anna took of them all; and it expressed a hope that he was well, and was not working too hard. It was not a newsy letter; but she reflected as she read it over that it was magnanimous in its tone. “ And why shouldn’t I be magnanimous? ” she thought. “Events have proved me gloriously in the right; magnanimity is only decent.”

She sealed the letter, and put it with her hat and gloves. “ If I mail it in the morning, he ought to get it some time tomorrow,” she thought. “ I wonder how he spends his evenings—working, doubtless. I’d go down and see him sometime, if it wouldn’t look like an advance. But of course it would. And if he hasn’t curiosity enough to want to see me, I certainly haven’t enough to seek him out.”

She went in for a good-night look at her children, so warm and sweet as they slept. She had often indulged in the ceremony in Jefferson, and Avery had almost never gone with her. That had hurt her at the time, but she was glad of it now; if her life and Avery’s had been twined together in many little ways, they would have been harder to untwine. As it was, the bond had severed easily enough, and had left her without regrets.

“ Nothing ever bothers me now but money matters, and I suppose money matters will always continue to bother me,” she reflected as she brushed her hair. “ Cecily Fairchild with money enough—it’s inconceivable! Yet there are people who have too much. Once before I die I should like to experience the sensation of having too much money.”

She caught her own eye in the mirror, and smiled at herself. “ I’m afraid the events of the day have rather gone to my young head,” she thought. “ But it’s small wonder if they have. Mr. Sims! Imagine! If his encomiums were known, wouldn’t there be jealousy in ‘ the office ’! ”

CHAPTER XIV

AND AVERY GOES MARCHING ON

A hundred miles away from Cecily and her office—yes, a hundred miles away from anything that concerned her— Avery Fairchild had given himself up to his new life. Looking more like a young monk than ever, he worked at founding his Association. All the backing he could get, he got; all possible publicity, all aid, financial and moral. This thing was to be at once the channel of his future energies and a living monument to his determination. And in spite of inevitable setbacks it grew, grew and prospered and became daily better known and more influential. “ It is splendid,” wrote Grosvenor, hearing through a third person of Avery’s success. “ It is just what I had expected of you,” was Lois Butler’s testimony.

In his zeal for his work, and perhaps in some relief at release from a more formal way of living, Avery made his bachelor arrangements very simple, and found that he became very easily accustomed to such simplicity. His meals he took wherever he happened to be: indeed in these preliminary days he was often out through the state, organizing the work. By way of permanent habitation he rented a furnished room not too far downtown. Cecily would not have called the room “ furnished ” at all. There was no rug, and there were no curtains. Calf-bound books on medicine all down one side frowned at cloth-bound books on sociology and economics lining the other; at one end under the windows stood a large desk, and opposite, against the fourth wall, a meager dresser. This left no place for the bed except the middle of the floor; and there, both of neces- sity and in the interest of a free play of air, it stood, a narrow white iron bed, with a green-shaded light depending from a cord over it. No one, it would seem, could have a regret, far less a dream, in such a room; it was a place for hard work, solid reading and sound sleep.

The hermit-like nature of his accommodations, and the fact that he was after all not a hermit, may account for the fact that after he had got things once in trim, and this independent work of his was beginning to go, and to go mightily, Avery found himself suddenly unwilling to devote his entire time and thought to his work. When he came home at night he wanted change, he wanted amusement; sometimes, to his own disgust, he quite acutely wanted Cecily, who when the mood was on her could be most distinctly amusing.

Failing Cecily, he managed presently to find amusement elsewhere. People in lines of work similar to his own made a friend of him, and he learned to enjoy their company, and to seek it. Wealthy people whom he met in financing his work had him to dinner; and although there was in his intercourse with them the damning thought that he must be always at his best, he got a certain wry pleasure even from being at his best. That must be how women felt in most of their social life, it occurred to him in passing: they had not simply to enjoy themselves, they had to succeed.

When he had no engagement with either the great or the simple, there were always, now that he had become a city-dweller, people in the mass for him to have recourse to. Avery alone was of course not handicapped in going out as was Cecily alone; and with his natural lack of sociability he soon grew to prefer these solitary excursions to any others, although he admitted that their novelty might be half their charm. He went to the theater a great deal, single tickets being always within his reach. He did not know a good play from a bad one, and he never would; he went as much for the audience as for the play. He liked to feel these hundreds near him, all so intent on the mimic lives across the footlights, all for the moment so unconscious of self.

Then there were the cinema theaters, so dear to the economical heart of the populace, with their shadowy dramas flickering ghost-like at one end of their gloomy auditoriums, and the unceremonious arrival and departure of their patrons. When even the cinema theater seemed too confining, there were the city streets, where air and motion might be had while a man watched people. The people of a great city, moving along at night under the lamps—what a strange and many-sided phenomenon! How much there was that one would never know about these figures, glimpsed for a moment and then gone; and yet, from the elegant fur-wrapped ladies in limousines to the poor drab on the crossing, how much one could after all tell at a glance! Flitting creatures, as flitting and as shadowy as those in the cinema —strange, significant creatures, each of them, too, an observer in some degree, and each in his own consciousness the center of his own little universe.

The rude removal from domesticity of a man by nature neither vicious nor vulgar often has as its first result some such broadening or, at any rate, loosening of interest. Avery floated into the general so easily that once the first wrench was over he seldom felt much regret for the particular. After one of the visits of his children it always took him some time to regain his usual equanimity; but he did not see his children very often. As for Cecily, he was doing very well without her, though that now remote lady seemed neither to know nor to care how well he did. Sometimes he worried about her; connubial habit still had so much hold on him. But he too felt that he was now settled for life; and he would certainly have regarded it as an insult if any one had told him that for all his gravity he was still a man, and a young man.

With women as women he had now nothing to do. He met and talked with many women in the course of his work, but he did not regard them precisely as women: they corresponded to “ patients ” in the life he had left. He employed a woman organizer, who was certainly a most useful person, invaluable in “ getting at ” women’s clubs; and in his outer office there were two women stenographers. But the one he seldom saw, and the others he never looked at. In fact he was now living a fine free celibate life, with as much possibility of permanence as a celibate life usually has. To his own view, his life stretched before him like a long, narrow, clean-swept road, visible and uniform to the very end. Chance and change, except as they might come to him through his work, could hardly intrude into such a life. Avery fixed his eyes on that imaginary road until it fairly hypnotized him, until his belief in it was almost literal. He did not dread change only because he no longer believed it possible: for him all things were determined.

Into this clean, bare, narrow road came a vagrant breeze, light enough but disturbing; and Avery perceived that he was still under the dominion of chance and change. He did not, however, recognize the disturbing element at once; how should he, indeed, when it was introduced by such a person as Mrs. Kiteley Van Duzen? Avery would have exonerated Mrs. Van Duzen in advance from any knowledge, even, of disturbing elements, not to speak of propagation of them. She was one of Avery’s oldest acquaintances in Chicago, and had been very valuable to him in starting his Association. She was a large, solid woman, powerful physically and socially, who dabbled ponderously in philanthropy, and was suspected of sportive touches of socialism; she was saved from being ridiculous by her deep appreciation of the necessity for backing altruistic ideas with coin of the realm. In mere ordinary decency Avery was grateful to Mrs. Van Duzen, and loyally suppressed the irritation that the mere sight of her never failed to rouse in him. Why need any woman, he wondered, even a philanthropic, middle-aged woman, have such a battleship bearing, and such large, uncompromising feet?

Mrs. Van Duzen sailed in upon Avery one fine afternoon, taking the outer office by storm and at once invading the inner. She dropped into a chair that creaked under her weight, planted her feet squarely and demanded, “ How are things going, Dr. Fairchild?”

Avery had never fully got over expecting to hear her address him as “ young man.” Struggling to forget her feet, he answered urbanely, “ Very well indeed, Mrs. Van Duzen. We are beginning to have more calls now than we can take care of. I think I could put another organizer into the state field at once, if I had any certain prospect of being able to pay him.”

“ If that is the case, we must get more money. We cannot allow our growth to be hampered by simple lack of means.”

“ You agree with me, however, that we must pay our way as we go? ”

“ Of course. Under the circumstances you will not be displeased to learn that I came to talk with you about another contributor?”

"Another contributor? Dear lady, lead me to him,” said Avery.

She smiled; she could appreciate his jocosity. “It isn’t he; it’s she. I’m speaking of a young widow, Mrs. Morrison Keppel—she was Caroline Russell,” Mrs. Van Duzen informed him.

The name conveyed nothing to Avery; he murmured politely, “ Ah, yes? ”

“ She married Morrison Keppel when he had grown children, some of them older than she,” Mrs. Van Duzen went on for his enlightenment. “ He had a big fortune, solidly invested in downtown real estate. He was violently in love with her, and the girl wasn’t a fool. Well, he died a year ago. Of course she has plenty of money; and as she is in mourning, she has not much opportunity of spending it.”

“ An ideal contributor, I see,” said Avery. “ I shall be delighted to make her acquaintance, Mrs. Van Duzen. How soon can I? ”

“ This afternoon, I believe. I told her that if you weren’t busy I might bring you up in my car, and the poor girl was excited at the thought. She lives alone except for an unmarried sister-in-law, who is a good duenna, I suppose, but no companion whatever for her. After luncheon Caroline has a walk or a drive, and then mopes until bedtime. She is mourning very strictly, you see.”

Avery rose to get his hat. “ How much do you think a call from us would be worth to her?” he asked in passing.

Again Mrs. Van Duzen knew that he was speaking in jest, and again she appreciated his jest; but in her reply was visible the shrewdness which underlay her ponderous peculiarities. “ I should think it would be worth about two hundred dollars,” she said.

Avery closed his desk. “ If we can make two hundred dollars in one afternoon—”

“ In half an afternoon. It’s late now; she is sure to have returned from her walk.”

When they arrived at her house, Mrs. Keppel had, indeed, returned from her outing, though there was nothing in her appearance to suggest that she had recently been out; her cheeks were as pale as the white crape gown that she wore. When they were ushered in she was lounging before the drawing-room fire, listlessly fitting together pieces of a wooden puzzle on a board affixed to the arm of her chair. At her elbow sat her sister-in-law, a sinister female who gave the impression of being always at people’s elbows. She was of a thinness that no dressmaker could disguise, and increasing deafness had given her a horrible peering look that made her resemble an inquisitive death’s head. “ A perfect Gorgon,” thought Avery.

The room in which they sat had been designed for magnificence; with the passing of years it had grown a little subdued and faded, and was improved thereby. A sweet, old-fashioned smell, possibly lavender, which clung to all Mrs. Keppel’s garments, had been so diffused about by her occupancy that it now clung to the very chairs where she had sat. The room or the odor, or the dreadful duenna, or possibly the first sight of Caroline Keppel’s pale face and ashy blonde hair, gave Avery the feeling that here was a creature for whom life had stopped. From the vantage point of a man whose life lay so definitely ahead of him, he dared to pity her almost before they had spoken.

Later he decided that instead of having stopped short, her life had not yet begun. He had an unexpected opportunity for finding out. The Gorgon was carried off at once by Mrs. Van Duzen, and the alternate pipe and boom of their voices could be heard at intervals from somewhere across the hall, like an intermittent fife and drum duet. Avery sat down near the fire, and Mrs. Keppel gave him a little shy smile.

“What is the puzzle that you’re doing?” he asked.

“ It’s a new one; I don’t even know yet what the picture will represent when I get it together.”

“ I don’t see how you can ever get it together.” Avery bent over the pieces on the board.

“ Oh, I can; but of course it takes a lot of time. I suppose you think it’s a very silly way to spend time? ”

“ No, I hadn’t thought that.”

“ I think it is,” she maintained. “ Very silly, indeed, though not perhaps as silly as some others. I suppose you never waste any time? ”

“ Do you think me a paragon, Mrs. Keppel? Or do you think that’s how I try to impress people? ”

“ I think you’re a man who is doing a splendid work, and one that must take an infinite amount of courage,” she said. “ Mrs. Van Duzen has been telling me about you. To keep people from getting sick, and prevent all that suffering and misery—it’s so wonderful. And it is being done—you are doing it.”

“ We are making a very modest little beginning,” said Avery.

“ That isn’t to deny that you have great aims? ”

“ Well, no, I wouldn’t deny that.”

She mused for a moment, with her eyes on the fire; before that she had looked, shyly but quite continuously, at him. The profile that was turned to him was lovely in a delicate way, though the mouth was quite unformed; it seemed the profile of a very young woman. Caroline Keppel was twenty-eight years old, as Avery learned afterward; but she looked younger than that, and seemed still younger than she looked. Her life had done little to mature her. Only a year out of school she had been married to the elderly and fastidious Keppel, who had been won by her wistful and rather unintelligent youth; and during their married life he had done his best to preserve the charm that had attracted him. Between him and the Gorgon, who had lived in his house since the death of his first wife, Caroline had spent her married years; and as yet Keppel’s death had meant only a familiar presence removed, and a passing from two keepers into the closer custody of one, and into the path decreed by tyrant custom for those in mourning. Caroline had never rebelled against her lot, had scarcely even thought about the fact that she had a fixed manner of life. But today there was in her shy eyes a standard feminine perception of the fact that the caller who came on such a noble mission was a young man, and distinctly handsome.

“ Tuberculosis,” said Avery after a pause, “ could be stamped out in a generation, if only everybody would set about it.”

He was quoting from one of his pamphlets. It was growing fatally frequent with him to quote his own pamphlets and speeches, especially his speeches. But something in her candid, uncritical eye, which turned to him as he spoke, made him smile and add, “ Of course, that won’t be in your and my generation.”

“ But it’s a wonderful idea,” she maintained. “ And to go about diffusing ideas like that must be a wonderful life.”

“ Such a life as one may make sacrifices to obtain,” he said seriously. “ And at that, it isn’t all beer and skittles.”

“ But it has a purpose. And for the sake of a purpose—”

“ A purpose compensates for much,” he agreed.

“ How did you ever gather courage to undertake such a thing? ” she demanded. “ Didn’t you have to make a—a break, and wasn’t it awful to do?”

“ Yes. Yes to both questions,” said Avery. “ But the courage was supplied from without.”

“ By another man? ”

“ Hardly. By a woman.

This did interest her, even made the color come into her cheeks. “ Women don’t often do things like that,” she said.

“ Oh, yes they do! ” said Avery. “ Simon-pure disinterested things, much oftener than you perhaps have any idea.”

“ Then tell me of this one. I should like to know about such a woman.”

Avery was nothing loath. He had, indeed, by this time evolved a story of Lois Butler and himself that was a fine piece of idealistic narration. Grosvenor would have chuckled naughtily if he could have heard it, and hearing it would probably have made Mrs. Butler a little ashamed. But Mrs. Keppel drank it in; to her there was something very noble and affecting in. the story. Cecily did not appear in it, unless the hearer chose to personify as “ wife ” certain malign influences felt all through. Along at the end, however, Avery mentioned his children; and Mrs. Keppel wished at once to know all about them. Avery particularized as to age, sex and coloring, and conveyed the information that they did not live in Chicago, and he saw them only occasionally. “ I live by myself, batching it,” he explained.

She examined into his arrangements as an interested child might: made him describe his little room up two flights of stairs—" You really live in only one room? ”—exclaimed over his irregular arrangements in regard to meals, and shook her head at the idea of his lonely evenings. Then abruptly she reverted to his children. “ It must be nice to have little children,” she said. “ My husband had three, but they were all grown when I married him. Grown children don’t count, but the little ones are sweet. Won’t you bring your children to see me some time when they are visiting you? ”

It seemed droll to Avery, but his polite promise evidently made her happy. When a moment later the Gorgon and Mrs. Van Duzen reappeared, like an impressive procession of the major and minor proprieties, Mrs. Keppel gave him a rapid, happy smile, as if there were between them a delightful secret understanding. A minute afterward he might well have doubted that she had ever smiled at him, for under the eye of her sister-in-law Mrs. Keppel bade Dr. Fairchild a very colorless farewell, scarcely lifting her eyes as she did so.

Avery was not aware of having been greatly interested by Mrs. Keppel; indeed, without an unconscious revelation he would not have known that he had been interested at all. But when Mrs. Van Duzen inquired on the homeward ride, “ Was it two hundred? ” Avery realized with a sense of shock that he had forgotten all about the money which was supposed to be his sole object in the interview just ended. Money had not been mentioned by him or Mrs. Keppel.

There was no need of making his forgetfulness public. Avery simply said to Mrs. Van Duzen, “ You are a prophet, daughter of a prophet.” And while she, pleased at her own sagacity and his appreciation, went on to explain that she had led Judith Keppel away because Caroline was afraid of her, and would not dare even to give away her own money under Judith’s eyes, Avery was wondering whether Mrs. Van Duzen could detect the absence of that two hundred dollars from the annual report of the Association.

CHAPTER XV

THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER

He did not have to falsify his books in order to pacify his friend; for only a few days after his meeting with Mrs. Keppel Avery received a note from her, accompanying her check for one hundred dollars. He looked at the check first—he felt it to be bad manners, but it was done before he thought. Then he read her note quite slowly and carefully. “ I should like to see you again and hear more about your work,” she assured him. That would be easily possible, thought Avery, as she had previously heard not about his work, but about himself. How could any man be expected, when a pretty woman was questioning him about himself, to turn the conversation to business matters?

“ If you could lunch with me some day, perhaps we could talk more at length,” Mrs. Keppel went on; and then, without so much as an allusion to the check inclosed, she signed herself cordially his. Avery read the note a second time, and decided that it sounded like an invitation. Well, he thought, why not? A man must lunch somewhere; and in work like his it certainly paid to be courteous to wealthy contributors. He reached for his telephone, and looked up her number.

Mrs. Keppel’s voice sounded slightly frightened; Avery made his soothing. “ I wished to make an appointment with you to talk about the work,” he said after a moment.

She drew her breath audibly; then she demanded, “ Will you—can you come to lunch?”

“ I should be charmed to.”

“ When can you come? ”

“ At almost any time. I don’t have many luncheon engagements.”

“ Can you come today? ” she brought out desperately.

“ Indeed I can,” he said heartily.

She laughed in some excitement. “ I shall expect you at one o’clock,” she said, and then added with another laugh, “ Don’t forget.”

Avery did not forget; he arrived ten minutes before the hour, feeling a bit uncomfortable, as if the outcome of these so simple actions might at some time place him in a false position. He did not look uncomfortable, however, only very handsome, and very sleek, and faintly amused.

Mrs. Keppel was waiting for him before the drawingroom fire, and she made no pretense of employment: she was frankly waiting. Also, she was alone. “ Judith isn’t at home today,” she said at once, feeling apparently that she ought to say something; then she added impulsively, “ Wasn’t it all right, my asking you when she wasn’t here? ”

“ Very right, indeed,” said Avery consolingly. “ Her deafness makes her very hard to talk to; I’m sure that I shall like it better to have just you to talk with.”

As a matter of fact Avery was not madly delighted at the prospect of a three-hour tete-a-tete; but he felt the beginning of a kind of pity for Mrs. Keppel. This luncheon represented adventure to her; it was an escapade. The notion of escapade connected with lunching in her own house, under the eyes of her own butler, opposite so staid a person as Avery thought himself, showed him well enough how narrow her experience had been. Viewing the thing according to the standards of the two women he had known best, he decided that Lois Butler would have drawn therefrom interesting conclusions as to the survivals of mediaeval-ism in modern society; and Cecily would have been frankly amused.

Cecily would have liked the punctilious arrangements. Avery found the food heavenly; after his round of cheap restaurants he was in trim to do it full justice. Mrs. Keppel, on the other hand, ate almost nothing. Some remaining trace of the ineradicable “ doctor ” led Avery to ask, “ Don’t you ever have any better appetite than this? ”

“ I never have any better appetite,” she answered, “ but I eat more when Judith is here. If I didn’t, she would call a doctor.” The butler had disappeared for a moment, and she lowered her voice to say, “ Not that even a doctor isn’t sometimes a welcome diversion.”

“ Thank you,” said Avery.

She looked bewildered. “ You mean—? Oh, of course!

You are a doctor yourself. I won’t forget that again.”

“ Forget it as often as you like,” said Avery. “ It’s as hard to make most people forget that as it is to take away the priestly character. People call you ‘ doctor ’ in the most personal connections; they put it on your tombstone when you die; jf you live in a small town they call your wife ‘ Mrs. Doctor.’ You can abandon your profession, but you can’t drop the title. Sometimes I think it would be a great luxury to be once more just plain Mister.”

“ I’ll call you Mister if you like,” she said.

“ Do,” said Avery, laughing.

Perhaps she felt that she had been bold to say that; at any rate, she now began to talk about books and pictures and travel, and with some determination held the conversation to these subjects. She had been abroad six or seven times, and Keppel had led her through a considerable amount of carefully selected reading. She must have been a patient little thing all her life, Avery thought: receptive he could hardly call her, for she was actually unscathed by the culture with which she had been so assiduously surrounded.

At the close of the meal she led him back to the drawingroom. Avery stretched out his legs to the fire. He was permeated by a vast feeling of leisure, and in his life leisure was a delightful novelty. He caught Mrs. Keppel’s eye upon him, and smiled. “ Do you know,” he said, “ I think I should like to sit by a fire such as this for a solid week. Sit by a fire, and do nothing but picture puzzles.”

“ I haven’t done any puzzles lately. I’ve been reading this.” She displayed for his approval a volume picked up from a nearby table. It was one of Lois Keith’s housing studies, written perhaps ten years before.

“How do you like it?” he asked.

“ It seems so shocking,” she said simply. “ The poor children in those places, you know.”

“ If I were you, I shouldn’t think too much about it,” said Avery.

“ But people like you give their lives just to better such conditions! ” she exclaimed.

“ Once a person is in it, it’s work like any other work. But you won’t do any good just by worrying yourself about such conditions.”

“ You think I couldn’t do anything about them but worry? ”

“ What could you do? ”

What, indeed, could she? Mrs. Keppel sighed, but with an air of relinquishment she returned the book to the table. Avery had a foolish feeling that he had been cruel to her. In an effort to find a more agreeable subject he said, “ I had a letter from my boy this morning. It is the first I’ve ever had; he’s just learning to write.”

Her face lighted up instantly. “ How charming! Have you the letter with you? ”

After some fumbling Avery produced it. Mrs. Keppel bent over it eagerly, and gave a little, soft laugh as she made out the huge' uncertain scrawl. “ The darling! ” she exclaimed. “ The darling! ”

“ It makes me feel like an old man to get letters from my son,” said Avery. “ He will be going off to college before I know it.”

“ Do you suppose he will be a doctor? ” asked Mrs. Keppel. “ Or a social worker? ”

Candor would have compelled Avery to say, “ I suppose he and his mother will settle that between them.” But in this atmosphere a reference to Junior’s mother was somehow not easy; he contented himself with replying, “ Either or both, I suppose, or neither, if he likes. Nowadays in these matters we allow people to choose for themselves.”

“ You think that people should be allowed a good deal of individual freedom?” she asked slowly.

“ I think that they are allowed it. In all matters of real importance the times are grown anarchical. That is my conviction, Mrs. Keppel.”

“Matters of real importance, you say?”

“Yes. My life,” explained Avery, “is in its major aspects mine to do with as I will. It is free from church interference, tolerably free from state control, hampered by public opinion only if I am a sensitive fool, or if the work I want to do demands public support. But if I chose to come into your drawing-room of an evening in an unstarched collar, consider the uproar that would be created among visitors.”

She laughed. “ Yes. My sister-in-law would consider that real anarchy. I am not sure that I should mind, however.”

Something in her tone made Avery look at her quickly; it seemed to him that she had not taken his remark for the simple persiflage that he had intended. Perhaps he ought to be careful what he said to her; yet in view of her years and her status any very elaborate care seemed superfluous and absurd. Women were not brought up in convents or kept in cotton wool nowadays. Ah, but Mrs.

Keppel was the old swathed type; and that constituted both the pity of things and her peculiar appeal. “ Don’t you ever try to be an anarchist, Mrs. Keppel,” he said. “ It wouldn’t do.”

“ I didn’t mean to try,” she said, a little startled, but a little hurt too.

“ Let me take that book away with me,” he requested.

“ Yes, if you care to. You will probably get more from it than I could,” she answered. “ But I may,” she said after a pause, “ I may give you some money for your sick people, mayn’t I? ”

Avery smiled at her wistfulness: money was not usually given with this air. She misinterpreted his smile, and hastened to say, “ It would be such a pleasure to me, you know; and I have more money than I know what to do with.”

“ I shall always be glad to have your help,” said Avery heartily. “ Don’t think that I do not appreciate your interest in us. I would rather you didn’t go wading into this modern muck and mud by yourself—that’s all. If you would like to see some of our workings, I’ll take you myself out to a sanitarium, or to the Babies’ Pavilion. Should you like to go? ”

“ Oh, I should love it! You will really take me? And you will let me send you a check every month, so that I may feel I am doing something for the sick babies——”

“ You may set the day yourself,” said Avery. “ Only let me know a little in advance, so that I shall be in Chicago. I sometimes have to be out of town, you know.”

“I shall love it!” she repeated.

The object of his visit having now been accomplished, Avery was of course at liberty to go; but he did not go just yet. He liked the great, quiet room, and the firelight, and the chair that conformed so well to his body; he liked to sit here with this woman; he was even beginning to think that he liked her. She was such a relief from his occupations of every day; she was so different from most of the people with whom he had to do. She had a certain pale beauty, which a rich setting was well calculated to bring out; she had, above all, the appeal of her limitations. The princess imprisoned in a tower had been the favorite heroine of Avery’s boyhood; but he had of late years got out of the way of ever expecting to meet a princess in a tower.

The talk took an amiable meandering turn; it even allowed itself occasional silences, those last proofs of congeniality. Mrs. Keppel would never stimulate a man to effort, far less alter the course of his life: Avery felt that from the beginning. But in the peace and leisure of her presence a man could rest. At times one was very desirous of rest, and it was singularly hard to come by.

Their idyl was interrupted by a maid, a close-lipped, Argus-eyed maid, who reminded Avery of the absent Miss Judith Keppel. “ The car is here, Mrs. Keppel, if you’re ready for your ride. Miss Keppel said that I was to remind you,” 6he said.

Mrs. Keppel frowned, and her lip trembled; evidently she wished to rebel, and probably she did not quite dare. Avery hastened to say, “ Do take me to the office, Mrs. Keppel, if you are going that way.”

“ Surely,” she answered. “ That will save a little time for you, won’t it? ”

“ It will make up for some that I have spent here so agreeably while other things were pressing upon me,” he said.

Mrs. Keppel allowed herself to be enveloped in a black fur coat and crowned by a black mourning hat and veil of undeniable smartness, but vastly unbecoming to her pale tones. She and Avery got into the limousine, and she was whirled off for her afternoon’s airing, exactly as if she had been a baby or an invalid. Did she hate her dependence, he wondered, or would she some day come to hate it? Or had she simply been humiliated because her dependence was shown before a stranger?

She seemed at least to enjoy herself during their ride together; doubtless she was often lonely. When she set him down at his office she shook hands with him, and murmured shyly, “ You won’t forget? ”

“ No, indeed I sha’n’t. Let’s go some time next week,” he answered. “ Telephone me—or rather, I will telephone you.”

She was charming, he reflected as he settled himself to his work; but it was with a charm that would never come between a man and his business. In proof of that fact he put in a very good two hours at his desk, pitying Mrs. Keppel a little, perhaps, because she was of a type so mild.

It never occurred to Avery that any type, no matter how mild, has its characteristic defenses. From his office Mrs. Keppel drove to Mrs. Van Duzen’s, and stopped for a cup of tea. There were only the two of them; and when the talk grew intimate Mrs. Keppel divulged the fact that she had seen Dr. Fairchild, and heard her friend grow warm in his praise.

“ He talks about his children sometimes,” she said presently in a pause. “Is his wife dead?”

“ I’m not sure, but I think they are divorced,” said Mrs. Van Duzen.

Whereupon Caroline looked so shocked and hurt that her friend quickly changed the subject: Caroline was such a simple, good, old-fashioned sort of woman that probably the very word divorce was distasteful to her. Thus Mrs. Van Duzen, never in all her wisdom suspecting that the guileless Caroline had discovered exactly what she wished to discover, and had thereupon turned the conversation before there was need of her making any disclosures herself.

CHAPTER XVI

A LUNCHEON PARTY

Avery and Mrs. Keppel made the promised excursion to look at the Babies’ Pavilion; later he lunched twice at her house. After that he did not seek her for some time: the acquaintance was very pleasant, but he did not care to have it ripen into intimacy. It might never have so ripened had it not been for a combination of circumstances which had in the beginning nothing to do with it.

Along in that second year Grosvenor came, by Avery’s invitation, to spend a week with him. During that time the eldqr man reviewed every aspect of the work the younger was doing. To Avery it was an absorbing and wonderful week; and he had throughout a feeling that Grosvenor was satisfied with him, was proud of his pupil’s work and fond of his pupil’s person. To a man who was, whether he realized it or not, lonely, the personal affection meant almost more than the professional pride.

But that was not all of it. On the last morning of his stay Grosvenor interrupted Avery’s consultation with his organizer to say, “ Fairchild, we are going to lunch today promptly, do you understand? ”

“ I’m never sure how promptly I can go,” Avery demurred. “ What is the special need for promptness today? ” “ Some one else is going with us, of course.”

“ Some one else? ”

“ Yes. A lady.”

“ A lady? ” Avery’s heart leaped up.

" The lady. No less a lady than Lois herself.”

“Oh! How did you get track of her? Is she staying in Chicago? ”

“ She’s stopping off for the day, on her way home from a lecture tour. I had written to her that I was to be here, and I flatter myself that she is here largely to see me. Probably you believe she has come to see you. Honestly, didn’t you know she was coming? ”

“ Honestly, I didn’t. She writes to me sometimes, to be sure; but it is weeks since I last heard from her.”

“ Oh, I never hear from her,” said Grosvenor. “ But now that I am so near, I was anxious to see her.”

“ Is her husband with her? ” asked Avery.

“ She wasn’t clear on that point. I rather think not.”

“ That’s too bad. He would be so convenient for me to talk to,” said Avery. Grosvenor chuckled.

They did leave the office promptly, and one of them, at least, went eagerly. At her lake-front hotel Mrs. Butler came promptly down to them, looking her resplendent best. She smiled radiantly, and gave a hand to each. “ To think of our being here together, the three of us! ” she said.

It was wonderful, to be sure; and in spite of Avery’s fears that three would be more than company, it was purely delightful. They sat at a small table, a table that just fitted three, in one of the dining-rooms of the complicated hotel; on one side of them was a window, on the other a palm. As Avery had foreseen, Lois and Grosvenor did at first most of the talking; what he had not foreseen was the nature of the conversation. If he had been ten years younger, it would have been a disappointment to him: for these two people, both so distinguished in their serious calling, both such guiding-stars to Avery, jested frivolously and continually, and sometimes not very adroitly. Grosvenor rallied Lois about everything, from her husband to her hat, which she had bought that morning, and he pretended to consider audacious for a person of her years. Lois was not able to give altogether as good as she got; but at least she received everything with unimpaired good humor, a good humor that included Avery and kept him from feeling left out. He wasn’t left out, even if he didn’t talk much; and it was pleasant not to have to talk. He could simply sit and look at her. She was so handsome and contented that she would have rejoiced even a casual eye; and toward Lois Butler Avery never would be casual.

He had indeed got so thoroughly to enjoy the present arrangement that, when they had finished eating, it was almost with displeasure he heard Lois say, laying down her single cigarette, “ Dr. Grosvenor, suppose you go and get me some magazines to read on the train.”

Grosvenor rose obediently, though he asked with a significant grin, “Shall I hurry back?” Lois and Avery were left alone at the table; it was growing late, and nearby tables were all vacant. The afternoon sunshine brought out a reddish gleam in Lois’s hair, and flecks of gold in her eyes. Her face was all friendliness as she turned to him. “ Now,” she said, “ tell me how you are getting on.”

“ Oh, magnificently! My work has gone better than I ever dared to hope—”

She swept his precious work aside with a gesture of her fine hands. “ But you,” she insisted. “ You yourself? ”

“What do you judge of me myself?” asked Avery, putting his elbows on the table. He did not quite know what to tell her; but he was also honestly anxious for her opinion.

She considered him seriously, as if she were in honor bound to tell him what she thought of him. “ You certainly are absorbed in your work,” she said after a moment, “and you seem purposeful. I like a man to have a purposeful look. But you’re thinner,—you are getting too thin; and you look somehow—how shall I put it?—like a man who spends a great deal of his time alone.”

“ Of course I do spend much time alone; but I like that, you know,” said Avery.

“ You may like it, but it isn’t good for you.”

“ Until my domestic status is settled, I may be constrained to spend a good share of my time alone,” Avery muttered, his eyes on the tablecloth. “ Lois,” he said suddenly, “ do you ever see or hear anything of my wife? ”

“ I never see her, and I haven’t heard anything authoritative from her. Of course I sometimes hear ordinary gossip; but you don’t care to know what ordinary gossip says.” “ I can guess that well enough. But I should so like to see some one I could rely on, who has seen her and could tell “You hear from her, surely?”

“ Oh, yes! When I send her a check she acknowledges it; and sometimes she writes to me between checks, short letters, straight to the point and abominably cheerful. They don’t tell me anything.”

“ And you never see her? ”

“ Never. My children come to see me sometimes, under convoy of a maid; but Cecily never comes.”

“Avery Fairchild,” said Lois abruptly, “are you pining for Cecily?”

Avery flushed, but he met the question squarely. “ Certainly not, except perhaps in the sense in which one may isometimes pine for, say, one’s departed youth. It’s a sentimental regret, no more. But I worry about her. She’s young, and alone; and if things went wrong with her, she wouldn’t let me know. Then she’s not a particularly strong woman, and she doesn’t always treat herself as she ought. In short, I’m still enough her husband so that I do allow myself to worry about her.”

“ That must be mighty unpleasant.” Lois was looking away, with an expression he did not understand; but she looked at him to say, “ Would it set your mind at ease if some common friend went to see her, and learn at first hand how she’s getting qn? ”

“ Where am I to find that common friend? ”

“ I would go, if you cared to have me.”

“ You would go? When? ”

“ At once, on my way home.”

“ You would actually do that for me? ”

“ Why not? ” she said. “ I shall be glad to.”

Across the table Avery took her hand and pressed it. “ My best of friends, and as kind as ever,” he said. “ I can trust you.”

“ Then it’s settled,” she said, her firm fingers in his. Again that expression which he did not understand came over her face; and Grosvenor, returning just then, surprised it.

“ Fairchild admires Lois whole-heartedly,” he thought. “ I judge however from Lois’s looks that she has been playing the part of Almighty God once too often, and has done something which she regrets.”

When he and Avery, after their farewells to Lois, walked away together, Grosvenor remarked carelessly, “ Lois looks well, doesn’t she? She is getting a little bit stouter, but weight is becoming to those large women.”

Avery did not answer, and his friend added mischievously, “ Do you still think her as much of a little tin angel as ever? ”

Avery laughed. “ Who ever said that I considered her an angel?” he demanded.

Yet his state at the moment was not unlike that of a man who has just been in conference with an angel. He walked as if he were walking on air, looking about him but not seeing anything, smiling vaguely, and at intervals trying to frown, so as to keep himself from getting too far above the earth. Well, why not? Did not the word Grosvenor had spoken in derision fit well enough in fact? Lois Butler had been Avery’s herald angel, trumpeting him to battle, his guardian angel, solving his difficulties for him. Even apart from his recollection of her face and voice, the thought of her divine promise to see Cecily was enough to make him light-hearted. If Lois had interested herself, no difficulties could last.

CHAPTER XVII

AND A MORNING CALL

Avery’s instinctive trust in Lois—he would have been ashamed to admit that it was instinctive—carried him buoyantly through the next two days. If Lois was representing his interest, he felt that his interest was certain to succeed; and wisely enough, he did not stop to ask himself just what he meant in this case by his interest, or how on earth, if that interest were any sort of suit with Cecily, he could possibly expect it to succeed.

The third morning happened to be Saturday. Still in his mood of divine complacence, Avery sat smiling as he began to open his mail. There was, as he had half-expected, a letter from Lois; and although he noticed it at once, Avery saved it until the last, to prolong the luxury of anticipation. A foolish thing to do—he smiled at himself; but he wanted leisure to read Lois, and to read of Cecily, and to read out of the letter its last particle of meaning. Perhaps—who knew?—perhaps he might even save the letter until afternoon, and devote his half-holiday to its luxurious consumption. That was not at all a bad idea.

In upon his heavenly mood came sounds of discussion, proceeding from the outer office. Avery’s stenographer was asking some one for a card; and that some one, a woman, was answering that she had no card, but that Dr. Fair-child would certainly see her. Some charitable or social-minded woman, no doubt, well-meaning and more or less of a nuisance. It was odd, though, how a man’s mind influenced his senses. Simply because he was thinking about Cecily, and that woman in the outer office happened to combine a nervous eager voice with a quick staccato mode of utterance, Avery almost believed for a moment that it was Cecily. So strong was his impression that he half-rose from his chair to go and see; and then sank back, ashamed of the idea, just as the victorious intruder, brushing past interference, appeared upon his threshold.

It was Cecily. Cecily, slim and eager-eyed. Cecily, crisp and alert. Cecily, watching him critically, and completely mistress of herself. So opportune was her arrival, and so exactly did her appearance tally with his recollection, that for a moment Avery doubted the evidence of his own senses. It seemed as if his thought must in some mysterious way have evoked her. He sat and stared.

“ May I come in? ” she asked blithely. “ May I close the door? Thank you. How are you, Avery?”

“ I am well,” Avery managed to say. “ Won’t you sit down? ”

“ Thank you.” She sat down, in the chair his visitors usually occupied. It was so placed that she now faced him across his desk, just as she had faced him hundreds of times across the breakfast-table. Her nearness, so strange and yet so oddly familiar, could not help but affect him. The blood came up under his dark skin, and then receded, leaving him ghastly. Initiative in the conversation he had to leave to her.

His embarrassment did not altogether displease her. “Are you surprised to see me?” she asked.

“ I’m delighted to see you,” he said. “ Did you come down this morning?”

“ Yes. On the early train. I have Saturday afternoon, of course; so I could come down for the day simply by asking for the morning.”

It was very queer, the idea of Cecily’s asking anybody for one of her own mornings. He didn’t like to remark on the queerness; so he asked instead, “ You have some shopping to do?”

She shook her head. “ You have the idea that women never do anything but shop? ”

“ They do things enough these days,” he answered, beginning to recover his equilibrium. “ Some rather rum things, too.”

“ Thank you,” she said demurely.

“ I didn’t mean you, of course,” he added.

“ Of course not.”

“ Where are you going, if I may ask? ”

“ It’s no secret. I want to spend some time in the Art Institute this morning. I like the Institute, anyway; and I was there one Saturday when I was a girl. I liked it better then than any other time, before I saw not only the collections, but also the city’s foreign population, strolling through the corridors and gaping at the statuary. I’d like to know what sort of impression Abyssinian sculpture leaves on the mind of a Croatian laboring-man, wouldn’t you, Avery? ”

An idea that might have occurred earlier to a stupider man was beginning to make itself clear to Avery. Cecily had come, must have come, from some sort of interest in him. He couldn’t as yet grasp the quality or extent of that interest, but he determined to meet it half-way. “ Where do you lunch? ” he wanted to know. “ Have you an engagement? ”

“ An engagement with Cecily, to lunch as fast as possible; there are other things in Chicago more interesting than its food. I have a ticket for the symphony concert this afternoon.”

“ The symphony concert? I didn’t know that you went in very hard for things of that sort, Cecily.”

“ I didn’t always. But one may get rather hungry for things of that sort,” she answered.

The picture that these words drew for Avery was not without pathos; but there was no pathos in the bright eyes of his companion as she glanced about his office. “ A snug little place you have here, Avery,” she remarked. Avery nodded. “ And busy, too, isn’t it? ”

“ Yes. We can’t complain of not being busy,” he said. “ But as you are an infrequent visitor, we’ll make some concessions in your honor. Cecily, won’t you lunch with me? I’ll trail about the Art Institute with you before, and disappear immediately afterward, if you want me to; but I should very much like to lunch with you, Cecily.” For some reason the idea seemed to shock her. “ Oh, no! ” she exclaimed. “ No, I really couldn’t, Avery.”

“ Why not? It’s your duty to, I think,” he teased. “ I haven’t been to the Art Institute since I’ve lived in Chicago, Cecily. It takes a Roman to be genuinely ignorant of Rome. Please, Cecily?”

She leaned across the desk and scrutinized him. “ Avery,” she demanded, “ are you trying to be gallant? ” “ Hang it, no! ” he shouted. “ But since when has it been forbidden for a man to take a woman he admires very much out to lunch with him?”

“ You see nothing peculiar in the circumstances? ” she asked.

“ Yes, I do. But the peculiarity all argues for me. I see you only once in a hundred years or so, and I naturally want to prolong the sight for an hour or two. What’s wrong in that? I don’t bother you very often.”

“ You don’t bother me at all,” she said placidly. “ I came here to bother you, if you choose to look at it that way. I don’t blame you if you do; but my motive in coming was actually to relieve your mind. I thought you might like to know how Lois Butler succeeded in her mission, if she hasn’t yet reported. I see she has, though. That’s her writing, isn’t it? ”

Too late Avery made a movement to cover the telltale letter, and then drew back his hand. “ I haven’t read what she has to say,” he stated. “ I am not sure what you mean by her mission; but I think it was kind of her to go and see you as she did.”

“Kind? It was most thoughtful.” Cecily met his look guilelessly. By that he gauged the extent of his blunder, for she was not at all a guileless woman.

“ If her visit has brought you here, it has done good, Cecily,” he said. “ Take her letter and read it if you like.” He thrust the unopened envelope toward her.

Cecily waved it away. “ When you write, be sure to thank her for bringing me,” she said. “ Though, of course, she only made my determination come to a head. I have been intending for ever so long to come and see you.”

“ If I had guessed that you wanted to see me, I should have come to you, Cecily,” he said. “ But I didn’t guess it. You and I are poor correspondents.”

“ There are so many things one can’t say in a letter.”

“ Yes,” he agreed. “ But if you had even intimated that you wanted to see me—”

“ Well, I didn’t intimate it,” she said with a touch of impatience, “ so here I am.”

“ Am I to understand that you want to—to go over the situation a little with me? ” he asked.

“ Just that, Avery.”

She made no movement to begin, however; and for a long silent moment they faced each other across the desk. His first impression that she was just the same as she used to be had now worn off. She was just as pretty—it was astonishing how pretty the creature was; she was dressed just as becomingly and jauntily as of old, though more simply, as befitted a woman who had her own living to earn. But her mobile mouth was quieter than it used to be, and her eyes even more shrewdly observant. She had been living and learning, that was obvious; and by every bit that she learned or lived apart from him, she was so much the more a stranger to him.

That quiet look of hers, gauging him, testing him, not in the least distrusting herself or hesitating on her own account, gave him a feeling of ordeal. “ Cecily,” he said earnestly, “ I’m no match for you in cleverness; and in matters like this a man can’t force a woman—he simply can’t. But I ask you at least to tell whatever you have to tell me, and not to keep me dangling. To what have you made up your mind? If you have made it up, please tell me so quite simply.”

“To what have you made up yours?” she parried.

“ In these matters my mind is wholly obedient to yours,” he insisted.

A certain constraint appeared in her manner. She had before been so brave and bright and dauntless that he feared she had something up her sleeve; and now, unreasonable man, he felt but the more anxious as her manner grew less easy and confident. She dropped her eyes, and began nervously to clasp and unclasp her gloves.

It was quite steadily, however, that she began, “ The present state of things suits me very well. If I were sure that it suited every one as well as it does me, and would continue to do so, I should say, let it alone. But I think that even now you are not satisfied, and I fear that in time perhaps I myself shall not be.”

A ridiculous and inopportune hope, which for all its ridiculousness was singularly fair-colored and delightful, brushed Avery just then. “ If it ever begins to pall on you—” he suggested.

“ Or on you,” she interrupted. Lifting her eyes to his, not without some effort, she said swiftly, “ If you ever care for a divorce, Avery, I shall be glad to give it to you. For the present I think there is less trouble and publicity in going on as we are now; but whenever you want your legal freedom, you have only to hint for it. Of course, I shall take advantage of the agreement myself, if I ever care to.”

The moment’s hope, or some latent hope that he carried always with him and never acknowledged, or perhaps only the brutal word “ divorce,” so shocking to vestiges of Puritanism, made this announcement come to Avery like a thunderclap. After all, there was nothing remarkable in her suggesting such a course; any third person would have deemed it the logical wind-up of their situation. Yet did she mean that she would actually cast off even the last sign of her marriage with him—renounce even his name and her legal right to call herself his wife—simply because she was so very, very tired of him? Or had the little wretch found another man—it shouldn’t be hard, with her looks—and was what she wanted a quit-claim deed? He didn’t actually care, of course; what difference did it make to him? If a man had cast a thing out of his life—a thing, or a person, either—he was very foolish if he didn’t do his best to abolish even the remembrance of that thing—or that person. But it was with a curious tightening sensation in his chest that Avery asked, “ Is this what you came to tell me? ”

“ Yes. I thought it was quite time you knew definitely. Of course, you might have guessed it for yourself, and yet you couldn’t be sure. Women sometimes hang on to men in the oddest way—” She wrinkled her nose humor ously at the idea of how women sometimes “ hang onto ” men. She added, “ You see why I couldn’t put this into a letter, don’t you, Avery?”

“ Yes, I see.” Avery sat heavily in his chair. Her pretty face across the desk from him seemed miles away; he stared stupidly at her saucy little hat and bright tie. Over and over his mind took in the details of her appearance; yet she seemed to get no nearer to him. He was angry with himself for noticing so much. What was it to him how she was dressed? And yet it was very characteristic of her, certainly, to dress so carefully for such an errand. If Cecily were going to be guillotined, she would ascend the scaffold becomingly attired and only a very little perturbed.

Now that she had delivered her dire message, she was not perturbed at all. She smiled a little, and said quite gently, “ I wanted you to see me, too. I thought from something Mrs. Butler said that you might be worried about me. But you can see for yourself that I’m well; and I’m safe, and I’m working hard.”

“ Are you happy? ” asked Avery, still with that same dreadful dullness.

“ Don’t I look happy? ” she asked, not challengingly, but as if she could afford to be generous and leave the verdict to him.

“ You look very fit, indeed,” he answered. Couldn’t she see that that only added to his grievance?

There was another pause; then-she slipped to the edge of her chair and said, “ That’s all, I think. I mustn’t keep the Institute waiting.”

“ Surely, you’re not going yet? I have so much to say to you.” He hadn’t anything to say; he couldn’t think of anything to say. He simply hated to see her go. “ I haven’t even asked how the children are,” he hastened to say.

She smiled. “ They are very well. They are growing and developing, learning new naughtinesses and new wisdom all the time. Shall I send them to you for a weekend soon, Avery?”

“ Do, please.”

“ It isn’t too expensive for you? Putting them and the nurse up at a hotel must cost you something.”

“ I can afford it, thank you; I am always glad to afford it. I like to have the children with me.”

She nodded brightly; then she rose, and gave him her hand across the desk. “ I am glad I have seen you, Avery,” she said. “ I’m sure it’s best to have everything understood. Don’t hesitate to let me know if anything happens.”

“ Nothing will happen, so far as I am concerned,” he said shortly.

“ Perhaps not. But I’m sure it makes you feel better, too, to have things understood, doesn’t it?”

She turned and started toward the door. He went halfway with her, and then she somehow got ahead of him, and opened the door for herself. With the knob in her hand, she stopped just a moment, her head in the air and a smile on her lips, bright and dauntless, every inch the captain of her soul and her own life’s mistress. Iron bars could not more effectually have kept him from stopping her, though he yearned with all his soul to stop her. But her look held him while she said, “ Good-day, Avery.” Then she was gone, leaving not so much as a whiff of perfume or a stroke of the pen behind her; gone, with a finality that spoke to his forebodings.

After all, he ought to have known it. If Cecily had made up her mind not to keep him in her life, she would never stop until she had cleansed it of the last vestige of him. He was a sentimental fool not to have thought things out himself to this same end. He had thought nothing out to an end, preferring vague hopes of which he was ashamed even in his secret heart, and vague dreams the fulfilment of which would not have satisfied him. Well, if he was bom a fool he would probably continue to be one; and when Cecily vanished through his office door she seemed to take with her the last of his spirit’s spring.

After some time Avery picked up Lois Butler’s letter and opened it. It did not matter very much now what she had said; but he might as well find out. The letter was written from Jefferson; Lois was very glad to be at home once more and to see Walter and her dear boy. “ I was successful in finding Mrs. Fairchild,” she went on, passing quickly to the true subject of her letter. “ In fact I saw her both at her office and at her home. She is with an excellent firm of lawyers, and they are coming to depend very much on her, it seems to me. She has a comfortable flat, where she gave me an excellent dinner. I think she knew I was there partly on your account, but that didn’t seem to check her hospitality.

“ Both she and the children look well. What you desire perhaps most of all to hear, she seems satisfied with her mode of life. I must confess that surprised me a little: for she always seemed to me a domestic creature, and here she is in the outer world; she seemed so fond of society, and under present conditions she is almost destitute of it. Yet you can tell when a person is happy, can’t you? and she seems so to me. I wish that you could see her, to judge for yourself.”

Lois as ever fatally right! Avery hotly resented her rightness on this particular occasion: he actually cursed her for a meddlesome female. But a moment later he felt that it would have been all the same if Lois hadn’t meddled. Careless of possible observers through the now open door, he dropped his head on his arms. He was convinced that he couldn’t live with Cecily; he lived on the whole much more happily and to greater purpose without her. Yet there were moments like the present when purpose and happiness and congruity and dignity all together seemed less to his aching senses than her mere presence, her tanging, salty presence, so much harder to forget than another woman’s sweetness.

Such moments do not last; life could hardly go on if they did. Avery suddenly raised his head, and then jumped from his chair. “ I’ll be back this afternoon,” he shouted to the stenographer nearest the door, struggling into his overcoat as he passed her.

Into the hurly burly of the street he rushed; faster even than the pedestrian crowd of Chicago he dashed from block to block, disregarding policemen’s whistles, dodging trolley-cars, nearly run down by automobiles. He would have taken a taxicab if a vacant one had passed; but at the rate at which he was going he made faster progress in these downtown streets than most taxicabs. Yet it seemed to him that he had been on the way for hours when he rounded a corner into Michigan Boulevard, and felt the lake breeze cool in his face.

Into the hall presided over by the two mortuary brothers De Medici he sped, feeling as if he had reached some sort of goal. But there was in this hall no one he knew, no one he might conceivably be looking for. Turning to his right, Avery made systematically the round of the sculpture, Abyssinian and other: no Cecily glowed amidst its everlasting calm. He went upstairs to the paintings. The permanent collection was supplemented today by a very interesting exhibition, of which Avery saw not a single picture. He had no eyes except for the people who fingered their catalogues and gazed awkwardly upward, as people do in galleries. Cecily was not among them.

In the Inness room he was startled for a moment by the apparition of a slender, smartly-dressed woman, not swung solidly back on her heels, like most of the women he had passed, but poised lightly, as if for instant flight. He started toward her; but halted midway. The woman hadn’t even to turn to undeceive him; for the hair beneath her saucily perched hat was red. In fact she did not turn; and he never saw the face that went with the back which had for a moment so thrilled him.

Avery circled the galleries a dozen times; he began to feel that people were watching him. The morning was wearing along. Suddenly he had another inspiration, and consulted a guard. Was there, he asked, a restaurant in the building? It seemed that there was. Guided by the guard’s instructions, Avery descended to the basement, passed a huge allegorical replica whose head touched the ceiling, and found himself in a room full of students, all chattering like magpies. Many of them were young women, and some of the young women were pretty; but not one of them was Cecily. At another time he would have liked to pause and watch these art students, perhaps to lunch here himself. But today, vivacious and unconscious as all these young people were, he felt no wish to linger among them. There was but one face he just now cared to see.

Sure at last that he should not find in the Institute the one he sought, Avery emerged finally into the outer air. He was beginning to feel both tired and hungry; worse than either, he was beginning to feel ridiculous. All Chicago was before him, if he cared to go on looking; and perhaps at the symphony concert, or in the crowd when it was over, he might find Cecily. But even if he did find her, what on earth was he to say to her? What could he say that she wouldn’t meet with her cool, smiling decision?

He started slowly back toward his office, he who had rushed forth so eagerly on the wings of impulse. His feet dragged as he went, and his self-esteem sank lower and lower.

In the office two placid stenographers were killing time, pending his entrance. He found them some work to do, and then went to his own desk. The sheets of Lois Butler’s letter lay before him, imprisoned by a paper-weight. Avery gathered them together, and put them into the envelope. Then he sat there and hated himself; and for a second dark moment he hated Lois as well.

When the two stenographers had departed, at the early Saturday closing time, Avery took his telephone, and called Mrs. Keppel’s number. “ Are you doing anything this afternoon? ” he asked her. When she said “ No,” he suggested, “Well, shan’t we do something, you and I? Can’t you get away? ”

To both these questions she said “ Yes,” and they made their arrangements accordingly. “ That’s not fair to Mrs. Keppel,” said accusing conscience. “ You are using her as a simple counter-irritant to Cecily.”

“ No. I like her for her own sake; and I'm not using her at all. I’m simply giving her a little fun when we both need it,” Avery argued. In his present mood the very word “fun.” jarred upon him; but in self-defense he put his fingers in his ears and ran away from accusing conscience.

CHAPTER XVIII

DEALS WITH AN OFFICE PERSON

On the Monday morning after her visit to Chicago, Mrs. Fairchild was the first person to appear at the office of Sims, Morley and Sims. The same thing had happened rather often in the course of her employment there: indeed a woman who was giving her whole attention to the office could hardly be anything else but prompt. Perhaps, too, a woman who was determined to be thoroughly business-like needed a few moments each morning to put herself en rapport with business. But that presupposes a certain lack of any natural interest in business; and Mr. Sims Senior at least would never have believed any such thing of Mrs. Fairchild.

Five minutes after her arrival, as Mrs. Fairchild was sharpening a day’s supply of pencils, Mr. Morley also appeared. Now the phenomenon of Mr. Morley’s early arrivals had only lately begun to be manifest. All the previous years of his connection with the firm, he had thought ten o’clock a suitable hour for beginning the day’s work. Even now he did not come down early too often; if he had, a watchful outer office might have connected his punctuality with some other person’s.

Yet surely not with Mrs. Fairchild’s. When she heard his step she looked up, gave him a very casual “ Good-morning,” dated her notebook, and began to poke about her typewriter with an oil can. Mr. Morley went on to his own office, left his hat and coat, and presently came back with the most casual air in the world. When he approached Mrs. Fairchild she opened the drawer in her desk where she kept her purse and other small belongings, and produced a book, which she handed to him. He stood weighing it in his hand and looking down at her; she gave that undivided attention of hers to her machine.

“ Did you like it? ” he asked after a moment.

“ Yes, very much.”

“ Is there a note inside? ”

“ No.”

“ Aren’t you ever going to write me another note? ”

“ The one I did write was an inspiration,” she said. “ If you lent me another such tantalizing book, I might write you another note about it.”

“ That puts it up to me, doesn’t it? ” he answered. “ Well, I shall bring down another book tomorrow, and I shall try very hard to find one that is tantalizing.”

“ I don’t promise,” she stated.

She wouldn’t, his smile said. He sat down at the desk nearest to hers, and changed the subject. “ Wasn’t it odd that I should see you in the park yesterday? ”

“ Not at all odd,” said Cecily. “ I take my children and my maid to one or another of the parks every fine Sunday. Lincoln, Jackson—all the patriots and fathers of their country; we know every inch of their demesnes.”

“ You’re luckier than I, if you know what to do with your Sundays,” said Mr. Morley. “ I like week-days; one’s work breaks them up pleasantly enough. But Sunday, unless I week-end somewhere, is stupid for me. I usually lunch or dine out, or motor or play golf all day, if it’s fine; if the weather is bad, I read until I’m almost blind. All the while I’m conscious of a deep sense of boredom.”

“ Some people have too easy a time in this world. If you worked harder during the week, you’d be glad enough to rest when Sunday came around,” she said.

“ Oh, Sunday is a beastly day for a single man. That’s the general testimony—it’s perfectly beastly.”

“ If that is all that is the matter, why don’t you marry? ” she asked. “ I’m sure that you could find some nice girl who would agree to be your wife Sundays only, on Bernard Shaw’s plan.”

Mr. Morley smiled, but his next remark was rather grim. “ That is about the sort of wife my friend Bradley Antisdel has, I think.”

“ The nice man who was with you yesterday? ” she asked. “ He doesn’t look very happy.”

“ No, poor devil. I think he had more pleasure from the few minutes he spent playing with your children than he has had before in a long time.”

“ It didn’t seem to me that he was getting much pleasure from it,” said Cecily. “ He was rather pathetic and wistful, I thought.”

“ I’d like to tell you about him some day,” said Mr. Morley, leaning toward her. “ That is, of course, if you care to listen. Poor Bradley is lonesome Sunday and every other day; his only change from lonesomeness is acute misery. And he’s rigidly faithful to the woman who treats him so.”

“ Women are capable of a variety of meannesses,” said Cecily.

“ Clara Antisdel is. If she belonged to me, I’d choke her.”

Cecily laughed. The idea of such violence on the part of Mr. Morley—Mr. Morley, whose perfect “ niceness ” was his charm and his raison d’etre—the idea really was very funny; and yet she liked his genuine concern at his friend’s unhappiness.

When she laughed, Mr. Morley began to smile, and they passed suddenly into a sort of intimacy. Yet only a moment later she was remarking, just as she might have remarked it to either of the other partners, “ I shall be very busy today, I suppose. Miss Carter is leaving at the end of the week, and candidates for her position are to come today. I am to try them out, and present only the best for Mr. Sims’s inspection.”

“ And he will tell you to go ahead and hire? ”

“ Probably. He’ll say,” Cecily gave a naughty imitation of Mr. Sims’s manner, “ ‘ I told you to get me a stenographer. I don’t care how you get her or where you get her, so long as you get her. Only don’t keep coming and asking me questions. It’s funny people never can do as they’re told, and not ask questions.’ ”

Mr. Morley grinned at the caricature of his partner. “ You have Sims down pretty well,” he remarked. “ Sometimes it makes me nervous to think of all these eyes out here trained on us of the firm; I suppose even our smallest peculiarity can’t pass unnoticed.”

“ Oh, the outer office adores you,” said Cecily. “ It’s Mr. Sims Senior who ought to feel his ears burning at odd moments.”

“ The outer office adores me—unanimously? ”

“ No. Mrs. Fairchild likes Mr. Sims the best of anybody. He’s strong, if he is gruff,” said Cecily teasingly.

They certainly were progressing today; but at moments Morley liked to feel again under his feet the accepted standards of the office: in some things it was best not to try to go too fast. “ Isn’t the outer office rather inclined,” he asked, “ to resent the powers and responsibilities that Mr. Sims thrusts upon you?”

“ It might be, if I weren’t so modest about them,” she answered. “ I’m modest about them because I know that Mr. Sims cherishes delusions about me. If he ever awakens——”

“ Oh, come now! You aren’t trying to make me believe that you’re quite an ordinary stenographer?”

“ I don’t know, I’m sure. Mr. Sims is a better judge of my stenography than I am myself,” she said smoothly. “ Of course, none of us is ordinary to himself.”

“ Perhaps you’re not ordinary to me; would I lend my French poetry and German philosophy to an ordinary stenographer? ”

“I don’t know. Would you?”

“ She would have a lot of use for it if I did, wouldn’t she?” asked Mr. Morley. He looked at his watch then, and rose from his chair. “ The office force ought to arrive soon,” he said. “If they don’t, the candidates will precede them.”

He went into his own office, and Cecily immediately put down her defensive oil can, and sat looking idly out of the window. It was very hard for her to get her thoughts on the day’s work today, even with the advantage of the early fortifying minutes to herself. Now she caught herself wondering if Avery got down to his office this early, and deciding that he did not—Avery had never been a friend to early rising. She gave her shoulders a little shake, and frowned angrily. Why should she be thinking of Avery at all—what were his comings and goings to her?

It was with actual relief that she answered the brusque greeting of Mr. Sims Senior; this was the everyday world making its welcome demands, which so effectually excluded mere sentiment. “ Do you care to dictate at once? ” she asked eagerly.

“ Aren’t you going to be too busy today for all my dictation?” he asked.

“ Not at all,” she answered. “Applicants can wait; and once I’ve got you down, Mr. Sims, my notes can wait too, if necessary.”

He grunted as if satisfied. Cecily thought with amusement what fun it was always to come up to the scratch—at least, where one person was concerned; to preserve that attitude toward all the world might end by making one very much a machine.

When she came out of Mr. Sims’s private office with a notebook half full, the rest of the office force had arrived, and a row of candidates was sitting along the wall. As she began the weeding-out process, another candidate arrived, and then another and another; so that for a time she seemed to get farther and farther behind. Every unemployed stenographer in the city seemed to be applying for the open position; and every stenographer in the city seemed to be unemployed. As she weeded out, Cecily’s “ undivided ” mind was aware all the time of the perpetual faint smirk on the face of the departing Miss Carter, who was going to be married, and felt her position to be enviable, and of the perpetual scowl on the face of the oldest stenographer in the office, who clearly regarded Cecily as an upstart.

In her own mind she was less an upstart than a bold buccaneer; for if she held the field, it was surely by virtue of sheer boldness. She made her impression on these people, just as in the old days in Jefferson she had always contrived to make her impression on people there—an impression not so very different, after all. Of course, she was not all that she appeared to be—neither were the people around her; and of course, they lived under the perpetual possibility of finding one another out. But that possibility was rather exhilarating than otherwise; it was sometimes the only thing that kept the daily monotony from growing unbearable.

Today she was in a new situation; she had not previously wielded the hiring power. The sense of power combined with that always lurking sense of uncertainty to banish the depression and wistfulness of the last two days. She worked rapidly at the weeding-out process until there were only two candidates left; then she sat back, and very judicially considered them.

Either of them would do, she had no doubt: each had given satisfactory references, and had written a good specimen letter. She wondered how badly either of them needed the place—as badly as she herself had once needed one? One of the girls was distinctly attractive: the only daughter of a widowed mother, perhaps, brought up tenderly, and forced by unexpected circumstances to earn her own living. She would certainly look the better of the two in the office. The other, awkward, rather severely dressed, had still something in her face that appealed to Cecily. It might have been described as a look of dawning power, such a look as one might expect to see on the face of an old-world peasant woman who was just beginning to realize herself. Cecily had an uncomfortable feeling that she had seen that look somewhere before, if she had not indeed seen that very woman. In spite of herself the look held her and drew her; little by little it eclipsed the evident charm, the very probable capability, of the other girl. “ Here is some one who is growing,” Cecily thought; and then, “ She looks intense, too; I think Mr. Sims would like her.”

She found herself dismissing the more finished product, telling the crude, powerful girl that she might have the place, and that she might come in the afternoon for an hour or two, to find where things were kept. “ Miss Carter will be glad to show you,” Cecily said.

The sound of factory whistles startled her; it was noon already. “ And I have an engagement for lunch,” she muttered as she put on her hat. “ Oh, dear! In this world one either waits or keeps others waiting.”

She was going to lunch with Fannie Kinkcaid. In the same block with Cecily’s modest duplex stood a rather pretentious apartment building, in whose most expensive apartment the Kinkcaids lived. It was characteristic of Fannie that she should be indifferent to location, though she had a good eye for convenience and even luxury in her apartment. She was a good-natured, rather vulgar woman, not without a certain native shrewdness. She had been attracted in the first place by Cecily’s children, and had soon come to admire Cecily herself. Cecily had at first liked the Kinkcaid automobile: rides were a luxury these days. Later she had come to have a friendly feeling for Fannie herself, half because Fannie was such a good soul, half because aside from the automobile there were no outside inducements to like her. In Jefferson Cecily had made it her business always to know the right people; still more important, never to know the wrong ones. In business life Cecily had always her impression to make. But with Fannie it was different; she liked Fannie, frankly, because Fannie didn’t count.

The two of them often lunched together; and the days when they did so were marked “ gras ” In Cecily’s calendar. Fannie fed an ever-increasing bulk on the choicest food the town afforded, and deplored unceasingly the fact that it afforded nothing choicer. “ A city this size,” was her ever-renewed wail, “ and no better place for two women to go for lunch than the grill room of a department store! ”

“ It’s a good thing for you,” said Cecily from the vantage of her own irreproachable slimness, “ that this is the best the town affords.”

“ Oh, my dear, if you were born to be fat, you’ll be fat,” said Fannie, scooping up a forkful of mayonnaise. “ But take my word for it, if anybody started a really excellent place in this town—a Fifth Avenue tea-room—he’d make money.”

“ I don’t know but you’re right,” said Cecily, her attention arrested. “ It would be a good opening for a woman, wouldn’t it? ”

“ Why don’t you try it? ” asked Mrs. Kinkcaid abruptly. “ You have the business training, and you know all about food and buying and that sort of thing.”

“ I wish I did,” said Cecily. “ If I did, maybe I should try it, Fannie. Would you be a customer of mine? ”

She passed off the matter lightly, very lightly; but in her own mind she had the feeling that one of her ideas was coming. Perhaps it would simply come and go, as so many ideas do; perhaps, on the other hand, it would be one of those overwhelming, often rather sudden ideas, two or three of which had moulded her life so far. At any rate, a coming idea was always interesting.

Thanks to the morning’s extra duties and Fannie’s lengthy lunch, Cecily stayed late at the office that afternoon. She supposed every one else had gone; and she typed away in haste. Looking up at the end of a sheet, she discovered that the new stenographer was still there; and she surprised on that curious, intense face a look that was fairly burning, a look in which there was admiration and curiosity, and some other emotion, Cecily could not tell what. It was certainly not gratitude. “ Why does she look at me like that?” thought Cecily, and spoiled the new sheet she was beginning. “ You needn’t stay any longer, Miss Samuels,” said Cecily. “ Your hours are over at five, you know.”

Miss Samuels looked at her and swallowed hard; her fervent expression sank into dull apathy. “ How ugly she is,” thought Cecily. “ I hadn’t noticed before how ugly she is. I wonder why she looked at me like that? ” She went back to her typewriting, and dismissed both Miss Samuels and her extraordinary looks from her mind.

They were not always to be so dismissed. The next evening, when Cecily left a little early, with Mr. Morley’s volume tucked securely under her arm, Miss Samuels left just behind her. That might be merely a coincidence; but it began to recur every evening. More embarrassing still, whenever Cecily looked up during the day’s work she seemed to find Miss Samuels’s eyes upon her. If Cecily left early, Miss Samuels left early; if Cecily lingered, she lingered. If Cecily started for a glass of water, Miss Samuels was there before her, and proffered the full glass. It was noticed in the office, and commented on; the new stenographer was christened “ Mrs. Fairchild’s shadow.” Cecily, although she was not averse to admiration, was annoyed—the more so because she felt that Miss Samuels’s emotion toward her was not admiration only. It had in it a certain sinister quality.

She would probably have put the girl in her place with a few sharp words, if her mind had not been so occupied just then with other things. The new idea of Fannie Kink-caid’s sowing was germinating; and side by side with it was a somewhat incongruous fact, of which she was only now becoming distinctly aware.

Richard Morley was beginning to be a factor in her life. The consciousness of his importance had not come to her as a sudden revelation; yet a few days, these very days immediately after her return from Chicago, were all that were needed to make her consciousness very definite. Once she had thought of him simply as the amiable member of the firm, and had rather despised him for that perpetual amiability. Even when he singled her out to the extent of lending her books he had simply added to her estimate of him envy of his excellent library. For her he represented a certain culture, a certain tone, a certain plane of living.

Now abruptly in the course of a few conversations the man had emerged to her consciousness from all that he represented. At the same time she must have emerged to his; but woman-like she had caught the truth of their changed relations while he was still groping for it. He admired her, and she liked him; their interest in each other was growing, and would doubtless continue to grow.

She was not displeased at her discovery; yet she shrank a little from the consequences that it might entail. Of course, she had known all along that her life would not always be so clear of the male element as it had been during the interval since she left Avery Fairchild. Some women were capable of leading indefinitely a gray neuter existence, but Cecily was not among them. She might have been grateful, then, conscience told her, that the new masculine interest was dawning in such a likable shape. Often she was grateful. When she was with Morley she appreciated his good qualities, every one of which was of such a nature as to make his relations with a woman delightful to the woman. In view of those qualities it was astounding that he had remained so long unmarried: some day he would undoubtedly tell Cecily all about it. It was when she was alone, however, that she could not help regretting the passionate days when loving hadn’t been based so exclusively on liking.

That was as good as saying that she wanted to be young always: or else that she regretted Avery Fairchild. She didn’t regret Avery; her calmness in their last interview had certainly shown as much. And if she regretted the passionate follies of eighteen, it was time she gave herself something new to think about. She was still too young to begin to regret such things as her divine lost youth, the vanished passion of which had entailed consequences that she was only now beginning to live down.

Had it not been for her perturbation over Morley, the idea given her accidentally by Fannie Kinkcaid might have remained an idea and nothing more. Under present conditions it had become a rather carefully thought out plan by late summer, when Morley’s snatched conversations with her were growing more and more frequent. It was divulged to him in one of them that took place in “ the office ” after hours. Morley was lounging in a chair he had pulled up to the other side of her desk, watching her in the mellow light of late afternoon. Cecily, as usual, was apparently devoting only a small share of her attention to him, though he had always the feeling in talking to her that nothing escaped her.

“ You know,” she had just remarked in some unimportant connection, “ I am a very restless person.”

“ That is only another way of saying that you are modern,” he suggested.

“ Only another way of saying that I’m a woman, perhaps you mean.”

“ Certainly only another way of saying that you’re you,” he toyed with the idea farther. “ I can’t imagine you as placid.”

“ I should hope not! ” she exclaimed. “ I would as soon be dead as placid; I hate the very sound of the word.”

“ But to tell you the truth,” said Morley, “ I shouldn’t be dumfounded if you grew to be even placid. You are so many things already that I can’t imagine you as being.”

“Yes?” She kept her eyes obstinately lowered.

“ For instance,” Mr. Morley made the point, not for the first time, “you don’t seem in the least like a stenographer.”

“ Oh-h-h,” she breathed, “ I thought you considered me a very good stenographer.”

“ You know what I mean,” he said. “ Your stenography is much above the average; but you are not, and you know that you are not, a stenographer person.”

“ Do you mean,” she suggested, “ that I don’t seem to you to fit in with all this? ”

Following her gesture he glanced about the spacious, solid, familiar office; then he looked back at her. She was looking at him now, earnestly and eagerly; and she seemed yery young. There was a characteristic nervous grace in the way she sat, one arm flung across the top of her typewriter, her clenched fingers almost touching his sleeve. He looked at her so long that he forgot she was waiting for an answer, and was startled to hear her repeat, “ Do I suggest all this?” She included the office in another quick gesture. “ Do I? Do I? ”

“ Do you want me to tell you what you do suggest? ” “What?”

“ A salon, perhaps. Some background, at any rate, deeper than anything we have around here—and power.” “ Oh, thank you! ” she said quickly. “ I was afraid for a moment that you were about to draw a sweetly domestic picture.”

“ So little do you suggest that,” said Morley, “ that it surprises me when I see you with your children; I am always startled at your fondness for them.”

“ Why not tell me that I’m an unscrupulous woman, and be done with it?”

“ You know I don’t mean anything of the kind. But you are full of surprises, contradictions, changes; in some ways, Mrs. Fairchild, you seem to me like a very young woman, a woman whose character hadn’t actually ‘ set.’ ”

“ Perhaps you’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “ I’m decisive enough in trifles; but I don’t know exactly what I want in big things. To know just what one wanted, and to steer directly for it, would be a life worth living.”

“ Happy the people who are born with a ruling passion,’’ said Morley.

She nodded, and sat for a moment in silence, looking wistfully ahead of her. He loved her pensive moods; their very occasional character made them all the sweeter. They never lasted long: now her eyes cleared with a snap, and she said, “ Suppose we drop the ever-interesting topic, what I think of you and what you think of me.”

“ We have never discussed what you think of me,” he said. “ Let’s change to that instead.”

She laughed. “ Mr. Morley,” she said, “ don’t be surprised if you hear some day that I am leaving this office.” “ Don’t you like it here? ” he asked. “ Or have you other plans ? ”

“ I like it well enough, if I could afford to stay.”

“Ask for a raise; we shall be glad to give it to you,” suggested Morley. “ My partner would do any amount of raising before he would lose you, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“ All the more reason I should leave before his bubble breaks,” said Cecily. “ It isn’t purely a question of money, however. Even if you paid me far more than I am worth, so that I could afford to stay here all my life, then all my life I should be a mere cog in somebody else’s machine. I have been thinking lately that I should like a machine of my own. That may be mere restlessness, or conceit.”

“ Or it may be human nature,” he said.

They looked at each other steadily for a moment, and he smiled. He had a fine smile, and a fine, well-bred, highnosed face, that looked as if generations had gone to the making of it. At moments like this, quite irrelevantly Cecily would find herself dwelling on his appearance, and it always pleased her; it suggested things that she loved to think about. She liked everything that the man connoted; it was no wonder she liked the man himself.

“ It’s the spirit of the age, too,” he went on presently. “ In these days everybody wants a machine of his own. Even woman, the pre-ordained cog, wants one.”

“ And you don’t like that? ”

“ Oh, yes, I do! ” he maintained. “ It startles me a bit, perhaps; but I admire you for it. Have you thought yet what particular form your machine is to take? ”

“ I have thought, and in some detail. The idea was bom of practical experience; and the more I think about it, the more it appeals to me.”

“ Do you care to tell me what it is? ” he asked.

“ I should like to. It is nothing more nor less than an expensive and elegant luncheon- and tea-room.”

“ My dear Mrs. Fairchild! ”

“ Now you are horrified,” she accused him. “ If I simply talk of the idea of a machine, that’s all right; but when I propose to enter a field that’s perfectly honest and fairly remunerative, and hasn’t yet been touched in this town, you’re horrified.”

“ I’m not horrified. But it would mean responsibility and worry, and the investment of capital from which, even if you were successful, you would scarcely get adequate returns for some time. Have you thought of all this? A salary is less independent, but it’s safer.”

“ I’ve thought of all that,” she said. “ And yet the longer I have it in mind the more this plan attracts me. Do you realize that with all the money there is here, this town hasn’t a decent place—”

Just at that moment the outer door of the office opened, and Miss Samuels entered; she had left, supposedly for home, three-quarters of an hour before. “ I—I forgot something,” she stammered.

Cecily bent over her typewriter; Mr. Morley scowled at the intruder. Miss Samuels, out of breath but undaunted, went to her desk and fumbled in a drawer, glancing sidewise as she did so at Cecily and Mr. Morley. Then she closed the drawer, looked hard and directly at them, with a sparkle in her deep-set eyes, and left as empty-handed as she had come.

“ By Jove, I don’t like that girl! ” Morley burst out. “She didn’t want anything; she came back here to spy on us.”

Cecily defended her own choice of a junior stenographer for the office. “ You couldn’t call it spying, it’s so obvious,” she maintained. “ And if she haunts my footsteps, it’s partly my fault. The poor girl admires me, and I like admiration.”

If Miss Samuels had accomplished nothing else by her intrusion, she had broken in upon Morley’s mood. He rose and began to fidget about the office. “ You haven’t in any way committed yourself to this plan?” he asked.

“ No,” said Cecily, picking up some papers. “ But I am thinking of it, and looking around; and the more I think and look, the more it attracts me. It is distinctly feasible.”

“ Think still longer before you embark on it,” he advised. “ Meanwhile I’ll speak to Sims about increasing your salary.”

“ Don’t trouble yourself,” she said coolly. “ I can speak to him myself, if I want it done.”

“ I prefer to,” he answered.

They were miles away now from the confidential mood of a few minutes ago; Cecily felt that for the day all actual communication between them was at an end. She was not surprised when she heard him start toward the door of his private office.

With his hand on the knob he halted, and spoke with unexpected harshness. “ I advise caution, but my private hope is that you will do this thing. I can’t help feeling so about it. You and I ought never to stand to each other as employer and employee. It won’t do much longer.”

He vanished, and Cecily stared after him. He could mean only one thing by his brusque statement: he had become conscious of his growing feeling for her. Well, that would make the situation more interesting, perhaps; at any rate it had to come some time, And why not Richard Mor-ley as well as another man; why not, indeed, Richard Morley much rather than any other? Amused, excited and vaguely distressed, Cecily seized her wraps and fled before he could emerge again; there were times when it would not do to remain too long upon the scene.

CHAPTER XIX

DEALS WITH CEASING TO BE AN OFFICE PERSON

Need of money was indeed pressing Cecily. Her salary had already reached a very respectable figure, and Avery’s remittances were double what they had once been; but her expenses were rising too, and bade fair to rise higher. Now that Junior was actually in school she began to realize that she was face to face with the problem of educating her children. Educated they were to be, better than their mother had ever been; she had made up her mind to that. But it would take money to educate them, money for years and years; and after that there was her old age to be thought of. Of course, for a pretty woman there was always the possibility of annexing a man and a man’s income. But Cecily had decided that if she married again it would not be for financial reasons; she had paid, and paid dearly, for the privilege of exercising freedom of choice.

With regard to Richard Morley as a candidate for her hand, she couldn’t make up her mind. The only thing that she definitely intended sq far as he was concerned was to get out of his office before, in his increasing admiration for her, “anything happened.” Yet when anything did happen, she might feel that it was distinctly pleasant; it might make her very happy. Only, for the present she preferred to let this thing run, and turn her attention to other issues.

The more that she thought of her tea-room, the more attractive the idea seemed to her. She already had her eye on a place that would suit her, a vacant building on a corner, centrally located, but not too noisy. Of course, she needed capital, but there were half a dozen ways to get that. Oddly enough, she chose the least obvious: she sat down one night, and impulsively wrote to Walter Butler.

After the letter was mailed she had compunctions for having written it; her acquaintance with Butler had been slight, and she had not communicated with him for years. But her judgment was not at fault: two days later she had an answer to her letter. Butler stated that he had placed to her credit in a bank fifteen hundred dollars; if that wasn’t enough, she could call on him for more. “ I admire your courage,” he went on, “ and I am sure you will be successful in your undertaking. It is a fine idea. No other entertainments in Jefferson were ever so well arranged and served as yours. I haven’t told Lois about your plan yet; but as soon as you have everything in full swing, she and I will walk into your shop some day and surprise you.”

That was all beautifully generous of Buder: his prompt response, his kind words, even his not telling Lois just yet. He wanted to come at her with news of Cecily’s success, not of her temerity; yet Cecily knew that if he kept anything from Lois, even for a day, it was at some cost to himself.

The arrival of the money committed Cecily to her undertaking. For a day or two she dallied with the idea, telling herself that she was foolish to leave a sure thing for a risky, that the office had been a haven to her and might so continue, that she couldn’t always be plunging and never come to grief. For another day she played with the idea of leading Richard Morley to a declaration, and then accepting him out of hand: a beautifully simple solution of existing complications, if only one could be sure that it would solve them forever, and that things would always continue to be simple. But she wasn’t ready for anything like that, and she was ready for her new undertaking. A week after Butler’s letter arrived, Cecily was bending all her energies to the new matter in hand.

Characteristically, she undertook the hardest thing first, and approached Mr. Sims with news of her leaving. He, took it with unexpected gentleness. “ We couldn’t hope to have you always, I suppose. Well, I wish you luck.” He swung his chair toward the window, and then flung round again to growl, “ Have you all the money you need? If not, I’ll lend you some; I know you’ll pay it back promptly. You want to start things off handsomely, you know.”

Cecily had always been proud of Mr. Sims’s approval— all the prouder because he was not an approving sort of man. Now she measured the depth of his concern by the fact that he evidently spoke to Sims Junior at once about her leaving: communication between the father and son was usually limited to strictly necessary business, except when, at intervals of about a week, the older man upbraided the younger, more or less on general principles.

Before lunch-time, however, young Mr. Sims strolled up to Cecily’s desk. “ I say, you know,” he remarked, “ I’m mighty sorry you’re going.”

His somewhat fatuous countenance showed genuine concern. Cecily looked at him in some surprise, for during all the time she had been in the office she had had very little intercourse with him, and that little had usually been of a hostile character. “ I’m sorry too,” she said, “ but I feel that I have to consult my own interest.”

“ Yes, of course.” He nodded dejectedly. “ But it seems a shame.” As he turned away he muttered to himself,, “ The only real looker in the office, too.”

Miss Samuels stopped him as he was going out, and seemed in her intense way to be asking him questions. He answered shortly, for the poor girl was very little of a “ looker ”; but Miss Samuels evidently got the information she desired. As Cecily was putting on her hat to go out for lunch, she was aware of her faithful shadow at her elbow. She would be glad to be rid of that surveillance; but as she was so soon to be rid of it, she forced herself to ask kindly, “ Are you going my way, Miss Samuels? ”

The girl nodded breathlessly. Her eyes were smoldering with excitement, and she looked heavier-browed and lankier of wrist than usual. “Shall we lunch together?” asked Cecily as they went down in the elevator. “ I warn you that I’m in a hurry. I have some things to do after lunch.”

She was in fact doing something that very moment. As she went down the street, half a step ahead of her breathless, silent companion, she was mentally “ budgeting ” her fifteen hundred dollars, allowing so much for rent, so much for furnishings, so much for wages; she would like to keep a small sinking fund if she could, as an enterprise of this character could hardly be expected to make money at first. She would spend as much as she dared on furnishings—appearances would be half the battle. “ And service the other half,” she thought. “ It will be the servant problem raised to the nth power, the service will.”

When she had almost forgotten her presence, Cecily’s companion suddenly burst out, “ Mrs. Fairchild, I hear that you are leaving the office. When you go, I want to go with you.”

Another proof of embarrassing devotion, thought Cecily. “ I should like to take you,” she said. “ But, you see, I sha’n’t have any way to use you. I can attend to my bookkeeping and my small correspondence myself; I expect to employ only a cook and waitresses.”

“ I could wait on table, Mrs. Fairchild; at least, I could learn to,” said Miss Samuels quickly.

“ Well, you would be very foolish to do it,” said Cecily in an even tone.

“ I suppose so.” The girl sighed, then brightened a little as she added, “ We can see each other though sometimes, can’t we?”

“ Yes, indeed,” said Cecily heartily.

“ I can even come to lunch at your tea-room,” and Miss Samuels brightened a little more. “ And we can see each other sometimes in the evenings—”

Cecily was not listening to her. They had come abreast of the corner that Cecily had from the first coveted for a “location”; there it stood, light, airy, just large enough— and she had fifteen hundred dollars capital. Cecily looked at the placard in the window, estimated mentally the number of tables she could place, wondered what could be done about a kitchen; then abruptly she started for the agent’s office. In the interest of the community’s lunches she missed her own that day; but when she got back, late and triumphant, to Sims, Morley and Sims’ office, she had actually rented her “ location.”

After that the days went by with such bewildering rapidity that Cecily hardly knew when she left Sims, Morley and Sims’. Leave the office she did, and before she left she hired and “ broke in ” the young woman who was to succeed her; but even while she was doing so, she was outfitting her tea-room. She loved “ outfittings,” and would willingly have equipped a store or a house every week of her life. In this present task both her extravagance and her native shrewdness came into play: she got “ nice things ” not only because she liked them herself, but because she expected her customers to appreciate them. Let other extravagant women come here, and they would find opportunity to spend their money; and other shrewd women would here find their money’s worth.

On a perfect winter day the tea-shop opened. Cecily had lain awake most of the night before, imagining every possible accident, and convinced that the whole undertaking could never be a success—and if it failed, what then? But with daylight imaginative terrors deserted her, crowded out, nerhaps, hy the details that she must see to.

The whole day went like one of her best-conducted parties of the Jefferson days. The shop was crowded for luncheon, and again for tea: the service went without a hitch. Mrs. Sims brought a large party; several of Mr. Morley’s friends came. Other people had been, attracted both by actual advertising, and by a judicious use of personal comment— the city was small enough to make mouth to ear advertising still the most effective.

Every detail of Cecily’s careful planning was noticed and appreciated: the quaint little bouquets, the monograms she had herself embroidered on the homespun linen napkins, the fact that the cretonne under the plate-glass table-tops matched the cretonne at the windows, and the same tints were caught again in the flowered English china. Some of her ideas would soon reappear in private houses, unless Cecily was very much mistaken; but she had plenty of ideas, and could afford to give them away, if people would only buy her muffins and salads.

The last of her guests lingered until half-past six. The door had only just closed behind them when Mr. Morley’s car drew up to the curb, and Mr. Morley alighted. Cecily waved her hand to him through the window. “ Why didn’t you come in earlier?” she asked as he entered.

“ I was afraid there would be nobody here but women,” he said. “Did you have a good crowd?”

“ Splendid; all we could handle. They were all very appreciative, and everything went off beautifully.”

“ I should have been represented here by proxy,” he said, his eye wandering about the shop. “ Oh, yes! ” On a little table by themselves, where they would not detract from the effect of the little bouquets, were several vases of congratulatory flowers; and among them, he had singled out the orchids of his selection.

“ Oh, yes! ” she echoed. “ They’re lovely—lovely! ” She went quickly up to the table, and bent over the flowers. Standing so, in the exquisite dress she had made for her opening, she looked for all the world like a hostess after a wonderful party, a fairy party, or even like a bride after her wedding; her sparkling excitement was merging moment by moment into a misty, weary, happy contemplation. Morley felt a sudden impulse to put his arms around her, and capture her at this moment of high exquisiteness; but the patent indecorum of such conduct here and now stayed him.

“ Every one was most kind,” she said a moment later, examining one by one a heap of cards that had evidently been detached from the flowers. “ I didn’t know I had so many friends. Mr. Sims, and young Mr. Sims—the Kink-caids—Fannie was here for both luncheon and tea—Miss Samuels—‘ the office ’—Walter Butler—Anna. Anna is my maid, you know; wasn’t it wonderful of her to think of doing this? ”

Morley was wondering who Walter Butler was. “ Aren’t you ready to go home now?” he asked. “I’ll drive you, if you are.”

“ You’ll drive me? ” She glanced into the street. “ Oh, I thought perhaps you were driving your own car. Why don’t you ever? ”

“ Because I’d rather sit back quietly and talk with my friends.”

“ At least one friend could sit with you if you drove,” she insisted.

“ But—shameful confession—I have never learned to drive,” he admitted.

“ I wouldn’t have that to say of myself, if I were you. Why, even I,” said Cecily, “ can drive a car.”

“ You’re one of these people who can do anything, I think.”

“ Or at least think they can,” she suggested. “ Well, I’m ready to go now. I’ll lock this door; the help can go out the back way.”

“ Shall we drive around for a little while? ” he asked as he handed her into the car.

She nodded, and he gave the order. “ Now, isn’t this nice?” he asked as they glided off. “ Nicer than if I were my own chauffeur?”

She shook her head obstinately, murmuring that she “ wouldn’t trust any hired chauffeur.” Then she changed the subject. “ You needn’t have been afraid of being the only man at my place of business this afternoon,” she said. “ Half the town’s chivalry was there, as well as all its beauty.”

“ Anybody I know? ”

“ They were all people you know, I’m sure—the best people in town,” she rallied him. “ There was one person there I was curious to see.”

“ Yes?”

“ Mrs. Antisdel. I heard her called by name, and I’m sure it must be the wife of that nice, worried-looking friend of yours.”

“ Yes, Clara would be quite likely to be there.” Mr. Morley’s face had darkened at the name. “ What sort of woman was she?”

“ A pretty blonde, with cold eyes and a very disagreeable mouth.”

“ I never noticed that she is pretty,” said Morley. “ The rest of your description fits perfectly.”

“ Oh, she is pretty, so far as physique goes,” insisted Cecily. “ You hate her, don’t you? I must admit that the mere sight of the two of them is enough to make any one a violent partisan of his.”

“ You would hate her too,” said Morley. “ A woman of your sort, Mrs. Fairchild, couldn’t help hating a woman of hers. I’ll admit that there is only one person on earth I should actually like to see roasted alive at a slow fire. That person is Clara Antisdel.”

“Just because she isn’t agreeable to him?”

“ There isn’t any ‘ just ’ in it. Coldness of heart and lack of generosity aren’t considered cardinal sins; but in some of their developments they are worse than any cardinal sin could be.”

“Then she isn’t a sinful lady?”

“ Heavens, no! She mistreats Bradley in the name of all that is high and holy.”

“ Women can be so delicately cruel,” said Cecily.

“ Mrs. Fairchild, when a woman has married for money, what ought she to do? What ought her attitude toward her husband to be? ”

“ A woman ought never to marry for money, of course,” said Cecily. “ But if she does, she ought to go through with it, and make the best of her bargain. If she isn’t too good to take his money, she isn’t too good to treat the giver decently.”

“ I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Mr. Morley. “ It is very much my own conviction; but sometimes men and women differ so in their way of looking at things.”

“ I infer that Mrs. Antisdel married your friend for his money, and that she is—well, stingy? ”

“You infer correctly. She was in love with another man at the time of her marriage. Her mother arranged this match for her, I suppose—Bradley was quite a catch. But Clara was old enough to know what she wanted, and she made her choice. Having made it, and secured Antisdel’s money, she began to immolate herself on the altar of that other affair of hers; and she has immolated consistently ever since. Not only does she grind his face in private, but she delights in always appearing before people as woebegone as possible.”

“And he doesn’t retaliate?”

“ No. Bradley loved her to begin with; and then, he hasn’t the retaliating disposition. All he wants, or has ever wanted, is to sit quiet and be happy. He’s mortally hurt now, and he gets hurt afresh every day, you see.”

“ Then it’s one of those situations where there’s no way out? ”

“ No way out, I’m afraid.”

Cecily’s face, turned to him in the soft light, was very grave; it looked sweet and pure, and full of pity. “ You try to relieve him all that you can, of course—to make him forget? ”

“ Yes, in so far as our poor bachelor distractions can make a man forget such a thing.”

“ If it’s a touch of home, sweet home that he wants, bring him around to my house some time,” said Cecily.

It seemed to Morley that her sudden flippancy covered a really wonderful generosity. “ Do you mean that? ” he asked.

She had only half meant it; but to his eager question she replied promptly, “ Of course I do.”

Her divining mind saw heights and depths of torture in Bradley Antisdel’s position; and in the happiness of her success she was inclined to be generous. She liked Morley’s concern for his friend; she liked Morley himself. Tonight, when she was happy anyway, and when success seemed to be on the point of freeing her from ever having to think about a man, she liked to think about Richard Morley. Another time she would feel differently about it, would realize with horror that either this day had been the first of many, or it had not: that she would spend the rest of her life, in all probability, either in some neat commercial groove or with Richard Morley established permanently at her side. Tonight the realization gave her no horror. Side by side, the two of them rode on in a silence that grew sweeter as it lengthened.

It seemed to Morley that they said good-night only a few moments later. He was not the less happy of the two, for he approached her without detaining second-thoughts, such as she usually felt; and tonight he was especially happy, for he could not help contrasting the frank, the generous, the open-handed and open-minded Cecily with the stifling and oppressive Clara Antisdel.

CHAPTER XX

AVERY’S LITTLE AFFAIR

This period in Cecily’s life was devoted to new and growing interests. At about the same time Avery Fairchild, miles away and completely out of touch with her, had begun to have a craving for novelty. Once you got the hang of a thing, he found, you required decided change. His work did not bore him; he was determined never to let it bore him; but eighteen-hour days had begun to pall. He deliberately sought change. And for thorough and complete change, change that was like stepping not only into another atmosphere but into another age, he went more and more to Caroline Keppel.

She always welcomed him, always seemed to find it convenient to welcome him. They fell into a way of spending their Sundays together. He would come for lunch—in the Keppel circle they dined at night Sundays as well as other days. Afterward, if it was fine weather they would motor. If it stormed, they ensconced themselves by an open fire, and talked or played chess. Keppel had taught her how to play chess, and she now taught Avery. The very deliberation of the old-world game suited him: to idle like this hour after hour was for him the refinement of luxury.

They had ceased to use the drawing-room, and she received him now in her own sitting-room, a small apartment on the second floor. The room was always very warm, and there were a great many flowers; the novels and magazines that made up Caroline’s reading lay about on chairs and tables, and there was a great basket full of half-finished embroidery. Caroline liked to begin, but she seldom finished anything: as time went on, the condition of her work-basket came to be one of their favorite jokes. They accumulated quite a stock of these jokes, and a store of little allusions, chiefly of his inventing. Caroline rarely invented, but she was intensely appreciative. When a man is, whether he will admit it or not, still smarting from having been discarded, appreciation is grateful to him; it can hardly become so gross as to be distasteful. And Caroline was a born echo. Docile to begin with, she had been trained to echo Keppel; and now that he was gone, she sweetly echoed Avery.

Not all the hospitality was of her furnishing. He repaid her by taking her to queer little restaurants, or sometimes to the theater, or even to motion pictures. It was all new to her, and delicious; her life had been so narrow, and her ideas were so simple, that for her there was a tang of forbidden fruit about many things which were commonplace to him.

Their intimacy went unremarked for some time, because their social circles did not cross. It was sure to be remarked, however; and some instinctive perception of that fact made Avery uneasy one day when he was talking with Mrs. Van Duzen. That lady had come into his office ostensibly on business; but all the time that she talked she was more or less furtively “ sizing him up.” Presently she began to approach personal subjects with a series of ponderous swoops and circlings that made it a relief when she actually brought out, “ Have you seen Mrs. Keppel lately?”

“ Yes,” he said simply.

“Did you know that Judith Keppel has left her?”

“No, I did not. I should hardly have supposed it possible.”

“ It is accomplished. And the odd part of it is that Caroline turned her out.”

Avery laughed. It was funny to think of Caroline’s turning anybody out, let alone the celebrated Gorgon. “ I had missed Miss Keppel lately,” said he. “ If you wanted a word with Mrs. Keppel at one time you had to resort to stratagem. But I hadn’t any idea that the relief was permanent.”

Mrs. Van Duzen had followed his laugh with an uncertain smile. “ Permanent enough, I suppose. But what really concerns you—Are you sure this is news to you?”

“ Dear lady, absolutely! ”

“ Well, I suppose Caroline wouldn’t tell you, and perhaps she wouldn’t thank me to. But I’m going to; I feel that you ought to know it. Judith came to me with the whole business; she was not only furiously angry, but troubled as well. It seems that the entire quarrel was about you.”

“About me?”

“ Yes. At least, it began that way. Judith objected to your being there so much, and Caroline said she would choose her own friends. Judith asserted her authority, and Caroline read her a perfect Declaration of Independence. You can imagine how it would go.”

“ I should imagine that I was merely the pretext, or at most the starting-point,” said Avery. “ The trouble was bound to come; no woman in this age will consent to remain indefinitely in swaddling-clothes.”

“ Well, perhaps,” she admitted. “ But I thought that you ought to know about it.”

“ I wish that you hadn’t told me,” said Avery.

“ Oh, you needn’t feel conscience-stricken about it,” said Mrs. Van Duzen. “ Caroline is better off without Judith. But she’s an impulsive little fool; and now that she’s up in arms, she may go too far. Don’t let her.”

“ What can I do to prevent her, even forewarned as I am, if she feels like going too far? ”

Her eyes met and held his. In her voice that seemed to come from an imposing distance, with her best manner, she said, “ You can do everything, I think.”

“ You are mistaken,” he protested.

Mrs. Van Duzen smiled, a very majestic, very knowing smile. In general Avery appreciated this woman’s usefulness, but was inclined to despise her intellect. Now suddenly she struck him as clever, clever beyond his reach to checkmate or even to apprehend. He had an uncanny feeling that if she marked out a path for him, he would have to tread it; with absurd intensity, he hoped that she would not go on.

She went on, however; she grew painfully concrete. “ Why don’t you,” she asked, “ make yourself Caroline’s guardian for life? She has money, and she is not bad-looking. She certainly needs some one to depend on, and she thinks that you are a wonder.”

“ She’s a charming girl,” said Avery. “ But I have enough to do to look after myself and help my consumptives.”

“ Well, keep your own counsel,” she advised. “ There is no hurry. But I should like to see Caroline settled.”

“ If a guardian is what she wants,” said Avery—he avoided the use of the word “ husband ”—“ if a guardian is what she wants, she need fear no lack of candidates.”

“ Her money would draw them; that is exactly the trouble,” said Mrs. Van Duzen. “ But you are so disinterested.”

“Was any man ever that?” asked Avery.

Mrs. Van Duzen took the question for one of his jokes; she laughed, and the subject dropped. But when she left him, she could not take with her the seed she had sown. Avery heartily wished that she had held her tongue; but as she hadn’t, he couldn’t quite ignore what she had said. For his sake Caroline had sent away her sister-in-law; and she had kept not only the motive but even the bare fact from him. She hadn’t wished to embarrass him; perhaps like him she was satisfied with the present state of things, and didn’t wish to look too deeply into their relation. Avery wanted to believe that, and presently found himself able. He was less able to dismiss the subject from his mind. It sat at table with him, stayed before him as he worked; it proved rather a haunting idea, though he hardly knew whether he should call it agreeable or the reverse.

After his solitary dinner his bare room was suddenly distasteful to him, and he left it and went out. It would be waiting for him in its solitude and its bareness when he returned. He felt a swift pang of desire for a home, some gracious dwelling-place presided over by a wife-person, a sweet, not too dominant creature who belonged to him. He was still young; walking along he stretched his muscles and threw back his shoulders, and felt how young he was. He was young, and he could not go on to the end of his life like this. He had mistaken emptiness for serenity; now he detested emptiness. His discontent burned within him.

It was an evening of early spring, unseasonably warm and very damp. The fog rolling in from the lake filled his lungs. “ A bad night for my consumptives,” he thought, and then hated his consumptives. Why must they come intruding into his thoughts? He worked for them—wasn’t that enough?

It was a night made for love—he might as well admit that. Avery gave himself a mighty shake, and then drew up to avoid a passing automobile which had in his abstraction all but run him down. A man and a woman sat in it. They were very young, and their eyes were misty with passion; her hand was clasped in his. They were looking straight ahead of them, but they saw only each other. The sight of them made Avery fierce. He was not much older than they: would no woman’s hand ever lie clasped in his again, no woman’s lips ever be raised to him?

He walked on and on, his restlessness raging through him. He had left his own district far behind, had got into a part of town where the policemen no longer saluted him, and the look of the streets was unfamiliar. He did not care where he went; one place was as good as another, in this wearisome, hopeless game of running away from oneself.

And then gradually the streets grew familiar once more; he was going somewhere that he had gone before, some time. Quite suddenly he saw that he was only a block from Mrs. Keppel’s house. He paused, his heart fluttering like a girl’s; then he turned, and deliberately made his way thither.

The windows of her sitting-room were lighted, and one of them was open to the evening breeze. He stood and looked at that open window, and the beating of his heart almost suffocated him. He did not know why he was there nor what he wanted; but he knew that if Caroline came near the window he should call to her.

She did come presently, and stood at the window peering out into the night; against the light within her hair was misty, the edges of her dress were luminous. “ Caroline! ” he called softly. “ Caroline! ”

She did not start, but she looked out intently; it was almost as if his voice had answered something in her thoughts. “ It is I, Avery,” he said. “ Come down here; please come down.”

She vanished from the window, and he was not sure that she had heard him at all; but a moment later the house-door opened. Avery stretched out his hand to the gate; it swung on its hinges, and he met her in the tiny grass-plot. A stone wall and a row of lilac bushes shielded them from the street.

She had slipped a satin cloak over her tea-gown, and was bareheaded; her outline was softly feminine, uncertain, romantic. She looked up at him as they met, and put out her hands to him; still she said not a word.

He took her hands in his. “ Wretch, to stay indoors on a night like this,” he chided her, laughing a little.

“ I had hoped that you would come,” she whispered, and then added lamely, “ or telephone. You will come in? ”

But he would not go in; as he felt tonight, he could not pay an ordinary evening call, between walls and among servants. He took her arm instead, and drew her to the side of the house, where they could talk unobserved.

“You had hoped that I would come tonight?” he asked.

She pressed her hands together, lifted her eyes to his and nodded.

“How could I stay away from you, on such a night?” he whispered.

He repossessed himself of her hands, and slowly drew her to him. She did not resist, but her eyes held his; even in the gloom they questioned him. For a moment she made no sound; then she caught her breath sharply, and her arms went around his neck.

Youth renews itself in man to this extent, that each woman kissed for the first time is the first woman kissed; and across the beloved lips there lies just then the shadow of no other. When Avery’s arms met around Caroline Keppel he was no longer the experienced man, once married and twice a father; no longer the dedicated man, the prophet of a new social order. He was that simplest of things, mere man, in his eternal juxtaposition with mere woman: that simple thing, as inevitable as the stars in their courses there above.

He felt no desire to speak; after their star-touching first moment he held her close to him with one arm, and stroked her hair. “ I hoped that you would come. I’ve always hoped that you would come—like this,” she whispered.

Oh, amazing Caroline! Discreet and daring woman, who could keep her own counsel so long, and then at just the right moment give herself so completely away! He laughed a little, thinking how her hopes had run on ahead of his. Then he thought how if it had not been for a meddlesome woman and a night unseasonably warm he might never have come “ like this ”; and it seemed to him that he had much to make up to Caroline.

Presently she shivered a little. “ Are you cold? ” he asked. He opened his coat, and she crept inside; he could feel her heart beating against him. Encircled by the rough coat and by his arm, she laughed drowsily. “ I don’t know why we don’t go inside,” she said. “ I can do as I like in my own house.”

They went inside presently; but before they went they must linger and linger, listening to the spring wind in the budding lilacs; and above the spring wind they heard the beating of their own hearts, and the call of their too long denied youth.

CHAPTER XXI

PROGRESS OF AVERY’S LITTLE AFFAIR

Avery awoke the next day as the man of experience, with a past, a future and an ethical sense. He realized that he was engaged in an affair with a woman, and he found the idea surprisingly distasteful, although the woman was not distasteful in the least. Undoubtedly he would some day ask her to marry him; and he shivered at the thought, which brought with it a horrible vision.

The vision was not of married life with Caroline—he couldn’t imagine that at all. It was of Cecily’s face when he should go to her and ask for a divorce. “ You couldn’t stick it alone, could you, Avery?” he heard her ask; and there followed in the ears of his imagination other questions, put in her imperturbable way, “ Is she pretty? ” and “ Has she money? ” and perhaps even, “ And does she adore you, Avery? ” followed finally by charitable consent to any arrangement that suited him, and sweetly expressed wishes for his happiness.

It was in vain for him to tell himself that even if he went so far as to ask her for a divorce, he needn’t see Cecily personally, that, indeed, under the circumstances it would be quite unusual for him to do so. That didn’t soothe him. The idea wasn’t that he heard or didn’t hear what Cecily had to say; what troubled him was his giving her any chance to say it, to him or to any one else; it was his putting himself into a position which she would cynically enjoy. “ You couldn’t stick it alone, could you, Avery?” He struck his fist on his desk, and glared about his empty office. No, by God, he wouldn’t ask Cecily for anything. Cecily would herself be remarrying one of these days, making some confounded, long-headed good match. He would wait, and let the proposal for a divorce come from her; he would wait, if he grew gray-haired in the waiting, and Caroline got tired of him and cast him off.

Not that he could imagine Caroline’s casting him off. He softened as he thought of Caroline, Caroline who had waited so long for him to come to her. She was waiting for him now, he had no doubt; thinking of him as she ate her late breakfast, counting the hours that separated them. He would let her know that he counted them too; it “ worked ” better with a man, he would show the world, when a woman was simple and sweet than when she was clever and critical.

Her voice came over the wire thrilling with joy. He would be with her late that afternoon, he told her; he would come straight there from the office. “ It looks like rain,” she said anxiously. “ Shan’t I send the car for you? ”

Avery chuckled at the idea, though her anxiety did not displease him. “ It might arouse too much interest in my office if you did that,” he said.

“ Come as early as you can,” she said. “ Remember, I shall be watching for you.”

She would watch, and wait. How old-fashioned, and yet how sweet it was. She might have said “ and pray ”; he would be willing to wager that she did pray. It was pleasant for a man to come back to such simple values, especially when he was weary of ultra-modern ideas and ultramodern people. Not that he didn’t like Caroline for her own sake; he mustn’t represent his liking for her as too exclusively a matter of reaction.

The threatened rain fell that afternoon; and Avery, getting thoroughly soaked on his way to her, felt his impatience rising. He walked slowly to let it rise the higher; oh, but it was sweet to have some one to go to!

The open fire was burning in Caroline’s sitting-room, and tea was laid on a table near it. She sat waiting in a new and splendid gown of blue and silver; her days of mourning were past, and she glowed at him with a pale radiance beneath her ash-colored hair.

When the servant left she sprang to meet him, and exclaimed how long he had been coming, and how wet he was. “ Late, but here,” said Avery, keeping one of her hands as he threw himself into a big chair and stretched his legs to the fire. “ And now that I am here, I shall stay until you put me out.”

“ But your feet! What would you say if one of your patients got so wet? ” she remonstrated.

“ None of the eternal doctor! ” he admonished. “ Speaking merely as a man, I should be glad to see any one get wet in such a good cause.”

He drew her toward him; she knelt beside his chair. “ Oh,” she repeated as he released her, “ you were so long coming! ”

He smiled at her naivete, but realized that it put a double burden upon him. “ Give me some tea, Caroline,” he said. “ I want to talk seriously to you.”

“ Oh, don’t, please don’t! ” she cried. “ All my life I’ve been talked seriously to, and I don’t like it. I want you to be young with me.”

He thought of the years when she had been shepherded by her husband and Judith Keppel, thought of how her youth had always been denied; and then he thought that their relation was as yet very new, and there would be plenty of time to discuss it seriously. He picked up a fold of her blue drapery, and stroked it between his fingers. “ What a lovely color this is! ” he said.

“ And there are other lovely colors, rose and green and yellow and lilac. And I am going to have them all,” she proclaimed.

“Extravagant one!” he jibed.

“ Who has a better right than I, I ask? I’ve been through a sort of premature old age, Avery, and I’ve just come young. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for you I should never have been young at all. Think of growing old, when you have never been young.” He grasped her hand in quick sympathy, and as she returned the pressure she added, still plaintively, “ And now that I am young, I don’t want anybody to scold me. At least now, when I’ve just found “ My dear girl, I gave up all idea of talking seriously to you long ago.”

“ How long ago? ”

“ Ages and ages! Some time after I came into this room, never mind when.”

“ That’s lovely,” she purred at him. “ I love it when you give in to me, Avery.”

“ Most women would,” said Avery.

“ I don’t care what most women would do. I don’t even care what you would say or do say to most women, when you’re outside; but while you’re here, Avery, we won’t discuss most women.”

She poured his tea for him, and he drank it. The index of forbidden subjects was growing at an alarming rate, he thought; it hampered conversation if one always stopped beforehand and thought whether a subject was allowable. He was silent, and she moved about the room, bringing up a little stool, getting a guitar and tuning it. “ I’ll play for you,” she said as she sat down on the stool. “ Shall you like that? ”

“ I didn’t even know that you could play,” he said.

“ You know very little about me yet,” she announced.

“ It will be such fun to discover. You talk, when you aren’t singing, and I’ll listen all the time,” he proposed.

“ You may be disappointed,” she warned him; but clearly she didn’t think so. She was luxuriating in the very thought of letting him know all about her.

She began to play, and after a few minutes to sing. She sang little French and Italian songs, snatches of opera, things that she must have learned in solemn lessons and other things that she might have picked up in the streets of foreign towns. A fold of her blue drapery lay across his knee. He sat watching the fire, lulled by the warmth and the music. This was far pleasanter than talking; this listening, and at times almost ceasing to listen, and merely being, was just what his hungry soul desired. And unacknowledged but ever present, there lay in the depths of his mind the consoling consciousness that when he chose he could leave all this behind, and go away by himself.

After some time Caroline left him. “ I’ve ordered dinner to be served here,” she said as she came trailing back. “I hate that big, bleak dining-room; we shall be much cosier here by the fire.”

That was indiscreet of her, it seemed to Avery. But he had promised not to scold; and anyway, what would have been the good of pointing out to her an indiscretion in which she would probably have gloried? “For this young woman, I am a large and lively spree,” he thought. Aloud he said, “ That will be nice. I like to eat all over the house.”

“ I’m so glad you do,” she said. “ We’re going to have all the things you like best. I’ve noticed, every time you took me to dinner, what you seemed to favor.”

“ Who would have thought a young woman would be so noticing? ”

“ Little birds, and a Romaine salad, and a bottle of sound wine,” she announced.

There was no doubt that the wine would be sound, he thought; and she really had hit his taste in the other items. He smiled up into her eager face. “Jolly,” he said.

It was jolly to have one’s tastes consulted, and to feel once more about one that teasing, tantalizing, satisfying thing, a feminine atmosphere. And after a day’s work it was pleasant to sit still and be ministered to, and eat an exquisite dinner of some one else’s choosing—it was unnatural for a man to have to bother about food. Yet if the time ever came when he should eat all his dinners and spend all his evenings in this atmosphere, should he really like it so well?

Second thoughts can spoil even the best of dinners, and Avery tried resolutely to banish his from his mind. He was so successful that at the conclusion of the meal he had not a thought of any kind in his head as he threw himself back in his chair. “ Aren’t you going to play some more? ” he suggested.

She shook her head, and began to move softly about the room. She was not so quiescent as he; indeed she was a little wistful. Perhaps she expected him to play the conquering hero: she was so much younger than he, and she had probably spent the day imagining what the evening would be like. When she drew near him again Avery held out his hands to her.

One thing led to another: a handclasp to a kiss, that kiss to another, and many kisses to half an hour when he held her close and called her silly, endearing names. And now the magic of the night before returned completely; now at last he was thoroughly happy, and would have stayed the fleeting moment if he could. She lay quiet in his arms, pale and exquisite; the scent that clung about her garments covered them both. This was youth: this was ecstasy: this was life.

It was terminated neither by time nor conscience. She stirred presently; lifting her hand, she stroked his hair. “ I love your hair,” she said. “ It’s like black satin.”

The first time he had ever kissed Cecily, she made almost the same remark. Avery’s arms stiffened, and he drew his head away from her. “ I think I would better go soon,” he said, and rose from his chair.

She was conscious of a sudden coldness, ignorant of what had brought it about. “ It isn’t late,” she protested, her lip drooping.

“ Not very late, but Avery has a big day’s work ahead of him,” he explained.

“ Very well,” she said with a sigh; then she brightened again as she added, “Will you come tomorrow?”

“ Tomorrow? May I? ”

“ Indeed you may.”

“ If I may, I will,” he said. “ Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

That pleased her. “ Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” she repeated, as if it were a charm. She put up her lips for a good-night kiss.

“ Yesterday and yesterday and yesterday,” rang in Avery’s head as he strode down the street. What had he to do with tomorrows? Yesterdays pursued him, lay on him like a weight. He thought he would walk home, to tire himself. The rain had ceased, and the pavements were wet and glistening. Yes, he must tire himself. It was a long walk, and perhaps at the end he could sleep. He wanted to sleep; yet how could he, unless he could forget? And how could he forget? Cecily was with him as he walked: his first love, his bride, his wife, a tantalizing creature never quite grasped, and now gone—gone. No doubt if he had her back they would simply repeat their old story, jars, coldness, veiled eyes and glances that never met; yet now with every nerve he longed to have her back. What did it matter whether they agreed or disagreed? “I am my beloved’s.” Yes, now and always, together or a world apart, happy or unhappy, I am my beloved’s!

Cecily would smile, if she could see him fresh from the embrace of another woman, and yearning for her. He could smile himself, but it was a wry smile. Was he never to be able to forget that long-past love of his? Must he drag it with him on an ever-lengthening chain to his life’s end?

No, by God, he wouldn’t! He no longer cared for Cecily, nor she for him, and he wasn’t going to make a superstition of her. Fiercely he put the idea of Cecily from him, sternly he turned his mind toward the free life he had won, the life of liberty and service. It was the weather that was affecting his nerves, that and the idiotic conduct of which he had lately been guilty. What had he to do with women, or they with him? His mind ran on eagerly to his own high, bare room. Once there he could shake off this obsession; once there, he should be himself again.

With a sense of relief he ran up the stairs, threw open the door and turned on his light. For a minute the relief deepened; in the air of that austere chamber he could certainly breathe more freely. Then he saw, lying on his big, neat desk, a letter addressed to him in Cecily’s writing. For a moment he felt oppressed, and thoroughly indignant; this was a shabby trick for fate to play him just when he was summoning his self-command. Slowly and rebelliously he opened it.

It was an intelligent, friendly letter, apparently written on no particular occasion. Avery’s shrewd guess was that she had been up to something, and was writing from compunction, but he could gather no hint as to what the something was. She told him of the success of her tea-shop, which was already paying; she told him of Junior’s progress in school, and related incidents of Margaret’s precocity. “ When you wish to see the children, you have only to say so,” she concluded; and signed herself his as ever, Cecily.

Avery laid down the letter, and groped in his desk drawer for a picture. He seldom looked at it, but he knew where to find it; and now he drew it forth, and held it close up under his desk-light. It showed Cecily, in evening dress, seated with the baby Margaret on her lap; one arm was about Junior, then some two and a half years old, who stood beside her. Cecily was looking down, and her face was in shadow; but her soft, wavy hair and the familiar lines of her neck and her thin figure were there; and in her arms she held his children.

He studied the picture in detail, recalling how she had had it taken as a surprise for him. She had made her own dress, clever, clever girl! and the little frock that Margaret had on, and perhaps Junior’s as well. How thin she was, and how plump and healthy the children! It looked as if they had drained all the vitality away from her. He remembered the night when Margaret was born; remembered that after Junior’s birth he had not wanted another child, had been afraid that it would kill her when it came, she had so nearly died at Junior's birth. But she had not been afraid: she had always been brave where her children were concerned, and most awfully generous. She had named the boy for him, and the girl, whom he had wanted to call Cecily, for his dead mother. All those things had been marvelous to Avery. And yet so soon afterward they had had nothing to say to each other, and then had come the breach.

And in spite of the yearning of these occasional nights when one remembered, it was a breach past healing, on his side as well as on hers. He was to go to see another woman tomorrow, and doubtless in another year that woman would be calling him husband. It was the way things went.

Avery slipped the picture back into its drawer, and went and leaned in the open window. Somebody two houses down the street was playing a phonograph, and through the damp air the music carried perfectly, came to him fully and sweetly. Avery listened to one record, something on a violin, something very fine-drawn and wistful. Suddenly he began to enjoy his own melancholy; he would have liked to lean there all night, and have the music go on and on, and breathe the damp air until it grew chilly with the dawn.

The violin music ceased, and the person two houses down the street changed the record. His next choice was a song; and at the close of the first line Avery started as if he had been shot, and closed the window violently. The person down the street was playing “ Love’s Young Dream.”

Before he went to bed, Avery sat down and wrote Cecily a long letter. It was simply interesting and friendly; yet when he rc-read it and remembered how he had spent the evening, he felt rankly polygamous. Nevertheless he got it ready for the mail; if sending it constituted polygamy, so much the worse for monogamy.

In the morning his head ached, and he was once more a prey to those second thoughts of his. He destroyed the letter he had written; and some time later, he telephoned to Caroline that he would be at her house early. Cecily belonged to his catalogue of vain regrets, and he had no intention of not leaving her there.

Later in the morning he was much annoyed when, after several more or less furtive glances at him, his poor plain stenographer asked if he didn’t feel well. He assured her and himself, and his lingering thoughts of Cecily, that he had never felt better in his life.

CHAPTER XXII

MORLEY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

Cecily's tea-shop, which had been at first an interesting novelty, soon established itself as a response to a long-felt need in the life of the city. In winter it was cosy, with drawn curtains and low lights and steaming pots of tea; in summer, clothed with awnings and farther shielded from the street by great pots of things green and growing, it seemed to take its characteristic note from the pleasant tinkle of ice in tall glasses. And at her desk going over accounts, or hiring and training her waitresses, or greeting her customers and making them feel like her guests, Cecily pervaded the place, a firm and gracious young woman, mistress of herself and, so far as her conscience dictated, servant of the people.

Her affection for her business grew to be almost a byword among her friends. The tea-shop was like a third child to her, with the addition that the success of her tea-shop was a perpetual and delightful surprise, whereas her children were matters of course, and she got from them pretty much what she expected.

The responsibility and the independence and her own graciousness reacted on her most favorably. She had always been pretty, in a too thin, too nervous, almost dry way; now she seemed to be passing from a protracted girlhood to a lovely maturity. Her figure was rounder, her mouth sweeter, her very voice fuller and softer. She had blossomed, it seemed; though whether it was all her new occupation, or whether other causes were at work as well, who should say?

Richard Morley could not, though he observed everything that happened to her. He saw more and more of her these days, frankly took up as much of her time as she would allow him to take; and the attractioa that drew him to her was steadily growing in power. It was not by any one quality that she drew him: he had known other women who possessed her various qualities to a greater degree. But either the blending of them, or some mysterious final quality supplied by his own imagination, attracted and held him. And once the attraction was established, his very maturity and the stability of his character tended to make it permanent. If all he wanted had been a suitable wife, his own social circle could have furnished half a dozen candidates better fitted than this present one. But he didn’t want a suitable wife, he thought it odd that he should want a wife at all. He had simply fallen in love with Cecily; and being in love, he intended to marry.

He was sitting with her one hot Sunday afternoon. Cecily’s tea-shop was not open Sundays, and he liked to come to her flat. Even on a Sunday, a day hitherto devoted in spite of his better judgment to a boredom inherited from his Puritan ancestors, Morley found her poignant— final proof, if proof were needed, of her peculiar and penetrating charm.

The window shades were down, and the air of the little room was sultry. Cecily was wearing a white dress, and looked very cool; but even she seemed to feel the languor of the day. Conversation went altogether by snatches. At intervals the two of them fell silent, and then he would feel her presence more strongly than ever, almost unbearably. Forthwith he would plunge into conversation again, and for a few moments the interview took on a false appearance of vivacity.

“ When it gets cooler,” he said, “ we’ll go for a ride, shan’t we? ”

“Junior and Baby and all?” she asked.

“Junior and Baby and Anna,” he asserted. “We’d take the dog, if you had a dog.”

“ That will be fine. Anna deserves a little outing, I’m sure. She likes you, you know,” said Cecily.

He was glad of that; in a pinch a man is glad of all allies. Again conversation lagged, and again he was fearfully conscious of her. “ Do you ever happen to see anything of Bradley Antisdel ? ” he asked hastily.

“ Oh, yes! ” she answered. “ He took my invitation quite seriously, and he has come. Not often, you know; in fact I think not more than three or four times.”

“ I’m glad he has,” said Morley heartily. “ I know it does him good.”

“ Perhaps it does. It isn’t any trouble for me: he just sits and watches the children, and at the end of an hour or so he gets up and goes.”

“ I know it does him good,” Morley repeated. “ And it’s fine of you to say that it isn’t any trouble to have him here. I know it can’t be amusing for you; poor old Bradley isn’t very good company these days.”

“ I’m sorry for him,” said Cecily.

“ Any one might be,” answered Morley, and then added sharply, “Don’t let me get on that subject, Mrs. Fairchild; I never know when to stop.”

The mere mention of “ that subject ” made him angry, now and always. His anger broke the smooth surface of his “ niceness ”; and yet in it he always seemed “ nicer ” than ever. Perceiving that fact, Cecily looked at him so kindly that Morley made another abrupt conversational plunge.

They were distracted by the entrance of Margaret. Cecily called the child to her, arranged her hair-ribbon, dropped a quick kiss on her cheek. “Where’s Brother?” she asked.

Brother was reading, it appeared. He frequently was reading, in spite of the difficulties of the newly acquired art. “ Brother’s going to be a bookworm, I fear,” said his mother, smiling at Morley. “ I was myself, in my youth.”

“He is very much like you?” asked Morley.

“ Oh, very much! ”

“ But your little girl isn’t.”

“ No,” said Cecily. A shade of embarrassment appeared in the manner of each; this time it was Cecily who hunted a topic. “ Did I tell you,” she asked quickly, “ that Miss Samuels has moved up into this neighborhood? ”

“ Miss Samuels? ” Morley pretended intense interest. “ Oh, yes, that girl in our office—your choice.”

“ Yes, my choice.”

“ Your choice has turned out well, I think,” said Morley. “ She hasn’t done much work for me, but the other men seem to consider her satisfactory.”

“ She ought to be,” said Cecily, “ if only by reason of the effort that she makes. If you could see her as I have—”

“ She was an adorer of yours, wasn’t she? ” he asked. “ Did she move up here to be near you? ”

“ I don’t know,” said Cecily. “ She still haunts me, but she isn’t so awkward about it as she used to be. She comes to the tea-shop often for lunch—oftener than she can afford, I’m sure. Well, one night she lay in wait for me at the corner, and told me that she had moved. She asked me to come and see her, and I finally went.”

“ And it was revealing? ”

“It was. If you could see that room of hers—! It was the usual furnished room to begin with, but quite impossibly neat; and it was crammed with books. The most improving books: dictionaries and grammars, and the ‘ Iliad,’ and ‘ How to Look at Pictures.’ And she has read them all, and studied most of them. Imagine, she has even taught herself German! ”

“ I can’t imagine it,” said Morley. “ But all that effort is mighty fine.”

“Isn’t it? As 1 sat and listened to her schemes for self-improvement, I felt awfully ashamed. I’ve had so much greater opportunities, and I’ve wasted most of them.”

“ I can’t believe that you ever in your life wasted an opportunity,” said Morley.

“ Yes, I have,” she retorted rather sharply.

Again there was silence; and suddenly Morley felt moved to attack the subject he had been so pointedly avoiding. He leaned toward her. “ Margaret,” he said, “ go see if you can find Anna. Mrs. Fairchild, before we go for our ride, let’s devote a few minutes to talking about ourselves.”

“ That’s always an agreeable pastime,” said Cecily. “ But have we anything in particular to say about ourselves? ”

“ I have. Can’t you guess what it is? ”

She shook her head. Leaning back in her chair, her bright eyes on him, she seemed to claim her immemorial privilege of being wooed.

“ You had some flat-hunting project on a week ago, didn’t you? ” he asked.

“ Yes. Had I forgotten to tell you about that? I meant to tell.”

“ Never mind it just now; you can tell me about it afterward. But please don’t go on with it until you consider what I have to say. I’m fairly well off in this world’s goods, Mrs. Fairchild. I’m older than you, but I’m healthy and decently good-tempered, and I’ve lived a harmless if somewhat useless life. I want you to marry me.”

She drew a long breath, and continued to look steadily at him. “ Thank you, Richard,” she said slowly, “ thank you.”

“ I can’t give you all that you deserve, perhaps,” he went on, “ but I can make your life easier for you—and I’m rather mad about you, Cecily.”

“ Thank you,” she said again; her eyes were softer.

“ I’ve never felt that you cared much about me,” he continued, “ but you like me, don’t you? ”

“ I like you very much, Richard,” she said. “ But there are—obstacles.”

“ Obstacles? I see none; you will have to make me believe that.”

“ You see none? ”

“ None,” he averred. “ Certainly your children are no obstacle. For a man of my age, to come into a ready-made family is finer than having one of his own. And I adore your children, Cecily.”

“ You would be wonderful with the children, I know,” she said. “ As they grew older you could help me with them, especially with Junior. I see breakers ahead; I should like a man’s help with him. No, it isn’t the children.”

“ Aren’t you free? ” he asked. “ I didn’t know, but I have always taken it that you were.”

“ I can be at any time, I dare say; there are only some formalities to go through,” she said.

Icy fingers seemed to grip him. “ Perhaps you don’t care to be. Perhaps you still love your first husband? Cecily, it isn’t that? ”

She shook her head. “ How could I love him? I never see him. Avery Fairchild is nothing but a name to me now.”

“ Avery Fairchild? Of Chicago? That doctor who goes all over the country and lectures about tuberculosis? Was he your husband?”

“ Does he go all over the country? I thought his work lay in Chicago.”

“ Perhaps it does. I’ve read about him in the Chicago papers. A very handsome man, to judge by his picture.” “ Yes. He is handsome,” she said.

“You weren’t—happy together?”

“ No. Marriage wasn’t what I had pictured it, and I wasn’t satisfied. I ask too much of life, I suppose.”

“ But you can give me,” he said, appealing artfully to her generosity, “ all I ask.”

“ If I were fifty years old,” she said, “ I would take you, Richard.”

“ Will you when you are fifty? ” he asked quickly.

She laughed. “ Ask me then,” she said. “ And meanwhile, I’m going to take the flat I was speaking of, and move in the fall. Shall I tell you about it?”

“ Of course, tell me about it.”

“ Well, a man has just turned a huge old frame house into flats, and I can have the third floor. For no more rent than I pay here, Richard, I can get a dwelling-place that will do my soul good. A great balcony, three beautiful little bedrooms, bath, kitchen and such a living-room—!

Such a huge raftered living-room—real rafters, they hold up the roof—and full of the softest light! ”

“You have taken it, you say?”

“ Yes. I did so yesterday. I hesitated before only because I wanted a play-place for the children; and now the landlord tells me that I can have half of the back yard, all fenced off. But the living-room, Richard—you will love the living-room! ”

“ The living-room will have a chance to get very tired of me, Cecily. I am glad that you like houses and the decoration of them. It will make me very happy if some day you tell me to have my old place done over.”

She smiled at him, shaking her head, and he thought best to drop the subject. Yet as he started for his drive half an hour later, with her beside him and her boy between them, he felt even happier than starting off with her usually made him. He had made some gain that afternoon. In the first place she had allowed him to use her given name, the sweet English “ Cecily ” that he loved. And she had by no means refused him; he did not believe that she intended to refuse him. He thought none the less of her for not falling into his hand at the first sign he made; and she was assuredly worth waiting for. Wait for her he would, even if necessary until she reached the fifty years she had suggested. Meanwhile he appreciated the present state of affairs, which was sweet, if tantalizing; tantalizing, but sweet.

CHAPTER XXIII

EPISODE

“ Avery Fairchild is nothing but a name to me now.” Cecily had surprised herself when she said that. It was fatally true, though, and she had for a long time acknowledged it to herself. It was months since Avery had even let her hear from him. Not, of course, that Cecily minded it on her own account; but he might very well have shown some interest in his children. Avery had never been furiously paternal, but she had thought that his children meant something to him, had reproached herself more or less for separating him from them. But he was allowing them to grow away from him as they grew tall and lovely, and, to a mature mind, more interesting every day. They had now ceased to ask either when Daddy was coming home or when they were going to Daddy; and although those questions had pricked her sharply enough in their day, she rather missed them now.

In the spring she had herself written to him, in a spirit of compunction for things he might have resented if he had chosen; she had written a consciously agreeable letter, as agreeable as she knew how to make it. Her letter had remained unanswered. Remittances still continued to come, but they were sent now by the bank. The check had grown from twenty to forty dollars, a growth which indicated prosperity on Avery’s part; this very summer it advanced to sixty. Cecily, being now prosperous herself, began to bank all his drafts as the nucleus of a fund to educate the children.

Like Morley, she occasionally saw Avery’s name in the .Chicago paper; it occurred to her that some day she would see it there in another connection. Avery might very well remarry; why, indeed, should he not? She admitted no interest in his plans, had certainly come to the end of her own relations with him. But if that were the reason Avery had cut his children, if he indeed planned a new household and perhaps a second family, she would see to it that her children had a new father. Richard Morley was wonderful with her children; but then Richard was always perfect in his attitudes. She really ought to marry him; she was coming quite to like the idea. The generous character of his passion appealed to her; and the ease and richness of his life were such as she had always desired.

Still she hesitated. A woman could know first love but once, a serener feeling befitted after that; but there were times when in spite of herself Morley’s wooing threw her mind back violently to other days and another lover. The passion of those days had faded, but remembrance of all that had happened since could not dim their wonder. With all her liking for Morley, and her appreciation of both his qualities and his environment, she was never thrilled by his person or his feeling for her. The worst of it was that she had known such a thrill, and missed it in the present situation.

After that summer day when he had first asked her to marry him, Morley often recurred to the subject. “ I am happy as I am, Richard,” she would plead. “ Some day, perhaps.” Later she changed it to, “ Some day, surely— but not just now.” And within sight of her unkissed lips Morley held his patience, and argued with himself that he, too, was happy as things were. A woman was not less attractive for being chary of herself; and she rose in his estimation for being able to keep a man of his years and experience guessing about the whole situation.

At least, she didn’t keep him at arm’s length because she lacked generosity. All through that next fall and winter Bradley Antisdel came more or less regularly to her flat; and she allowed and even encouraged him to come, though his dumb presence must have bored her. Morley sometimes encountered him there, sitting in a corner, never staying long, often silent for half an hour at a stretch, but drinking in peace at every pore. Antisdel was one of those to whom the gift of expression has been denied; but one evening when they left together he said awkwardly to Morley, jerking his head back over his shoulder, “That’s what a home should be like.”

Morley divined how it must appeal to him—the lived-in atmosphere of Cecily’s new flat, the pretty children in the happy hour between supper and bed-time, the woman who used her nervous energy at worst only for the production of witty and wicked sayings about people. Even the absence of row would appeal to poor Antisdel; in his own house, if he was not being frozen, he was being rowed. He rather preferred the rows; for during them Clara could not yearn quite so pointedly for her deserted lover.

“ It’s a rare chance for Bradley, finding such a woman as Cecily to give him a few hours of peace,” Morley thought, “ but if Clara ever finds out about this, there will be a memorable row.” Clara made a point of not caring anything about her husband; but Morley suspected that she would not put up with anything that looked like an infringement of her property rights in him. “ She’s a common dog in the manger, as well as a tragic heroine,” was Morley's summing-up of Mrs. Antisdel.

Cecily never seemed to worry about the possibility of Mrs. Antisdel’s finding out; as indeed why should she, considering what there was to find out? Beside, every moment of Cecily’s time was taken these days. She was working hard, seeing a great deal of Morley, settling her new flat. What leisure had she to think of anything so unimportant as poor Antisdel, standing like a beggar to receive the crumbs that fell from her table?

Her new flat was all that she had hoped it would be, an airy and unusual dwelling, suited to Cecily as she was at this stage of her life. In the great raftered living-room, full of the soft light that she loved—a room that transformed and improved any light, day or electric or fire— Bradley Antisdel continued to occupy at intervals the least comfortable chair; and Cecily endured his visits with fine ironic patience.

“ The odd part of it,” thought Morley, who watched and analyzed the whole situation, “ is that Bradley isn’t a bit in love with Cecily, unless I’m very much mistaken. I think that he never has loved any one but that beast Clara.” Morley wouldn’t have liked it, of course, if Antisdel had been in love with Cecily, and Cecily probably wouldn’t have liked it either. The fact that he so obviously wasn’t, saved the situation and probably accounted for her patience. She was simply being generous.

The three of them, Cecily, Antisdel and Morley, were sitting together one winter evening. The children had just started for bed, under conduct of Anna; Morley and Cecily had drawn their chairs close to the wood-fire. Antisdel as usual sat back a little, though they had urged him to draw up too. He was as quiet as ever tonight, but it was not merely his retiring disposition that made him sit back. He wanted to look at them. Morley and Cecily looked happy; he could see what a life they had stretching before them; he wished to watch them, and think of their happy, happy future. He loved Richard Morley, and here was Morley in love with and apparently on the point of being loved by God’s kindest woman. Her beauty and intelligence any one could observe, but only Bradley Antisdel knew how kind she was, kind even to a poor devil who must bore her to death.

“ Why don’t we pop com over the coals, or even toast marshmallows? ” asked Cecily from the depths of her chair. “ I should love it if you fed me toasted marshmallows, Richard.”

“ Beastly, sticky things” objected Morley. “ I’ll be glad to pop corn for you though.”

“ That’s like you, Richard,” she commented. “ Popcorn comes down to us from the Puritans, I think, and it’s certainly an ascetic dainty.”

“ I’m not sure about that,” said Morley. “ I know that when I was a child I loved it chiefly because I could gorge myself on it without ever getting sick.”

“Richard!” she exclaimed. “Were you ever really a greedy, dirty little boy? ”

“ All little boys are greedy and dirty, even your delightful Junior,” said Morley, smiling.

“ Oh, I can’t allow that! Mine is a model child,” she protested.

The door-bell rang at that moment, and they heard Anna go to answer it. Antisdel’s experience had made him apprehensive; he sat rigid now, fearful that something would interrupt their pleasant evening. Morley and Cecily, both secure in a good conscience and the background of a life unshaken by rows, seemed not to have heard the bell; they were looking at each other. But when Anna showed the new arrival into the room—there was no other place to show her—Morley sprang to his feet and rushed forward. “ My dear Clara! ” he exclaimed. “ Have you come for Bradley? It’s a good wind that blows you in here; I’ve been longing to have you meet my friend Mrs. Fairchild. Mrs. Fair-child, this is Mrs. Antisdel.”

Clara Antisdel was in evening dress, with a rich wrap and a huge muff. As she stood in the doorway, her lips curled and her eyes blazing, she was a striking and effective figure. A figure of triumph she seemed to poor Antisdel; she had tracked him to his last little refuge. Richard Morley saw in her only a bad-tempered woman who was always determined to make scenes; a scene was what he wanted to avoid.

“ I hope you aren’t in any hurry, Clara,” he said. “ We were planning some innocent bucolic delight, such as popcorn; though of course if you’d rather, the four of us can go out somewhere to spend the evening.”

His effusiveness only let Mrs. ‘Antisdel see that he dreaded her. She answered him with a single look; then she turned the batteries of her scorn on Cecily. Cecily, to be sure, did not seem to mind: she stood with an arm resting lightly on a chair-back, and regarded her visitor with an expression in which curiosity predominated.

“ So,” said Mrs. Antisdel, breaking her silence, “ so you are the woman he comes to see! ”

“ Clara! Clara! ” protested Antisdel.

But Cecily needed no allies. “ I suppose I am,” she said, “ formally at- least.”

“Formally?”

“ Yes. I think,” said Cecily, “ that he actually comes to see the children, and because it’s quiet here.”

“ Are you sure it’s quiet? ” asked Mrs. Antisdel. “ Isn’t it rather that you make it interesting? ”

Morley seemed to choke at that; but Cecily laid her free hand on his arm. “ No, Mrs. Antisdel,” she said slowly. “ I don’t make it interesting. I don’t even find it interesting.”

“ That is hard to believe,” said Clara, throwing her head back.

“ I don’t see why it need be,” said Cecily, her courteous tone never altering. “Doubtless your husband was once the same as other men. Now he hasn’t a single idea except peace, peace at any price.”

Clara kept her superior manner, but she stumbled now. “ What does that mean? ” she asked.

“ Simply that he doesn’t get it at home, I suppose.”

“ That isn’t any of your affair.” Clara’s magnificence was dwindling into vulgarity; it became more apparent every minute that she could if she chose lead any one a life—! “ When this business is aired—”

“ Clara, don’t talk nonsense,” said Morley sharply.

“ What have you to do with this? ” asked Mrs. Antisdel.

“ You are speaking to the woman to whom I am paying my addresses, as the phrase is,” said Morley. “ I hope to marry her, Clara, if she will have me.”

“ In that case, I can see how you are interested,” said Mrs. Antisdel nastily. Once more it took Cecily’s touch to restrain Morley.

“ I haven’t promised to marry him,” said Cecily, always very quietly. “ But if I do marry him, I shall carry out my bargain. There is nothing like keeping to your bargain, Mrs. Antisdel. If you want to leave a man, leave him; but so long as you keep his name—and spend his money— don’t starve him and don’t badger him. The silly game will ruin your own life, and it will leave him yours in the end only because he has become such a poor creature that no other woman will have him.”

Clara Antisdel’s face blanched at that last hit. She began to stammer something, but Cecily went on, “ You came to me, Mrs. Antisdel, not I to you. I’m not the keeper of your private conscience, but you yourself have given me some right to speak in this matter. You are spoiling a good man’s life—oh, he is a good man, a fine man! He would be an agreeable man if you only gave him the chance. You’re spoiling your own life too. Of course, that’s your business; but don’t ruin his. So long as you are his wife, be his wife; or leave him, and leave him in peace.” “ For some other woman? ” snapped Mrs. Antisdel.

“ Perhaps. After all, why not, if you don’t want him any more? But that isn’t the course I should like to see you take, Mrs. Antisdel. The splendid course, the course for a really human woman, is to stay and make him happy. Men are such silly things, so easy to make happy.” A little smile flickered over Cecily’s lips.

Clara Antisdel, who had come to make such a magnificent scene, was somehow overborne. Nonplussed, though not convinced, she stood tapping her foot and looking at Cecily, this curious woman who dealt out world-old truths as if they were new-minted by her own experience, and somehow succeeded in making her listeners think that they were precious.

" It’s easy to spoil things, Mrs. Antisdel,” Cecily wound up, “ and it’s not always easy to make them right again. But for you, fortunately, the making right is easy. There stands your good, patient Bradley, who never looked at another woman—all this talk of another woman may amuse you, but it’s awfully beside the point. He only asks you to be decent to him. That’s a real life, for a woman, being decent to some man. Surely, you won’t push aside your chance of a real life? ”

“ What makes you talk this way to me? ” asked Mrs. Antisdel, almost pitifully.

“ I’m sorry for your husband,” answered Cecily. “ So is every one else who knows him. Perhaps you like to have people sorry for your husband. I think myself that it’s a most humiliating position for you.”

That drew a little of Clara’s former fire. “ I didn’t ask for your opinions,” she said hotly.

“ No. But you must admit that by coming here you laid yourself open to them.”

Mrs. Antisdel looked away from Cecily, looked doubtfully at Antisdel. That gentleman, who had at first been only profoundly uncomfortable, had begun to have gleams of a wonderful hope. “ It’s only truth that she tells you, Clara,” he hastened now to say. “ She has been very kind to me, and she must have been dreadfully bored all the time. I’m not exhilarating at my best, and I haven’t been at my best lately.”

“ Do you blame me for that? ” she asked.

He had just now more than his usual courage. “ Sometimes you might be kinder to me than you are,” he answered.

Mrs. Antisdel stood summoning all her reserves, calling especially to mind that idea of her lost love which had stood consolingly by her in so many crises. She had, however, a feeling that it was more or less useless against Cecily. Bradley was a simple soul, and easily impressed; but what did this cool young woman care about her lost love? Mrs. Fairchild might have had a dozen loves of her own, and lost them—and then lived them down. Before her impression of Cecily rather than anything the latter had said, Mrs. Antisdel stood agape.

She saw that she had failed of her effect; and at the same moment there came over her a stunning perception of a whole new range of effects. One could be very effective, it appeared, simply by being kind—especially if one were not the sort of person whose kindness comes gushingly and foolishly forth, were indeed kind rather by contrast. She moved suddenly, dropping her big muff. Antisdel sprang forward to restore it to her; somehow about it their hands met, and then their eyes. His held that dog-like pleading which she had so often seen, and so often despised. It was stupid of her to have sounded Bradley always on that one string; stupid for her, to have him always the same in his response. If one were kind, at least sometimes—

“ I have the car here, Bradley,” she said softly. “ Should you like to come with me? ”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“ Home. Shouldn’t you like to come home with me?”

In his response she saw that already he was vibrating in a different way. Hope springs high in this world, on slight provocation. Even in Bradley Antisdel it sprang high; and in the delight of its springing, he was rather curt in his farewells to his kind woman. Clara too was cold; there are things one cannot admit having learned from another woman. But Cecily did not seem to mind; from her height she watched their departure with a certain amusement—these two going out arm in arm! The door closed behind them, and Morley found his tongue.

“ You were splendid! ” he cried. “ Splendid, my dear! ”

Cecily looked at him for a moment; then her brow contracted and her fists clenched. She laid her head down on her chair-arm, and burst into tears.

Morley had never seen her cry. In vast distress he stooped over her, murmured soothingly, even tried to take her in his arms. She shrank from him. “ Please, Richard, go away,” she sobbed. “ Go away, please, and leave me alone.”

He went away, at a loss to account for her sudden emotion. If she had in spite of appearances allowed herself to care for Antisdel— But she obviously didn’t care for him; no woman who cared for a man could talk about him as she had talked about Bradley, or hand him over so coolly to his legal wife. Yet if she didn’t care about him, why should she go to pieces at the sight of his truce with Clara?

Was it, perhaps, not the people at all, but something in the situation itself, that had moved her? There was more in her life than she had ever cared to tell him, perhaps more than she could have told if she had tried. There might be some very bitter depths. It could not be for nothing that she had left her husband, that mysterious abstraction whom Morley knew only as a name in the Chicago papers.

Morley had hit near the truth in his last conjecture, had at least succeeded in hitting the exact opposite of the truth. It was of Avery Fairchild that Cecily thought as she lay sobbing to herself; but it seemed to her at this moment that it was for nothing she had left him. She had been generous tonight; why had she not been generous with Avery? Everything might have been different if she had only been different; but it was too late now. At the thought of how much too late it was, Richard Morley was suddenly hateful to her; it was for other arms, than his that she longed. And Avery had not written to her for months, had probably forgotten her altogether, had doubtless consoled himself with another woman. Too late now—and all her own fault.

She grew calmer presently; she realized that if things weren’t as they ought to be, at least they must be faced as they were. She had been rude to Richard, and had sent him away in a manner quite foreign to the gospel of kindness she had just been preaching. When her head was cool again, she telephoned to Morley. In a voice that was still a little thick she told him that she hadn’t meant to be rude; and he answered that she hadn’t been, that his only thought was distress at seeing how she felt. He feared that she had been working too hard lately; wouldn’t she dine with him the next evening, and go to some silly show that would cheer her up?

He was so much better than she deserved. She accepted gladly, gratefully, feeling herself wrapped round by his unquestioning tenderness. At these times of self-reproach, and in the mad moments when the thought would occur to her that in some way her path and Avery’s might yet cross, and the dour man might reclaim her and refuse to give her up—at all such times, she wrapped herself closer and closer in the protecting garment of Morley’s devotion.

CHAPTER XXIV

AVERY PAYS A VISIT

Avery Fairchild had drifted into an engagement of marriage. At least, he supposed that he was engaged to be married; but both his inclination and Mrs. Keppel’s had made the arrangement somewhat indefinite. Avery’s status was still unsettled, and bade fair to remain so until his mounting feeling for Caroline, if it did mount, should overcome his obstinate determination not to ask Cecily for a divorce. As for Caroline, she was satisfied with things as they were now. At present she enjoyed both liberty and romance, and in her married life she had known neither. With the very idea of marriage she associated all sorts of dreary pomposities and restrictions.

Finally, she loved the relation in which they now stood. There was always a masculine background in her life these days, and a feminine in his. They were much together; Avery had the run of her house, the use of her car, if only he would use it. Many times he drew the line, for fear of making her conspicuous; and as the older of the two, and the man, he felt it his duty to warn her that people might talk. To which Caroline answered sweetly, “ Let them talk,” and picked up her guitar.

Where she would have been without her guitar and her intricate toilets, and the tea- and chess-tables over which her white hands fluttered so delicately, Avery did not know. Such women as Cecily and Lois Butler made their appeal of themselves, would have made it on a desert island; but Caroline Keppel spoke in and by the multitude of her things. Her wealth was no mere extraneous thing; clothes and automobiles, house and servants, little luxuries and big, were her means of expression. For Avery’s benefit she increased the means: bought, as she had threatened, new clothes of silken and glowing magnificence; bought a new limousine, and then because he would not use it, bought also a smaller closed car. She increased her accomplishments, too, passing from guitar to mandolin and even to violin, having her agreeable voice farther cultivated, practising three hours of a morning for the sake of that one hour in the evening when she should sit near him and sing to him.

The abundance either of her possessions or of her leisure finally got on Avery’s nerves. Little suppers for the two of them appeared when he would sooner have rummaged through the ice-box; Caroline waited for him evenings when he would rather have gone home and to bed. To keep off the contagion of her soft ways, he worked harder than ever; and work was again constantly grateful to him— he had that at least to thank her for. His little room was grateful, too, cold and calm and bookish; Avery returned from her atmosphere hungry for asceticism.

That spring, when his acquaintance with Caroline was already more than a year old, he once more changed his occupation. A daily paper of huge circulation and mounting ideals conceived of a “ department ” of advice on health, run from day to day by a medical authority. It was in a way an extension of the work that Avery had been doing; and he was asked to conduct the department, giving up his entire time to it. The salary was good, the opportunity great, the field new; and the Anti-Tuberculosis Association was now so well organized that he could intrust it to others to carry on. He consulted Lois Butler by letter. “ Go ahead,” was her advice. Avery went; and after the change was made he spoke of it to Caroline, and wrote to Grosvenor, and, somewhat less promptly, to Cecily.

Grosvenor answered at once and rather quizzically,

Cecily in a polite, formal little note. Lois came personally to offer her comments, arriving in town with Walter Butler to spend the week-end. Avery spent most of it with them, and was steeped in a queer feeling of their happiness. Lois had never regretted her stupendous condescension in marrying Walter, had apparently never even realized it; and Walter on his side had never for a moment forgotten it. They had grown together vastly in these last few years, they with their perpetual unconscious “ we,” had even grown to look alike, now that they were both gaining weight. Some of the manifestations of their content Avery did not like: they might both, for instance, have been better dressed; Avery objected to handsome fur coats grown a little shabby, and made to order shoes obviously the worse for want of blacking. But the spread of their radiant content was over everything; their plans, their home, their boy, echoed through their speech their perfect unity.

They met Mrs. Keppel once, when the four of them dined at a restaurant and went to the theater together. After that Caroline was forced to lie by with a bad case of tonsilitis. With the exception of poor Caroline’s suffering, that was all exactly as Avery would have had it: he wanted Lois to meet Mrs. Keppel, but he didn’t want to force the acquaintance, or have Lois suspect—well, suspect anything.

In a half-hour when she and Avery were alone, Lois spoke of Cecily. She and Walter had seen her in her tea-shop—“ a wonderful tea-shop, Avery, the best-conducted that I ever saw anywhere, and an institution of the town.” Cecily was looking very well, and prettier than ever.

“ I hear very little about her,” said Avery. “ I wonder about her sometimes, how she really likes being ‘ on her own,’ and whether she is still unattached.”

“There are rumors in Jefferson—I don’t know what foundation they have—”

“But repeating them merely as gossip, they are—?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the cigarette he had in his hand.

“ They are that she is engaged to a man she has met lately, a parti, an eligible.”

“ Yes? It would be strange, you know, if she couldn’t do well for herself.”

“Oh, as to doing well—!” Lois’s fine hands seemed to push something away from her, and her fine eyes were troubled.

Avery clung to his friends to the last moment, accompanying them to their train, and chatting with them through the window until the train left. He had not seen them very often since he left Jefferson, and his correspondence with Lois, sustained so long, had lately fallen off. But for him she would always be a woman apart; and she and the husband with whom she was in such harmony seemed to keep Avery in a fine, sweet air.

He had not brought himself to confide to Lois his quasiengagement-—a proof that the engagement was pretty sharply separated from the rest of his life. He was already having doubts as to the wisdom and the perpetuity of that arrangement; yet when in deference to her tonsils Caroline went away for a month, he missed her. His delight at missing her measured for the first time the depths of his distrust of their relation. She was a relaxation for him, but, poor girl, she distracted him from the serious business of life. Of course not even Caroline Keppel, fine flower of dependence though she was, could live her life entirely in relation to some one else’s; and he assured himself that only his own unreasonableness chafed at her just and really very modest demands upon him.

She came back from her vacation very much refreshed, and eager to be with him. She had more new clothes, had learned to play a little Hawaiian guitar, had bought a great deal of new music; even when she was away, she must have been thinking of him constantly. But he had involved himself, not only in an immense amount of medical reading, but in some investigations of his own. He wanted to work nights and Sundays, and Caroline pouted. “ This won’t last forever,” he said in his own justification. “ And you know, if I am to guide the public health, I must guide it correctly.”

They were in her sitting-room, and had finished their game of chess; when the disposal of the next evening came up, Avery had pleaded that he must work. Caroline rose so abruptly that she knocked half the chessmen off the board. “ Of course,” she said sharply, “ that’s all right for you. But if I wanted to do anything else when you wanted me here—”

“ You could go ahead and do it,” he said mildly. “ I don’t ever want to feel that my visits are a burden to you, Caroline.”

“ But there isn’t ever anything I want to do, in preference to seeing you,” she went on stormily. “ And you know it, and take advantage of it; but when it comes to making any sacrifice for me—”

“ I appreciate your devotion, indeed I do,” he protested. “ But I don’t demand it, you must remember.”

“ If you only would! ” she thought; but she said nothing. She bit her lip to keep the tears back.

As the simplest way of ending the discussion, Avery went around the table and took her in his arms. “ I love you, you know; you mustn’t ever forget that,” he whispered.

It worked like a charm, as he had known that it would: she kissed him, and smiled. Then she lifted her face again to say, “ And you will come tomorrow, won’t you? ”

He yielded, though he could feel shackles about his wrists as he did so. Consciousness of his bound state made him take his leave at once, and very shortly; and it stayed with him all the next day. Grumpilv enough he went to Mrs. Keppel’s, picturing all the way the fascinating and important work that he was leaving undone.

Having carried her point, she was now very gracious: fed him sumptuously, and at first amused him charmingly. But her throat was not strong as yet, and she could not sing very long. She talked instead, and her evil angel led her to choose a topic that she usually avoided for her own sake as well as for Avery’s: she held forth at length on plans for their marriage.

They would live here, of course, she said, unless he preferred to go somewhere else. Of course, they could buy a new house, but this one would really be very nice, if it were done over; she had never liked the present decorations. Avery could make any changes he wished. He could have Keppel’s room done over to suit him, or any other bedroom that he chose. Their honeymoon they would spend in Europe; she supposed even his precious work could wait while he was on his honeymoon.

Avery did not like to think of its waiting, while he dangled about Europe in her silken wake. And at the very idea of the late Mr. Keppel’s bedroom sumptuously redecorated for him, he felt nostalgia for his own bare “ diggings.”

The air seemed close and heavy. He would have liked to go for a drive, and they could have gone at once if he had only suggested it. But the car was Caroline’s, bought with the late Mr. Keppel’s money; and Avery did not suggest a drive. To excuse his silence he lighted a cigarette. Caroline always had his favorite brand ready for him; but he ignored them, and took one from his pocket instead.

In the midst of a silence that was, on his side at least, not wholly cordial, a maid came to summon him to the telephone. He came back with a worried frown. “ It’s my landlady,” he explained. “ There is a special delivery letter for me. I told her to send it over.”

“ Don’t you suppose it’s business? ” she asked.

“ No. All my business goes to the office.”

“ Bad new from your relatives? ” she suggested, and added flippantly, “ Have you any relatives, Avery? ”

“ I have two children,” he said dryly.

“ You don’t talk about them as you used to. And I haven’t ever seen them, Avery. Am I never to see them? ”

“ I don’t know. I haven’t seen them much myself, lately.” Avery was nervous, but he was trying to hold himself in check, to speak civilly, if not at length.

She disregarded danger signals. “ Avery,” she said abruptly, “ isn’t there some way that you could get the children? ”

He sprang to his feet, half strangling. “ Oh, I didn’t mean that as it sounded! ” she cried. “ I wouldn’t take them from their mother, of course. Only I thought how you would like to have them——”

“ For God’s sake, Caroline, be quiet! ” he shouted.

She stared at him, startled. He went to a window, opened it, breathed deeply of the outside air; he saw nothing that was before him. If the letter would only come! It might be bad news about one of the children, it might be about Cecily. If it were Cecily sick, or even—dead— and the letter found him here! He shuddered, and Caroline, watching him and seeing the shudder, came and closed the window.

The letter finally came. He snatched it in an agony of apprehension, and read it at a glance. “ It’s from Cecily,” he said. “ My boy is sick. I must go at once.” He looked at his watch.

Caroline rang for the car, telephoned about trains, offered to send word to the office in the morning. She had recovered from her awkwardness; she was now perfect in her solicitude. “ Let me know, Avery, let me know at once,” she whispered as he left. But he scarcely saw her. In her house, in the very car he had shortly before hesitated to use, he was suddenly out of the circle of her influence.

In the train he never once harked back to her; all his thoughts ran ahead to Cecily and his child. He re-read her letter a dozen times, though in twice reading it he had learned the bare phrases. “ Seriously if not critically ill— thought you ought to know—will keep you informed.” He would glance down it to the scrawled “ As ever, Cecily,” at the end, and restore it to his pocket; in a few minutes he would be reading it again. He seemed to get a sort of obscure comfort from the act; and, indeed, it was the only comfort he gained on the trip.

When he arrived at his destination it was late at night. He left the station walking like a man in a dream. Slowly and with infinite trouble, as if nightmarish weights were attached to his feet, he found the street where Cecily lived; then he paced up and down it looking for her house. The address was given in her letter—he referred to it repeatedly. But house-numbers were not easy to find; and in the darkness most of them eluded him completely. He finally recognized the house by its architectural peculiarity: it was so tall and square, but there was apparently only one entrance. There were lights burning in the third story, too; and some one had said that she lived in the third story. Who could have told him that? Lois? Perhaps; he couldn’t seem to remember.

With his hand on the bell he hesitated, and crossed the street to reconnoiter. On a second view, there were not many lights; and no doctor’s automobile stood before the door—that at least was a relief. Perhaps no one was awake in the house; and in that case, he could not disturb them at this unearthly hour.

Avery thrust his hands into his overcoat pockets, and began to pace up and down the street. It was cold, and he was confoundedly tired; his head ached. Time was when he was pretty well inured to being up all night; but lately he must have got soft. It might be better for him to be back in general practice again: after all, that was a man’s life. It had its braveries, its dangers, its combats and its victories; in his memory it glowed with a kind of morning splendor. But if it was anything like his memory of it, why hadn’t he stayed in general practice? He forgot exactly why not, though he remembered a vague sensation of discontent. His reasons had, somehow, something to do with a woman. Yet when he'left the life of which he was thinking, he had given up a wonderful woman. Given her up, had he? he wondered in his daze. Why, no; for at this very moment she seemed to lie in his arms, with her face upturned to his. And then suddenly it wasn’t Cecily’s face at all, but Caroline’s; and burning disgust filled him. He stumbled in his walk, and almost fell.

This wouldn’t do at all. He should be going fast asleep next, and having a policeman speak to him. He took a considerable turn down the street, counting the blocks in the sidewalk and also counting his steps, hoping by the intricacy of the calculation to keep himself awake.

Day dawned at last; and with the first glimmer Avery stationed himself opposite to Cecily’s, and began to watch the windows. His stupor left him; burning impatience filled its place.

His impatience was rewarded sooner than he could have expected. Some one came presently to one of the dimly-lighted windows, and leaned there to watch the dawn. It was Cecily. To Avery’s straining eyes she looked white and spent. He crossed the street on a run.

She must have seen him coming, for the door yielded under his hand. He Tushed up the stairs—they seemed fairly interminable; how on earth did she ever get the children up and down? Though, of course, the children weren’t babies any more; he kept forgetting that.

At the top of the stairs, in the dusky hall, she was waiting for him. She seized his lapels, and delivered herself in a rapid whisper. “ He’s better, Avery—oh, much better! He had a bad night last night; that’s why I wrote you this morning—yesterday morning, I should say. But he has slept tonight. Until just now the nurse was asleep, and I stayed with him. He’s been quiet all night. Perhaps he wasn’t as sick at any time as I thought him; the children have always been so well, I suppose I’m silly about them. Still, I thought you ought to know.”

“You were right; I’m glad you let me know.” Feeling her tremble, and remembering how she had looked across the street, he growled, “ Damned nurse, sleeping her head off and letting you get yourself thoroughly done up.”

“ Oh, I shall sleep today. How I shall sleep! ” she exclaimed, and then added, “Won’t you come in, Avery?” Even in the grim light of dawn the living-room was a wonderful room, a creation in rooms. Avery looked about it curiously, recognizing here a thing and there a thing, and recognizing over all a touch, that old-time characteristic touch of Cecily’s.

“Should you like to see Junior?” asked Cecily. He nodded. Did she still call the boy that, he wondered, when they were alone?

She led the way to a little passage, off which opened a row of doors. They passed through one, into a small, simply-furnished room, with some of a boy’s traps on shelves against the wall. A uniformed nurse rose from a chair beside the bed. “ Miss Wilkinson, Dr. Fairchild,” said Cecily carelessly.

Avery stooped over the bed. The boy was fast asleep, with one clenched fist resting on the bedclothes. Avery asked a few questions of the nurse, and laid his hand on his boy’s head, whether affectionately or professionally he hardly knew. Then he drew Cecily out of the room.

“ He’s getting on very nicely, I should judge,” he whispered. “ You will be in worse need of treatment than he is, if you aren’t careful.”

“ I’m all right,” she assured him. “ Just a minute, Avery, until I get a handkerchief—”

She went into the last doorway, at the end of the passage. Avery stood where he was, but he followed her with his eyes. No need to have her presence claim that room; he would have known it anywhere, with its soft pale colors, its little stand of books beside the narrow immaculate bed, its exquisite dressing-table with the photograph of her children in the middle, its general air of cloistral neatness, of almost cloistral charm. This was like, it was very like, Cecily’s little room in the Jefferson house. Memory took him by the throat; he would have asked nothing better than to throw himself on the little bed, and bury his face in the pillow, and sob.

He was saved from sentimental excess by Cecily’s return. “Avery,” she asked, “are you hungry?”

“ Now that you speak of it, I am,” he answered.

“ Come on.” She led him into the kitchen. “ Anna’s asleep,” she said. “ Let’s get ourselves some breakfast.”

Very much in the manner of a honeymooning couple— they had done it many times themselves during the first months of their marriage—they hunted out bacon and eggs, made coffee and toast. Avery “ set the table ” on the shelf of the kitchen cabinet, and there presently they sat down together.

As Avery ate, his spirits rose. He kept up a flow of questions, which Cecily answered with short sentences and little quick jerks of her head. “ Does Anna sleep in the Toom with Margaret? ” he asked, and “ Have you visited Junior’s school?” and, with some embarrassment, “Have you plenty of money to get along? ” Later she talked: she told him of the success of her tea-shop, and also spoke of a new plan. Some day, when she had money enough ahead to make it feasible, she hoped to open a working-girls’ lunchroom in a part of town quite distant from her tea-shop.

“ Something different, Avery,” she said. “ I want to have it as simple as possible, but with everything very pretty: just as pretty as my tea-shop, but of course not as luxurious. 1 should like to use blue and white dishes—you can buy such pretty ones for so little money—and plate-glass table-tops with blue and white cretonne under them. Starved souls ought to be fed as well as starved bodies. I think that with good management I could come out a little ahead on such an undertaking; but of course I can’t venture on it until I have money in the bank.”

It seemed curious to hear Cecily gravely discussing a philanthropic undertaking; it struck a discordant note in his sense, exquisite and in part painful, of dipping into his past. But she talked with so much interest, and went so into detail, that he was convinced her interest was unfeigned. “ She talks to me as she might to any other man,” he thought. “ But at least she feels that she can talk freely to me about what interests her. That is something.”

A sound behind him made him look around. There in the doorway stood the small Margaret in her night-clothes, trailing a pink blanket behind her. “ Why, Baby, what are you doing out of bed at this hour? ” asked Cecily.

Margaret, grave, sleepy, utterly adorable, stood looking at Avery. Did she remember him, he wondered; little children have such short memories, and she was so very little. Avery held out his arms to her. “ Aren’t you coming to Daddy, Margaret? ” he asked.

She came then with a rush, and climbed on his knee. Avery wrapped her up and held her. Margaret was by this time a relatively mature child, in her own opinion; she even looked forward to going to school. But to Avery she seemed nothing but a baby, a small immature feminine copy of himself. He sat looking down at her, watching her eyelids droop and droop, and finally close. She did look like him, very much like him; he wondered if Cecily knew how much. He looked up quickly, in order to surprise Cecily watching them. She was watching them, indeed, but rather absently; and when he looked at her, she yawned.

It occurred to him that it would be a good thing if he went away, and let her go to sleep. But he didn’t want to go away; or rather, he wanted to, but he couldn’t make up his mind to put down the child and go. Finally the telephone rang, and Cecily went to answer it. Only then Avery rose, and carrying the sleeping Margaret, followed her into the living-room.

Cecily, with one knee in a chair, stood between him and the window, answering the telephone; her profile was toward him. There was an unstudied grace in the pose; and the sight of her so, graceful, careless, off guard, struck him as somehow poignant ahd memorable.

Her voice roused him. “ Isn’t it rather early for you? ” she was saying into the mouth-piece. “ That’s good of you. . . . I’m grateful for your anxiety, but I’m sorry it kept you awake. ... He passed a very good night, thank you; I’m sure he’s going to get well now. . . . Yes, come and see me late this afternoon; I’m not going downtown today.”

Was it a woman friend she was talking to, he wondered, or her “ parti ”? The expression of her face as she turned to him settled the point; she looked at him almost insolently.

“ I beg your pardon; I shouldn’t have listened,” he said.

“ It’s of no consequence,” she assured him.

“ I’ll go now,” he said stiffly. He laid the sleeping child on a divan. Cecily bent over her, and adjusted the blanket.

“You’ll rest now, won't you, Cecily?”

“ Yes,” she answered. When she lifted her head she looked simply white and tired.

“ You’ll let me know at once if there is any change in the boy’s condition? And you’ll let me know, anyway, how he gets on?”

“Yes, Avery.”

“ I shall—I shall come again,” he said. She did not answer.

He left her, and began to go down the interminable stairs. He stumbled as he went—he was so very tired. But if he was so tired, why was he going away? Here surely he could have found rest. To have Cecily beside him, and to sink down, down——

What nonsense! In the outer air he stood breathing deeply, and lighted a cigar to steady himself. “ I couldn’t rest with her, ever,” he thought. “ And yet, even if I thought we should get on now no better than before, I would go back to her again, if she would only have me.”

That was nonsense too. She wouldn’t have him, and he wouldn’t go back even if she would. But it was very upsetting, stepping for a moment into her atmosphere, stepping almost into their old life together. It made a man think things.

How would she strike him if he met her now for the first time? As happy and successful, no doubt; for surely she was happy and successful. “ She has her projects and her babies, congenial work and her own money. Doubtless she could have her choice of a dozen better men than I, if a man were what she wanted. Perhaps she regrets me sometimes, in a purely sentimental way; but she has stamped the follies of her youth underfoot. It’s quite time for me to do the same with mine.”

He tried to think of Caroline; and felt, with a sinking heart, that the follies of middle age may be worse than the follies of youth. In the train he went to sleep, and forgot about follies and women; and when he reached home he was utterly spent, and was thinking about nothing at all.

At the door he was met by his landlady, a fat, fussy soul, who would have been devoted to him if she had dared. “ Somebody kept 'phoning to you this morning, Dr. Fair-child—a woman. The last time she left her number; you were to call her as soon as you came in.”

She gave him Caroline’s number. Avery groaned aloud at the thought of talking to Caroline just then; yet the poor girl was doubtless anxious about him. “ I’ll call her now,” he said to his landlady. “ Will you be so good as to make me some tea or something? I’m not going out today.”

She bustled off, delighted with the commission. Avery went to the telephone, and gave the well-known number. “ After all, this is the right thing to do,” he thought as he waited. “ Heaven knows I need some one.”

CHAPTER XXV

DIVERSIONS OF A FIANCE

Avery soon resumed his habit of going to Mrs. Keppel’s; but now he never went there straight from the office. Under pretext of wishing to dress, he always went home late in the afternoon. There, two or three times a week, he would find a note from Cecily, telling him that Junior had made satisfactory progress, or had caught cold and was not quite so well. He always scribbled a little note in answer; and when he presented himself, sleek and handsome as ever, before his mistress, there was an added sparkle in his eyes. It did him good to change his clothes, he explained to her; when he got ready for the evening, he liked to shake off every trace of the office.

That was very different from the sentiments he had professed not long before, but Caroline tried to believe him. She herself would often spend half the afternoon dressing, trying first one gown and then another; she had taken to appearing in full evening dress. After their greetings were over Avery was expected to notice and comment on her splendor; but he never guessed how much anxious effort had been expended on every detail.

“ I thought," she said one evening, after the preliminaries were all over, “ I thought you might prefer to dine at a restaurant.”

“ Just as you like,” he answered. His eyes had wandered beyond her.

“ As you like, Avery.”

“ It’s immaterial to me.”

It was material to Caroline; her nerves ached for excite- ment. But as he would not express a choice, she obstinately determined to disappoint herself. “ Then we’ll stay here,” she announced.

“ That will suit me,” he said with cheerful alacrity.

“ I don’t feel like going into a crowd tonight. I’m tired, I think,” she said.

He looked at her kindly. “ Have you been overdoing? ” he asked.

She nodded miserably; her plumage was already drooping. She didn’t want him to be kind to her; he had kissed her as he might have kissed his mother, and that was worse than no kiss at all.

They sat down to dinner in the stately dining-room; lately she did not admit him to the intimacy of her sitting-room. Across the beautiful table service they seemed a brilliant couple; but they talked as if they were at opposite ends of the earth. Avery simply could not get his mind on his surroundings; each time that he caught it wandering, he tried by forced consideration and interest to make up for his absent-mindedness. Caroline saw his effort, and hated him for it. She would have liked to quarrel with him, but she hadn’t the heart. She played with the things on her plate, and choked back her tears; she wondered why she had ever let herself get into this situation.

In the beginning Avery Fairchild had been for her a fascinating escapade. Sending Judith away, letting Avery draw closer and closer to her, had all been part of a romantic adventure. She had felt that she could allow herself romantic adventures, for with the Keppel money some of the Keppel self-confidence had passed to her. If it pleased her to amuse herself with a man, that was her affair; when it no longer pleased her, she could call it off.

But after that very night in her garden from which dated Avery’s disillusion, she became more and more conscious that she didn’t want to have done with him, that she would sooner, indeed, have parted with her right hand. She clung to him even when she felt it would have been better policy not to cling. She tried her every fascination shamelessly, she who had once been so far above such tactics; and she was only too delighted when Avery allowed himself to be fascinated.

Months ago she had made up her mind that if she had to marry him to keep him, marry him she would. And in the face of that condescension, she could not help seeing that he was beginning to be bored with her. “ Give him up— give him up now, before he goes,” her intelligence urged her; but she wasn’t prepared to give him up. It would have suited him altogether too well; and after the first dramatic excitement was over, what would become of her?

She finally gave up all pretense of eating; and Avery actually did notice that. “ Really, Caroline, I’m afraid you aren’t well,” he said.

“ I’m very well, Dr. Fairchild,” she answered, emphasizing the word “ doctor ” with childish spite. How handsome he looked in this soft light! If it hadn’t been for his good looks, she might never have seen him a second time. Well, that would have been better all around; so she hated his good looks.

“ Is your throat sore? ” he asked mildly.

She shook her head, not daring to trust her voice. Doubtless he would put it all down to her nerves; what did he and such as he care for feelings?

When they were alone in the drawing-room she put her arms about his neck, and burst into tears. “ I get so lonely without you,” she whispered. “ Avery, dear, I miss you so.”

“ My poor darling! ” He sat down before the fire and drew her to his knee. “ Foolish one, loving heart,” he murmured. Just so he might have soothed a child who had fallen down in the street; but Caroline was past caring for parallels; she allowed herself to be soothed, and was grateful.

She had, however, lost her sense of fitness that evening. When she presently began to talk it was of their marriage, her plans and arrangements for it. She knew that he always shrank from the subject; she could now feel him stiffen as she talked. But her unhappiness had gone to her head like wine, and she could not check her own garrulity. She even talked of what they would do with her money, and that topic she knew Avery hated; she was even proud that he hated it, for he showed that her money was not what interested him.

She brought up on the worst topic of all. “ When are you going to get your divorce, Avery?” she asked.

He had been wonderfully patient heretofore; but now his patience snapped. “ I shall wait for my wife to divorce me,” he said. “You’ve always understood that; or if you haven’t, you understand it now. If you object, you don’t have to wait for me, you know.”

“ Oh, Avery, I didn’t mean anything like that! ” she cried. “ You know I’m glad to wait for you. But I can’t help it—I’m jealous of that marriage of yours.”

“ Why should you be? ” he asked sharply. “ You’ve been married yourself.”

“ I know, but it’s different. My husband died—and, anyway, it’s different, Avery.”

“ Your choice of topics is rather extraordinary, Caroline,” he said coldly.

Her face flushed. “ I dare say you don’t like it,” she said. “ I think you have never quite ceased to love that woman, Avery. You don’t realize how easily you call her ‘ my wife ’ even now.”

“ Force of habit,” said Avery. “ She was my wife for several years, you know.”

“She has your children; perhaps that’s what I feel.”

“ If I could go back, I’d try to be a more fatherly father to my children,” said Avery.

“ We make lots of mistakes in this world,” she said softly. He nodded shortly, hoping that she would find an indifferent topic.

But her evil angel still possessed her, and she continued to talk about their marriage. There had been a time when she wouldn’t think of it; and now she seemed unable to think very long of anything else. “ We can go south winters,” she assured him. “ The kind of work you are doing now can be done anywhere.”

“ I beg your pardon, but it cannot,” he answered. He was trying to be indulgent with her, as she seemed to be nervous, but there were limits to his endurance. She was making him feel hampered; and hadn’t he always fought that hampered feeling, sacrificed almost priceless things so that he might not be hampered?

They had progressed to rather a lively dispute when he was summoned to the telephone. When, lately, hadn’t the telephone interrupted him, with more or less timeliness? “It’s a telegram,” he said to Caroline, his lips whitening; and then he listened in silence.

The words “ This is Western Union ” had at once turned his thoughts to Junior; so that his first sensation on getting the actual message was relief. It had already been replaced by regret, however, when he hung up the receiver. “ The telegram is from Jefferson,” he explained to Caroline. “ My friend Walter Butler is dead.”

“ Oh, that’s too bad! ” exclaimed Caroline. “ He seemed a very agreeable man, the only time I ever met him.”

“ Yes. There was this about Walter: he always made his sacrifices gaily,” said Avery.

“ Are you going to the funeral? ” asked Caroline.

“ Yes. Perhaps I’ll even go to Jefferson tomorrow morning. I might be able to do something.”

“Something for her?” asked Caroline sharply.

“ Yes. A man sometimes can. So far as I know, she hasn’t any male relatives.”

He stood looking at the floor; his thoughts were obviously miles away. Caroline ventured to lay a hand on his arm. He started; and looked first at her and then about him, like a man waking from a dream. “ I think I’ll be off now,” he said. “ I have some things to do before I can leave town. Good-by, Caroline.”

The evening was still young; and when he left her, Caroline sat alone in her finery, and stared at the fire. Avery was going away, and going to see a woman. He had made no secret of his admiration for this woman; still, perhaps it was better for him to see her than to see his “ wife ”— his wife indeed! Perhaps, so far as that went, he had a wife in every town. Twice lately he had left her to go out of town to see some other woman. “ But I could endure that,” she thought, “ if I were always perfectly sure that he would come back to me.”

He would come back this time, of course; and she tried to believe that he always would. Wasn’t the determination, after all, largely in her own hands? Well, she would be very tactful when he came back. She had been clever enough at first; it was only when she came to feel so intensely about him that she had lost her head.

Yet what was the good of a relation in which one had to be constantly tactful or constantly at war? What satisfaction, after all, did she get from the best of her interviews with Avery nowadays? When she thought of him in his absence it was with delight: to her mental eye he was a man among men. But when they were together they quarreled regularly, or else one or the other of them in mere superiority refrained from quarreling. This, said Caroline to herself as she sat watching the fire burn down to a steady glow, wasn’t happiness. If it was even love, so much the worse for love.

As her nerves returned to something like their normal state, her mind resumed the delightful occupation of building up her picture of Avery. It wasn’t, she reflected, as if she didn’t actually appreciate his fineness. He had devoted his life to a noble purpose; he was heart and soul in a work that she couldn’t even comprehend. She found a melancholy pleasure in building him up as high as possible, and abasing herself as low. He was wonderful, and she, in spite of the dross that surrounded her, was ordinary, very ordinary; except in her appreciation of him, she felt, she was actually stupid.

So far Caroline had often gone in her thoughts after Avery left her; but tonight she went farther, and found something she had not seen before. It was not so much seen, perhaps, as glimpsed and then lost again, and then once more glimpsed: something alien and terrifying, that yet came upon her soul in glimmers of a pure radiance. It was a pure gleam, which must be in some ways like Avery’s devotion to his work.

Suppose that after all her years of independence, after her one spurt of self-indulgence in claiming Avery, she were some day herself to follow the gleam? She had loved Avery for following his; yes, it seemed to her that the real reason for her love, indulgent as that love might have been, was that Avery was at bottom a high-souled idealist. If she in her turn followed the gleam, if she too paid the price for following, some day Avery would realize what she had done, and respect her for it.

As much, perhaps, as he respected one of those other women, those women he went out of town to see. Her jealousy flickered up again when she remembered where Avery had gone; but it didn’t bum deep enough to destroy all recollection of that gleam. She could see herself, if something only gave her strength, ending this whole affair in a glory of self-immolation. But when she covered her eyes with her hands, and tried to blind herself to everything but the magnificence of such a sacrifice, she only found herself forlornly wondering what Avery was doing, and when he would actually leave for Jefferson.

Avery, as a matter of fact, worked the rest of that night, and left for Jefferson on an early morning train. He must be getting back into something like his old form, for after this last sleepless night he was alert, and pleasantly excited. He dozed intermittently on the train; and whenever he woke he would pity poor Walter Butler, who had left the goodly earth so young. To think of Walter’s being dead, and all his cares and joys at an end, while he, Avery, was actually on his way to Lois!

It was odd that he should be always going to Cecily or to Lois, and then coming back to Caroline. And the oddest part of it was unmistakably that it should be Caroline to whom he always came back. If it had been either of the others—! Of course, it was a droll idea, his going back to either of those others; but just now it seemed more natural than the actual state of affairs. How wonderful the country looked today, the kind, quiet country—how good it was to be going through the country to Lois! The whole earth was sweet, and poor Walter Butler had been forced to leave it.

Avery had reckoned confidently on being able to slip into Jefferson as quietly as he had on the occasion of his last visit—that memorable visit when Cecily told him she had had enough. But he had reckoned without his fame. All the citizens subscribed for a Chicago paper, most of them for that particularly far-reaching paper on which Avery was now employed. The Chicago Aedile proclaimed Avery an authority, a pioneer, almost a prophet: Aedilee-reading Jefferson took its former citizen to its bosom. Hearty citizens wrung his hand in the hotel lobby, stopped him on the street to congratulate and question him. An enterprising reporter was at hand before Avery had had time to wash his face. He arrived at Mrs. Butler’s door with a feeling of having fought his way there.

The Victorian house looked especially gloomy today; it seemed—or was it his imagination?—as if all the glowing life that the young Butlers had brought into it was gone, and instead of that brief bright light reigned the natural somber spirit of the place. Avery shivered as he stepped into the lofty hall. This was a wonderful house for a funeral; it might have been built with that in mind.

He was shown into the library, and Lois came directly down to him. “ How good of you to come, Avery! ” she said. They stood for a moment hand in hand, without speaking; then their hands parted, and they sat down.

She was in a huge, high-backed chair, with a great window behind her. The afternoon sun lighted her black-robed figure, her quiet pose with hands clasped in her lap. She was like some storied queen mother, so collected was she, so stately and picturesque; but he noted that her eyelids were heavy.

She spoke first of Walter’s death, which was caused by pneumonia. He had been ill only five days. “ He was cheerful up to the very last, and droll,” said Lois. For a moment tears filled her eyes; that dying drollery of his was awful in the remembering. Then quickly she asked about Avery’s work, and discussed some experiments of her own. Presently she sent for her boy, who came and stood beside her: a beautiful boy, strikingly like her, though it pleased her to see in him a certain resemblance to his father. “ Walter left me everything,” she said, her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “ He knew that, for all my theories, he could trust me to deal justly with his boy.”

When Avery rose to go she asked, “ You expect to be here for some days? You will come again?”

“ Until the day after tomorrow, at least. Yes, I shall come again,” he said.

As a matter of fact, he stayed a week. His late fellow-citizens arranged a banquet in his honor, and proposed to have him talk to them on “ The Health of a City.” It was an opportunity not to be missed, a sowing of seed in virgin soil. Avery communicated with the Aedile, and stayed.

He saw Mrs. Butler three more times, after the glimpse that he had of her, controlled as a statue, at Walter’s funeral. They talked very naturally at those interviews: Lois never took the conventional tone of the bereaved. Avery, who had once looked on her as a person calamity would never touch, saw her now as a woman who would fairly absorb calamity, and thereby rise superior to it. She missed her husband every hour and every minute, he felt; but she was detemined to live out the life that was hers.

She was tremendously interested in the chance that had come his way here in Jefferson. “ I believe,” she said the morning when he came to report the success of the banquet and his speech, “ I believe that you are doing more for Jefferson in these few days than I have ever done for it. I’ve tried, you know; but I haven’t exactly ‘ taken ’ here. I’ve been tremendously happy here, though. Perhaps now that I’m alone, I shan’t be in Jefferson constantly.”

A few minutes before he left, she seemed to nerve herself up to something that she had all along wanted to ask. “ Avery, are you going to marry that girl—Mrs. Keppel? ” “ I am not sure ” would have been a foolish reply, as well as unchivalrous. “ I expect to,” said Avery.

“ You wouldn’t marry for money,” she said. “ I know it isn’t that. Do you love her, Avery?”

“ I suppose so. A man must' have some woman in his life, you know.”

“ Avery, it cuts me to hear you say that. It isn’t like you. Things haven’t turned out right for you, have they? ”

“ I don’t know about their rightness. They have turned out as they had to,” he murmured.

“ I’m not so sure about that. These last few years have changed my ideas on many subjects, Avery.”

“ You were very happy, these last few years, weren’t you? ”

“ Very happy. Have you,” she asked, “ have you seen Cecily lately? ”

“ Of what was that a propos? ” he asked.

“ It wasn’t a propos. I simply wished to find out.”

“ Perhaps it was, though,” he said. “ I wonder if Cecily’s ideas have ever changed?”

“ I thought she had developed wonderfully, the last time I saw her,” Lois assured him.

“ I’ve seen her quite recently,” Avery admitted. Thereupon he told her the story of his visit to Cecily.

“ It makes me think of many things,” she mused. “ Avery, are you quite, quite sure that all is over between you? ”

“ I couldn’t be surer.”

“ But if one of you took just a step toward reconciliation—I hate the word, let me say—toward each other, Avery—”

“ It would do no good. It’s most unlike you to even speak of it.”

“I know; I know. It’s indelicate, too.” She smiled at the mid-Victorian turn of the expression; then she went on, “ It’s only that I want to see you happy, and that, perhaps, I’m not quite myself just now.”

“ I understand. I’m not angry, Lois, I shouldn’t think of being.” He put out his hand to her, to show that there was peace between them.

Her firm warm fingers grasped his frankly. As they did so she said, with one of her startling flickers of femininity, “ Avery, if you’re not angry with me, make the first step toward her. Please, just to see. Only the first, that’s all you need make.”

He laughed at her persistence; but the sheer audacity of the idea had something fascinating in it. To walk again into that so characteristic flat of hers, to say, “ Cecily, I’ve come to stay,” to put down his hat and stay, regardless of Cecily’s parti, reckless of Caroline, snapping his fingers at the past, and if need be at the future—it was an enticing vision.

Lois read in his eyes that he was tempted. Having sown her seed, she was careful not to say too much, and he left soon afterward. “ Write to me sometimes,” she bade him. “ Good-by.” She smiled, however, as she added, “ Good luck.”

He left her standing in the middle of the room, with her hands hanging loose at her sides, and something like her old brave bright smile on her lips. To Avery there was something sublime in her lack of wistfulness; he felt that she was not so cheerful without an effort.

But he soon found himself, rather oddly for him, thinking less about Lois than about what she had said. To go back—to make a bold trial for Cecily’s regard—that was the idea that Lois had left him with. If he made the attempt, at worst he should be no worse off than he was now; and the prospect of success was dazzling.

He began to recall hopeful signs, and was surprised at the number that came to him. Cecily had shrunk from ever actually getting a divorce—that was very significant, in view of her definiteness in most things. She had always answered his letters—deficiencies in correspondence had been on his side. She had been generous with the children; here too, if complaint were possible, it was not to be made by him. Probably she had sent him away in the first place more because she hated the life they were leading than because she hated him. Well, he had hated that life too; but now they were wiser, and could live a better. Yes, both of them were wiser, and both of them had grown. If they should live together again, Cecily could be as independent as she liked; and he would be as independent as he liked. And at night they could always come home to each other. He smiled at the quaintness of the reciprocal phrase; and yet, why not?

The idea was beginning to take possession of him; and he viewed its rise without alarm, although he knew how completely ideas could possess him. There were obstacles, of course; that dreadful dangling relation with Mrs. Keppel was an obstacle. But what had he ever cared for obstacles, when one of his ideas possessed him? His marriage to Cecily and his entry into his life-work had both been feats of the headlong. He. was not afraid to crown them with a precipitous remarriage.

He could see so well how the whole thing might be worked out. This blessed newspaper job had come just in time; now he could offer to go and live in Cecily’s city, if need be; yes, thanks to good train service and the United States mail, that would be quite possible. Perhaps she would consider him magnanimous to make such an offer; at any rate, he could come offering concessions instead of demanding them.

His idea seemed to him a breath from a mighty future, a future when man and woman should enjoy an independence now undreamed of, leading ever to a union now impossible. Caroline Keppel had always represented a step into the past; and that had always worried him. To be rooted in the past, but not rooted to it—that was the right idea. And this new marriage with Cecily should be an affair of right ideas, of ripe experience, of perfect adjustment, even as the old marriage had been an affair of passionate youth and its maladjustments, of things by their nature powerful and sweet, but tending ever to destruction.

The longer he thought of the scheme, the more completely it had possession of him; and on the train he had nothing to do but think. From feeling that his idea was a forlorn hope, he passed to thinking that it was reasonable and possible enough; and thence, as the hours went by, to believing it as good as done. He would set about it at once: a day and night of solid work, perhaps, to get a little time for himself; and then a good rest, to get his mind in perfect working order. In a few hours he might—think of it!—be arguing with Cecily. A man needed all his faculties to argue with Cecily; he smiled as he recalled her occasional petulance. But he trusted himself, and his own determination when an idea possessed him. Just a little time now, and he would again rush for a train, and in that train rush through miles of country; and from that train— from that train he would rush to Cecily.

This present train, jerking and rattling away from Jefferson, reached Chicago just after nightfall. The idea had now grown on Avery to such an extent that he and the idea were identical; it was a triumphant, soaring idea that was carried through the lighted streets in his person. To the eyes of such an idea, how wonderful everything looked! It was an enchanted city now, this noisy, dirty, careless metropolis at which he scolded daily. Good old Chicago— it had been very good to him! He would come here often, of course, even after his new life had begun; and if some -day his work took him to other places, at least he would never lose touch with Chicago.

He encountered his landlady in the hall; and at sight of her his courage somehow sank. There was no' reason why it should, no reason at all; but she was a fussy soul. “ Has anybody been here to look for me? ” he asked, simply in order to have something to say.

“ Yes, Dr. Fairchild. There’s a man waiting for you now,” she said.

At this totally unexpected reply Avery’s eyebrows shot up. “The dickens! Where is he?”

“ In the parlor, Dr. Fairchild.”

Avery opened the door of the parlor, a room he had not entered three times as long as he had lived in the house. The man rose to meet him. “ Are you Avery Fairchild? ” he asked. Avery nodded. “ I am from the sheriff’s office,” the man went on.

For a moment Avery was honestly at a loss. “ You work late, don’t you?” he asked genially.

“ I was anxious to serve this paper on you, and make return,” said the man.

Avery put out his hand for the paper. A minute later he heard his own voice saying dully, “ I acknowledge service. Is that all? ” In another minute he was alone.

A summons and complaint in a divorce case, just like hundreds of other that were ground out annually: stereotyped phrases, routine allegations. But this was different from every other case; this was the complaint of Cecily Fairchild against Avery Fairchild. It couldn’t be, though; in his excitement he must be making some sort of stupid mistake.

He carried the paper upstairs with him, and put it on his desk. Then he took an immense drink of cold water; after which he undressed with scrupulous care, unpacked his suitcase and restored everything to its place, and took a bath. In moving about the room he avoided looking at the paper; he had a ridiculous hope that if he only avoided looking long enough, when he did look it would have disappeared. But at last he had no farther excuse for not looking; and when he looked, there it lay. He picked up the paper, and read it very carefully, by the light of his own lamp. It seemed to be all there, right enough; but it was simply beyond credence.

Dully and unbelievingly, he crawled into bed, and fell into a light doze. Suddenly the day’s bright dream returned to him, brighter now a hundredfold. He could see his whole life before him, now no longer a straight, hard road, but a daisied meadow, perhaps, a sunny place where duty and pleasure, development and indulgence, were all gloriously blended, where he walked always with a slim, dark-haired woman, whose dry staccato words were all music to him.

He started awake in a little while, and then the whole truth rushed blindingly upon him. His magnificent idea amounted to nothing, and Cecily and he had come to the end. It was useless to protest; but something in. him protested nevertheless. “ Girl! Girl! ” he cried out as he lay there, “ we have had the past; we should have the future.” The dismal phrases of the legal paper recurred to him; yet he held out his arms to her bright image. “ I never stopped loving you, dear,” he whispered, “ I never stopped loving you.”

Daybreak found him still lying there, going over and over in his mind the things that ought to have been and the things that were. He got up and pulled down his shades; there was no hurry now, for he had nothing but work ahead. Finally he went to sleep, and slept heavily until noon.

His first act on rising was to write to Cecily’s lawyer that he would not contest the suit. The lawyer’s name, he noted, was Sims; that must be the man Cecily had worked for, once upon a time. What business had any Sims to step in and tell him that he must have nothing farther to do with Cecily? But Sims really did nothing; the actual message, of course, came to him from Cecily. In this world or another, Cecily intended henceforth to have nothing whatever to do with him.

On his way down to the Aedile office, Avery mailed his letter to Cecily’s lawyer. In the next block he stopped to order some flowers for Caroline. “ I suppose,” he reflected grimly, “ it’s Caroline from now on.” And his obvious, honorable, worldly-wise duty, marriage with the attractive, desirable, devoted Caroline, sickened him like a descent into some mouldy catacomb.

CHAPTER XXVI

—AND OF A FIANCEE

Richard Morley had finally “ put the whole matter up ” to Cecily. A dozen times he had decided to do so; a dozen times he had let a good opportunity pass, because things were very pleasant just as they were.

Then one evening he had dropped in to see her, without any sort of intention. He found her at the end of a difficult day, one of those days when everything seems to go wrong. She was very tired, and very nervous. She fidgeted in her chair, got up and walked about the room, picked up things and put them down. Repeatedly she seemed on the point of crying; and then she would laugh instead. It was not a moment he would ever have chosen to speak of an important matter, if he had simply been choosing: it was not a moment when she ought to be called upon to make an important decision. But seeing her so made him aware of an instinctive desire to do for her, to keep her worries at arm’s length. This desire grew in intensity; and with it came presently a wish to take her on his knee, and soothe her just as one would a fretful child. That was obviously very silly, for both in sound sense and self-control, he had no doubt that Cecily was his superior; yet when she seemed defeated and frustrated, as she did tonight, she had an appeal in addition to any that she had ever possessed in an hour of triumph.

Against his own better judgment, he undertook to introduce his subject. “ Cecily, I want to say something to you,” he began.

“ I’m sorry for that. I’d rather go for a ride,” said a74

Cecily. “ I should like to ride and ride in the darkness—in darkness and silence.” She flung out her hands toward him.

“ Listen to me just a minute,” he said, “and then we’ll go riding after that.”

“ If you would only learn to drive your own car,” she said, “ we could talk as we ride, without fear of being overheard.”

“ There are very few things I wouldn’t say in my car,” he answered. “ Mat is a safe enough man, Cecily.”

“ Oh, perhaps he is, in that way. Perhaps he’s even a bit deaf,” she retorted. “ But I tell you, Richard, I think that man drinks.”

He smiled at the universal feminine suspicion of masculine intoxication. “ I’m sure he doesn’t, Cecily. He has worked for me for years, you know.”

“ Well, you wait and see,” she said darkly. “ Anyway, you miss a lot of fun in not knowing how to drive your car. You wouldn’t always have to drive, you know.”

“Should you like to drive a car?” he asked.

“ Shouldn’t I? ” She flung herself back in her chair, and stretched her arms above her head. “ I used to, a little. I tell you, Richard, if I had my life to live over, I’d live it in doing such things as driving cars, and I’d let my duties go hang.”

“ I can see you,” he said quietly.

She smiled a little, and then yawned. “ If you have something you must say before we start, I’m listening,” she said.

“ Since you are listening,” replied Morley, “ I’ll say my say at once. Cecily, when are you going to marry me? ”

“When am I?”

“ Yes. Ought I to ask, are you going to marry me? ”

She smiled again, wryly this time. “ I should be a fool not to marry you, shouldn’t I? ” she asked.

“ My dear girl, don’t take it that way! ” he besought her. “ I think everything of you, Cecily. You needn’t sacrifice anything in order to marry me. You can do pretty much as you like, you know; and I can give your children every advantage.”

“ What a rapturous proposal! ” she ejaculated. “ There, Richard, never mind; I didn’t mean to be nasty. I am fond of you; and it will be nice to feel sometimes that I have some one back of me.”

“ I shall see that you never regret it,” he said. The tone of his voice startled her.

“ Why, Richard! ” she cried. “ My dear fellow——! ” She put out her hand to him.

“ May I kiss you, Cecily? ” he asked huskily.

“May you? You must!” she cried gaily. “And after that we’ll ride and ride, Richard; and when you bring me home, we’ll find that we have lots more to say; and you shall kiss me again.”

All the rest of that evening she was gay and sweet; if she had been with Avery, he would have guessed that after her evening’s gaiety she would probably cry herself to sleep.

However she got to sleep, she was awakened the next morning by the entrance of Anna, beaming at her over a flower-box. “A boy just now brought it,” she said; and then, being a confidential servant, she waited for her mistress to open the box.

It held long-stemmed pink roses, dozens and dozens of them. Cecily laid them beside her on the bed, and closed her eyes. Fragrance filled the room, she breathed it in, and luxuriated in the feeling of being sought after. But she rose presently, and went to work just as usual. A dozen engagements, marriage itself, should not make her forget that she had her place in the world’s work, with bills coming due monthly and a modest pay-roll to satisfy at the end of the week. Yet she worked that day with a mind pleasantly vacant, or filled only with a soothing perfume of pink roses.

She had a good crowd for luncheon; one very charming party made her sit down and talk with them; evidently they considered her the biggest part of her own stock-in-trade. How would it be when she was Richard Morley’s wife? Just the same, she promised herself passionately; she forgot all the disagreeables of the day before, and told herself that not by one iota would she change her business, her precious business, for any man.

After luncheon she went home, as she usually did for an hour before the tea crowd began to come. Morley knew of her custom, and often telephoned her at this hour. Doubtless he would telephone today; she was glad to find herself pleasantly excited at the prospect. But when she reached home, a note from Morley was what awaited her, a note delivered by Anna as proudly as if all this delightful masculine attention were being paid to herself.

It was only a line, hoping that Cecily would come home this afternoon, as he was sending her a little present. What would the present be, she wondered as she dropped the note on her dressing-table. A string of pearls, perhaps—she glanced in the mirror at her throat, almost seeing its smooth suface so encircled. She had always wished for pearls; yet somehow she would rather Richard didn’t begin by loading her with jewels.

Anna, now positively excited, came to summon her to the door; the present must have arrived. Cecily, prepared to meet a messenger with a jewelry box, saw no one at the door; behind her Anna said, “Downstairs, Mrs. Fairchild; it’s downstairs.” Cecily ran down the long flights, emerging breathless and bare-headed in the afternoon sun. Before her stood Richard’s chauffeur, the same Mat of whom she had spoken last evening; and at the curb was a new runabout of choice and sophisticated beauty. “ Your car, Mrs. Fairchild,” said Mat, touching his cap. “ Mr. Morley’s orders were that if you were at liberty, I was to give you a lesson in running it.”

An eager, starry-eyed Cecily answered Morley’s ring herself that evening. “ Richard, dear, what a present! ” she cried, lifting her face to be kissed.

He laughed boyishly. “Did you like it?” he asked.

“ Like it? Why, it’s the thing I’ve always wanted! It’s my idea of luxury, Richard. I could hardly tear myself away from it to go back to work.”

“Why go back?” he suggested.

Inside his encircling arm she drew back to look at him with sudden gravity. “ Don’t say anything like that, Richard,” she begged.

“ No, I won’t,” he said hastily. He seemed somewhat afraid of the subject. “ But save some scraps of time, won’t you, for the new car and for me? ”

That day marked the beginning of a very happy period for Cecily, a period when she lived on excitement and devotion. It seemed to her as if she were a girl again: she had always the feeling of being deliciously sought after. Richard was quite wonderful: he was lavish at times, and she liked his lavishness, but often he allowed her to forget his possessions, and remember simply himself. After all, it was that self which sought her.

This indeed was his real courtship. Before this he had made her feel that he liked, even that he loved her; but above all that she had his profoundest respect. The undeniable difference in their social positions had made necessary that showing of respect, and he had shown it very nicely, very delicately. But now mere respect could be taken for granted: now he would lay at her feet nothing less than his devotion—his devotion and his need of her.

And in the warmth of his devotion, Cecily blossomed afresh. Her little hats were jauntier than ever, her white collars neater and saucier. She played with her children as if she had only just discovered their fascination. She gloried in her new car, and in her own cleverness with it; she jeered afresh at Richard, because running any car was beyond him. He loved her jeering, gloried in her high spirits; they were to him proof that this marriage of his was to turn out a great success.

As yet he and Cecily had told only a few people of their engagement. Anna had to know, of course; and Anna was delighted. Mr. Sims was told; and the news so affected him that he actually came to call upon Cecily, sacrificing to his respect for his partner and his admiration for Mrs. Fairchild a stiff twenty minutes that was full of agony both for himself and for the lady on whom he called. And Richard told a woman friend of his, an exquisite and elegant woman, near his own age, who also came to see Cecily. The reason why this woman had been told was immediately patent to Cecily, and from her height of woman intensely sought she was heartily sorry for this fading, exquisite creature who adored, and who wasn’t wanted. She admired, too, this woman’s courage in coming to see her, in exposing to her sharp eyes that tremulous secret. “ I couldn’t have done it in her place,” she thought. And then, as she noted and appreciated her visitor’s charm, almost timid, yet wonderfully finished, it struck her, “ Why didn’t Richard marry this woman years ago ?* Beside her, I must appear shoddy and second-rate. What has made him choose me? ”

Ordinarily she saw well enough why Richard had “ chosen ” her, and why he had never married this exquisite woman, of whom he was fond, and nothing more than fond. In his ordered, cultured, middle-aged existence, Cecily was a wonderful disturbing element: she was romance, she was adventure, she was youth. Against her the habits of a lifetime and the attractions of an elegant spinster had no chance of succeeding.

So interested was Cecily in playing her new part of the young fiancee, and so bent was she on making the most of these happy days, that she ignored or postponed one or two things that were incumbent upon her. This neglect led to an incident trivial in itself, and yet to her spirit so significant that it changed her feeling for her new situation and even altered her attitude toward her peerless fiance.

She was driving home in her car one Saturday in her afternoon interval. She had intended to go directly home, but lured by the air and the sense of motion she had driven around for half an hour; and a new turning brought her opposite the house where Miss Samuels roomed. Poor, devoted, boresome Samuels—Cecily hadn’t even thought about her lately. In the magnanimity of her happiness she determined to go see Samuels some time; then reflecting that this was Saturday afternoon, when Miss Samuels wouldn’t be working, and that she herself had an hour of leisure, she turned the car and stopped it before the rooming-house.

Miss Samuels’s wilted landlady was obviously awed at this bright vision descending from a smart car. She managed however to stammer that her lodger wasn’t at home, but was expected at any moment. Would the lady wait?

“ I’ll go up to her room,” said Cecily sweetly. “ Don’t trouble; I know the way.”

In the neat little bookish room Cecily drew off her heavy gloves, and began to examine the books. There were some new ones, annotated in pencil; evidently the self-improvement went steadily on. Cecily shook her head, amused by this diligence and yet respecting it. “ If we all availed ourselves as thoroughly of our opportunities—” she reflected; though at the same time she knew she would have been actually more affected by another person’s magnificent disdain of opportunities.

She might read for a few minutes, while she waited for Miss Samuels. With one of the more interesting books in her hand, Cecily turned away from the shelves, and moved a step or two toward the middle of the room. Then she gasped audibly, and the volume dropped to the floor.

In the center of the dresser-top, among the neat cheap toilet articles, stood a large photograph in a silver frame. There was no mistaking that handsome dark face, that smooth thick black hair, those wonderful supple hands of which the photographer had caught the very trick. No, there was no mistaking the subject, even if Cecily herself had not had a copy of the picture. It was one Avery Fair-child had had taken for his wife’s birthday in the Jefferson days.

Cecily’s first impulse was to seize the picture and run; even so do we possess ourselves of what belongs to us, wherever we happen to find it. But a moment later her mind was in a whirl of conjecture; and her own conjectures held her rigidly there. Then it was too late to run; for she heard hurried footsteps on the stairs, and Miss Samuels herself rushed into the room.

She took in the situation so swiftly that it seemed as if she must have suspected it beforehand. She stepped between Cecily and the dresser, and stood there panting; in the silence of the room could be heard the beating of her heart.

After a minute or two Cecily spoke; her tone was easy, if somewhat artificial. “ Your landlady said that she expected you soon. I told her that I would wait here. I was passing, and stopped for a few minutes. This is the first time, isn’t it, that I have ever come here as an unexpected guest?”

The other woman bowed her head, speechless; her hands hung heavily at her sides. At that moment her origin and ancestry were clearly manifest: one could fairly see behind her the generations of dumb driven cattle. Sudden anger flared up in Cecily; she felt a furious desire to spurn all those cowering wretches in the person of their descendant. “ Where did you get that picture? ” she demanded.

The dull face suddenly lighted; the long hands and bony wrists were flung toward her in a gesture of passionate appeal. “ Don’t tell him,” the girl said in a low voice. “ He has forgotten all about me, but—he’s like a god to me, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“You know him?” asked Cecily. A wild thought had come to her that Miss Samuels’s seeming devotion to herself was an espionage inspired by Avery.

“ I did know him once, in Jefferson.”

“In Jefferson?”

“Yes, Mrs. Fairchild; I lived there then.”

“ I never knew you there, did I? ”

“ No, Mrs. Fairchild. We were very, very poor. I had a sister, with three small children; she was dying of consumption. He came to see her; he was very good to her. If you could have seen how he used to come among the poor people—not only like a doctor, Mrs. Fairchild. Like a ray of light, like an inspiration.”

“ He used to work among poor people a great deal,” said Cecily. Yes, she remembered that, and how disagreeable she herself had always been about his doing it; but Avery as a ray of light—she simply couldn’t imagine that.

The other woman, however, seemed to take her remark as hearty agreement. “ I was a poor, ignorant girl,” she went on, her face more and more transfigured. “ I was without ambition, without sense of responsibility. When my sister died, I should have tried simply for a little pleasure in life, if the thought of him hadn’t somehow come before me and stopped me. As it was, I studied instead.

At first I studied evenings, and saved a little money; and then I took up shorthand.”

Cecily suppressed an exclamation. “ At the Jefferson Business College? ” she asked. The other nodded.

It all came back to Cecily then, her breezy autumn walk in a mood of furious discontent, and her encounter with all the pupils pouring out of the business college, and her passing glimpse of this girl’s crude face, with a sort of awakening visible even then amidst its crudity.

“ Oh, I have worked! ” Miss Samuels cried in exultation. “ I have taken care of my sister’s children. I had to have help, of course, but I’ve been always there, so that they couldn’t feel themselves friendless. Two of them have gone to work, and the other is still in school; I mean to keep her there as long as I can. Of course, it has taken most of my money to do for them; I know what it is to cook your own meals on a gas jet and do your own washing in the bathroom when the landlady isn’t looking. But always, through it all, I have found time and means to study, study, study.”

Again she flung out her arms in that sweeping, passionate gesture; and now as she went on she lifted her head and looked Cecily full in the eye. “ I got the picture to remind me; I went to a photographer in Jefferson, and got him to sell it to me for the first money I earned with my shorthand. It isn’t always easy to keep on in the path you have marked out for yourself, especially when you’re young. And there are things to keep away from, too. The men of my own class—I wouldn’t look at them now. The men of a class above wouldn’t look at me, I know; I’m not pretty. But I’m satisfied as I am. To go on always, doing my decent work in the daytime, and at night studying, and thinking my own thoughts—that is enough for me.”

A woman living by the light of an ideal—of an illusion, if you liked; and that illusion Avery Fairchild! With a flicker of curiosity Cecily asked, “ How did you come to make a friend of me?” She would have thought herself the last person this idealist would have taken for a friend.

“ At first I only wished to be near something that was his. I suspected too that there was misunderstanding, and I had a wild idea that in some mysterious way I might help to clear it up. But soon I grew to love you for yourself. You’re not in the least like him, but you’re just as wonderful in your way. I—” She paused, her face working. “ I can’t bear to think of you two, my ideals, any way but happy together.”

“ I'm afraid that’s out of the question,” said Cecily, with a gentleness that surprised herself. Some obscure impulse of pity made her add, “ It isn’t anything that he has done.” “ I knew it wasn’t! But if he hasn’t done anything, couldn’t you—couldn’t" you make up with him? I know other men admire you, and you like them perhaps, but— it—isn’t—possible—that you don’t love him.”

She was silent, and drew a long breath; perhaps she expected to be rebuked for what she had said. But Cecily was scarcely conscious now of the other woman; it might have been her own soul speaking to her. She stood as if rooted to the spot, the prey of fast-coming memories; nothing was real or near but the voice of the dim dead past.

Suddenly she lifted her head. What was she doing in this room, with this girl? In a moment she was herself again; and then the past so vividly evoked seemed a nightmare. In view of present conditions, it mas a nightmare, this ineradicable unthinkable past.

Without a word, Cecily turned and fled, stumbling down the stairs—there seemed to be hundreds of stairs. In the sunny quiet street everything looked distorted. Something seemed to be pursuing her, something so horrible that she didn’t dare even to learn what it was. She grasped the steering-wheel with bare hands; her gloves had dropped in that accursed room, and if they had been filled with gold she wouldn’t have gone back for them.

Down the street she rushed the little car at breakneck speed; but her feet pressed the floor frantically because the car did not, could not, go fast enough. Down that street and up another she drove, and across town. There, in the solidest, oldest block of the City’s most “ exclusive ” street, lived her friend and quondam employer, Mr. Sims.

Young Sims happened to be in the hall when she was admitted. At sight of her he shot up his eyebrows and stroked his silken mustache; suspecting her approaching marriage to “ old Morley,” he was doubly prepared for persiflage. Cecily passed him without so much as seeing him.

Sims Senior was in his library, where he habitually took refuge, when he chanced to be in the house, from women and their ways. It was a grim room, all his own. He got up at Cecily’s entrance, and drew forward a chair for her. “ I am glad to see you, Mrs. Fairchild,” he said.

Her silence, and the odd strained way in which she looked about her, almost succeeded in frightening him. “ Is there anything the matter? ” he asked. “ Is there anything I can do? I hope there is.”

Suddenly she slid toward the edge of her chair, and her glance fastened itself on him. “ There is something,” she said. “ Something that must be attended to, and at once. Mr. Sims, I want you to get me a divorce.”

His face did not change; he pulled a pad of paper toward him. “When—?” he began.

CHAPTER XXVII

INFERENCES FROM A SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE

In the days of her bereavement, Lois Butler turned to Avery. With the passage of time after Walter’s death she seemed to grow not less but more lonely: the appeal of her grief was greater. “ You knew him too, Avery,” she would say, “ you knew him.” The friends of her early life hadn’t known her husband; in her husband’s city she hadn’t very generally made friends. Now in her frankly unhappy state, it must be Avery that she sought. They wrote regularly; she saw him on repeated visits to Chicago, and she asked him to come to Jefferson. Avery could not help feeling that it was a distinction for him to be so singled out by such a woman; and he received her all the more readily because during these days he was not himself particularly happy.

One result of their renewed intimacy was that he perceived in Lois certain common feminine qualities which at one time he would not have believed her to possess. He noticed now, for instance, how often engagements with Lois seemed to forestall engagements or possible engagements with Caroline. There was some natural feminine wiliness here: he grinned on discovering it. Once it would have appeared to him as the clay feet of his idol; but he was getting older, and coming by degrees to see that a woman is after all none the worse for being a woman.

Caroline, he was sure, knew as well as he the object of those engagements that so often kept him from her. The engagements themselves he made no attempt to conceal. Perhaps she would have liked it better if he had: a little 286 mystery in the background would have renewed the savor of their own affair. But Avery’s indifference as to how much she knew galled her.

She endeavored to beat him at his own game, or at least to pique his interest. She went out pointedly With other men; it was not difficult, he would find, for Mrs. Keppel to get masculine attention. But Avery, far from being piqued, said gently that he was glad to have her go out, go all she cared to; he explained that it gave him more leisure, and that his mind was at rest about her when he .knew she was having a good time.

“ Shall you like to have me go out with other men after we are married? ” she blazed out.

Avery simply smiled in answer, smiled just as one would at a child who was trying to say something daring and naughty. He was very sure of himself, she thought; and yet why shouldn’t he be? This attempt at revolt on her part ended in nothing; she was more unhappy in her rebellious expeditions than when she simply sat at home and waited. Probably any future rebellion would end in the same way, and she would go on to the end of her life caring more for Avery than he did for her, and accordingly bound hand and foot in her actions.

Yet she wondered sometimes if their lives would go on long together; she wondered if they would ever be married. More than once, enraged at his real or fancied neglect, she even determined to break the engagement herself. More than once that singular gleam which had come first on the night Avery heard of Butler’s death, returned to her; and she was frightened, delighted, fascinated. But she hadn’t strength to make it perpetually hers. At the sight of Avery, or the mere sound of his voice over the telephone, resolution would turn to water. It seemed that she could not help herself.

Then one evening, one never to be forgotten evening, he came to her with his divorce decree in one pocket and an engagement ring in another—his freedom and his thralldom both upon his person. The ring was a magnificent one, a combination of diamonds and sapphires; to slip it on he took off the wedding-ring she had worn for so many years. “ If you would like something else better, we can change this,” he said. “ But this is my ideal of what looks well on you.”

“ Oh, I wouldn’t have you change it for worlds! ” she cried. “ It’s perfectly beautiful, and it was so sweet of you just to get it as you did. Your taste is wonderful, Avery.”

Indeed she could not say enough to express her appreciation. She kissed him again and again; being surprised this way made it doubly wonderful. What she did not tell him was that the sight of the new ring on her finger gave her new confidence; and that was what made her happy.

Presently he thrust his hand into a pocket; and there encountered his temporarily forgotten legal paper. “ Did I tell you,” he asked—he knew he had not—“ did I tell you that we can be married at any time after the expiration of a year?”

“Not actually?” she exclaimed. “Oh, Avery! Then I can announce our engagement? ”

“ As soon as you like,” he said. “ There isn’t any hurry yet, is there?”

“ No. Perhaps we would better wait. Only I’m anxious to have it done, because from that moment I shall be yours before the world—and yet I shall never be yours at heart more than I am now.”

She was a sweet little thing, and at moments like this she touched him. If only he couldn’t always, at any mention of their marriage, feel chains clanking about him! But he was fond of Caroline; and as a practical point of conduct, he had no choice but to go on. He had taken this other life into his—in a wanton moment, perhaps, but he had taken it; and he must live up to his bargain. The sooner he began to do so, the sooner he should get used to it.

He went to Jefferson the next day, half hoping that on his return the blazoning forth to the world would have been accomplished, and he himself definitely and publicly committed. Meanwhile, “ we who are about to die—” He had a farewell or two to bid before the public assumption of his new status.

Immediately after his arrival he visited the Jefferson Health Department, which now, thanks to his exertions, employed a full-time health officer. Then he strolled along the river-bank, up to Mrs. Butler’s. It was a November day, of the chill, mournful kind; his errand, if errand he had, was mournful too. He walked slowly; thick-coming memories seemed to clog his brain and impede his footsteps. And yet he was very glad to be here, and to be going to Lois; he rejoiced even in the depth of his melancholy, so suitable to the day and place, so little like mere vexation.

Lois, apprised by telephone of his coming, was waiting for him; she received him in her converted conservatory. It was the first time that they had sat there since Walter died. The queer, familiar room, and Lois’s voice and presence, brought back the old days so strongly that when Avery’s sense of duty forced him to stammer out his news, he didn’t himself believe it.

Lois heard it very quietly; after a pause she lifted her eyes, and said, “ So you and Cecily have come to the end.” That was the thing which struck her.

“ To the end, no doubt,” said Avery. “ It doesn’t seem possible! ”

“ It was never meant to happen.”

“ In a sense, no,” he agreed. “ In another sense, perhaps it couldn’t have been avoided. I am willing to admit, though, that I’ve been weak with her all along. But I didn’t see my conduct as weakness until it was too late. We aren’t bom old enough, Lois, that’s the truth—to say nothing of our marrying too young. And in our youth we look on things broadly and crudely: I love or I don’t love,

I am angry, or this thing annoys me and I should like to have it ended.”

“ You don’t know what Cecily intends to do? You never found out what her application meant? ”

“ No. I never tried to find out. What would; have been the use? I should only have distressed her. If we could begin again, and live life over in the light of our experience, it would be different.”

“ If we were a little more patient all the time—” she suggested.

“ Yes. And if we realized even in our preoccupation and our bad tempers that you may never consciously think of a person, and yet never once have her out of your mind—-—” “ That,” said Lois quickly, “ is marriage, or its result. You couldn’t come closer to the gist of the matter.”

He nodded. “ In our different ways, we seem to have learned the same thing, Lois.”

She picked up a magazine from the table at her elbow. It was a radical sheet, conducted by very young men and women; it shrieked protest at every existing institution. “ Some of my closest friends founded this,” she remarked. “ The only reason I wasn’t in it myself was that it wasn’t a money-making scheme, and I had to earn my living. Those same friends hooted when I married; heaven knows what they would say if they could see me now.”

“You aren’t the radical you once were?”

“On some subjects, I am: distribution of income, for instance. But marriage—”

“ Marriage has treated you so kindly,” he said.

“ Perhaps that accounts for it. Yes, it must. For my ideas on the subject are still fairly liberal, but my feelings— Avery, I feel that by its very nature marriage is permanent. I don’t say it ought to be; I say it is.”

“ By that same token, you think I shall be more or less an idiot if I marry Mrs. Keppel? ”

“You do fully expect to marry her, Avery?”

“ I fully expect to. We go pretty much where we are wanted in this world: Cecily doesn’t want me, and Caroline does.”

“That isn’t the question,” declared Lois. “A frivolous society woman is not the wife for you. What does she know of your work or your aspirations? ”

“ Nothing,” said Avery. “ Perhaps she will give me a rest from them—complete change, you know.”

“Do you believe that she will? I don’t,” said Lois bluntly. “My opinion is that having just spent several painful years scrambling out of the frying-pan, you are now on the point of jumping into the fire. But perhaps you’ve fully made up your mind, and in being disagreeable to you now I’m simply spoiling your visit.”

“ There is one thing that, if it could happen, would make me change my mind even now,” said Avery.

“Yes?” She leaned forward, interested.

Avery looked her steadily in the eye. “ Marry me yourself, Lois, and you will save me from all other women.”

For once in her life, Lois’s poise deserted her. Her face went white and then red; she stared at him in fascination.

“ I’m not raving, and I’m not joking, Lois. It isn’t possible under the circumstances for me to say all that I’d like to: but you have only to speak a word, and I’ll break my engagement to Caroline, and wait for you. I know you don’t love me, but you like me pretty well. You have a good many years yet to live, and we could work so splendidly together. You’ve always helped me; can’t you go on helping me—always? ”

She shook her head mutely. “ I hardly know why I’ve said this,” Avery went on. “ When I came here I didn’t intend anything of the sort; and of course if I had intended to speak to you of such a matter, I should have waited. But it would be a wonderful thing, if it could come to pass, Lois.”

“ Oh, yes! ” she breathed. “ It would be very wonderful, Avery.”

She got up then, and walked away from him; she stood looking over the curtains at the river. Presently she said, without turning, “ I hope that I shall always be able to help you, Avery. I want you always to feel free to call upon me. But I can’t marry you, not even ”—she hesitated —“ not even now.”

“ You can’t, Lois? ”

“ I’ve had that once, you know,” she said, “ marriage, and all that it means. I can’t go back to that.”

“ Having had that, you won’t put up with anything less? ”

She left the window; she came up and laid her hand on his arm. “ I can’t, dear. I can’t,” she said.

He gripped her hand in his. Her hand grasped his in return, firmly, frankly, yet he had a curious feeling that she was not frank, that for once in her life she was forcing her attitude.

“ I think it’s selfish of me not to do as you ask,” she declared. “ It’s selfish of me; but in this matter I have to be selfish. You see that, don’t you? What you can’t see is how it hurts me to be selfish to you, Avery. You’re the best friend I have in the world; I would do anything for you, except that.”

And then, close upon his impression that she wasn’t quite frank, followed another impression, so wild that it startled him, so farcical that he would never have dared to tell it to another person, even if there were any one to whom a man could tell such things. But absurd as it was, he knew from the moment it entered his head that it was true. Wonderful Lois, so lately widowed, so perfect in her devotion to Walter’s memory, was actually afraid of her own feeling for Avery. She had already sacrificed to love, had given freely and ungrudgingly years of her precious, brilliant life to it; and she wasn’t willing to love again.

He sympathized humorously with her unwillingness; and, away down underneath, he loved the fact that she was afraid of him, that with the corner of her which was merely feminine and affectionate, she found him all too attractive. It must be a bit humiliating for her, though, to fear anybody; and the entrance of that little niggling fear presaged the end of their relation. Never again would they sit together quite as of old; and perhaps in time they would cease entirely to sit together. This was the oddest way for their relation to end; unless, perhaps, the odd thing was that, being man and woman, they hadn’t reached this end sooner.

“ We won’t speak of it again, Lois,” he said. “ But I should have liked it awfully well.”

“ I believe I should have liked it myself; but it’s quite impossible,” she said. Again she was forcing the note, and her eye wavered in meeting his.

“Won’t you have Jerry down, if he’s in the house?” asked Avery briskly after a moment’s pause. “ I should like to see him again before I leave.”

“ I left word for him to come in when he returned from his walk. Evidently he hasn’t returned,” she said.

“ In that case I shall miss him,” said Avery, rising.

“ You don’t mean to say that you are going now, Avery? ”

“ Yes.”

“ But I shall see you again? ”

“ No. I’m going back to Chicago by the night train.”

“ Going back to Chicago—so soon? ” she faltered. She was frank now—she was frankly troubled.

“ Going back to Chicago at once. ’ Going back to Chicago,” he iterated mercilessly, “ to do my simple duty, Lois.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE GLEAM

Surely, thought Avery, his way had never been marked so clearly before any human man as Avery’s own was before him. There could be no equivocation now, and no more delay than was absolutely necessary—was in fact demanded of him by the laws of the commonwealth. He would do his duty henceforth, not only because he was a noble fellow and devoted to duty, but because as things had turned there was nothing much else for him to do. When of three possible courses two had failed, it required neither discernment nor determination to go ahead on the other. Oh, Avery was beautifully clear in his own mind; and it never occurred to him that Fate might still have a trick up her sleeve.

He had a chance to get his course a little in perspective, as it were; for he was not going back to Chicago quite as directly as he had made Lois believe. He stopped on the way to fill two lecture engagements. Dr. Fairchild was coming to be in demand as a lecturer—a sign not only of his own increasing popularity, but of the growth of interest in the things he represented. The solid citizen, the governing body or board, the intelligent laboring-man, were all coming to be interested. Education for health was the new order; and of that new order, Avery Fairchild was in the middle west quite peculiarly and indisputably the prophet. To feel the truth flowing through one to eager minds—that compensated for the many times one was disappointed! Ah, a man could live in his work, when he had such a work to live in!

On his return to Chicago he went directly to the Aedile office, and attacked his piled-up mail, that queer, eager, sometimes intelligent, often pathetic and occasionally comic mail of his. He looked up presently to say to the stenographer at his elbow, “ Will you telephone for me, please? Call up Mrs. Morrison Keppel,” he gave the number, “ and tell her I shall be over about six o’clock.” It was the first time he had ever communicated with Caroline through a third person. Yet why not, when the whole world would soon know of the bond between them, and recognize its irreproachably regular character?

It was actually seven o'clock when he rang Mrs. Kep-pel’s bell, though he had come straight from the office. “ Just as I came from the train! ” he cried as he stooped to kiss her; he intended to forestall reproaches for his tardiness.

The face that she raised to his was not, however, reproachful: it was sweet instead, and very, very serious. Not since the early days of their acquaintance had he seen her look so sweet, and never before had she looked so wholly, so purposefully serious. She was dressed simply, too; nothing flashed or glittered or shone as she moved. “ Has anything happened? ” he was moved to ask.

She shook her head. All during dinner she talked calmly of indifferent matters, thereby increasing his feeling that something had indeed happened: for when since he could remember had she been satisfied to be impersonal? But whatever its cause, an interlude of peace was not bad; perhaps it even promised a certain peace in the future.

When they were alone after dinner in her familiar little sitting-room, Avery made himself comfortable by the fire, and picked up a magazine. “ Shan’t I read to you as you sew? ” he asked. “ Or would you rather talk, Caroline? ”

She stood with her back to the fire, and looked at him without speaking. Avery, still retaining his magazine, put out his hand to her. She ignored the outstretched hand, continuing to fix him with a look of singular clarity and steadiness. Something, clearly, had come over her; but so long as it wasn’t either jealousy or a romantic transport, he ventured to hope that it wouldn’t disturb him too much.

“ Avery,” she said presently, “ you came here straight from the train? That is, you didn’t go home? ”

It was his tardiness, after all; he was going to get a wigging. “ I sent my bag home, and went straight to the office,” he explained. “ My work was stacked up for me there: mail a foot deep all over the top of my desk, dear. That was why I had to come here all travel-stained.”

“ Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she assured him/ “ I only wished to know if you had gone to your room.”

“ No, dear.”

She drew a long breath; her clear gaze dropped for a second, and then once more fixed his. “ Because, Avery,” she said slowly, “ because I’ve been there.”

“Where?”

“ To your room. I went there the day before yesterday.”

He didn’t know what to make of that statement, delivered so simply and earnestly. “ But you knew I wasn’t in town, Caroline,” he finally brought out.

“ Yes. Oh, yes! That is why I chose the day I did, Avery. I wanted to go when there was no chance of your coming in—and when I could have a day or two afterward before I saw you.”

“ That sounds as if you were making some sort of pious pilgrimage, Caroline. What on earth made you want to go there? ”

“ I wanted to see your environment, Avery. Not the environment of an office, or anything so calculated: I wanted to see the careless surroundings of your everyday life.”

“ What you saw was careless enough, I’ll be bound.

Well, I'm sure it was all right if you wanted to do it, Caroline; but just what,” he asked with some amusement, “ did my landlady say? ”

“ I told her, Avery, that I was from your office, and was sent there for a book.”

“ Very convincing.” Avery checked a laugh, but could not help saying, “ I have no doubt she thought you looked it, Caroline. But what did you do when you got past the landlady? ”

“ I had quite a time getting rid of her, Avery—"

“ I can believe that,” he interjected.

“ But when I did, I sat down on the edge of your bed, and looked around me. I sat there a long time, to let things soak in; and I thought and thought.”

A quaint picture, the elaborate Caroline seated on the edge of his monastic bed, thinking, thinking; he could fairly smell the faint lavenderish aroma of her garments spreading through his bare chamber. And then something in the contrast hardened him. “ Did it amuse you to see how badly I live? ” he asked.

“ Ah, that wasn’t the idea! And you don’t live badly, Avery; I’m not so stupid as to think that.”

“Not badly, only very differently?”

“ Differently—with a hopeless difference, Avery.”

Her candid eyes again met his; her pale cheeks flushed a little. Then slowly between her and her lover she lifted her slim satiny left hand. It was quite bare.

“What have you done with your engagement ring?” asked Avery, fondly imagining that he thereby changed the subject. “ Have you made up your mind after all that you don’t like it? I thought you might want to make a change.” “ I took it off as I sat there on your bed, Avery. I haven’t worn it since.”

Some shade of her incredible meaning at last came home to him. “ You mean—? ”

“ I appreciated all that I saw,” she explained. “ A man who can live as you do, who chooses to live that way, couldn’t live in my environment. He would be stifled. Things, things, things—I not only have them, I love them, I couldn’t do without them. They’re my life, Avery; conformity to a wonderful ideal, personal self-denial, visions and their realization—that is yours.”

He had all along seen something of that himself; only he hadn’t put it so flatteringly, or considered the matter so crucial. But he couldn’t admit its validity when she set it forth. “Nonsense, Caroline!” he said stoutly. “You never saw bare bachelor diggings before, and you’re quite naturally horrified. But you attach too much importance to what was really only a strong visual impression. You know, I haven’t always lived in that room.”

“ I know; but when you had your choice, it was to that room you betook yourself. You haven’t always lived the kind of life you’d like, Avery; but that room represents it, in one way.”

“What if it does? You’re not breaking our engagement because you don’t like my taste in room decoration, are you?”

“ No, Avery. I am breaking our engagement ”—her eyelids fluttered—“ because I see all that your room implies. I’ve never seen anything so clearly before.”

“ You think that we wouldn’t be happy, Caroline? ”

“ I know that we wouldn’t. Oh, perhaps for the first little while I could make you happy; I’m sure I could.” She smiled a little, happily at first; but the smile ended in a sob. “ In heaven, perhaps you and I could be happy always, but here on earth—”

“ You’re not willing to take the chance, Caroline? ”

“ It isn’t a chance, Avery. For a long time, I kept hoping it was; that’s why in spite of all that I’ve seen for a long time, I haven’t come sooner to a decision. But that day everything cleared up for me. It isn’t a chance at all.”

“ Oh, come! It isn’t like you to sit here discussing such things! ” he protested. “ Leave them to older, more sordid people, Caroline. You love me, and I you; isn’t that enough? ”

“ No,” she said flatly. “ No, it isn’t, Avery. Once I should have thought that it was, but it isn’t. Perhaps you’ve liked me all the better at some times because I’m on the whole an unseeing little fool—because I don’t usually try to be anything else. It’s not the least achievement of your life, Avery Fairchild, that this time I should care to see. For once, my eyes have been opened.” She pressed the backs of her hands against her recently opened eyes, as if literally the eyeballs ached.

A thought occurred to him. “ Perhaps you have found some other man——?” he hazarded.

“ Avery! ” She was hurt and shocked by his suspicion; it had never occurred to her in her sincerity, in her final surrender to the gleam, that her motives would be doubted.

“ I beg your pardon, Caroline,” he said hastily. “ It was nasty of me to say that. I’m so awfully startled and upset —I never suspected—”

“ I knew you would be upset,” she conceded generously. “ That has been one of the worst thoughts I’ve had to face during these miserable days, Avery.”

He could believe that the last few had been miserable days; only through real suffering would such a resolution erect itself in her unstable character. But he must have misjudged her all along, for he had never suspected her capable of anything like this: for right or wrong, this was splendid. During all those past hours when she had seemed to be merely selfish and fretful, she had been trying to reconcile his mode of life and hers; she had been groping her way toward this conclusion. Her so significant visit had been only the climax of her groping.

“ Forgive the egotistic sound of it, Caroline,” he said. “ What will you do if you don’t marry me? ”

“ Live as I always have, Avery, with the minimum of thought and exertion. Live as I did just after Morrison Keppel died, perhaps—only I won’t have Judith back. I won’t,” she said with a flash of spirit, “ have Judith back, ever.”

She had turned a little away from him, and was looking down; against the glow of the fire her profile was indistinct, but her ash-colored hair made a soft line of light. He had sat so often and looked at her like this; but now as he sat and looked, it was borne in upon him that he would never do so again. This was the end, the end of watching and drifting, the end of his diet of mixed emotions. For even now his emotion wasn’t mixed, it was fine and pure: he had never before admired her so heartily and wholly as he did at the moment of separation.

Of course, he had to make an effort to weaken her resolution, to postpone her action. “ Let’s at least think things over,” he suggested. “ You have taken me so utterly unaware. You’ve had time to work yourself up to this; at least, give me the same. Let me see you again before I consider this final, Caroline.”

“ What would be the good of that? ” she asked in a low voice. “ You’ll grow used to the idea soon enough if you don’t see me.” She actually smiled as she added, “ In another year, if you happen to hear my name, you’ll wonder who Caroline Keppel is.”

That was the nearest she ever came to irony; and it somehow brought Cecily to his mind. He was indignant with Cecily for thus invading the situation: doubtless she was spending this evening with her fiance, and unquestionably she was not spending it parting forever from that fiance. This evening would leave her bound to another man, and Avery hopelessly and uselessly free. But that wasn’t what Avery minded; what exasperated him was his inability even now to carry off a situation that actually didn’t concern her without in some way relating it to that everlasting woman.

“ You can’t make me forget you,” he said sturdily to Caroline. “ You can turn me out, but you can't make me forget you.”

“ As you like,” she said, her eyes again averted. “ I shall do my very best to forget you, Avery.”

Avery looked at his watch, and returned it to his pocket; then, sliding forward in his chair, he absent-mindedly warmed one hand at the fire. Caroline still stood silent, with averted face; between them the silence deepened and deepened. Avery hadn’t anything more to say; there wasn’t much of anything to say. He left his chair and stood beside her. She glanced at him, and then away from him. She was spent with her effort, and was doubtless wishing he would go. He would have gone, at once, only it didn’t seem suitable that such an important interview should terminate so soon. He wanted to go, but he didn’t want her to know that he did.

And then as he stood idly there, feeling the warmth of the fire on his back and thinking, if he thought anything at all, that he should have a great many free evenings now-then without warning there came to Avery a moment of comprehensive clearness passing any other he had ever known. Such moments come, one hears, to drowning people; they come sometimes during serious illness, or when misfortune has opened a man’s eyes; or even, now and then, from the simple fact that it is three o’clock in the morning. But they come very rarely in the shank of the evening to a man standing near a bright fire with a pretty woman who has just at some cost to herself fulfilled his inmost unacknowledged wish. That is perhaps one reason why Avery’s crisis took him so chokingly by the throat.

For it came over him of a sudden that Caroline had taken him, poor girl, quite simply at his own valuation, and his own valuation was utterly false. His own valuation of himself, that groundwork on which he had at such cost to himself and to others built his life, simply hadn’t any right to exist. It wasn’t that he hadn’t done good work; there were in his last few years accomplishments which needed no apology. But his whole magnificent ideal of himself— what a slatternly patchwork he had made in attempting to realize it! Even his celibacy, the signs of which had so impressed Caroline, was nothing but a fine self-denying pose. If he had been in the least faithful to his celibate ideal, or worthy of the exemptions it brought him, he simply shouldn’t be here now.

He stood there shivering in nightmare horror. The worst of it was that he had to play his part to the end; he was at that very moment planning to use the avenue of retreat Caroline’s faith in him had laid open. Doubtless he would continue to play his chosen part, that of an awakener of the public conscience. At least, he was learning tonight how a thoroughly bad conscience felt. “ Avery Fairchild,” he thought to himself, “ you rotten, rotten sentimentalist! ”

He could deceive himself, he could deceive other people; he was even now deceiving the woman at his elbow. But there was one person he had never deceived. Cecily had left him, it came to him suddenly, simply because she had seen through him. Oddly enough, Caroline was taking a similar course because she, on the contrary, didn’t in the least see through him. But, oh! he achingly thought, what a happy life would have been his if he had been either high and clear or quite simple and opaque, instead of cloudy, confused, confusing, he and his ideas!

It remained for him finally to break the silence. “ Don’t try to decide anything tonight, Caroline,” he said. “ Think it over, and sleep on it.”

“ I have thought it over, so many, many times,” she said wearily. “ I want to get it settled, and then I shall sleep.”

He looked at her kindly, noting her tired eyes and drooping lips. “ I’m afraid it has made you awfully unhappy,” he said. “ It’s too bad that I ever had to come into your life for no end better than that.”

“ It has made me awfully happy, too,” she urged bravely. “ Often, often, it has made me happy.”

She was playing her part magnificently, he felt. Women were like that, at least the women with whom Avery Fairchild came in contact were; for he recollected that this was the second time he had been magnificently and magnanimously chucked. With reviving egotism, he winced now at the remembrance.

Caroline was ready by this time for the last formalities; she held out something in her closed hand. “ Your ring, Avery,” she said.

“ Keep it,” he answered. “ Keep it, even if you never care to wear it.”

She had evidently rehearsed the scene pretty carefully in her own mind; and she wasn’t prepared for this. “Keep it? ” she echoed doubtfully.

“ Please do. I haven’t any other use for it, you know,” he said.

“Would you—would you like me to have it?” she breathed.

“ Indeed I should,” he said.

She flushed and looked at him gratefully; the first tears of the evening stood in her eyes. She was now, he saw, she had been all along, beautifully true to her type. She might be as right as Lois had ever been, as final as Cecily; but she had made her sacrifice romantically, and she was grateful for any romance that she could get out of it.

In virtue of this perception, the least Avery could do was to take her in his arms, to assure her that he didn’t consider this final, and that even if it was, he should never, never forget her. He acquitted himself gallantly, although he was sick at heart. Knowing that it was their last embrace, but protesting to her that it couldn’t and mustn’t be, Avery got through it; and suddenly, strangely, found himself in the street, without remembering exactly how he got there.

The street looked curiously empty, and he felt a little dazed. Small wonder, to be sure, if he were dazed; this thing had happened with incredible suddenness. And sudden as it was, it marked the end of something. For he was now, he vowed solemnly as the air began to clear his head, through with romance, for ever and a day.

He hadn’t exactly outgrown it: romance, rather, had outgrown him. All his life, it seemed to him now, he had been perpetually thrust out of doors, and had come to himself on the pavement, to note always in a detached way that the street was pretty well empty. Well, so be it, then: the outsides of doors for him henceforth, the chill, crisp, outer air. As thrice rejected by women, middle-aged, devoted to a work for which, after all, he had made sacrifices, it was time for Avery on his side to forswear romance.

Then as the cool air filled his lungs, and brisk walking braced his whole being, he became aware of the fact that he was tremendously glad to be rid of his entanglements. He might never find again, in the old life to which he was returning, quite the old satisfaction. But in the old room, once a certain aroma of lavender had been dispelled, he might look to find something like the old absorption in his work, something like the old high contacts. If the old single-hearted belief in himself should indeed prove to be gone, thanks to the blighting clearness of tonight’s vision— well, he was no longer so young that he demanded from life everything at once.

It had been an awful moment, that moment of revelation at Caroline’s fireside. He shivered again now when he remembered how his weakness had actually gathered itself together and struck him full in the face. Yet even a man’s weakness, if carried to the pitch to which Avery carried his, may serve, he presently saw, in place of strength for him. For without his weakness where would Avery have been? If he hadn’t been the sort of man to be won by a word— the sort, even, to be swayed by a woman’s word—he could never have done the work that after all lay so close to his heart. Why, if he hadn’t been that sort of man, he wouldn’t even (oh, most immediate thought!) have been Avery Fair-child. He hugged the idea of his work, even if it didn’t now seem quite so important as it sometimes did. He hugged the idea of himself, even if it was a somewhat scarred idea.

If he had been firmer and clearer, he would have been another, man. Of course, he reflected at last rather ruefully, it might have been better for the world if he had been another man, even were the world to lose in the metamorphosis his wonderful, his incomparable work.

CHAPTER XXIX

THOSE TEDIOUS PRELIMINARIES

It wasn’t until Cecily actually began to hang back, and became in some particulars a little evasive, that Morley on his side became insistent. He had indeed been all along so patient, had so beautifully refrained from hurrying or worrying her, that Cecily might almost have supposed him tepid, if she hadn’t so clearly seen that his failure to press her was due to the self-restraint which was after all at the root of his perfections.

He did in fact desire her, as a man honorably may a woman; and when she was shortly to be free before the world, and was by her own acknowledgment his, and was yet grown strangely reluctant, he couldn’t but begin to press her. Why he had to press, and why he could feel her steadily, delicately resist the pressure, was more than Cecily herself could say. Why wasn’t she happy and carefree now, as she had been in the first days of her engagement? Nothing had changed, unless she herself had; and if she had indeed changed, what was the meaning of that?

At any rate, she was now more appreciative than she had ever been before. She appreciated Richard fervently, she counted and cherished his fine points, taking him apart and then putting him together again, assuring herself over and over that he was, take him part by part or take him altogether, quite the finest human being she had ever known. She appreciated him exactly as if she had to make up to him for something. But for what could she have had to make up to him, except perhaps some deep-down sentimental scruple, unworthy the attention of a woman of her years and experience?

So far as her deeds went, she had lately bound herself more closely to Morley. In the first place she had told more people, had in particular told Fannie Kinkcaid, whom to tell was as good as putting a thing in the newspapers. But right there she had been chilled, because in response to Fannie’s generous and genuine delight she had been so passive, even though she had longed to glow in her turn. Her mind had floated off idly to the time not far ahead when back in Jefferson Edith Wallace would learn of her new marriage; and then she was ashamed of herself for thinking of such a thing.

She had farther bound herself by going at Morley’s solicitation to look over his house and decide what changes she would like. She had never been in his house before; she entered it for the first time as its future mistress and, of course, its critic.

That house had been a revelation to her, so full was it of family portraits and old books, of inherited furniture and time-touched hangings, so wholly the fruit of heritage and tradition. She was beyond exclamation; she surveyed in silence until they came to the dining-room, and then she wheeled on him. “ What are you doing with such a house in the Middle West?” she asked. “How could people like yours ever bear to leave the East, Richard? They must have had such ties there.”

“ Oh, they did have! ” answered Morley. “ For long enough they dreamed of going back. But of course that’s over now; I shall never go back.”

“ They had to leave? ” she insisted.

“ Indeed, they had to. Sheer financial necessity, my dear Cecily. In my grandfather’s time the family had come down to tradition and pretty well nothing else. My grandfather did well enough as a beggared gentleman, but my father was a break in the tradition. My father made money.”

She stepped back to the faded, deep-toned drawing-room. Not even Richard’s father’s money had spoiled it, thanks to the family taste. “ We won’t spoil it now,” she said quickly. “ It’s delicious just as it is, Richard.”

“ I’m glad you like my old things,” he said. “ But coming here as mistress, I thought you would naturally desire to make some changes. You’re so awfully clever, Cecily; you could surely improve the old place.”

“ I’ll decide where to keep my waste-basket after I come here,” she said, smiling. “ Any real change, though, wouldn’t be an improvement; it would be sacrilege.”

It would be, of course. But why was she, Cecily, coming into a house where even a minor improvement would be sacrilege? She who was not by nature reverent, but was, as Richard said, so awfully clever, she whose breath of life was change, flux, modernity—what was she doing in this gal'ere?

She wasn’t actually in it yet, thanks to the law’s delay: her decree forbade her remarriage for the space of a year. But morally she was in it, fathoms deep in it; and actually the months were slipping by quickly enough. Not quickly enough for Richard, who seemed to want to get all preliminaries out of the way; who wanted to rush forward to greet her freedom with open arms, and all arrangements made for their marriage. But surely that ought to have pleased her; surely she was at last about to step into a setting such as she had all her life coveted, to say nothing of possessing herself of the finest man, she maintained, the finest man she had ever known.

In these days her tea-shop became a perfect refuge for her. She was so busy there, things were always coming at her from so many sides at once, that she had no time to be sentimental. And everything there was so definite, and suited her so well. She knew what she wanted to do and how to do it; and things always came out so splendidly for her. The planning ahead, the ordering, managing her work people, pleasing her customers so well that they would come back again and again—all this She was mistress of, all this she loved and clung to. And this too her marriage would change. Of course, Richard had promised that she should always keep her shop; but presently it would become, not the source of her income and the mainspring of her daily concerns, but simply the plaything of a rich man’s wife.

A rich man’s wife, splendidly above all harassing details. A rich man’s wife, gorgeously furred, dressed in perfect taste, jeweled expensively but unobtrusively. Ah, she could fill the bill! What else had she always longed for? And when there was as the rich man in the background, not some awful thick-necked beast, like Edith Wallace’s husband, say, but the charming, impeccable Morley— why, she ought to be very happy, that was all.

Often she was happy enough. But there were times, especially when she was tired, that everything disgusted her, when nothing held her to her bargain but the fact that she was after all so fond of Richard. Worse still, there were moments of abnormally clear sight, when she could see that if she had intended to marry a rich man she should have done it years before, before she ever went out into the world, to meet its rough blows and its rough embraces. To many a poor man, one to whom her Saturday night’s money would mean something, to keep on doing for her children, and feeling that they couldn’t have got on without her doing for them—that idea had a fatal attraction for her. It had been coming at intervals now ever since that wretched afternoon at Miss Samuels’s; and it was since that afternoon that she had found herself unable to get back her old gaiety and swagger. That racking after noon, remembrance of which was like a nightmare, had opened her eyes to so many things! And in view of her situation, she wanted her eyes closed. Ah, that was awful! When one had been so many years in the wide world, to make one’s prayer, “ Close my eyes—”!

She had to trust to her will now, and to that cultivated appreciation of Richard. Passionately she wrapped herself in his tenderness; resolutely she set herself to meet it with an unfaltering devotion. She was guilty, in her passionate endeavor, of some ridiculous behavior in small things: shutting out trifles that savored of her rough world without, devoting herself resolutely to anything that smacked of the fireside and its cherished banalities. By these trifles, in her clear-eyed moments, she measured the extent of her wilful blindness; and then shuddering she again closed her eyes.

After one of those clear-eyed moments had passed, she was always grateful to Richard for pressing her. As they came with increasing frequency now, she was glad that Richard more and more pressed her. Indeed his eagerness had now mastered him; and when she was neither blessing nor evading that eagerness, it seemed to her beautiful and boyish, and a very little pathetic. He was happy, at any rate; and if we could only live in the happiness we create, Cecily would have been happy too.

Would she be married—he came at her so—as soon as the year was up? Would she? Of course she would, if he wished it. They wouldn’t wait a day longer than was necessary. Let him only come for her in his car, with a white bouquet, and she’d put on her best hat and walk right off with him. Or he could hire a taxi, if he liked: that would make it a wee bit more secret and romantic. It would be like marrying incognito, almost like eloping. When he said he couldn’t see that, Cecily said he could suit himself as to the vehicle; all she insisted on was the white bouquet. “ Keep track of the days, Richard,” she admonished him.

“ I am counting them,” he answered quickly.

She could joke about taxis and white bouquets, but she couldn’t make up her mind on some points just as important —wouldn’t think of them at all. There was the question of a wedding-trip, for instance: she wouldn’t express any preference as to a trip, or even as to dispensing with one. “ Plan that all yourself, Richard; surprise me,” she said. And Richard, reflecting that perhaps it was his role to plan the wedding-trip, went into the recesses of a well-stocked memory to plan the most idyllic trip that was possible.

He found a great pleasure in the doing of it: many were the trips he took with her in imagination, in order to select just the right one for the two of them in reality. But he had curious, drab moments when he didn’t believe that the trip would ever come to pass. It wasn’t that he doubted Cecily, or even imagined her as turning him away at the last moment: it was simply that the prospect of life with her was too good to be true, and at his more sober moments he couldn’t believe in its approach.

The year wore away with surprising swiftness, it seemed to Cecily; even Morley found it shorter than he had feared it would be. Finally it had only weeks to run, and presently the last day was upon them. And with its dawn, and the realization that her fate was now upon her, Cecily grew calmer. At least, she would now be so busy that until everything was settled she wouldn’t have any time to think.

Richard came over that last evening of the year, and they dined together at a restaurant. Neither of them mentioned the day, but they were both keenly conscious of it. Afterward in the automobile he took her hand in his and whispered, “ Soon now, soon.”

She wasn’t afraid of it, in that way. “ As soon as ever you like,” she said aloud, looking straight ahead of her.

“You have preparations to make—things to see to?” he asked.

“ Only a brilliant new suit and hat to be married in. I can get those ready-made; I am easy to fit,” she said.

“ Then why not at once? ”

“ At once, if you like.”

He breathed freely. He had always thought her a young woman of decision; and any shade of reluctance in her manner made him uneasy. Of course, he appreciated all her little reserves and delicacies; but there were times when she had struck him as sick of her bargain.

“ I have an idea, Cecily,” he said.

“Yes, Richard?”

“ The next fine day—tomorrow, if it’s clear—let’s take the car, and run down to Chicago—”

“ Chicago! Why to Chicago? ” she asked sharply.

“ It’s the best place to shop, isn’t it? I supposed it was.”

“ I could get my things there, you mean? Yes, of course. But I could get all I need here, Richard.”

“ I know. But I’m sure you’d have more to choose from there. And I thought if we took the car, and made sort of a lark of it, you wouldn’t find it such tedious business.”

“ What a manager you are, Richard! ” she said in some amusement.

“ Ah, you don’t know how I like to have somebody to plan for! Just because I’ve dawdled limply through this much of my life, you mustn’t get the idea that I’m incapable of forethought or firmness.”

“ I had hoped,” she said, smiling, “ that you wouldn’t be too firm, Richard. One manager is enough in a family.”

“ It isn’t that, Cecily, dear. It’s that I like to do for you—”

“ I know, Richard.” Indeed that wasn’t what bothered her. Her vision of herself being drawn along in Richard’s so uncharacteristically energetic wake disturbed her, not because she was afraid of being superseded as “ manager,” but because she would never have been so drawn along if she hadn’t been fundamentally reluctant.

Her reluctance was nonsense, though. She hastened to fall in with Richard’s plan, and even, in her own parlance, to go it one better. “ We’ll go tomorrow, if the weather is good, Richard,” she said. “I’ll drive you down in my own car.”

“ But that would tire you, dear. My idea was to make it as easy as I could for you.”

Although the glass was up, and the chauffeur couldn’t possibly have heard, Cecily leaned toward Richard as she said, “ Will it be easy for me, do you think, to look forward all day as I shop to being driven home by your chauffeur after he has had a whole day in Chicago to himself?”

“ Cecily, he doesn’t drink.”

Cecily shrugged impatiently: in some things, she believed all men stuck together. But she was trying to be gracious; and after all Richard’s plan was rather good. “Just as you like, then,” she said. “ It’s most kind of you to think things out the way you do, Richard. I—I’m busy, you know, and tired.”

He took her in his arms, poor, tired, sweet little thing. “ We go tomorrow? ” he asked.

“ Tomorrow.”

“And how soon after that—?” he hinted.

“ Oh, at once! ” she cried. “ The license and the parson are so easily got, you know, once the trousseau matter is settled.”

Her face, close to his in the dusk, was laughing and tender. The complex feminine sight and sound and odor of her, here beside him in the darkness, would have been exquisite enough; but at the thought that all this was Cecily-!

“ Sometimes,” he whispered, “ I have an awful feeling, dear. This is too good to last. I wasn’t made to be so happy—or so intensely alive.”

“ I don’t particularly know why it shouldn’t last,” she said. “ But a man like you ought to know that one can’t depend on things lasting, Richard. You have me here tonight, and tomorrow you’re going off with me for an all-day excursion. Isn’t just that enough for the present?”

“ It’s wonderful,” he said.

“ Isn’t it enough? ” she insisted.

“ It’s boundless,” said the infatuated Richard.

She was lovely then; she bent her energy to making him, for this one evening, supremely happy. Her success pleased and excited her; it was wonderful to think that one could do so much for any human being, and the power to do it was like an answer to all sorts of questions. Of course, if you were exceedingly happy yourself, you didn’t think so consciously about making another person happy: there were more things you could take for granted. In view of the fact that it was she who deliberately gave happiness, Cecily felt years older, vastly more experienced than Richard, whose years were so many more than hers, whose experience was in many respects so much vaster.

Perhaps that was the right attitude to take toward him; perhaps it was the attitude which would eventually make itself permanent. It was only in virtue of the side of her experience which, after all, went deeper than Richard’s, that Cecily knew how essentially unfair an attitude it was. Some relations in life have to be exactly reciprocal, or a hidden condescension will do its best to vitiate them.

But perhaps that was going too deep. Perhaps all that she actually meant summed itself up in the simple fact that she wasn’t a girl any longer, and that this present relation, or episode, or affair, as you chose to call it, wasn’t the beginning of her experience.

CHAPTER XXX

THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

After as many false starts as need be contained in one lifetime, Avery Fairchild was settled at last. The tenor of his way was now finally and irretrievably even. His work would hold him to the end: his interests would always be intellectual and humane, firm, impersonal. The last and greatest danger in his path—a danger to every man, and especially to every solitary man—had been women; and women were now eliminated as a danger, because one by one every possible woman had been removed.

After their parting he saw Caroline a few times in public places, usually in company with some man or other, always strikingly dressed, always, it seemed to him, a little haggard in her gaiety. He had made one or two feeble backsliding attempts at seeing her privately—it was so difficult to believe that they had actually separated—but she always repulsed him. No matter how haggard she grew, she was sincere at last; and she rested in her own sincerity. He and Lois Butler still corresponded fitfully; but since that last day at Jefferson their relation had never been the same. They pretended that it was the same, but they both knew better. Avery realized that their correspondence was dropping off, that their whole relation was tapering toward a close; he saw it do so very nearly without regret. From Cecily he never heard.

During his probationary year—probationary not to change, but to a succession of similar years—Avery expanded and settled as well: he became both a national and a neighborhood figure. He ran his column in the Aedile; he published a book called “ Social Workers’ Experiences ”; he spoke much, once or twice to physicians’ congresses, very many times to governing bodies that were to be influenced, most frequently to lay gatherings: for although his scientific knowledge was by no means despicable, his renown was chiefly as an apostle to the laity.

His home was still the little high-perched room that had been his so long. It would be his longer; he intended never to desert that good little room. He liked it well enough; and then he didn’t want to make any more changes. In it he changed nothing, except that books accumulated all the time, and papers threatened some day to overflow and prevent his egress. No, he wouldn’t change anything; now at last he knew where he was and where he would remain. If the room still looked like a temporary abode, Avery himself looked a little more permanent. In spite of his hard work he had at last begun to put on weight: not much weight, to be sure, but enough to dim his resemblance to a spare and somber young monk.

The first day after the expiration of his probationary period was particularly full of work for Avery: so full indeed that he had forgotten the day possessed any special significance. He had attended to his mail at the Aedile office, and written one of the pungent articles which had become a feature of that paper. Then he had labored on a course in public health work which an enterprising university extension had ordered of him; he had reached the section on small cities, and found it especially fascinating and baffling. Tiring of it at last, he had put in an hour beford dinner with some new medical journals; and now, dinner over, and two hours’ more reading despatched, he strolled out for some exercise before bedtime. He was well fed, and only agreeably tired: his health had never been better, and he was not in the least bored. The most important question confronting him was whether he should buy or borrow a new novel and therewith read himself to sleep.

Meanwhile he would smoke and stroll; and if any point of interest in his circumambient fellow-creatures presented itself to his notice, he would ruminate drowsily upon it. Such points of interest, with their remote, third-person charm, were especially suitable to a man whose acute personal life, the life of tanging pleasure and scalding pain, had stopped some time since.

Avery paused in the doorway to get his pipe going. It was a foggy evening, he noted: the row of lights down the street looked in the murkiness like loosely-strung opals, and the warm squares of lighted windows seemed to gaze at him like friendly, drowsy eyes. The policeman passed, traveling his beat, and spoke to Avery as to a respected crony. A couple of belated children, playing in the gutter, smiled sheepishly up at him: this wouldn’t be the first time he had sent them home to bed. Avery smiled back at them, too contented just now even to do his duty by the forlorn. This was peace and satisfaction that he felt tonight; and this back-street neighborhood, where the policeman knew him and the very guttersnipes respected him—this was home.

Having got his pipe going, he strolled off down the street. At the second comer he had to stop to let an automobile pass. It was turning into his street; and, ever on the lookout for one of his hazy points of interest, he scanned it as it passed. It was a fine large car, driven by a perfectly dressed but, it struck Avery, a not quite regular and reliable chauffeur. The body of the car was piled with boxes, behind which a man and woman were almost hidden.

“ I should say that fellow has been drinking. He will do well if he gets his passangers and their bandboxes home,” Avery had time to think before the car was exactly abreast of him. When it was, its own light, soft and dim, as became the light of such a car, revealed to him the faces of the occupants. For a moment his heart stopped beating. The man, the well-bred, well-got-up man, turning solicitously just at that moment to his companion, didn’t matter, were he ever so clearly revealed; for his pretty, charmingly-dressed, weary and rather bored companion was—not only resembled, but indubitably was, Cecily herself.

She didn’t see him at all, and in a moment the car had passed. Avery’s heart began to make up for the beats it had missed. With the blood singing in his ears, he clenched his icy fists and stood still just where he had seen her. Of all possible points of interest for the evening’s ruminating, he certainly hadn’t expected a vision of Cecily and her bridegroom elect. And those conspicuous boxes—her trousseau, probably. Her trousseau—hers!

The car had gone on up the street, in the direction in which Avery lived. Avery didn’t follow it with his eyes; for a few moments he wasn’t conscious of looking at anything. Then on his dulled ears a crash sounded; he raised his head, and looked. At the corner, less than half a block from his own familiar doorway, the automobile had collided with a surface car that crossed its path. Wings seemed to attach themselves to Avery’s leaden feet; before he was aware of starting, he made one of the crowd about the damaged machine.

Some of them had got off the car, of course; where the rest came from he couldn’t guess. In the street that had been so quiet five minutes before was a mob standing shoulder to shoulder. Without ceremony Avery elbowed his way through. “ I’m a doctor,” he heard himself saying to some one at the center; and he knelt on the pavement.

The chauffeur was already on his feet; but both his passengers lay with closed eyes. Avery could have cried aloud when he saw that still face of Cecily’s; but his early training stood him in good stead. Without his seeming to have anything to do with it, his fingers busied themselves with the work of examination, first of the woman, then the man. Then he stood up, brushing the dust from his knees, and found himself face to face with an officer of the law. He heard his own voice, deep and steady, though he hadn’t an idea of what he would say until he heard himself say it. “ You can take the man to the hospital,” said that authoritative voice. “ He has an arm broken, and a couple of ribs or so, and he’s dazed. It won’t hurt him to be moved, though. The chauffeur may as well go with him. The woman’s head and back have been hurt, and she ought to be disturbed as little as possible. It would be best if you carried her into the house here, I should think.”

The law chanced to be personified in the policeman to whom Avery had spoken a few minutes before, his own particular crony of a policeman. The officer’s duty was simply to summon the ambulance and get all the injured into it; but personal acquaintance carried the day against duty. He touched his cap and said, “ Very well, Dr. Fair-child. Stand back, you fellows; here, one of you help the doctor.”

Avery picked up the injured woman in his arms; the conductor of the colliding street-car followed with his arms full of the spilled boxes. Some of them had come open, and dainty, frivolous things trailed behind him as he went.

In the hall they encountered Avery’s landlady, curious, deprecating, somewhat alarmed. “ It’s my wife,” said Avery to her. “ She has been injured; we are taking her up to my room.”

The landlady rushed on before them, to turn down the bed. As Avery followed her broad back up all the stairs, walking gingerly with his burden, he was conscious of a passing wonder at the spontaneity with which he had said “my wife.” Of course, he would have had to say that, to explain this performance; but the two words had come very easily to his lips.

In his room, though, he had no time for any concern with the conventions of society. They put Cecily into his bed, and he and the landlady set to work to restore consciousness to her horribly still form. Once the landlady, seeing the changeless, greenishly pale face, began to whimper, and Avery checked her with a look. Once he stumbled over those boxes that the conductor had put down, and swore softly. Aside from those two interruptions, they didn’t seem to have any personal life there in the high-perched room. Avery simply worked without thinking; he didn’t have to think, and he couldn’t allow himself to do so now. And at his side his landlady toiled perspiring, doing as she was told without understanding why, sanctioning, in blind obedience to the immediate need, she knew not what, and for the present did not care.

For hours they worked there together; and at last the patient was breathing regularly, though she had not opened her eyes. “ That’s all for the present,” said Avery curtly. “ You'd better go to bed now, for I shall need you in the morning.”

His landlady drew herself wearily upright, dragged herself slowly from the room; even if she hadn’t been too tired to question him, her curiosity was deadened by the service he had exacted of her. Avery was left alone with the still form on the bed.

At first he didn’t even glance at the bed. He walked to the window, and looked down into the street. The victims had been removed and the crowd dispersed long since; the damaged automobile, pushed to the curbing, alone bore witness to the night’s events. The sky was beginning to lighten a little and a milk-wagon was making deliveries down the street.

He turned his back to the window presently, and adjusted his reading-lamp so that it cast only a dim light on the bed; he drew a chair to the bedside, and sat down. In the dim light Cecily didn’t look so unnaturally pale; at times he could even imagine that she stirred. He sat with his eyes fixed upon her, half expecting her to disappear if he looked away for a second. It couldn’t, it simply couldn’t be Cecily, lying here on his monastic bed; any more than it could be Cecily who lay so with her challenging eyes closed, and who never once in all these hours had felt his presence close at hand. But it was Cecily, Cecily herself, as he had seen her a thousand times, and never expected to see her again. It was Cecily, not only here, but for the moment in her weakness actually his: his, because tonight it was he who could serve her. Sitting quite still, never stirring hand or foot, Avery secretly blessed his profession at once and forever, because it had given him tonight’s service to her: blessed her weakness, and his opportunity, and chance, the mighty mistress: blessed his life, because it had held this hour, this hour of pain and trial, of bewilderment and wonder.

Light was beginning to flood the room, and dim the radiance of his lamp, when without warning her eyes opened and met his. Hers showed instant recognition, but no surprise. “ Hello, Avery,” she said weakly. He trusted himself only to smile in answer; and he was not sure that she even saw the smile. Her eyelids drooped again almost at once, and she slept.

It was only the weakest echo of a once familiar glance, but it acted like magic on Avery. Its effect was distinctly sobering. He saw all of a sudden that he had practically kidnapped his divorced wife out from under the nose of her fiance. Indeed, for all that he knew they might be already married, in which case Dr. Fairchild was certainly in an awkward hole. If he had only let events take their natural course, if he had only let the authorities take Cecily to the hospital—he who spent so much of his time preaching hospitals!—Avery shivered, as if he were caught naked and ridiculous before a jeering populace. And then he looked back at Cecily, sleeping there in his bed; and it seemed to him that if he had let them take her away the night before he would have committed the greatest blunder in his history.

Cecily’s sleep was now restless and disturbed; she woke again about ten o’clock. She looked down at herself, and murmured, “ Sleeping in my clothes. No wonder I’m uncomfortable.”

“ Feel strong enough to be really undressed? ” asked Avery.

She took his presence quite for granted. “ Yes, please,” she said.

He and the landlady finished undressing her, and inducted her into one of the landlady’s nightgowns. “ How do you feel? ” he asked.

“ Head aches—awfully,” she murmured.

“ Any pain anywhere else? ”

“ No. Things always go—weak spot,” she murmured feebly. Her eyes closed, and her fingers moved as if in search of something. Avery took her hand, and her fingers closed around his and held them. He sat down beside the bed.

“ Ought she to be like that? ” whispered the landlady.

“Yes, she’s all right. Slight concussion of the brain; she hasn’t yet remembered where she is or what happened to her,” he answered.

Cecily kept his hand all that afternoon. Once he released it and was about to steal away; but she half-wakened, and seemed almost terrified. So he took her hand again, and sat watching the afternoon wane and the shadows gather. Presently he went to sleep himself as he sat; and when he wakened with a start, it was quite dark in the room. Cecily had dropped his hand at last; she was moaning a little as she lay. He readjusted the ice-bag on her head, and tiptoed to the window. The damaged machine had now been removed; the street was just as usual. Cecily seemed to have dropped out of another life into his, and the other life hadn’t yet missed her.

If it didn’t miss her the next day, if no one came to make inquiries about her, Avery would have to take steps himself. Not, however, if she became fully conscious. In that case she herself would take the steps, and would doubtless make a few comments as well. He knew those brief comments of hers, which had the power to make him feel such a fool; he could imagine her stripping the present situation in three or four sentences, exposing it not only to her ridicule but to his own.

He turned back and lighted the lamp to look at her. With her silky hair down and the shadow of her eyelashes on her cheeks, Cecily asleep always resembled a tired child. The utter unconsciousness of her, Cecily who was always defensive, always aggressive and commentary—it was almost like seeing a proud spirit humbled, to have her here like this. No, it was more like seeing a complex spirit resolved into its elements. Its elements were simple and sweet; and now, in its elements, it was ever so briefly his.

For tomorrow they would have to make some sort of adjustment with the world. He didn’t know what sort; in his ignorance of how they now actually stood toward the world, he couldn’t even conjecture. But one thing he did know. Whatever ties she might have, Cecily wasn’t simply going to put her hat on her aching head and walk out of his life again as smartly as she had entered it. That would have been just the course he might have expected, in view of the past, and reason and common sense. But his own action, which had either violated or transcended common sense, just as you chose to put it—his own action had made her simply walking away quite impossible. At last they would have an understanding. “ By God,” he thought solemnly as he stood looking down at her, “ that’s a thing we never have had! ”

He sat down to see the night out. She was resting quite easily now; she might even come to herself before morning, though he scarcely believed she would. The case wasn’t in the least complicated; it was only the situation that was complicated. And Avery, watching all night beside her like a candidate for knighthood before his altar, felt within him the growth of a power to simplify the situation. In the dim, quiet room, beside the sleeping figure, he found nothing hazy or unreal; he felt instead like a man who has emerged from a world of shadows, and has found a solid reality. And if any one supposed he was now going to let that reality escape—!

CHAPTER XXXI

“ I MADE A SECOND MARRIAGE IN MY HOUSE ”

That next morning she woke promptly at six o’clock— there seemed to him something fateful in her even waking at her old familiar hour. Her eyes sought him at once; and when they found him she spoke, weakly but with her own familiar inflection. “ Aren’t you ever going to give me anything to eat? ” she asked.

It was the first full sentence she had accomplished. Avery, delighted beyond measure, and also somewhat shaken by the thought of the impending trial, asked, “ Well, what would you like to eat?”

“It’s morning, isn’t it? Oh, breakfast,” she suggested vaguely, and then added, “ Bacon.”

“ I guess not! ” he laughed.

He brought her a tray: she tried to lift her head, and sank back with a groan. “ My head hurts,” she confessed. “ I can’t sit up, Avery.”

He fed her breakfast to her mouthful by mouthful; there was a singular grace in her helplessness, just as there was charm in her broken ends of sentences. Cecily helpless and appealing—Cecily leaning on him!

After breakfast he rather expected her to ask questions— how long she had been sick, and how she came in that strange room, and very likely how he happened to be there. But instead of asking questions she made another demand. “ Something different to wear, please,” she begged, lifting an arm bound in the ridiculous long tight sleeve of his landlady’s nightgown. That garment was buttoned straight up the front, half hiding her throat; never before in all her life, he supposed, had Cecily worn anything so ugly.

“ I’ll go out and get you something different, as soon as the stores open,” said Avery.

“ A kimmy and some slippers, too? ”

“ Surely, surely,” he answered.

“ There are some things in those boxes,” she said, indicating the salvage from the wreck.

Avery winced. “ Never mind. Wait for the things I’m going to get,” he advised her.

He must have been stupid from lack of sleep; for it wasn’t until he was half-way downtown after her new garments that he realized the full import of Cecily’s statements. If she recognized those boxes, and knew what was in them, she must remember most of what had happened! If she remembered most of what had happened, the situation was actually on.

He wanted to run back to her now, and have it out with her. It would take a deal of talking to right things between them—unless indeed they had all along talked too much, and their talking had done for them. If she saw the situation as he did, it was too extravagantly simple to need discussion; and if she didn’t of herself see it as he did, he was afraid he couldn’t make her.

He bought her things before he actually went back to her: for any interview, Cecily would doubtless want to look nice. On his return he found her waiting for him, bathed and brushed by a landlady whom she had succeeded in completely subjugating. The two of them arrayed Cecily in the garments of Avery’s choosing; and the landlady stood and beamed at her. “ Doesn’t she look fine this morning? ” the good soul asked Avery.

“ Pretty fine,” he answered eagerly.

Cecily smiled, lying back among her pillows. “ Is that all, Mrs. Fairchild? ” the landlady asked.

“ Yes, that’s all. Thank you very much.” Cecily dismissed her.

Left alone with Cecily, Avery, who had so much to say, couldn’t find a way to begin. “ Will you give me a pencil and some paper, Avery? ” she asked suddenly.

He stood awkwardly by while she penciled two notes; she gave them open to him to direct. One was for Anna, the other for her head waitress at her tea-shop. As he took them his hand touched hers, and he soared suddenly to the clouds. Was Richard badly hurt?” she asked the next moment.

“ I—haven’t found out,” Avery stammered.

“ I think it is quite time you did,” she said coldly.

Avery flushed with anger. It was quite time he found out how badly Morley had been hurt; but it wasn’t Cecily’s place to tell him so—though doubtless she was very much interested, very much interested indeed. The woman was capable of walking over his dead body to marry Morley, if she chose to do it; so why would his living presence deter her? A week in another man’s rooms wouldn’t amount to anything; she had never been afraid of gossip. And as for appreciating a miracle when she met one, that was quite beyond Cecily.

She had sunk back and closed her eyes. In silence Avery directed the two notes, took his hat and went out. He mailed the notes, and then he went to find Richard and learn how he was.

That seal of his profession which had irked him so often and was now proving so tremendously useful not only helped Avery to find Morley but gained him admission to his actual presence. Beside the hospital bed where his redoubtable rival lay in a drug-induced sleep, Avery stood and chatted with the nurse. “ The doctor has been keeping him under anaesthetic all the time,” she explained. “ He isn’t so badly injured, but he has been very nervous and uneasy all the time, and he hurts himself when he begins to throw himself about.”

Avery bent over and looked into the high-bred face on the pillow, and suddenly there came over him an immense compassion. This man had clutched at a star, and had fallen back bruised and bleeding, with his whole life to remake; the star had fallen, Avery was now sure, into his own hand.

As if he felt through all veils the presence of the man he had long if vaguely feared, Morley began to stir uneasily. Avery stepped back out of his sight, and told the nurse he would leave a note. “ The poor fellow isn’t easy in his mind,” he explained. “ If you can let him have this when he wakens, it may help him. Ask the doctor in attendance, anyway.”

“ Cecily is safe, and rapidly recovering from slight injuries,” he wrote. He hesitated, then added, “ I shall come again to see you,” before he signed his name. “ Surely that’s prim enough?” he asked of the nurse.

Then he went back to report. “ Richard has a broken arm, and is suffering from nervous restlessness,” he told Cecily. “ I left a note saying that you were safe.”

“ Poor Richard,” she said softly, and sighed.

He sat down in the room, and looked at his watch. The afternoon was waning, and he became acutely aware of how long it was since he had slept. Well, he would go downstairs somewhere, or perhaps to a hotel, and have a long sleep tonight. Cecily could be left alone, and he needed all his faculties for the combat which couldn’t, he now reasoned, be postponed later than tomorrow. He rose, stumbling a little in the dusk, and made his way toward the door; he would just go out quietly, and send his landlady to make Cecily comfortable for the night.

A voice arrested him. “ Avery? ”

“Yes?”

“ Will you help me on with my kimmy? I want to sit up for a few minutes.”

Avery crossed the room, and dangled the garment before her. “ No. Sit down on the bed, and help me nicely,” she commanded.

Avery sat down, and began to tremble. He laid her kimono about her shoulders. His arm almost encircled her; he meant to draw it away at once. But she turned toward him, and her eyes met his; close to him in the gathering twilight, her face was questioning, tender, eager, like a young girl’s. His arm tightened about her; he drew her toward him. “ Don’t go, Cecily,” he almost groaned.

She gave a little laugh that was half a sob. “ I haven’t hurried myself yet, have I?” she asked.

“ Don’t ever go, Cecily. Stay with me always.”

“ Always is—a big word in human mouths, Avery,” she faltered. But she lifted her lips toward him for what he felt was his bridal kiss. Her lips were wet with her own tears. A strange embrace for Cecily, that bridal kiss salty with tears; but he wouldn’t have exchanged it, he swore to himself, for all the unthinking bliss of the days that were dead. The careless rapture of first love meant nothing in comparison with the love that was born of sorrow and had grown with experience, the love that sprang from life itself. This was sweeter for every misunderstanding, for every moment of separation; it was sweeter even because for a few seconds he could feel her sobbing against him.

When she was quiet he lifted her bodily, and carried her to the window; there he sat in his big chair, and held her in his arms as if she had been Margaret. At the window he could see her face; he looked and looked at it, that dear, familiar, ever new face. And having looked, he fell to talking: he babbled of parsons and licenses. “ Do you mean to say, Avery, that it will take the power of church and state to tell us we may live together?” she asked, smiling whimsically.

“ Have you forgotten that you're my divorced wife? ” he asked. An awful thought occurred to him. “ Cecily, you still are—my divorced wife? You haven’t—?”

“ I haven’t anything,” she said.

She would have been contented, then, to listen; but he wished to hear her talk. He pined for explicit protestation, would have her assure him in every way that everything was just as he wanted it. Some questions he was determined to have answered. “ How long ago did you make up your mind to stay with me, Cecily? ” he demanded.

“ That’s telling. Before you made up your mind to keep me, perhaps.”

“ From the moment I brought you up here, I meant to keep you, Cecily. My bringing you was only a fluke, if you choose to look at it that way; but it was better than any plan I ever thought out in my self-satisfied wisdom.”

She consented to tell him. “ Avery,” she said, and her look was very sweet, “ from the moment I woke up here and saw you, bewildered and only half-conscious as I was, I felt that I had come home. It wasn’t an intention, dear. When one is truly at home—”

“It was like that?” he cried. “Ah, my dear, that is best of all! ”

He kissed her disheveled hair, her soft, silky hair, that was like a child’s. “ I shall have my home back,” he said, “ and my children. And you—and you.” He couldn’t keep himself from it any longer; he had to have her assurance. “ Do you love me, dear? Do you love me? ” he demanded.

She laughed at that. “ I’d rather quarrel with you, Aveiy, than agree with any other man on earth,” she said.

At that characteristic answer he laughed too. “ Ah, that is love! ” he cried.

He would have liked to sit there so until dawn ushered in his wedding-day; but the physical man asserted itself. Without warning he yawned uncontrollably. Instantly Cecily was all compunction. “ You’ve been up nights without end,” she said. “(How long have I been here, Avery?) You must get a good night’s rest, or you’ll be done for.”

“ Indeed, indeed I couldn’t sleep tonight,” he pleaded. “ Why, Cecily, if you’re strong enough we can be married tomorrow, here. Do you think that in view of such a fact I could now go tamely to bed, and sleep? ” Much to his disgust, a second yawn, mightier than the first, broke from him.

“ As a favor to me, please try to sleep,” she said, politely suppressing her smile. “ I shall be a rather damaged bride, I fear; so I want at least a groom who looks his best.”

He didn’t intend to sleep, even though she bade him; but sleep he did, and very soundly at that. When he went to her in the morning sunshine she was lying there wide awake, and he knew somehow that she hadn’t slept. She wasn’t worse, but she had so many things to think about that night: reverently he turned away his thoughts from the things she had to think about.

They breakfasted together gaily enough, though Cecily hadn’t much to say. After breakfast, however, she began to talk; and it was of Richard that she talked. Richard, it appeared, might consider himself a very hardly used man. “I don’t blame you, Avery; I don’t blame even myself. It couldn’t be helped, I feel; but that doesn’t make it any better for him. The suddenness of the whole thing, you know: one day to expect to marry me, and the next, or what seems to him the next, to find me married to you. It will not only be a shock, but it will make him think I never cared for him. It will spoil the past, and that’s unforgivable. Even the bare situation may horrify him. Maybe it is horrifying in itself; I don’t quite know. In matters of life and death, one isn’t delicate.”

“ Cecily,” Avery said solemnly, “ I’ll bring your Richard to you before I marry you. We may be guilty of much, but we can’t be guilty of the last meanness.”

“ You will, Avery? Ah, you feel as I do about it! ” she cried.

“ The situation isn’t of our choosing,” he said, “ but we’ll certainly make the best of it.” Suddenly his eyes snapped. “ I’ll bring him here today,” he almost shouted.

“ How can you? He’s hurt, I thought you said; he can’t leave his room.”

“ I’ll bring him on a stretcher, if necessary,” Avery insisted. “ Don’t forget that for all my magnanimous promises, today is our wedding-day.”

“ Then,” she said, “ if you will assemble all my clothes before you go out, Avery, I think I’ll dress.”

Sure enough, when he came in about noon, she was dressed and sitting by the window. “ He’ll be here this afternoon! ” cried Avery.

“ Who, Richard? ” she asked, breathless.

“ No, the parson. I’ve got a license, I’ve done everything,” he exulted.

“ But I must see Richard first,” she insisted, half in tears. “ You promised, Avery.”

“ Well, you shall see him,” said Avery. “ Will you begin to think about me, after you have? ”

“Oh, Avery, once I’m free to think about you—!”

“ I know, I know,” he said hastily. “ I’ll bring him, never fear.”

He didn’t quite know how; but about three o’clock he actually brought Morley up to her. Morley’s arm was in a sling, his forehead decorated with strips of plaster; Avery had almost to carry him up the stairs. But Morley’s spirit was prepared for anything, except for blaming Cecily; and in spite of his physical weakness and his knowledge of what he was losing, he looked at Avery with a good deal of curiosity.

All along Morley must have known that he was losing, ever since he got Avery’s note; he must be in some measure prepared for what lay ahead of him. In silence the two men accomplished the ride, and the trip upstairs; Avery opened the door to his room, and led Morley inside. Then, purposely blind and deaf, he went out and closed the door behind him: it was Morley’s right and Cecily’s duty to thrash this thing out alone. But he hoped they wouldn’t thrash too hard, hoped that though sorely tried Morley could still be magnanimous.

Avery went slowly downstairs, quiet, but cheerful. He reflected that after all this wasn’t a first marriage: there were consequences and complexities still to be dealt with. No, it wasn’t a first marriage, but it carried with it something that no first marriage could. Then he had hoped, and now he knew; then, all unsuspecting, he had so much bitterness ahead, and now, in the wisdom of experience, he had put bitterness behind.

In the shabby parlor his landlady claimed him. Cecily had evidently confided in her, and the poor good woman was all excitement. She held him by the sleeve, and talked breathlessly of the lovely lady; and Avery, feeling older than her sixty years by all the accumulation of bitterness past and joy to come, smiled tolerantly at her. “ Go and put on your best dress, if you want to assist at a wedding,” he said. “ Get some friends of yours, too, if you like; but you haven’t much time.”

Presently he heard Morley making his way slowly downstairs. He ran to help him; and would have driven back with him to the hospital, but Morley waved him aside. Morley’s lips were pressed tight; in the overwhelmingness of his pain he was almost blinded. Avery’s happiness might in its course crush this strange man, whose destiny met his for this alone; but even at this moment Avery spared time to feel profoundly sorry for this superseded Richard, whose life, approaching so near fruition, had yet remained poor and starved.

It was only in deliberate magnanimity that he spared even a single thought then and there to Morley, limping painfully out of the saga. For that very same hour the parson arrived, and the excited landlady with her hastily summoned friend. “ Come, my dear,” Avery said, bending over Cecily.

At the last moment she demurred. “Is there any such killing hurry? ”

“ Indeed there is. We have wasted so many years, Cecily —from now on we have to make every hour count.”

“ Then—I’m ready,” she said.

“ Sit still, if you would rather, dear,” he urged.

She shook her head, and resolutely stood up; and before the window of Avery’s monastic room, still dewy-eyed from her interview with Richard, Cecily was married to Avery Fairchild.

In an incredibly short space of time just the two of them were left together, and Cecily had sunk back into her chair, white and weak. She rallied, however, to eat a little of the dinner that was sent in to them, and even to touch her lips to a champagne glass. But she was awfully quiet. Avery, fearing that her thoughts had gone back to other days and another bridal, talked and talked, in his endeavor to make her see that things couldn’t well be better than they were now. They went presently to sit in the window, and watch the lights come out all across the city, and the stars overhead. Her hand was in his, their shoulders touched. And still Avery talked.

Then suddenly, without in the least knowing how he got there, he found himself on the other side of the argument.

“ It’s only too bad,” he was saying, “ that so much should have had to happen, when it need never have been if we had only had a little more patience and forbearance.”

That roused her; he could feel her whole body grow tense. “ Don’t ever think it, Avery! ” she cried. “ If we hadn’t had the courage of our convictions then as now, if we had dragged along as so many couples do, we should be wretched now, that’s all—wretched past redeeming. Avery, I wouldn’t give my experience in the world for anything; it’s the best part of coming back that I can bring that experience to you now.”

“Well, perhaps,” he said doubtfully; he remembered suddenly and acutely that curious moment during his last passage with Caroline when all his chosen life had mocked him, and he had had to wrap himself close in the mantle of self-esteem, to get enough warmth to go on living. He missed a few words of Cecily’s.

“ If I know anything, I know that; if you miss that, you miss the whole meaning of our story,” she was saying when his attention returned.

As became a man on his wedding-night, he gave in, whether or not he was convinced. And then smiling she deigned to say, “ Why, stupid, if there had been no difference there would be no reconciliation. There would be no point to kidnapping a wife with whom you were on perfect terms, any more than there would be a possibility of kidnapping a woman who wasn’t your wife. It’s only the complete situation that gives you the incredible romance of the outcome, don’t you see? ”

He was looking at her now, not at the view. “ Then this seems to you romance? ” he asked.

“ Romance? This is life itself! ” she cried; and her tender, eager face turned to him.

“ You’re too deep for me,” he protested. “ But I dare say you’re right, Cecily.”

“ Right? Of course I’m right. I was right before, and I’m right now.” She laughed as she said it.

He dropped the argument then and there; the years had taught him some wisdom. In that wisdom he put his arm around her, and felt her dear tired head rest on his shoulder as naturally as if it had never rested anywhere else. The familiarity and the strangeness, the rapture and confidence and distrust of the whole situation, came sweeping over him. “ Cecily—” he faltered.

“Yes, dear?” she encouraged him.

“ Shall we—be going home—tomorrow? ”

CHAPTER XXXII

THE LAST WORD

In the fullness of a settled and apparently satisfied life, Richard Morley took suddenly to good works. He took to them, gossip rather more than hinted, on account of a disappointment in an exceedingly romantic love affair. Two or three people who might be expected to know scouted the whole story; but on the other hand it got about on good authority that Mr. Sims had let slip the remark that in Dick’s place he’d have taken to drink, because some things were too much to stand.

So perhaps Morley had to take to something; though he himself gave no explanation of his new interests other than that having no one to leave his money to, he had determined to spend it himself. Whatever the reason, he became, from the day when after a mysterious excursion he reappeared in town with an arm in splints, one of the socially conscious, the patron of every good movement in the city. Personally he wasn’t much different, only increasingly patient, and rather older in appearance; but a certain exquisite friend of his wept at the change. She could give him up for his own happiness, but it galled even a disciplined woman to give him up for anything like this.

There was held in his city one winter evening a large meeting in the interest of better housing conditions. Morley, as a patron of the movement, was accommodated with a seat on the platform, and informed that after the meeting he would be expected to take the speaker back to her hotel. He was by no means reluctant, for the speaker interested him, not only in her subject, of which she was thoroughly mistress, but in herself. She was a middle-aged woman, majestic in figure, dressed handsomely in black: her mouth was kind and firm, but her eyes were unquiet. “ What a radiant girl she must have been! ” he thought as he looked at her, and then, “ Does she, or doesn’t she, quite realize her own possibilities? Does she? She ought to; I think she must have given up her life to realizing them.”

She was, at any rate, a wonderful speaker. She held the audience from the first five minutes in the hollow of her fine hand: she tossed them up, she hurled them down, she squeezed them and fondled them, but she never once let them go. She spoke for an hour and three-quarters, and not a person left his seat.

There had been something of the platform in her manner and voice when Morley was introduced to her before the meeting; he was surprised, therefore, after it was all over, and she was seated in his car, to find her so simple and quiet. She leaned back, as if she were tired; and her face was almost gloomy. Little was said on their way to her hotel; and. he was quite unprepared for her appeal when they got out. “Won’t you come in and talk?” she asked hurriedly. “ I’m not in the least sleepy, and I am in the mood for talk.”

He followed her into the hotel parlor, and they ensconced themselves in a corner. “ This is nice of you,” she said smiling at him. “ I travel alone, you see, and I travel so much. It gets very dull sometimes. I oughtn’t to complain, though, for my boy is in school in the East, and I have my work. If I hadn’t, heaven knows what I should do.”

She had touched a chord in Morley which was swiftly responsive. “ I haven’t any boy, here or elsewhere,” he said. “ An old bachelor, Mrs. Butler, is the loneliest of God’s creatures.”

“ Yes. Some things don’t even bear talking about, do they? ” she responded. There was a moment’s pause; then she asked hurriedly, “ Was the best material in town at that meeting tonight ? ”

“ Yes, indeed,” he answered heartily. “ All of it except our one expert. We hardly feel that he belongs to us, though; his business takes him to Chicago several times a week, and about the country very often. He’s away somewhere now, I think.”

“ Do you mean Avery Fairchild? ” she asked.

“Yes. You know him?”

She nodded. “ Everybody in a related line of work knows him. Dr. Fairchild is one of the biggest men in the country, from my point of view. You are fortunate in having him live here.”

“ I’m sorry he wasn’t here tonight,” said Morley.

“ So am I,” she said. “ I had hoped to learn how he was getting on. It’s a long time since I last saw him.”

Morley had an impression that this was what she had been leading up to: that she had indeed brought him in here for no other purpose. “ In a town of this size, everybody can tell you everybody else’s affairs,” he said. “ We really are a city in many respects, but we haven’t outgrown the epoch of village gossip. Dr. Fairchild is prospering, I believe.”

“His wife is in business here?” asked Mrs. Butler.

“ Yes. That is why they live here, I suppose.”

“She is successful, too?”

“ Yes. She has branched out lately, and has a fine business. She also conducts a working-girls’ lunch-room that isn’t quite like anything else I ever saw. It would pay you to stay over a day just to see it.”

“ I’m afraid I can’t,” said Mrs. Butler politely, “ but I’m very much interested in hearing you speak of it. She must have developed since the days when I knew her. I knew her as well as the doctor, but it was a long time ago.”

“ Yes, she has developed,” said Morley drily.

“ And are they happy? ” she suddenly flung at him.

He might have closed like a clam on that; but instead he became expansive at last. “ Oh, they are happy enough, there’s no doubt of that! I see the two of them seldom, and then only by chance, but I know happiness when I see it, and I see it in them. I assure you that they are happy, Mrs. Butler. Not,” he discriminated, “ with the unthinking happiness of twenty-one, of course. Their bliss has a strain of tremor, almost of pathos, in it; so much has passed over them, you see.”

She took it quite wonderfully. “ You know,” she murmured.

“ Oh, yes, I know! I may claim to have made some study of the case. I have studied it,” he brought out recklessly, “ because I count it my greatest distinction that I once came very near to marrying Cecily Fairchild.”

Eye to eye, she gave confidence for confidence: her generosity even outdid his. For a moment just then he thought her greater than when she dandled crowds. “ I myself,” she said, “ once came very near to marrying Avery Fair-child. Not even Avery himself knows quite how near.”

He dropped his eyes; with elaborate nonchalance he selected and lighted a cigarette. “ I am now,” he concluded, “ only the infrequent spectator of their drama, except when I constitute myself its chorus. I wouldn’t mind being more, but Cecily’s conscience always hurts when she sees me.”

“ Oh, it would never have done,” she cried, “ for them to marry anybody but each other! ”

“ No, it would never have done,” he agreed.

He smoked in silence for a minute, and then suddenly and beautifully smiled. “ If you haven’t seen them of late years, you don’t know how truly you speak,” he said. “ It’s Cecily and her baby who are quite the crown of the affair. If you could see her with that child, Mrs. Butler—! ”

“You mean Margaret?” she suggested. “Margaret must be a great girl by this time.”

“ No, I don’t mean Margaret. This child was born only a year or so ago.”

“ Oh, since the—reconciliation,” she said. “ I didn’t know.”

There was a moment of awkward silence; then she rose with a rustle of ample black draperies. “ I won’t detain you any longer now,” she said sweetly. “ It has been very kind of you to come in and talk to me.”

“ I assure you I’ve enjoyed it,” he returned.

They moved to an elevator, and rang for it. “ I wish you all sorts of luck in your work here, Mr. Morley,” she said.

“ Thank you,” said Morley. “ We intend to deserve it.”

“ That’s the only way, of course.”

She looked of a sudden very weary, he thought; but she rallied herself, smiled brilliantly, and said, “ Remember me to Dr. Fairchild when you see him.”

“ I will, when I see him.”

Morley watched the ascending car as it bore her off. How very odd, that she should have revealed to him, a stranger, things that her closest friends didn’t know—and other things that she didn’t fully know herself. His picture of her would always be different from the thousands of others going about in other minds. It was neat, it was really very neat.

But as he rode home it wasn’t of Lois Butler that he thought. “ They are happy,” he murmured to himself. “ It couldn’t have been any other way. If they had been unhappy, I— But they are happy. They found each other, and they realized themselves.”

He didn’t mean to be embittered: to be embittered would really have been to lose everything. Rather wearily he leaned back on the cushions, meager, high-bred, kindly, a man who had lived so completely in his tradition that it had helped him to absorb tragedy, had helped him even to outgrow itself. Under the soft light his face was singularly peaceful.